So what most people don't realize is just allowing that belief in, I'm not actually broken, I'm bruised, I'm damaged. There may be some things I've got to correct and address about myself, but I'm not broken. I can get this right. We'll already get you going. And then the next piece that I talk about a lot in the book, I will never know what specific technique works for you, but there are two elements. Number one is awareness. So in the book, there's eat, explore, accept, transform, develop all the awareness. Let in all the crappy, shitty stuff that's happened to you in life. Stop running away from it, actually go find it. And then you have to sit in acceptance of it. Somebody who just interviewed me earlier today said, man, acceptance sounds really hard. And I said, it's hard until you practice it enough times where that's the path to success. So as we're sitting here talking, it sounds to me like even though of course it led to a lot of pain, you've now had acceptance of what happened with your dad and how you reacted. And you can kind of sit there and go, well, I did my best at 10.
Right? But that probably took time.
00:01:06
Raquel Baldelomar
It did take time. And now my goal is to learn all of that and as you say, reprogram just my brain of what a healthy relationship should be like to have a real intimate, have real intimacy with my partner. Hi everyone. My name is Raquel Valdelmar, and welcome to the mega podcast where I speak with high achievers on how they fulfill their professional dreams while maintaining balance throughout their lives. Today I'm with Dr. Aade Jaffe, a UCL, a trained psychologist and renowned expert in mental health addiction and relationships. After receiving his PhD from UCLA, he lectured at UCLA for the better part of a decade. Dr. Jaff E'S personal journey includes overcoming addiction. He was once a meth addict and drug dealer, but transformed his life after a SWAT team arrest and jail sentence. He is author of the Abstinence Myth and his new book Unhooked, where Dr. Jaffe destigmatizes addiction and uses habit changing knowledge and roots to help you lead an addiction free life. Dr. Jaffe is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and is known for his non-traditional approaches to addiction treatment and has been featured in numerous media outlets like CNN, Fox and NBC. He currently leads Ignite focusing on reducing stigma around mental health issues by helping individuals who are released from prisons find addiction and mental health support. Dr. Addie Jaffe currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife Sophie and their three children. Addie, welcome to the mega podcast.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I actually literally live eight minutes from the studio you live. This was very easy.
00:02:48
Raquel Baldelomar
That's so great. Yeah, because you've been traveling quite a bit, so
00:02:52
Raquel Baldelomar
So it's nice to have you here.
00:02:54
Raquel Baldelomar
I saw that you're from Israel. I am. I've never been there before. I would love to go to Israel. What was it like to grow up? You grew up there for the first 14 years of your life, right?
Yeah, I was 14 when we moved. I mean, I lived in the same two bedroom apartment my entire life. It did not move at all. My elementary school was across, not even across the street. It was our apartment building the parking lot. On the other side of that parking lot was my school for elementary school, high school was an eight minute walk. So Tel Aviv's a pretty big city. It's a metropolitan city, but my whole childhood was lived within a few blocks of home, which was, I didn't realize until later. And that probably has quite a bit to do with my success later. There was a lot of stability for me in terms of at least my social circles and all that kind of stuff. So Israel is a great country. I mean, politically, it's the nightmare that we all know has been there since I was born and before that. But living there, you don't really realize that everything is normal where you're born. But I loved it. And then at 14 we moved to the other side of the
00:04:00
Raquel Baldelomar
World. What prompted your family to move to the United States?
My dad was a physician,
And so he got a job. He did this exchange thing for about three months, I think it might've been six months, but he literally meant that he left home and went to work in America for six months. And when he came back, they liked him so much, they gave him an offer to go work. We were actually supposed to move to Norfolk, Virginia first, but then the guy who gave him an offer went to Chicago. So that's where we ended up moving. And yeah, it was initially thought to potentially be a temporary thing, but that was 1990, and then we are in 2025, so not that temporary.
00:04:37
Raquel Baldelomar
Similar to you. I grew up in South America. I grew up in Bolivia for the first 10 years of my life. So it was, for me, moving to the United States was a real culture shock. It was a socioeconomic shock in many ways. I went from just a very wealthy household in Bolivia to one of my parents. Divorce for reasons I won't get into, I know was very poor. And then fitting in, trying to fit in into a new school system, new friends created, just a lot of it creates, it's an imprint. It leaves an imprint in you. So I can totally relate to what you talked about in your book about how it created, you had a lot of angst growing up. Talk a little bit about that and how those emotional hooks that happened at a very young age.
Yeah, I mean, look, I had angst growing up in Israel. I think I had close to an ulcer essentially, but I was an internally anxious kid. A lot of people tell me they didn't know that on the outside, but internally, I never really felt like I fit in, et cetera. But I did fit in. So I had the same friend since kindergarten or first grade, but then I moved to the other side of the world where I knew nobody other than my sister who went to a different school three and a half years apart. So we've never attended the same school in our lives. And I felt completely alone. And as I talk about in the book, a lot of people don't realize there's the foreign kid tables. There's a foreign kid table in your high school. You may not be aware of it, but there's a group of kids who don't have another group, and they all make their own kind of boo bays of just mismatched toys. And so now I felt even more out of sync and my language skills were pretty poor. I mean, I had an accent because the language that is spoken in Israel is more British English than American English. And I had a bad accent at that, which I'm sure for you with Spanish was similar, right? You come in,
00:06:25
Raquel Baldelomar
Spanish is my first language,
But you don't know these things. None of these things when you're 14 years old, you're just trying to figure it out. And I think that at least led to me being willing or ready to experiment with things or try to fix that discomfort. I just wanted to fit in. I wanted to be comfortable around other people, but I wouldn't have been able to say that in words Back then. I didn't even know what anxiety was, but I had it constantly. And so as I talk about in the book, first time somebody gave me a drink, I didn't know what I was going to get. I did it because I was going to say no and stick out in a social setting. So I was going to say yes to whatever somebody asked me to do. But when I had that drink, 20 minutes later, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. I've never felt this comfortable in a social setting in my life. I fooled around with a girl that I liked that night. It was perfect.
00:07:19
Raquel Baldelomar
All these new things
For a 14-year-old, it was kind of like the best night ever. And I completely attributed it to the drinking because I didn't feel that way before drinking. And then once the alcohol hit, I had this warmth and comfort come over me. And so that started the ride.
00:07:35
Raquel Baldelomar
And that happened in an Israeli sleepaway camp?
Yeah, it was kind like boy and girl scouts, and they had a sleepaway camp in Jersey in the middle of the winter, by the way. So it's like freezing. There's snow on the ground. I'm from Israel. I'm from the middle of the desert. I'm sure in boli it's the same unless you live in areas where there's snow. It's like I'd never seen snow before in my life. Yeah, I mean, kids from Chicago, kids from New Jersey, kids from Palo Alto and San Francisco and LA all came together. It was like a thousand. It seemed like a thousand of us. I don't know how many kids were actually there. Definitely at least hundreds. And I felt comfortable. It was kids I could speak to and Israeli. And so that already made me feel more comfortable, but alcohol just locks something in.
00:08:13
Raquel Baldelomar
So after that experience at 14 where you had that drink and you had vodka, it was vodka, right? It
Was vodka warm, disgusting, those gallon jugs of vodka. It's not
00:08:24
Raquel Baldelomar
Was it was
Not Belvedere. Gr Goose was No, no, no. This was whatever you could get.
00:08:29
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah, it was there. Okay. So how did that then lead to, did you drink more? Were you starting to say, this feels makes me feel good. It gives me confidence.
