Here is the full transcript of Dean Taraborelli’s talk titled “Be Recovered: Breaking Free From The Disease of Addiction” at TEDxSedona 2018 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Journey of Addiction and Recovery
Thank you for that beautiful introduction. And the one part that wasn’t on there is I have this 30-year history with addiction. During that time, I learned that addiction was a lifelong incurable disease. I heard it thousands of times, and I believed it. And I’m here to tell you that maybe that’s not true.
Just like science takes a while to catch up, maybe that’s not true. Maybe addiction is a call for something else. And since we’re talking about addiction, we often think of the person that’s hit rock bottom and the homeless people. Ten percent of the U.S. population is addicted, and I can tell you it’s way more pervasive than that, because it’s shame-based.
We hide it. So, at the end of the day, an addiction is when I’m doing something that I don’t want to do, and I can’t stop doing it, regardless of the consequences. And I think we can all resonate with that. So here’s how I got so interested in all of this.
Personal Experience with Addiction
When I was 12 years old, you know, I’m a guy, I’m riding my bike. First thing I know, I have a joint in my hand. And I’ll fast-forward 30 years, and at the height of my addiction, I had a $200,000-a-year drug habit. That went on for, I don’t know, six, seven years.
And I can tell you, I could fill a book the size of “War and Peace” with all the drama, trauma, you know, injuries, accidents, hurts, near-death experiences, hospitalizations, overdoses, you know, I’ll spare all that. But my dark night of the soul, you know, the last six or seven years of this process, I’m in my dark night, which means I don’t know what to do, and I’m all alone. And nobody knows.
I’m working every day, and I’m doing my stuff, and I’m in this inner hell. And I don’t know whether to kill myself, or whether I’m going to overdose, or whether I’m going to smash my head through a windshield again, but something’s going to happen. And those are a lot of sleepless nights.
The Search for Purpose and Treatment
And as I was getting very close to the end of my life, and you know when it’s coming, the thing that bothered me the most was that I was not going to fulfill my purpose. And I didn’t even know what it was. But that irked me enough to get to my last treatment experience.
And at the same time, when this wasn’t working, I was going to treatment. So I spent 20 years in treatment, and I’ve been to every kind of treatment there is for months on end. I’ve been to doctors, and on all kinds of medication, and experimental protocols, and I’ve been to inpatient, outpatient, uppatient, downpatient, you know, you name it, I did it.
And when that wasn’t working, I scoured the globe. I’ve been to 50, 60 countries on planet Earth talking to shamans, and mystics, and clerics, and teachers, and doctors, and anybody that I thought could help. And here’s what I came up with. Treatment isn’t working.
The Ineffectiveness of Traditional Treatment
The model of treatment, and I don’t mean just inpatient treatment, the way we handle this situation is not working. Because I wanted to get well, and I paid very close attention in treatment. When I went to my first treatment experience, I said, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.
And I did it right up to the time I got high again. And I was watching everybody, and I noticed that I wasn’t the only one not getting it. Nobody was getting it. Barely anybody was making it.
I’ve been to treatment with thousands of people. Nobody was getting it. So I did a little Google, because I wanted to just check it out, make sure it wasn’t in my head, and I Googled the success rate in treatment, which is terrible.
Exploring Alternative Approaches
And at the time when I was doing that, I came up with something called spontaneous remission. And I thought, wait a second, what’s that? So that’s where people just decide to stop using, and they do. And I thought, I want to do that.
I want to be recovered. Recovery is not working for me. I want to be recovered. So while I was Googling, I came up also upon a word, iatrogenesis. And iatrogenesis means death by medicine. And medicine is the third leading cause of death in the United States. And that means I go in, I have problem A, and I die of complication B.
So staph infection. I go out into the hospital to take my appendix out, I get staph and die. That’s an iatrogenic response. So medicine, wait a second, I can’t just go to my doctor and go to the treatment center and say, here, tell me what to do and do it.
Here, third leading cause of death. Holy smokes. So let’s go back to treatment for a second. Why isn’t it working? Well, one thing I noticed is that treatment and the medical model is pathologizing normal life processes. So the pain, the loss, the grief of life, which we need to grow and process, and those are things of the soul.
The Over-Medicalization of Life
We now have turned them into diagnosable mental illness, followed by a pill. And somebody was sharing with me yesterday, they were watching a commercial of families packing up to move to a new city, and their little son’s in the back of the car, and he’s waving to his best friend, and oh my God, he’s crying, and of course he needs a pill. Not, wow, how’s he going to navigate life?
