Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about something that touches way too many families. Addiction. But here's the thing. We're not talking about it the way you've probably heard before.
You know how everyone says there's nothing you can do until they want help or they have to hit rock bottom first? Well, my guest today is going to flip all of that on its head. Kate Duffy is an interventionist and family addiction expert.
But she's also someone who's been where a lot of families are right now. She got sober herself back in 2013 after years of hiding bottles, lying to her three kids, and putting everyone through hell. Her own sister later told her she'd been afraid for her and afraid of her during those dark days. But here's where Kate's story gets really interesting. After she got sober, she started doing interventions in emergency rooms, you know, talking to people who just overdosed. And almost every single person she worked with asked her the same question. Will you talk to my family?
That's where she realized something huge was missing from how we think about addiction recovery. She started a family support group, and after nine months, she looked around the room and realized something incredible. The loved one of every single family in that group was now in recovery.
Every single one.
That's when Kate knew she was onto something big. She founded Tipping Point Recovery and created what she calls recovery Conversations, a whole new way of thinking about addiction that puts families right at the center of the solution.
Now Kate teaches families how to become what she calls the tipping point in their loved ones willingness to get help. She's written a book called Dear Family. She runs training programs, and she does these custom family interventions that are completely different from anything you've probably seen.
The crazy part, she says addiction isn't actually the problem, it's the solution. And families don't have to wait around feeling helpless while someone they love destroys their life. I'm really excited for you to hear Kate's take on all this, because honestly, it's going to challenge everything you think you know about addiction and recovery.
So let's dive in. Kate Duffy, welcome to the show.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Thank you, Diana. Thank you. Great intro. I appreciate what you put together.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Oh, you're welcome. Would you like to tell us how you got into this?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm happy to be here with you. Thanks for the invite and to talk about this. Yeah. As you described, I will was lying to my kids, and I was lying to my sister and my parents. I was in the middle of a divorce, so the way I Report it now is. Nobody was really watching out for my kids. They were teenagers.
And I didn't know this at the time, but I had become a liar, a manipulator. What I didn't know is that the illness was this mental health challenge inside of me that was looking for coping strategies. I was falling apart. I had experienced real severe betrayal and loss in a. Of a family member to addiction. A lot of things kind of stacked up in a period of a few years, and I lacked the ability to cope again. I didn't have this hindsight then. So I was just using alcohol and then eventually other drugs to regulate, to try to regulate myself. And I. I was just like the people I was hanging out with, they were drinking. And it just escalated to the point where my kids were confronting me and I. So I had to start hiding it. I had. I honestly saw no other way. Hiding bottles one day came to mind when you were reading the intro. My kids found eight bottles of wine, empty bottles, in my closet. My youngest, who was I think probably like 15 at the time, and they lined them all up on the table, and I walked in the back door just doing errands on a Saturday morning. But what I was holding was a extra large Dunkin donut cup that was filled with wine.
Almost gone, actually. And that's how I carried around doing my Saturday errands. And I remember that they were sitting there ready to confront me. My two daughters were at the table. My son was in the other room. He was in eye shot and earshot, but he wasn't at the table because he not a confronter. But the girls look like. My daughters look like state police. They were just not having anything. But we just found these. We know they're yours. We know they're not old because I was trying to tell them they were from before.
And I remember, literally, I can remember it today, that there were two things going on in my head. One was, what are you doing? This voice in my head like, what are you doing? These are the people I love more than anyone else.
And then the other voice was, and kind of, what's your plan? What are you doing and what's your plan? The other voice was, I can't believe they're. They're talking to their mother this way. How dare they talk to their mother disrespectfully. So they were this sort of good and evil. And I now look at it as like my soul part and my addiction part. The part that wanted them just out of the way. And what came out of My mouth was, this is none of your business and you shouldn't be disrespecting me. And I walked away. So the, the bad part won out. And I got to my bedroom and I just fell to the floor. I was devastated at what I was doing, but couldn't stop it.
And just fast forward as I finally started to get well after layers of treatment is what I call it, rather than failed attempts. I think I needed multiple experiences with different types of treatment.