Yeah. Look, it opened a door that I didn't even know was there. I was like this invisible door on the wall, and I opened it up and all of a sudden kids are having parties and drinking. I mean, at 14 years old is the age, 14, 15, 13. It's the age when everybody starts. So I didn't even know that I wasn't being invited to parties because I was the good kid that didn't drink. But now that I drank and everybody knew that I drank, I got invited to the parties where everybody was drinking. I was like, game on.
And so, yeah, I would say it started like this. I would go to any party that I could that got invited to and I would drink there. And then that became sort of a weekend thing. And then all of a sudden you're sneaking alcohol with your friends in the basement. And then as I talk about, we moved to upstate New York and this girl that I really, really liked in one of my classes were hanging out one night late. It's like one, 2:00 PM It's 17 years old or something, 16 at that point. And she hands me a joint. I'm like, obviously I'm not going to say no to this girl that I like. So now I have a joint. And by the time I got to college two years later, I was smoking and drinking every single night.
00:09:37
Raquel Baldelomar
And then how did that lead to meth? Because it's like smoking, doing joints, maybe some other recreational drugs, and then you go into meth and that's a big jump. How did that happen?
It's funny, right? And I literally talk about this in the book. When you see the end point for almost anybody's life, you can't understand how they got there
Because it wasn't just meth. It was meth and guns and drug dealing and cartel. It was insane if anybody's seen the movie traffic or if they've seen Breaking Bad or whatever, that was my life actually, somebody just asked me that in another interview. What did I think of Breaking Bad? I was like, honestly, when that show came out, it was like a Tuesday for us. There was nothing weird about that show, just that was the life we were living. So it didn't even register on my radar. It was like, oh, I guess they made a show about drug dealers. You look at that endpoint in a SWAT team arrest and how I got there, it seems insane, but what happens is it's these small little turns. It's tiny little choices you make along the way. So I won't walk you through all the choices, but I was in upstate New York at Buffalo State University of New York in Buffalo when I was smoking and drinking all day. And then I moved to LA because I could not stay in the cold. So I literally moved myself out. My whole family was still in New York. I moved myself out here, knew nobody. My drug use actually went down originally. I didn't have any connections. I didn't have people to use with.
But in LA there's a big drug scene. I ended up meeting a girl we dated. She was into ecstasy. We started doing more and more of that, what people call Molly now, but Ecstasy and MDMA. And then I was pretty poor paying out of state tuition. So my parents kind of said to me, look, we'll pay for housing in school. The rest is up to you. So I had a job, I was trying to make money, but the drugs were expensive. $25 a pill was expensive.
00:11:26
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah. How did you pay for that?
I mean, I could pay for one every two weeks or something, but then I figured out a hack, if you will, that I think most people wouldn't. These are the little choices that make the difference. I figured out that since I was the person who knew who we were buying from, if I just collected everybody's money ahead of time, I could get my drugs for free. So I did that a few times, and now I could have two or three pills for the night and I didn't have to pay for them, which at the time, saving $75 in a weekend was really, really meaningful. Then I figured out, okay, if I could just buy a few more every time, I'll have enough for this weekend and for next weekend for me and my friends, and then I'll make some money. So literally, I went to a friend, I borrowed $750. It bought me 50 pills. I did that three times in a row, and by the third round I'd saved $250 from each one of those, and I didn't need his money anymore. I could just buy my own 50 pills and 50 became a hundred, a hundred. That's how three
Became a drug dealer, five dealer, a thousand, 5,000. And when you start selling drugs, I wouldn't have even seen myself as a drug dealer initially. I just had drugs and my friends were buying them for me. That was the idea. But then when you have drugs, all your friends tell all their friends who want drugs, and next thing you know, there's 70 people buying from me. And then you asked about meth. So different people asked for different things. I would get connections, and I actually had meth that I was selling for much longer before I ever used it. But I first used it for finals. I used it to study during finals. I broke up with that girlfriend while she
00:12:56
Raquel Baldelomar
Broke up. And you were a senior?
00:13:00
Raquel Baldelomar
At this time.
And so I had a girlfriend, that same girlfriend that I started using ecstasy with, she broke up with me. I think she saw where things were going and I had no idea. So she ended it with me. I was in a really bad place. Finals were coming up. I literally didn't go to school when I was an undergrad at UCLA, I would show up the first day, pick up a syllabus and never show back up again. And now I had finals and I had not gone any class. And I was in depression because of the girlfriend. And one of my friends said, Hey, that meth stuff you got, you want to study, that's your ticket. And it worked like magic. I taught myself for all my finals over four days, got Bs and AEs and B pluses, and I was off for the races.
00:13:40
Raquel Baldelomar
Wow.
00:13:42
Raquel Baldelomar
What a story.
00:13:44
Raquel Baldelomar
And how long were you doing meth? You mentioned the SWAT team before you got, how long were you doing this? Were you in this place before the SWAT team came?
So 97, beginning of 98 is when I started using, at the end of 2001 is when I got arrested. And pretty quickly I became a daily user. So about three to four years
00:14:08
Raquel Baldelomar
Of three to four years. You were a daily user?
00:14:10
Raquel Baldelomar
Did your parents know your father was a physician this time? You were in la They were in New York still. Did they have any idea your son, the son was making BS and A's. So apparently you're somehow able to hide it from
I was so good at lying back then, but it's insane that my parents wouldn't have known. Later on, they told me they thought I was addicted to heroin because when I would go back home to New York, I wouldn't bring meth with me. And one of the side effects of meth is if you don't use it for 24 hours, you're passed out and you cannot get up. So I would go visit them. I would be okay for the first day, and then I'd be in bed for two and a half days a night. So I would act like I'm sick. I was 124 pounds. I'm 165 sitting here in front of you. Imagine me, 40 pounds lighter. I was a skeleton. I mean, there's no way They didn't know. My wife weighs what I weighed back then. So they must have known. It's another sign of how bad of a game you can play with your head in terms of just denial of what's going on.
00:15:15
Raquel Baldelomar
So during that period, you thought you were happy, you thought you were happy, you were just doing drugs, partying and keeping it from your parents as much as you can.
That's how it started. And we were partying every weekend. As I started selling more and more. It wasn't even every weekend, it was all week. Literally just every day we were doing something with meth always as the undercurrent to just keep me up. And all that started out as fun. It was crazy. It was, like I said, it's all this stuff that you've seen in the movies, like the crazy deals and a ton of money. I mean, for me, walking out like 10, 15, $20,000 in my pocket as a college student was insane.
And gradually it gets dark, but it's so gradual that by the time you get to the place where you can't trust anybody, I would have three to five guys working for me at any given point in time. They all stole, they all lied, they all cheated. I got robbed a couple of times, held up at gunpoint once, where when I got held up at gunpoint, they got $250,000 in cash and $400,000 worth of drugs to some people that would mean get out of the life. To me. It was like, go to my guy, get a gun, get a shotgun, start driving around when my gun under me in case, I mean, it was insane. It was like decision after decision. I just doubled down every single time. And by end of 2001, I served a little time in Beverly Hills jail. I was in three years probation.