How will he deal with that loss and change and friends, do I keep in touch, all the questions of life.
You know, let’s medicate him. And medication, here to tell you, you don’t have no qualms with medication, but unfortunately medication has become a lifestyle. It’s no longer an intervention, it’s now a lifestyle.
How many times have we heard people say, you know, you’ll be on this the rest of your life. And the problem with that is side effects. And every medication has a side effect, and some of those side effects are worse than the actual condition that I’m taking the medication for.
The Hidden Side Effects of Medication
And we hear them on TV, these are fairly drastic side effects, you know, death, heart disease, your head’s going to blow off, you’re going to kill your parents, that kind of stuff. And people say, you know what, I’m hurting, I’ll take it anyway, that won’t happen to me. That’s not that much different than a heroin addict that knows he’s going to get in trouble too.
But the one side effect that we don’t hear about is the side effect of numbness. So I have something in my external world, some condition that’s making me unhappy, so I take a pill so I can live with it and not have to manage it, unfortunately then I’m numb to other things, love and life and my intuition, I’m disconnected from that. So I take more pills for the numbness, because numbness is painful.
Addressing the Root Cause
So I realized in treatment that we were not getting to the core issue, that we were managing symptoms, it’s all about symptom management. So I’ll let you know that anxiety and depression and alcoholism is a symptom, it’s not a problem, it is a symptom. So we’re not getting to the root cause.
And I didn’t even think I had a root cause. I grew up, my family was kind to me, I was fed, I was cared for, I didn’t have the trauma that I heard all these other guys in treatment had, so I thought, I don’t have a core issue. But everybody that’s doing something that’s destructive has a core issue.
The Hidden Wounds
And what we do is we hide our wounds, we protect them. So if I were standing here and I twisted my ankle, my body would reorganize itself to take weight off of that ankle so it could heal. Something hurts me deeply, I will hide it so that people don’t inflame it, I’m going to protect it.
And eventually it gets relegated to the unconscious mind, where I forget about it, but it does not forget about me. So I thought, root cause, we’ve got to get to the root cause. So I’m sitting in treatment, I think to myself, wait a second, I know what to do.
A New Approach to Recovery
I’m going to leave treatment, and I, because I have been scoured worldwide, I know more about treatment than anybody that I’ve ever met, including most of the counselors that I’ve sat with, plus all these healers and all these different things, I’ve got this gigantic body of wisdom. I am going to go recover. And I am going to develop a program to help other people recover.
And so of course I called my parents, right? And I told them my great idea, and they were a little skeptical. So I leave treatment for the last time, and I come to Sedona, and I actually go through this process, which was the foundation of what we’re doing now, and I got well.
I recovered. And when I say that, what do I mean by that? Well, 30 years, I would tell you that 90% of my life force, my time, my energy, my thoughts, my money, went to using, and I’ve got to tell you, I don’t even think about it anymore.
It doesn’t even cross my mind. I’m in the business of recovery, and it still doesn’t cross my mind to go do that. So here’s the model, and the model has to do with integration.
The Integrated Approach
We are integrated beings, and we have become disintegrated. So we have a body, a mind, a soul, and a spirit, and these things work together in a very synergistic way, and unless we work on them in a synergistic way, we’re missing the power. So holistic or integration, it’s all the buzz now.
It’s a great marketing thing, and when I began this process, we were the only holistic center out there. In Google, it was like us. That’s it. And now it’s coming out, which is great.
People are catching on and, you know, throw a little green juice and some yoga in the mix and some mindfulness. But unless these practices are integrated, so the body, the mind, and the soul, and the spirit are sharing information. They’re like a database that shares information, so we have to work on them all if I want to clear any of it.
The Body-Mind Connection
So we talk about the body. So the body is this colony of cells, and every time I have a thought, it tells the body how to feel. So if I think about something a lot, I’m instructing my body how to feel.
And especially if I have something traumatic that I’m thinking about, so we sometimes think about that over and over and over and over and over again, I’m instructing my body. So then when I forget about it, my body reminds me. You know, I’m on the beach, and I’m having a great time, and my body goes, oh, yeah, you’re depressed.
Detoxifying the Body and Mind
Remember? Oh, yeah. Okay. So we have to clear that. We’ve got to clear the cellular memory in the body.
We’ve got to detoxify the body. So we’ve heard earlier today, food. A lot of the food that we’re eating is toxic, which means it’s laden with chemicals and hormones and antibiotics that my body can’t recognize, and it creates inflammation.