I was learning about the disease or illness or condition, whatever you want to call it, from professionals. And they were telling me things that I had never heard. And I thought, this is. They said this is a thinking disorder, not a drinking problem. It's a thinking problem. And this is your brain's being hijacked, your frontal lobe is shut off when you're in active. And I'm like, how come we didn't know this? How come nobody told my kids? How come nobody told me?
How come no one came to rescue them?
And so I recognize that all the people in my life were sort of what I call co signing the problem and they were spiraling as I was spiraling. And nobody in that scenario gets better.
So I quickly started to work in the field. I had to make sense of this. I think initially I did it to try to make sense of it and help because when you get that experience of this bottom of close to death and then you get well, you, you have to, it's just spilling over the top. I had to, you know, not go back to whatever career I was doing before that or any of the careers I'd ever done. I had to join this force. So I started working as a case manager. And then ultimately what you brought up working in the ER doing overdose intervention showed me that not only were the families powerless over this illness and no one was really teaching them from behind the scenes like why we did what we do.
The doctors in the ER were working tirelessly with overdose after overdose after overdose and alcohol related incidences. They just, people were just discharging within an hour of straight up dying. And I would think the family's not notified. It just looked like such a mess. I really remember feeling like they. I was just dropped from out of space into earth for the. I felt very brand new because I'd never been in that in the medical industry. I'd never been in the addiction industry. And I was two years sober. And I just remember looking around going, something's wrong here.
I was trying to follow people down the hall. The chief of physicians My boss in the job that I was working as this recovery coach and people were listening but they were like, well, he doesn't want it. And I was like, well, what's to want? He wants to die, she wants to die. Like they don't want this.
So I just started talking with professionals and the interesting thing was this was back in 2016, people were listening because we had a, we were really seeing high numbers of overdose deaths and, and non fatal overdoses and people didn't know what to do. It's costing the systems a fortune, right? We're losing lives. And so I feel blessed, I honestly feel divine timing of when I got sober and the world was ready to listen to me saying, what are you doing?
So I did, I started to engage. The interesting story about the ER was when I first got into the job, they did not let me in the room with the patient because of hipaa. You have to ask the patient, would you see this lady? They can't just let me bounce in. So here's how they were doing that. Would you like some help? They'd come out to me in the hall, already I'm all ready to go in and meet my brother or sister, as I'm thinking. And they kept coming out the first few weeks of this job and they'd say, oh, she doesn't want help. Or he said no, he declined, she declined.
And I remember standing there saying, well, they don't, they don't, they don't not want help. This is where I was pushing back and it ultimately, after a few weeks in the job and crying to my boss like, no, this doesn't make sense, it hit me, you're asking the wrong question.
Don't ask them if they want help. And I said, will you ask them if they'll speak to an addict? So we went from engaging 1% of the people to now 100% of them saying yes. So the doctors kept coming out saying, she said yes, he said yes. And I'm like, yeah, because we'll never deny each other. Even if in that moment they don't want to get well or they're not ready for a full on treatment experience, we will never say no to each other. That's just what I've learned in recovery, right? An addict will never deny another addict. And it's like a club. And so I started to engage them all. Now my level of engagement, my engagement meant they'd speak to me. So they'd sign the release and they'd speak to me and then they would discharge and My goal when they came in was to get them to say yes to talking to me one more time, whether it's at McDonald's, coffee or a meeting anywhere.
That was a win for me. And they were quickly saying to me, yes, I'll go to get coffee with you. I mean, I'd buy them coffee, I'd go have a cigarette with them, I'd do whatever I could do to just hang with them because that's what they needed at that time. And I did discover that they were quickly asking me to speak to their family, which I later learned there was something I was doing that was eliciting that because that wasn't a common.
Most people don't say yes, talk to my family. And so I'll share what I was. What I think I. Because I'm trying to unpack. Like, what was I doing that got so many to say, please talk to my family? First thing I did when I went in the room is I tried to interrupt and get a quick read on what was going on. Meaning.
And I think I just learned this young. You know, you walk in a room, you read people. I do anyway.