I got out of that probation early. It was almost hard to tell what a normal life would be anymore. So by the end, it definitely wasn't that I was partying a lot. It was just that this is what I knew how to do. It's almost even though it's drug dealing, and even though it, it's got this dark, bizarre version to it from the stories that we all hear, it's like if somebody gets stuck in a job that they hate, but now they're a regional manager and they're making $175,000 a year and their family depends on their money to pay mortgage and the car,
00:17:16
Raquel Baldelomar
And you are good at it
And they hate their job, but they're making money and they're on the path to success. It's hard to say, I need to leave this because it's not healthy for me.
00:17:26
Raquel Baldelomar
What was the point where you said, I need to change this? Was it the SWAT team experience
The point where I actually
00:17:36
Raquel Baldelomar
Fully
Recognized internally? No, actually weirdly, wasn't
00:17:38
Raquel Baldelomar
That really? It wasn't that. What would you say was that point?
So I got arrested. That's how the book starts. I got arrested, went to jail for a week. My leg was broken from a motorcycle accident. I had to get carried like I was on crutches. But they take the crutches away. You can't have they're weapons in jail. So I'm with a broken leg coming off of meth in jail, which means I was essentially passed out for five straight days. Eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping. My bail was almost a million dollars. There were guns and all this other stuff.
00:18:07
Raquel Baldelomar
And at this point, your family knew?
Yeah, they knew everything.
00:18:10
Raquel Baldelomar
They knew. Okay.
I mean, my lawyer called them
And they actually knew because of the accident. But my dad kept things under RAFs, which was probably not the best idea, but in retrospect, I wouldn't let them pay the million dollar bail. I sat in jail and I waited. When I got out of jail, my lawyer said, very matter of factly, we have to get you to rehab because if you show up like this in court, we're losing this and you're going to spend 10, 15, 20 years in prison. And he was just very straight up about it. And I said, let's go to fricking rehab. I think that was brilliant of him. I would've never considered going to rehab. He said, look, you're addicted. You have mental health issues. I would've fought him on that, But he was selling me on a get out of jail free card.
I didn't get out of jail. I did a year. But as I went to that first rehab, I ended up starting to use in the middle of rehab and I got kicked out. And it was then when I went, oh, crap. And I had this really forthright conversation with my dad who used to call me every day. And I was lying to him about why I was leaving the rehab. I was just doing the thing that I knew how to do. And then some voice came on inside, said, you got to tell 'em the truth. This is just crazy Now. They finally knew everything. And now you're back to lying to them. Just tell them the truth. Rip the bandaid off right here. And I did it, and my dad went off on me. He just screamed. And what's wrong with you? You idiot. You just spent three months on 25 grand on this rehab and now you're going to go to prison for the rest of your life. And normally my dad would end. He never yelled ever. But normally he would end some sort of speech like that to me with Don't move. We'll get you signed up to another rehab. We'll go over here. He would direct me
This time. He just ended in the end, he was like, what the hell do you expect us to do now? And I think that was the first moment that I really stopped. And I thought about it and I realized it just hit me that there's nothing that he can do about it and that it's on me. And I said, you know what? Don't do anything. I screwed up. I need to fix this. And I spent the next two weeks looking for my next rehab, by the way, using every day, sleeping on some girl's couch. And that I spent the next two weeks finding the place that I would then get sober in. Spent eight months there. Then I went to jail.
00:20:28
Raquel Baldelomar
And you talk in your book about your perspective on relapse. Talk a little bit about it. I really love what you say about how it doesn't mean failure that you're always an addict. It means that you just have more work to do yourself. And that was actually the moment when you relapsed, when that really hit you with that conversation with your dad.
Yeah. I mean, I think I'll do a segue a little bit that's not in the book, but I've learned even through these conversations, life is about learning. And whether we like it or not, we normally learn when things don't go well, it's just a fact. Every famous person started their journey of success by failure, period. And odds are that as they got better, they failed more in order to learn how to be better. It's just what happens, right? There's the classic like Lincoln and Jordan and Henry Ford.
00:21:17
Raquel Baldelomar
It's always in the verse that you learn the most.
I mean, Elon Musk, no matter how you feel about his political insanity and craziness that's happening right now in the world in general, no matter where you stand on the spectrum of politics, the whirlwind that is Elon Musk almost failed multiple times. I mean, one launch away from losing all of his money For SpaceX, it's like you have to fail in order to learn what went wrong so you can fix it. The problem with relapse is most of the time people are sold, we're sold this idea that you have to do this perfectly. And so when you don't, because nobody does really, I call, I dunno if I can swear on this thing
I call bullshit on all those people would tell me, I never screwed up once since maybe you didn't drink, but you had an anger attack at somebody and you screamed your lungs off with them and acted like an idiot. Relapse is not just the reusing of the substance. Relapse is going back to the insanity that you used to run your life by. So everybody has that as part of their journey. And a big part of the book, the whole sparrow eat cycle thing is actually about use. Those things. Use the failures, go, that didn't work. Why didn't it work? I started my morning fully intending on doing what I said I would do. When did it go wrong? If you do that over and over and over, everything else in life, you'll become more practiced at recognizing when it happens. And then you'll have better tools to come out on the other side of it, if every time a relapse happened, you go, oh my God, I'm a POS and I'm never going to succeed and I'm an idiot, and I may as well not try. You're never going to get better.
00:22:55
Raquel Baldelomar
But it was like during those relapse moments when you realize, okay, this is not working for me. I need to find another way. I need to get back into this. And then this is also, I think, a great moment to really look at what you're talking about in your book, unhooked, which is really about finding what are those emotional hooks that are making you go back to it. I think that's a very important part too, of understanding why are you relapsing? It's not just the substance. It's like what's deeper beneath that.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you were talking, I was just trying to figure out so many elements of what you said. We all have hooks, and the reason the book is called Unhooked is because people tell me I'm hooked on cocaine or I'm hooked on alcohol. I'm hooked on porn, I'm hooked on sex. I'm hooked on food. That's not what hooked on those things are the fixes to the pain that the real original hooks hold in place. So for me, social discomfort, I felt not good enough. I felt like I was constantly being judged, but really it was me judging myself. And so my hook was any single time something would happen in the environment that would make me feel less than make me doubt my worth, make me doubt my cool or whatever, just my value, I would have a reaction. What in the book is called the activation.
So something would happen, stimulus, I would perceive it as a threat to my value. I would think, oh my God, this is another indicator that I'm not popular enough. The girl doesn't like me, or I'm not smart enough. I didn't get the grade I wanted. Or that kid's looking at me weird. I'm weak. Whatever it was, I'm doubting my value. And that caught an activation. Anxiety. I didn't really have resentment, but anxiety, fear, loneliness, isolation. That was my internal activation. And then I learned responses. So sparrows a stimulus perception, activation response. The response was trying to fix the activation that I was uncomfortable with. I feel isolated. Well, let me go up to those people and smoke a joint with them. I'll feel less isolated. I feel anxiety about that girl not liking me. Let me have three, four drinks. I'll feel less anxiety, which is not uncommon.
Everything I'm just describing is really, really common. The problem for me was the substances became the coping strategy I had. I didn't have any others. My family didn't mention the word emotions growing up. I didn't even know those things were a reality. I went to therapy when I was depressed in college after a breakup. But really, I would argue, we talked about my life with that girlfriend, but we never dove in more deeply the earlier life experiences. So I never understood what was going on inside for me. And it wasn't until I failed enough times to figure that out that I started being able to treat it. And a lot of people spend their whole lives running away from those hooks.