The Impact of Inflammation
And inflammation is affecting all of my organs, and they’re sending signals to the brain that I am not okay. And I can’t perceive those signals, but they are creating this underlying feeling that I’m not all right. So there is a ton of now peer-reviewed science about the condition of the gut and conditions like depression and anxiety, ADD.
I was reading the other day that bipolar disorder has a link to mitochondrial dysfunction. Wow, my cells affect how I feel. At the end of the day, our brain needs nutrients and minerals to metabolize and to function well.
The Importance of Nutrition
If I’m not getting them, then my brain is going to begin to falter. So I’ve got to work on the body, and I have to change my relationship with food and the things I put in there. So then we have the mind, body-mind.
And most of the time, we think about the mind. That’s what I’m using to deliver this talk. Actually, that’s about 5% of my mind.
The Power of the Unconscious Mind
The other 95% is back here. It’s unconscious. And my unconscious mind is programmed like a computer.
So all the programs are running in the background, and they make me react. So I watch my parents when I’m growing up, and I say, you know, I will never grow up to be like my dad. Anybody ever hear somebody say that?
Breaking Unconscious Patterns
And of course, what happens? They grow up exactly like their dad because they’re programmed. When I have a situation on my hands, a trauma, something, I develop a reaction, I devise a strategy to deal with it, then that files in my brain.
So I know later. The brain’s efficient. So it stores things.
The Soul: Our Authentic Self
It says, oh, that happened then. I know what to do. I’m going to react. So most of our lives are actually unconscious reactions.
So we’ve got to get to the unconscious part. Good behavioral therapy is great, but it’s only dealing with the 5%. I’ve got to get down here. And now the soul, and this is where the juice is.
So I’ve sat with hundreds of people over the years, and I say, what’s the soul? And they say, you know, it’s my essential self. It’s my authentic, truest self. And I ask people, well, give me some words to describe that.
Invariably, they’ll say love, and passion, and community, and contribution. These are all things that sound like luxuries, as we’re on death’s doorstep, or I’m stressed out in the day, but these are basic life necessities. These are important to who we are.
The Need for Purpose and Belonging
An example is young people that’ll join gangs. So they join a gang, and all of a sudden, they have structure, and meaning, and purpose, and they have rules, and regulations, and structure. All the things they don’t have at home.
And they’ll take massive chances to get in these things, and break the law, and could go to jail forever, but they do it anyway. It’s that important. Another example is people in tragedy, crisis, 9-11, and hurricanes.
Unity in Crisis
People come together, and there’s no more race, or socioeconomic differences. We are at our best. I’m at my highest in crisis.
Why do we have to wait till crisis? So the soul, and when we are disconnected from our authentic nature, we get something called soul sickness. And soul sickness, as I was getting ready to die, that was my big issue, that I wasn’t going to do what I came here to do.
The Spiritual Connection
Body, mind, soul, spirit. So we live in this sea of energy, if you want to talk about the Earth’s magnetic field, or even the whole quantum field, and the field affects everything that’s in the field. So I have an energy field that’s generated by my nervous system, and this field interacts with the greater field.
Consciously, I can’t sense this field with my five senses, I have to do it with my intuition, my awareness, through my energy system. And when my energy system is compromised, then I’m not taking in that prana, that information that informs all of life, to make two sperm and an egg come together, a moment of conception, and a baby comes out, all the birds fly south at the same time.
The Synergy of Body, Mind, Soul, and Spirit
The song of life, that’s my antenna. So body, mind, soul, spirit, these are not new concepts, but we have to work on them in a synergistic way, and when we do, we can get out of recovery and actually be recovered. So people ask me a lot at these kind of conferences, okay, so if I’m recovered, can I go use again?
And these are counselors that ask me this, mostly. So I’m like, look, if there’s something wrong with the present moment, and you want to go ingest a solvent to change it, you might need a little bit more recovery. Because for me, being recovered means that I am aligned with my highest purpose, that I am no longer defined by the past, and I can let go of the past.
Defining Recovery
And people keep talking about the past because they haven’t resolved the past. So I’ve resolved the past, now I can be defined by who I am becoming and what is possible for me. That’s my new definition.
And being recovered means that I go from chaos to peace, that I go from scarcity to abundance, that I am on my hero’s journey. And the journey of the hero is where we take our deepest, darkest problems and we turn them into medicine. And that’s the journey that we all must go through as part of life.
The Hero’s Journey
So addiction might just be the wake-up call to step into your hero’s journey and become more than you ever thought that you could be. And when we do that, then we are recovered. And I’m going to tell you that you only have one journey, and you get to decide.