And I either was met with anger eyes, you know, like, I don't want you here, but fine.
And in that case, I wanted to go slow. Or I was met with, you know, they were twitchy and I could tell they wanted to move. Like, I just kind of quickly tried to assess where they were at.
And if they were not looking communicative, I used to, I would do some interrupter like, do you want one of these cookies? I just took this bag from the nurse's station. Something that kind of disrupted the moment. And they would look up, curious, kind of like a kid. I mean, I worked in early childhood. It would be how I would enter a group of three year olds is playful, right? Or animated.
And that helped me connect with each one. I would find my way to connecting with each one. And I would quickly, within the first 20 minutes of talking, I would somehow let them know that what I did.
And it would sound, it would depend on what they were saying. But it was. If they said, I'd say something like, you know, where do you live? Or who do you live with? Or like just trying to shoot the shit, right? I wasn't clipboard, I wasn't taking an inventory, I was just vibing. I wanted to know who they lived with. Because what I had discovered was their chances are they lived with someone who either didn't know or knew and was somehow inadvertently enabling, possibly contributing to the Cycle through not understanding them. I think I felt like at that point it was just instinctive. I felt like if people know you're using and they don't know the disease, they might be doing something that's not helpful and they're certainly terrified.
And so I would say something like, I don't know about you, but I lied, straight up lied to my family. And I would say what I did, that I was guessing they did.
And they would all say, yeah, all the time. And I would say things, you know, self deprecating. Right. Like, oh my God, I just, yeah, I felt like a piece of crap, I did this or that. And then they'd say, so I, I tell families, one of the first things is start to talk about yourself.
Right. We keep, we're pushing at them to do this and do that and stop using and stop scaring me or whatever and just would connect with them.
And they would eventually, within the first couple of hours of meeting them, say, can you talk to my mom? It was often these, A lot of them were in their 20s and 30s.
I'm in my, I was 52 at the time and they weren't my peer group.
But I remember the young men, many of them said, can you talk to my mom? You, you act like me, but you remind me of her. So you can relate to my mom, but you're just like me. I would say to them, why? What do you want me to talk to them about? Well, so here's what they'd say.
And I, I tracked all of this data cause I was obsessed with how many of them were willing to engage.
And they would say, one young woman said, well, if my dad doesn't stop enabling me, I'm going to die.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
Someone said to me, you know, my wife can't stand me. She thinks I'm doing this on purpose. So they started to just describe the pain they had and the pain their family had and because it's a trap for everybody.
And I remember the first, I was brand new right to this side of the equation, which felt like multiple sides.
And so I would say, okay, I'll talk to your mom, sure, but I'm going to tell her the truth.
To which they'd say, what do you mean? Well, that we lie.
Because unless they understand why we're showing up the way we're showing up, they can't help us. And they certainly can't help themselves. I think I was appealing to the side of them that didn't want to keep doing this. Also to the side of Them that just felt awful for what they were doing to their family. I've never met anyone that's like, I love what I'm doing in my family. You know, we don't, but we do it anyway. I remember calling professionals in the field that had more experience than me saying, is this okay? You know, you and I have talked about HIPAA before. They were out of the hospital. At this point, we're meeting at McDonald's.
I got their consent. They would sign a release because I was still working for a treatment center at the time, in the field, though, out in the community.
And so I do believe we signed a release back then. And if they started to drink or use again, they would be mad that they signed that release, but they would. They. They continued to allow, not stop their parents from coming to the groups that I was running. My sole purpose initially in doing this was I felt they were in a trap and that their family was in a trap. And I just wanted to shine a light on it for whoever was interested in seeing the truth.
But then when I started running the support group, I had one primary mission, and that was to tell the families that I did that to.
I heard so much anger and fear in the families.
What I realized is families have this narrow vision. They see their loved one lying to them, and they think their loved one is this. And what I was trying to explain to them is, no, we all present this way as the disease progresses. I just wanted to loosen their anger because I thought, if they're struggling with a substance and you're struggling with anger, nobody's getting better.