00:25:46
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah, and I think the book is very important for even people who are not necessarily have been addicted to drugs, any emotional hooks that you have. It can be food, it can be sex, it can be gambling. I would say that I've never had really a problem with drugs, but I love gambling. I play poker. That's my only gamble. But it still is gamble. It still is gambling, but it is. And I love the dopamine effect that you happens when you win a big hand. So you have to be very careful of what are these hooks that can trigger an activation,
And let me know if this resonates for you. So everybody gets dopamine rushes from playing poker
Right now. On the flip side, there could be serotonin also that gets released when you feel calm after it, or if you want a big hand and left, there might be other payoffs. But everybody feels that rush, the anxiety, the excitement. But if every time you fight with your partner, you run to poker because poker gives you something to focus on and excitement and dopamine and joy and kind of this excited buildup versus the pain that you're feeling in your relationship. Next thing you know, you're starting to find yourself in a pattern where you're going into gamble. Now, the gambling is not just there for the excitement, it's to mask the other piece. We actually call it negative reinforcement. So what you just talked about is positive reinforcement, doing things that make you feel good. That part is normally fine. Rarely do people find themselves in addiction because of positive reinforcement. It's the fact that it turns off negative reinforcement, so it takes away pain. Now, the ante, if you will, sorry for the pun, but the ante has just been raised when you go gambling because now you're counting on it to make you forget about the fight with your partner. Now gambling plays a deeper role now in order to get what you need, you may be willing to go a little harder on that hand because you really want the payoff because it's serving another purpose.
I know a lot of people with gambling addictions where now they're chasing the losses because they've lost so much. They feel massive shame about it. They don't know how to talk to anybody about it, and in their head, and it looks insane when you see it. They've lost a hundred thousand, they lost $250,000, and they're like, this next $50,000 hand that pays a four to one, I'm going to get 200,000 back. And then they'd lose that 50,000 hand.
00:28:13
Raquel Baldelomar
It's real. And for even people who are not necessarily have addictive personalities, who are sober in many other parts of their lives, whether it is gambling, addiction or food, and that's a lot of women, food is huge. A lot of women deal with that, and it's a very real, I mean, we're constantly thinking about food, and then it becomes then we eat something that we really like and then we can't lose the weight, and then it becomes just depressing. So it's a very understanding where those addictive patterns, how they come up is really, really important. And I think it goes so much into really trying to understand where those hooks are coming from. The negative reinforcement, a lot of many times we'll eat, if I'm having a bad day, I might eat something that is comforting, but it's not necessarily good for me.
And then if there's a job of comforting you, but now you feel shame around eating the thing, so now you have more negative emotions and shame might be different than stress for you. So with shame, like you mentioned sex, I make a big point in this book specifically to go abroad on addiction.
00:29:25
Raquel Baldelomar
Too
Many people focus on drugs and
00:29:26
Raquel Baldelomar
Alcohol. Exactly.
Look, sugar addiction is at least as much of a problem in our community. I mean, look at, I think it's like 47% of Americans are now obese. That's insane.
And that's addiction to sugar and fat. I mean, that's what that is essentially, and sedentary lifestyle. But the idea is we've gotten so comfortable with looking at those other people as having an addiction problem. Well, that person died of a fentanyl overdose. I'm not that person, but we're sitting on Instagram scrolling for 12 hours a day, or we're binge washing shows because we don't want to talk to our partner, or we're diving our head first into work so we don't have to talk to our kids and we don't have to talk to our wife. Different people have different versions of, essentially the way I define addiction in the book is any behavior that interferes with your ability to live a fully functional, joyful life full of contentment and purpose, et cetera, that the behavior holds you back from doing that. You've tried to stop it or slow down and you can't welcome to addiction. That's the idea. It's not those other people.
00:30:33
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah. So Addie, you talk about the definition of addiction, but I also think one of my philosophies about life balance is having vices that might not necessarily be healthy for you, but that bring you great joy. And for my case, it's poker. Let's say it's food, maybe I love poker and I have to make sure that I don't get carried away with it, but it brings me great joy. Sure. So how do you know for people who are aware that they have a vice, that at what point is it just a hobby that they really, really like that might not always be super healthy for them, but it brings them great joy versus, oh wow, it's an addiction. Now, I think a lot of people kind of struggle with that
Percent. And by the way, I think it's okay to recognize that having addictive compulsive tendencies and habits is on a spectrum. You yourself might move up and down that spectrum. I think too many people, especially in mental health, we've created this weird idea that there's some line somewhere in the sand,
And if you cross this line, then you're an addict. But it's bullshit. The line is made up. The line used to be alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence, and it was three or seven symptoms. Then they combined them, added one, made it 11 symptoms, and now you have low, moderate, and severe. We're making this up as we go along. So there's no ordained line in the sand. I think it's actually pretty simple. It's just hard for us sometimes to be the judges of it. And I have a tip in the book that I can give to people here to help understand, I dunno if you're in a relationship or not if you have family or not, but if this thing starts causing problem in your life because you're spending too much money on it, or all of a sudden you and your partner don't go on dates because instead you going to the casino and you'd rather gamble,
Maybe it's an issue. All of a sudden you can't afford rent because you gamble a little too much. Maybe it's an issue. So you try to do something about it. If you try to do something about it and you still can't stop it and it keeps progressing or staying at the same level, now you're walking into the area, the ballpark of what I'm talking about. And then honestly, it's really up to you how quickly you want to do something about it. Because the question of whether it's harming you or not is now open. It's hurting your relationship. It's hurting your ability to pay your rent and function in life. It would be better without it, or at least moderating it.
If you try it and you can't do it, well, when do you want to do something about it? Do you want to do something about it when you're homeless? Do you want to do something about it when you're divorce or would you like to do something about it? Now, the problem, if I'm honest, is too many people don't even see it as a problem until too late in the game. And so I talk in the book, and this is what I wanted to say, is too many of us look at accountability as a problem because in the past, think parents think, teachers think the law accountability meant we got caught doing something bad. But accountability is a great thing, right? I've got three kids, I've got a wife, I have clients, I have my own business. There's accountability everywhere. Before we started this interview, I got to go pick my kids up. If I don't get my kids today, I'm going to be held accountable for screwing up. That's a good thing. If you don't have accountability for too long, you can start straying. So there's some techniques and some suggestions that I make for people in the book, get more accountability in your life,
00:34:13
Raquel Baldelomar
And how do you get more accountability? Would you recommend?
First of all, you open up to it. So if your partner says something, and there's literally a story about this in the book, when my wife, while I was running a rehab said to me, Hey, you're drinking more than I've pretty much ever seen you drink. And we had been together like seven years by that point, about eight years. I had to pause. Why is she saying that? Is it true? Is it not true? Let me think about it a little bit. Too many times, we try to become super defensive and go, what are you talking about? Not this is just one night or whatever. And so the first thing around accountability is open up to it. The second thing is look around you. I call it a personal advisory board and develop a group of people that you go to be held accountable When you have ideas or thoughts, or there are events that happened in your life that make you feel like you're not a hundred percent certain that things are heading in the right direction. Go to those people that are in your personal advisory board and ask them, literally say, Hey, this just happened, or I had this idea, or I was dreaming about this last night. I don't know if it sounds crazy when I say it out loud. Allow people to be part of your developing life. Not everybody will agree with you, but at least you'll have some outside perspective and then you can make better choices.
00:35:23
Raquel Baldelomar
In your book, you talk about how some of the programs Alcoholics Anonymous, you'd felt like didn't really serve you well because it came from a different viewpoint. Can you describe about what's the difference between their approach and maybe the approach that you now through your work, through getting your PhD, what you've learned? Now?