And so in this support group, I literally would. They would tell me what their loved one did, and I would say what I did. It was just like this. And then I'd bring in other peers of mine, come speak to these families, and we just started to give them the playbook, I think, is what we were doing. So I did a lot of research in that year. Who's re. Who's teaching families? Someone's got to be teaching families.
And I went to al Anon meetings. They weren't really teaching families about addiction. They were teaching families to unplug from it or take care of yourself.
And I. I just kept searching.
I'd find grants, and I would put the whole grant through a word search to find the word family. Like, I was just looking for someone's gotta be telling the families the truth, and I wasn't finding it.
So tipping point started, because after those two years, we looked in that room, and really everyone was Sober because their families were understanding them, changing their response to them. One of the moms handed me her notebook after two years and said, I wrote down everything you said. And I thought, this can't be anything special. I'm just a sober person telling people about my experience. And then I realized that's special.
People need to know because families can't see the addiction.
And you have to hear it from someone who is living it. Right, Right.
My addiction and my sickness was in me. Couldn't see it on my body.
And so it had to come through my words and through my stories and through my experience in order for families to hear. But the thing I realized is families are listening through a filter of a whole brain.
More mental wellness, usually.
So even when I tell people things, they. I don't think we even hear it at the same level because we're all listening through different filters.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: So.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: So that's how it started.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: That's amazing. So you call it's a family problem, addiction.
But I remember when I first heard that, I felt a lot of shame.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: Shame.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: My family member was the one with a problem, not me at the time.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: And you didn't want to hold that because.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: No.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: What did it mean about you?
[00:18:31] Speaker A: You get reactions like that from families?
[00:18:33] Speaker B: I do. And I. There's actually. So there's shame and there's anger. I'm sure there's a wide range, but I see two sides of the spectrum.
One is pushing it away. Anger. I think it's probably all on the same scope. Right. Shame, fear, anger, it's probably all similar or it's just how it comes out. But yes, I actually believe that it's the barrier that keeps people family from recovering from. I call it the family disease of addiction.
I think. What's easier, maybe. Would it have been easier if someone said, how do you feel you've become unwell as a result of loving them?
Would that feel less shameful?
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Maybe. Yeah.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Because if you can self describe your own how you've become unwell as a result of loving them, it feels less like it's your fault.
Like it's as a result of loving them as a result of being close to addiction.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: It's like poisonous. And when you're nearby, it's contagious, it's sticky, it's icky, it's gross, it's heavy, it's toxic. Right. It's like narcissism. Yeah.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: And I think that when I first heard that, I thought, oh, if my loved one is an alcoholic, they're implying that I am too. Oh, so.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: So if I said you had the family disease of addiction, you would think.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: I meant they're, they're accusing me of being an alcoholic too.
If I were to answer that other question that you had, which is how is it manifesting in you? I would say I'm stressed out.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Exactly. So stress, that's really important for. I love hearing what's happening inside when you're hearing the messages.
Because I, I, what I feel like I've become is super alert to the barriers.
People's feelings, opinions, thoughts. They're blind spots and I just want to break through them if people want to. I don't want to break through anyone's blind spots if they're not co signing in it. But people, we need each other to rise above this.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: There's also a certain level of guilt, especially like if you have kids who are going through mental health issues or addiction.
There's a certain level. Especially with trauma being such a buzzword nowadays. It's so easy for parents to feel like they're responsible for their kids addiction.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: So how do you deal with that?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well, if they're listening to me, I talk, I, I can tell you you're not responsible, but that's just words.
So we have three components in our, in our program and they're designed this way because I think people need to be looping through all of these, which is understanding the addict and their whole experience. And it's lengthy. Then understanding yourself and your feelings about it and then separating the two so that you see two paths.
And I think that people need to, when you, if you feel guilt, like, well, it must be something I did.
When you start to understand why they're doing what they're doing, what the function of the behavior is, what they're seeking, what they need, what they get from the alcohol or drugs, it gives you some bandwidth to start to see that your reaction to it is you're attaching. Right.
It's like a process.
It almost feels like we're peeling an onion. Like I could tell you, oh, you're not responsible for them drinking. And you don't just go, oh great.