I'm going to change the starting point for this conversation a little bit. It's not that Alcoholics Anonymous didn't serve me. I was sober in AA for three years. Ironically, I didn't actually drink, so I was addicted to meth. But meth addicts anonymous is not where my sober living took me. So I ended up going to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was in the meetings that they went to, and I was sober for three years.
So it was the starting point of what I had. The question I asked now is, I'm not going to say I'm an anomaly. There are millions of people over the last a hundred years who've recovered using aa. My question was just, is that the right system to serve everybody in? Or are there better options than just saying, just go to a, and there are a lot of reasons, and we're not going to get to all of them in today, but first of all, it's very, very heavy handed religion based and Christian religion specifically, that turns a lot of people off.
00:36:47
Raquel Baldelomar
It does.
And my idea is, why are we turning people off when people need help? Why do we make them jump through 15 hoops before we allowed them to get help? So a ton of prayers constantly in there. And that makes sense because it started from religious groups. So it totally makes sense. So there's that angle. The second piece is this addictive concept of once an addict, always an addict that is ingrained into aa. I don't know if this was the purpose originally. I don't want to be cynical about the forefathers of aa, who by the way, had experiences towards the end that don't match the AA model at all. But the idea of you will never actually free yourself from this serves AA really well, because if you're going to do well in it, you're going to stick around. And so it creates this beautiful dichotomy.
Everybody who left AA failed, right? They did not succeed. Everybody who stayed in AA is the model of why it succeeds. And if you walk into a meeting, you are more likely to see the people who succeeded because they're there. Whereas 90% of people, more than 90% of people fail within a year. So you walk into meetings, you see all these people that have time, and you go, oh my God, this is the best thing ever. And then you start failing and they tell you, Hey, what are you doing wrong? Why are you not serious about this? Et cetera, versus what do you need? What's going on for you? What are your struggles? So you get judgment and shame because you're not measuring up, and I think the data proves it out, period. It's the best studies on AA talk about 13% success rate, 14% success rate, right? People leave rehabs that are based on a, and maybe 30 to 60% could stay sober through the rehab, but then something like 60% relapse in the first month. So obviously something is missing. If we had a treatment for cancer that worked 13% of the time, no one would do it. We would wonder whether we could improve the treatment. At least think about it.
00:38:51
Raquel Baldelomar
And so is your approach more really focusing on the accountability? You mentioned accountability. How would you say it's significantly different from aa?
Yeah. So first of all, n, aa, forever, whoever does not know this, the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking,
Which means that only people who are ready to stop can be members. And if you're not ready to stop, but your aa, you have to lie about being ready to stop. So I threw that out. I don't care if you're ready to stop or not. Are you ready to work on yourself? Is the only thing that I care about. Because if you're not ready to work on yourself, it doesn't matter. We can do work or not. You're not willing to do anything about it. That's fine. So if you're ready to work on yourself, then you're in number one. Number two, I don't measure success by abstinence. To be perfectly honest. I don't even measure success by reduction per se, but the vast 99% of people will come to me, want to reduce or want to stop. So I don't have to make people say they want to stop or reduce.
They come in with a set of goals and we support those initial goals. But the idea is then we look at how they're doing and we say, Hey, you want to to reduce, but we're having a hard time reducing. Why don't we try to take a break for seven days, 14 days? Let's see what that feels like. So we allow, I actually started ignited specifically because I studied after my PhD and my postdoc. I studied the barriers to treatment. I studied, why don't people over 90%? Now it's 95% of people don't even seek professional help for addiction, which is crazy in depression, anxiety, things like that. 70% of people seek help in addiction. It's like five in cancer, diabetes, et cetera. It's 80, 85%, 75% people seek help. They tell you have diabetes, you get a treatment in addiction, it's under 10%. So I said, why?
Why is it that only 6% of people go to get help? And it's cost, it's logistics. Who can leave and go to rehab for 30 days? I dunno. It's hard. So cost, logistics, shame, abstinence and negative opinions about treatment are the biggest predictors that we found. And I said, what if we just started something that had none of those barriers or it was really affordable? You could get in anywhere so you don't have to get in your car or leave your house for 30 days. We wouldn't shame you. We wouldn't make you pick accidents. What if we could build something that was that cool and people would want to do it? So that was the idea, and those were the things. It wasn't like I just wanted to make something different. We looked at what doesn't work and we tried to fix it.
00:41:23
Raquel Baldelomar
I was preparing for this interview. I was talking to a friend of mine who struggled with the food addiction, and she asked me, can you please ask him? I don't always want to be part of a community. I don't always want to be around people. I want to be able to do this on my own. I'm kind of an individualist, and I understand how important community is, and I see everyone, but I think I also, many people because of cost or because of just, they may just be more of have an individualist approach to this. Can you really successfully solve an addiction in a way that more individual level rather than having a community?
Yeah. Look, you absolutely can. I just want to caution us. Sometimes part of the reason you don't want to talk about, it's because of the shame of talking about it.
00:42:15
Raquel Baldelomar
You have to be free,
Recognize that then you're exacerbating. If you're open to talking about it, talking about it is not an issue,
But you're busy and you'd rather do things alone. Sure. Many, many times I find that it's actually shame that's holding people back. But the thing that lies under the surface more is we're social animals. One of the ways in which we feel more complete is by socializing with others. The problem is that socializing around these things means you're either hanging out with the crazy insane addicts that sit around in the basement or with the normal people. That's the problem. We've created this dichotomy, and the reality is, I talk about this in the book, if you include food gambling, sex addiction, which is not yet a recognized disorder, and then all the drugs and all the sex and alcohol and everything, there's probably about a hundred million Americans a struggle at varying levels of addiction. That's a third of adults in this country.
So saying that it's abnormal to struggle with addictive tendencies or compulsive habits is bullshit. Again,
00:43:14
Raquel Baldelomar
A lot of people, everybody, almost everybody has,
Well, they either have it or they know somebody who has it. It's kind of have this drawing in the book. We think that addiction is this little tiny circle in the middle of the whole thing, but really we're splitting kind of in half the people who struggle with it and the people who know somebody who struggles with it. And you belong in one of those two camps. I've literally still never met anybody who said, oh no, I've never met anybody struggling with addiction and I've never had it myself. So if that's, what else do we have that almost half of us do, and the other half of us watch people do that we would consider abnormal. I can't think of anything else. It's just this story we've told. So for your friend with food number one, just be clear. Why don't you want to talk about it in groups, number one. Number two can also, this is what I've seen. So in my programs in the United program, for instance, we start, you're completely alone, but then after module 10, we start exposing, okay, now how do you bring this into your everyday life? And it doesn't have to be those kind of 12 step or recovery communities, but there should be somebody in life that you can be very open about your struggles with because if you don't, over time, that shame will start creeping back in.
00:44:23
Raquel Baldelomar
You talked about how sex addiction isn't really recognized right now as a disorder. What do you consider sex addiction? Because it can be, I mean, such a pleasurable experience. Again, it's a spectrum. So where would you consider sex
Addiction? Sure, and again, in the recovery community is like sex addiction, love addiction, porn addiction. You could talk about all these different pieces. Really, really good question, and I'm going to go totally against the grain here for a second. Because first of all, because of personal experience. Secondly, because of, again, is it love addiction? Is it porn addiction? Is it sex addiction? Goes back to the BS of thinking that it's the behavior you do.
00:45:02
Raquel Baldelomar
You have to go deeper. You have to go deeper into the emotions of what's causing that.
If you're addicted to porn or you're addicted to actual sex, whether that's call girls, massage parlors or escorts or you're addicted to love, those are intimacy disorders. Those are ways of escaping, blocking, being overzealous about intimacy, but not knowing how to be healthy in it. You could connect it to attachment disorders, early developmental issues. It's not porn that people are addicted to, porn are addicted to. They're addicted to a quick way of getting a release when what is on the back end of it is a lot of trepidation, discomfort, inability to engage intimately with others. I discovered porn when I was 11 years old, just ran into my dad's porn collection, and then it became this funny cat and mouse game. I would steal his porn. He would figure out and steal it back. I'm 11 years old, by the way. My dad was an ob, GYN. He never talked to me about sex once.
00:46:00
Raquel Baldelomar
Really.
I was like, I had the master. I could have had a masterclass in sex growing up. Not a single. The only conversation we ever had about sex was when he realized I stole his porn and he came in my room at two o'clock in the morning. Where is it? That's the closest to a conversation we ever had about sex. And it's kind of half joking while I'm saying this, but how uncomfortable are we with sex that the vast majority of men watch it? Many of them watch it multiple times a week at least, sometimes multiple times a day. Daily is more common than most people are willing to consider. 30 to 40% of men hide their porn use from their partners. And I'll tell you, as a growing adolescent, boy, am I going to deal with the discomfort, the anxiety, the weirdness of going and talking to a girl that I like and potentially being rejected. And then I also don't know what the hell to do anyway. So I'm nervous about even performance, right? And am I going to do that or am I going to go for a hack that in three minutes can take care of what I think is the point?
I think the point is orgasm. I think the point is to get off. I think the point is to see some naked bodies. True intimacy is about a lot more than that. And obviously this is pretty obvious, but you're never going to get that from porn. You're not going to get it from sex, even if it wasn't porn. You're addicted to actually having sex, whether that's, again, paid sex. You're not really getting intimacy there either. So all of those disorders are really some inability or overreliance on specific maladaptive, as we say in psychology, like things that aren't working in pursuing intimacy or being avoidant of it. You said you're in a
00:47:40
Raquel Baldelomar
Relationship with what you mentioned about just the attachment theory portion of it. It really does show how you grew up. What was your attachment style? Growing up with your parents really impacts your attachment style. Now,
If you're a love addict, you probably have an anxious attachment style. You're overbearing. You're the person who's texting 17 times. It's just blah, blah, blah, and no responses. You're anxious. You need one, just a person to let you know that they care about you versus porn. Maybe you avoid it because porn is not going to lie to you. It's not going to make you work for it. It's not going to fight you. It's going to deliver what you needed to deliver, but it's empty. There's no, no real connection. Which one of the things that scares me, by the way, a complete aside, is with AI and virtual reality kind of stuff. This may it really scary. I mean, really
00:48:34
Raquel Baldelomar
Scary. Oh my goodness. Absolutely.
00:48:37
Raquel Baldelomar
It's so real. It feels so real.
Imagine if VR porn can converse with you.
00:48:43
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah.
I mean, we may literally end up with a place where people just don't want to engage in intimacy,
00:48:49
Raquel Baldelomar
Have relat relationships, actually have real relationships anymore.
Yeah. I mean, intimacy is hard. Yes, it's real. Intimacy is hard. Whether it's friendship or romantic intimacy, it's difficult. There's work it, you're not the same person. You disagree, you fight, you get scared. All those things, even when it's really good, most of the time you run into these kind of experiences, these scary, frightening, almost like pivot points. I feel like in relationships that can be big explosions that lead to growth and everything else, but you have to work for those.
00:49:23
Raquel Baldelomar
You've been married for how many years now?
Married for 15 years. We've been together for 20.
00:49:28
Raquel Baldelomar
That's amazing.
00:49:30
Raquel Baldelomar
So you can definitely talk about intimacy and relationships if you didn't have, my father abandoned me at 10 years old. So it created me, it created attachment issues within me, I would say. And it took me a long time to get to the point where I can have a healthy relationship with my current partner to actually choose to be, I think there was a moment of love addiction, but love addiction with the wrong kind of men that the makes sense.
Your mirror, right, you mirror
00:49:59
Raquel Baldelomar
Exactly.
You're overreaching and they're avoiding, which works really nicely together.
00:50:05
Raquel Baldelomar
Right? So it took me a long time of therapy to recognize my own form of just attachment styles and what I was attracted to and being attracted to a healthy archetype, a healthy person. So how would you suggest people who don't necessarily have a great framework growing up in terms of a template of their relationships with their parents, how can they as an adult work through that trauma to try to have a healthy, very healthy, intimate relationship with their current partner?
My wife and I do a lot of this work together with couples, and I think for me, the model is actually pretty similar. So now we're talking about a Hook Abandonment.
I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Nobody's going to love me. Nobody cares about me. Flip that to, I'm not worth enough. Flip that to people aren't trustworthy. You're always going to be alone. Everybody's always alone. Nobody really cares. Those to me are hooks because the moment something in your world, a stimulus, a trigger, tugs on a perspective that I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Now you've got fear, now you've got anxiety. Now you've got to react. So dad left me a 10. That's scary. And if anybody, like I said in the book, anything looks crazy if you only look at it at the end, but you go all the way back, dad left me a 10. If dad, the man who is supposed to care about me forever, and I'm supposed to always be protected by, he's supposed to be by my side until the end of my life. If he's not sticking around, either there's something incredibly wrong with him or there's something incredibly wrong with me, or this is just the way the world operates and everybody sucks and they're terrible people and you can't count on anybody. You have to make sense of it somehow. And now, depending on how you reacted to that, how many 10 year olds go, well, obviously my dad has some problems, but I'm a worthwhile kid.
00:52:01
Raquel Baldelomar
It's very,
00:52:01
Raquel Baldelomar
Many topic 10-year-old.
At that point, I'm solid in my own being, I believe in my value. I will find somebody. No, nobody does that. So now you've got to react. You got to make sense of what happens. My dad left us when I was eight. He came back, but it shook my world. Parents aren't, they're supposed to be together forever. What do you mean? So that response created patterns of understanding the world for you. By the way, 10 is probably some of the later ages where the really, really deeply ingrained stuff that is hard to let go. It becomes your model of the
00:52:33
Raquel Baldelomar
World. Totally.
It's your model of the world. So now, if I wasn't good enough, if I wasn't good enough to keep my dad around, who do I have to become or who will love me? If my dad was too good for me, then who will give me attention? Right now we're starting to seek to fill a void, but the problem isn't in us. The problem isn't our perception of our reality, which I talk a lot, perception a lot in the book. But again, when you're 10, you have no idea. By the time you're 14, you've created some ways to deal with it. And I can go on assumptive tracks, but we've never really talked about this. So some people close up, they don't let anybody close. Some people spread themselves everywhere because it's like, let me just get some proof from somebody that I am worthwhile. We react in the ways that are as adaptive at the time I talk about we do our best.