You don't snap into acceptance of that. I think it comes in layers.
And I feel like we don't have a diagram yet of this, but I keep seeing it in my head. This framework is like peeling off the layers because what we tell you families. And when I say we, I mean people on my team. And we're all in recovery ourselves. We all had bad bottoms. People like hearing from us because it's raw and it's real.
We say, nothing you did made me drink, and nothing you could do could make me not drink. Now, are there some dysfunction, less healthy, functioning things when we are little? Yeah, but didn't you have those too, from your parents who were less than whole? So there. It's one thing to lean in and say, could I have been a better parent? Yeah. Did I cause this? No. So I just encourage people to answer your question. I would encourage people to say, what if that wasn't true?
Start to explore loosening the grip that might have on you. That definite. That idea that you're guilty and there's freedom on the other side of it.
Here's the other catch.
Your loved one has a better chance of getting sober when you start to unpack some of that yourself.
How is that possible?
What do you hear when you. What do you think when you hear that? Does that sound like bs?
[00:23:13] Speaker A: I'm trying to remember what it was like before, Before I got into recovery and before I did some work. I'm trying to remember what it was like back then. I think for me, I needed to feel pain before I was ready to do work.
And at the time when I got into recovery, yeah, I was, you know, I guess I could disclose my, My.
I. I did have a spouse who, who had me, you know, who. Who brought me to this world of. Of recovery. At that time, how did I feel? It's hard to remember that. I think I. I did want the pain to go away and I wanted to be more in charge of my own world.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: But you got. You were. You said the pain needed to reach a certain threshold, but before you were ready to do the work. And I, I meet with that a lot. I meet people a lot who come in because they read my book or they heard something and they want to hear from us, but I can hear their attachment. And I don't even mean this negatively to the story, to the pain. And there's some comfort in that for a while until there isn't. And so what if people are. If I'm giving a solution and I'm continuing to hear the story, I might, depending on my comfort level with the person or what I appear to have their readiness be, I might say, are you open to me poking at that?
Or, you know, are you open to looking at an attachment or holding onto that story? And people can. Can learn that. I'm holding this because I don't know what else to do. I'm holding it because it's easier to be mad than do something about it. Right. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what it means about me.
So I do think we have to reach a certain level of pain before I like at least being in community to invite people that there could be another way.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Yeah. At the time I was also, I was delegating a lot of my power to my spouse.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Not consciously probably, right?
[00:25:10] Speaker A: No, not.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: You weren't aware of it? Yeah, no, no.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: But I made myself very dependent emotionally.
And so when it came to the point of our separation, it was, it was all about taking my power back in the places that I could take.
Not, not the stuff that I can't control, but the stuff I could control.
Like, you know, cleaning up my house, decluttering, fixing my daily routine, doing exercise.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: So that's what you were starting to do, to put yourself back together was strengthening. It's almost like you were strengthening on the outside.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I wasn't doing the inner, inner work yet, but I had to clean up sort of my visual, my environment.
And then once the, the environment was where I wanted it to be, I also got into, into recovery, into 12 step at that point and I got introduced to steps and I realized, oh, there's more to life.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: I love that you cleaned up the outside. I think of it as the outside house instead of the inside house. Right. I love that you cleaned that up first. There's so there's numerous ways to go about this. Right. You don't. There's no one right way to recover.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: I started losing weight like when I first got sober. I've.
I lost so like 10 pounds in the first month and, and I was like, oh, I like this.
So my total motivation for quitting in the beginning was vanity.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Well, you're tapping on something really important for me that I teach families. It doesn't, this is my teaching doesn't have to be everyone's. It doesn't matter what causes you to begin to get sober. It's often something that maybe you don't value later on. Vanity. Or doing it for someone else or doing it for a kid because we need a boost initially and if it's for someone else, it at least starts to get us up out of the hole.
The goal is as we improve our self worth and our self care, then we're doing it for us. There's no way I got sober in this last time for myself.
No, I got sober because I honestly, I think I got sober because I thought I was going to kill someone. Driving in the car because I kept driving drunk and I was just looking to stop. That one problem I had. No self worth.0. At the end when I say empty shell, I remember looking at trees on the highway and wondering in my mind how fast I'd have to go to hit it to be sure. I died because I was terrified of pain and I didn't want to go through that, but I googled what that was, and it's called passive suicide. I literally googled what it was to start to think about this. It wasn't active suicide. It was passive. And that scared the heck out of me.
But it wasn't because, oh, my God, I deserve a better life. There was nothing of me to even think of deservability.
So I always say to people, great, if it was vanity that brought you here because it got you started.
Doesn't matter what gets you started.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: I kind of left it for a while, never got out. I stayed sober. But in terms of emotional sobriety, I think I got into 12 step in a big way because of romantic relationships.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Oh, okay, say more.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: And I would say the pain of that was so acute, the breakup from my first sober relationship was so painful.
I have two children, and I would never want to leave them on this planet without me. But the thought of this life is just too painful.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: I have a very similar story at two and three years sober. Actually, when I was working in the er, I fell madly in love. And that created so much codependence in me after betrayal that it was a very hard breakup. And one of my mentors taught me on the flip side of every alcoholic coin is a codependent. And I think, you know, you got sober and then it was very similar. For me, that was almost more painful.
I agree with you. And I realized once I started doing this work with families, I realized why I went through that, why it was helpful. I went through that because I'm helping families with that now. So having both sides of the coin for me is what makes our work unique. And that is understanding the alcoholic side and understanding the codependent side. And codependency is not a bad thing. It's just how you used to love.
You didn't know the difference between you and other people.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Right. How would you define it further?
[00:29:29] Speaker B: I think of it as.
I think of as codependency, as something, some habit we learned as children that actually kept us safe.
So as little kids, I believe all of us lived in some level of dysfunction because we're all raised by human beings, right? So that's just my theory. Some less functioning and some more functioning. But let's just assume you were raised by human beings and there was some, some amount of dysfunction. Right. Or in whole. On not whole people, fully whole. And for me, I'll describe. I was scanning the environment as a child for how to be safe. And it was if she was happy and he got this or she needed that. I was the people pleaser. I was the middle child. And I learned to scan the environment and twist and contort myself to be. I'd be funny when I thought people needed funny. I'd be quiet when I thought people didn't want any noise. Cause there wasn't a big range of emotions allowed in my house. There wasn't comfort around a big range of emotions. So it was like neutral or go to your room.
And so I adjusted and I, I accommodated. And that's how I believe it started for me. So when I'm in a relationship, a love relationship, my behavior mirrored that. I'm okay if you think I'm okay. I'm okay if we're intimate. I'm okay if you're happy, you're perceiving. If I'm perceiving you to be happy, that is exhausting. That is not love. That is really uncomfortable. And so the breakup of that.
The way I describe the codependent recovery to me feels like you're peeling your skin off.
That's what it felt like. Yeah, I mean physically aching. You know, they describe opioid withdrawal to me and I never had that. It feels very like it might be similar.
So that's why people keep going back, break up and you go back, you break up and go back and it's like this love bombing and then throwing the. Me, I threw his clothes in the garage, which I didn't even do in a 25 year marriage with betrayal. But this was a two year relationship. I mean, I just, I lost it.
And he was an addict and I. And I was helping addicts and I. And I was making a mess at home.
Yeah, it's painful. And so I think of it as I clasp my hands and say codependent relationship is when you can't tell the difference between where you end and someone else begins. You don't know what's yours.
You think their feelings are your responsibility. It's this infusion, which is why I got that skin analogy. I mean, it's gross, but it's, it's like tearing off, tearing yourself apart from someone is super painful. On the other side of it though, so freeing to find yourself again.
But that's a big journey.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: It is a journey. Without that pain, we might not be motivated to do that work.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: I had no idea it was all about him. He did this, it's his fault.
And I remember thinking one night, I'm the common denominator in all these relationships.
Maybe there's something I'm doing, maybe it's me.
And that was a deeper layer. My first layer was 12 step with drinking and drugs. And my second layer was other people finding myself at that new level.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: Going back to families, how.