You're 10 years old. You are just and adapt in the way that you know best. Now, you fast forward 10, 20 years, right? You're 30, dad left 20 years ago. But the marks in terms of how I see myself are still there. And if I've done the quote wrong things, but again, how many people do the right thing when they're 10, 11, 12, 15. So I've done a lot of wrong things along the way. I was just trying to survive. So I've actually been shown, maybe even been told by more people that I actually am not worthwhile, that I don't have value, that nobody is going to love me. So now I have that same idea reinforced, which
00:53:58
Raquel Baldelomar
Is you have to imprint all of that, and it's very, very hard to do that as an adult. But that is how can people do that as adults knowing that they had this happen to them as a young child?
So the first step to me always is just to recognize that it's not real and that it's in your head, which is hard. It's easy to say, really difficult to do because you've looked at this as truth, not as, maybe there's something wrong with me. You've looked at it like I'm a broken human being for 20, 25 years. The first step is to go away. Wait, maybe this can change. I talk about it in the book. There's a book called Mindset. I didn't even hear about that book when I first started believing in this concept that I want to talk about, but it's a great book by Carol Dweck.
Almost everything about you is changeable. Maybe not your eye color other than context or whatever. But almost everything about you is changeable, psychologically, emotionally, it may require a lot of work, and then there's practices you need to put in place to make that happen. But the first thing is to believe that there's hope and there's another side. That's number one. Number two, I talk about the sponge. I dunno if you remember the example about the sponge, but you absorbed how to live in life and what is true and what is false and what is good and what is bad. Again, from birth, right before birth, actually to probably about eight to 11 years old. That's the stuff you're some of that you're going to have to rewrite.
And there are some methods in the book on how to do that. Once you believe that it's possible, it's kind of on you to play this game. And this is actually what the whole book is about. So where am I losing it? And what you're talking about right now, most of it will come out around perception or activation. I have emotional traumatic responses that come up every time a man leaves me. I'm assuming it's a man, sorry. But if it's a man leaves, it's like a trigger of what happened with dad at 10 years old.
00:55:45
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah.
Okay, now let me recognize that. So now at least I know that it's there. Okay, how do I play the game with myself to change the perception so that God forbid or whatever another relationship ends, but it doesn't have to be a relationship ending. It could be a fight where a partner walks out that can be triggering enough. It doesn't have to be the end. Now, how do I play the game with myself to reconfigure that perception? Well, how else can I perceive it? Now you have to start creating new versions of reality that you never got exposed to. So okay, he's leaving. He needs a break. He's leaving because he's too activated right now. It's not that I'm too activated, he's too activated and he needs 30 minutes. And we start coming up with and we start testing new tools and techniques with our partner.
Now, in case it's not clear as I'm even talking about this, to do all this work, you have to believe that there's a better path on the other side. Who's going to do all that work if you really think you're broken? So what most people don't realize is just allowing that belief in, I'm not actually broken. I'm bruised, I'm damaged. There may be some things I've got to correct and address about myself, but I'm not broken. I can get this right. We'll already get you going. And then the next piece that I talk about a lot in the book, I will never know what specific technique works for you, but there are two elements. Number one is awareness. So in the book, there's eat, explore, accept, transform, develop all the awareness. Let in all the crappy shitty stuff that's happened to you in life. Stop running away from it. Actually go find it. And then you have to sit in acceptance of it. Somebody who just interviewed me earlier today said, man, acceptance sounds really hard. And I said, it's hard until you practice it enough times where that's the path to success. So as we're sitting here talking, it sounds to me like even though of course it led to a lot of pain, you've now had acceptance of what happened with your dad
And how you reacted. And you can kind of sit there and go, well, I did my best at 10. But that probably took time.
00:57:44
Raquel Baldelomar
It did take time. And now my goal is to learn all of that and as you say, reprogram just my brain of what a healthy relationship should be like to have real intimacy with my partner. Now, how would you recommend being the fact you've been with your partner for 20 years? How can people develop intimacy? How can a couples, what are ways to develop strong intimacy?
I think most of us are really afraid of conflict because we've seen it play out one of two ways. It either doesn't happen in my family, essentially there was no conflict. But then when it happened, it was a blow up. It was
00:58:21
Raquel Baldelomar
Repressed for so long that then it just exploded.
Like throwing dishes, broken, screaming at the top of the lungs, kind of a thing like full nightmare arm again at all.
00:58:32
Raquel Baldelomar
So embrace conflict, even if it's if's
Uncomfortable, it sounds crazy for people to say, but I think true intimacy, there's that weird idiom of intimacy is into me, you see? So I let you see into me, and the idea is I have to stop being afraid that I'm going to say things that make you uncomfortable because it's through the discussion that I'll discover that they make you uncomfortable. If I really care about you, we'll figure it out and we'll sit there. But what most people do is with trepidation, they touch on something that's sensitive and then they back off because they don't want to rock the boat. So I think I talk in the book about getting comfortable, being uncomfortable is really important. Learn constructive conflict. So there are tools. The gottman's are the place that Sophie and I did a lot of our training around relationship couple. They have things like the gentle startup. If you have to have a really uncomfortable conversation with your partner, there's something you want to get off your chest don't come in there and go like, Hey, we really need to talk. All of a sudden you put them on the defensive, they're scared. There's this idea of gentle startup saying, Hey, there's something I really want to talk to you about. Probably need about 20, 30 minutes, maybe an hour of your time is right now a good time are you're in a space where you can listen.
And if they're in the middle of work or they're stressed out themselves, they're fully allowed to say, okay, kind of a little scared about what you're going to tell me right now, but right now is not a good time. I have a meeting in five minutes. Can we talk at five? So you've given 'em a lead up. You've shown them respect. You're not attacking them. So that's one thing. The other one that everybody I think knows, but it's hard to practice use. I not you statements I feel I am struggling with. I have this experience when you say you do this all the time, the other person becomes defensive. So there are a lot of little tools, but intimacy is to my mind, all about knowing how to sit uncomfortably in conflict and get to the other side.
01:00:28
Raquel Baldelomar
It's a beautiful thing when you can have develop real intimacy with a person,
01:00:33
Raquel Baldelomar
For 20 years. I think that's so impressive. You've been with your wife for 20 years and been married for 15 years, and you have three kids.
01:00:41
Raquel Baldelomar
So having three kids, how do you maintain the romance with three kids?
It's hard. It's hard. My wife and I actually just talked about how we've let date nights go, even though we tell all the couples we work with, how important those are, but I'm literally traveling like 70% of my time now. So I'm home two days a week,
Not the week. So three and a half days every week. So when I'm home, I haven't seen everybody. So I want to go out to dinner with the family or I want to do something altogether and stealing a night away from the kids when I only get two and a half, three nights with them for a date night, always felt selfish for the last year, year and a half. And she was like, yeah, I don't care if we feel selfish, we need it, so let's do it. So those things are important. That's the standard version. But my wife and I, even when we don't get full date nights, we make damn sure to have our own experiences and ones that are sexy and sensual and fun for us.
My wife just reminded me of this, but I said early on in our relationship that we get to make up the rules of what we want our relationship to look like. My parents almost got divorced and they were not incredibly happy together by the time my dad passed. That's not the model I want to follow. So it's on us to start looking around and saying, well, what do we want our relationship to be? But I'll tell you, my wife struggled with, she talks about this publicly, so it's not like something I'm revealing, but she struggled with sexual abuse and she's was only with one partner really before me for five years, and it was abusive. That took a lot to unravel a lot. And I wasn't prepared. I was not armed with the right tools to deal with a partner who had essentially been sexually assaulted and raped for five years.
I didn't know how to deal with it, so I ran away because it was too much for me. And so we kind of had to find ourselves over time, but we just kept coming back and back and back. There was a yearlong breakup in the middle of all that. And what I say to people is, you have to ride this journey with your partner. I would be a different person if I hadn't been with Sophie for 20 years. It's pretty obvious he was by my side. I wouldn't call it compromise as much as you couple enough so that you feel connected in a deep, deep level. You support the other person's growth because they're a different person than you, and they hopefully support yours because you're a different person than them. So it's like the connection between you makes you stronger. But when it comes to romance, again, back to how many people are uncomfortable talking about sex.
When we held our first couples workshop online, which I think was God eight years ago or something, nine years ago, almost everybody was married or engaged who was on the workshop. I think we were like 10 couples, and we said, Hey, we're going to take 15 minutes and we want each of you to turn to the other and tell 'em some of the things you like best in the bedroom and some of the things that you don't like. And then some of the things that they don't do and you wish they did like five minutes for each. They came back and almost all of them said, that's the first time they've ever had that conversation. And you think to yourself like, oh my God, you've been in relationship how long? But we get so uncomfortable about this stuff, so we don't talk about it, and we just kind of hope that it works out. So take the time for the two of you, have those conversations. Find out if you're really into your partner. Find out what makes them enjoy themselves, what feels intimate and strong for them. My wife and I are totally different people. I want her to feel pleasure, so I need to understand what that means, not in my head and vice versa.
01:04:19
Raquel Baldelomar
And you talked about spousal support. I think spousal support is so important for just couples struggling through just any problems they have. But I think especially what you have gone through, I'm sure that Sophie has been just hugely,
Yeah. So I met Sophie after everything.
01:04:37
Raquel Baldelomar
Okay.
Our third date, she slept over and she came to my last probation hearing.
I was like, yeah, I've got to go to court. Starts at eight 30. I got to be there. She goes, where are you going? I said, I think it's hopefully my last probation meeting. I think they're going to release me. I've been really good for the last four years. She said, I want to come. You want to come to my probation here? So we went to court and to this day, she tells the story of seeing my attorney try to get me off probation and the DA fighting against it, and the judge turning to DA and say, what do you want from this guy? He's in school. He's never failed a drug test. He's paid all his dues. This is exactly what we want to come out of the system. So I think she said that for her. That meant a lot to see that somebody has gone through all that. But you said support. You want somebody who's going to be there for you. When shit's hard too. Everybody's there when you're making the money and you're young and everything is easy. Who's going to be with you when stuff gets hard?
01:05:38
Raquel Baldelomar
Had you've been so great, we could talk for hours. I want to finish up with just some questions we ask all of our
01:05:44
Raquel Baldelomar
So the whole show is about balance. Let's first talk about what are your three top three healthiest habits?
I have a morning practice that I am as close to religious about as I've probably ever been about anything in my life. It's a gratitude practice and kind of a forward projecting moment to what would make this day really good. I exercise again, I'm pretty religious about that in terms of having specific things that I need to meet, whether that's the time, just making sure that I get what I need from movement pretty much every day, like six days a week.
01:06:16
Raquel Baldelomar
And so when you talk about your morning practice is like a morning meditation.
If I'm really good, I'll throw in literally two to three minutes of meditation. And meditation is probably not the strongest part of it, but it's literally, I use the five minute Journal. I talk about this quite a bit. It's kind of funny. Sophie gave it to me almost as a joke,
Like a gag seven years ago. She thought I would never use it, and it's become a ritual for me. I now have a digital version that I like to use, but I like writing. I don't typing the stuff. But for me, gratitude, I was a very cynical, scarcity based kind of person. So the gratitude stuff helps me refocus my energy on what's already working. My life's pretty amazing, but I can still constantly find stuff that needs to be fixed. So that's a gratitude practice. Then the movement, you said healthy. I mean, I think this is more mental health than physical health, but I still try to make sure that every week in my life I have moments where I am connecting to my lessons, connecting to the things that I've already learned, whether that's by teaching others, supporting people, talking to my kids, but really diving into the lessons I've learned so I don't forget them. I would say that's the third one.
01:07:28
Raquel Baldelomar
That's great. So I mentioned to you one of my principles about balance is having healthy vices. So things that are not necessarily good for you, but that bring you great joy. So what would you say are your top three vices that bring you great joy?
Top three vices. Again, it's hard for me sometimes to call these vices, but I guess they could be. So I talk about this a little bit in the book, not incredibly deeply, but over the last, let's say six to eight years, I've developed this relationship with psychedelic practices that really helped me get grounded. That's one. It's funny, I don't even think about it as a vice, but I'm sure some people would, especially given my history with drugs, what are I really like risks, which I think is how I got into all this trouble in the first place. So now I feel like I have to find a moderate way to engage in enough risks to feel like I'm pushing myself, but not enough risks to really hurt myself. So that comes up in a lot of different ways. I have a motorcycle. I don't ride at a ton still because that motorcycle accident that led to the SWAT team arrest was pretty intense.
I couldn't walk for a year, but I ride periodically. But also, boxing is one of my favorite workouts, and I specifically like the ones where they spar, so like headgear and you just punch each other because Mike Tyson has this saying, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And it's true. We think everything matters until there's somebody there with a boxing glove and they're about to take your head off, and then everything gets really, really narrow and focused, and it's really, really easy. So I believe that, make sure that we're all comfortable.
01:09:15
Raquel Baldelomar
What are the top three books that you recommend most often?
This is Hard. Biology of Belief is a really, really big one.
01:09:23
Raquel Baldelomar
What's that called again?
01:09:25
Raquel Baldelomar
The Biology of Belief.
I talk about in the book Bruce Lipton. He's one of the people that I can consider a mentor or a guru that I look up to. I mean, that book that I talked about, mindset
Is a really great book. There are some management books that I won't talk about. They're a little bit different, but another book that is a pretty easy, oh, the Four Agreements. That's a great one. That's a big one. So because that one's such a common one, I'm going to sneak in it forth. Is that okay? Extreme Ownership is another book that I really, really love. We talked about accountability before. If you read Extreme Ownership and you don't understand how important, it's, you just have 100% accountability of everything in your life. Then you miss the point, read it again.
01:10:04
Raquel Baldelomar
Okay. All right. So Addie, last question. If you have one single message on a billboard on what it takes to achieve the balance of health, wealth, and happiness, what would that message be?
Can I include the same message? I'm going to give the same message I gave in the book. Somebody asked me in an interview. If there's one thing you would tell people who struggle with addiction, but it's the same thing I would tell anybody who's stop lying. Stop lying to yourself and other people. If you're not all in on something that's going on in your life, speak to it. Figure out how to change it. Stop pretending. Stop wearing those masks.
01:10:38
Raquel Baldelomar
Is there anything else that you would like to leave our viewers with?
No. I mean, a lot of times people want to connect.
01:10:43
Raquel Baldelomar
Yeah. How can people find you?
Yeah, I'm on social media everywhere is Dr. Aade Jaffe. That's DRAD. Jaffe Read. Unhooked is the best website to find out about the book, but it's available on Amazon and all the other places
01:10:55
Raquel Baldelomar
You get here. Highly recommended it everyone. Great book.
01:11:00
Raquel Baldelomar
Thank you so much. Thank you so much to everyone who watched this, listen to this. I love you all. I love you. Thank you for your support. If you like this podcast, please click the like and the subscribe buttons. It helps the YouTube overlords distribute this podcast to more people who are interested in balance. Amen. Thank you all so much, and until next time.