Yeah, how do you help them understand what they're doing is perhaps loving but contributing to the problem?
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Well, in this conversation, if people are listening, they may be identifying, they may be self identifying. That codependent relationship can be a partnership, it can be a parent, child, it could be a sibling. Right. There may be an element of codependency. So if this is resonating with people, what I say is you're finding yourself. That's the goal of recovery, is to find your way. There are multiple paths to get out of this pain.
But the first step is to say, this is pain and to know there's an absolute path out and there's a better way. What I love about what we do at tipping point is it doesn't matter if you want to help yourself or you want to help your addicted loved one more. It doesn't matter. Like I said before, you got sober for vanity. So what that was, that didn't lead you forever. You found a deeper meaning.
So if people want to help their loved one, great, we can help you. If people want to just help themselves because they want to leave or they want to set better boundaries, great, we can do that. But here's the good thing. Everything I teach a family member to help them distance with love, to help them cope, to help them set better boundaries is what their loved one needs.
All the things we teach family is what's better for the addict. And all the things we teach you about the addict is actually better for you.
So it's a complete win, win, total win, win, total win, win. So I don't care if you come in and say, I don't care about myself, I just want to give him a better chance. Great, we can start with that. But guess what? You're going to be getting better as a result. Because the things I'm teaching you to do are step back from what you're currently doing. That's contributing. And I don't tell people what that is.
People need to Self identify.
So the question for families is always, what do you think you're doing or not doing that is unhelpful for you or for your loved one. And people are usually pretty quick to understand what that means. I'm either, I'm obsessing, I'm stressing, I'm chasing them.
Someone told me today I jumped in front of his car when he was driving to try to stop him. Yeah. I mean, there's no limit to what we do. That's unhealthy. It's quite extreme. My book is, has a whole chapter on what is your loop, what is the thing you're caught up in.
And so people need to self identify that.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: What do you do when bills come in for your loved ones and you know they're going to go to collections?
It's going to hurt their credit rating.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: They're not going to be able to rent their own place because they're always going to have to rely on you to co sign.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: What do you do?
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Right. So question would be, do you feel prepared and ready to take that responsibility on for the rest of your life if they never recover? How far are you willing to go with this? That's something to think about. And for people that feel done, there's a way out. But let's back up and talk about people that don't feel ready to be done. Let's just talk about that for a minute. If I'm drinking and drugging and you're paying my bills, a family told me we've, we've paid off 12 cars that were totaled as a result of DUIs and like just a complete train wreck. And then this, this cleanup crew would come in and they wanted to be done with that. And how could they do that? Because then he'd have this mounting debt. So what we did is we talked to them about the value for someone in recovery to have the responsibility to repair their credit. You can't take that away from someone.
You cannot ever give someone the esteem that comes from raising your credit score. I'm a perfect example of this. My family did everything for me, everything for me. Because my parents are givers.
And the habit, the pattern started for me really young. I was a. I was asthmatic, really asthmatic. So they were like, oh, poor Kate, she needs extra stuff. So I just became the one in the family that got extra care because they were afraid that I had asthma when I was little. Right. It just became a thing.
And I remember in early recovery, my mother wanted to outfit a whole apartment And I said, you have to stop if you do this. Which is loving and trying to be helpful. All it's doing is teaching me that I can't.
And if I don't learn at 50 years old how to manage myself, how, how will I get through? You're not going to be here forever. And there's no amount of. I can't tell you what it feels like to watch my credit score go up, to watch my savings account grow, to watch my debt diminish.
You couldn't have given that feeling to me by anything you did for me.
So I tell people I know people that have come out of jail with mountains of debt and not a piece of stitch of clothing on their back and they buy a house in a couple of years.
There's nothing people can't do when they recover. And you don't want to rob people from the opportunity to carry the water and chop the wood, as my friend Earl says. He says, chop the, chop the wood and carry the water is what early recovery is about. And so that's a tough one, though.
I know people that have walked away from helping their loved ones with hundreds of thousands of debt, dollars of debt.
And it's been as painful as we described. Breaking up with those codependent relationships, it's really hard to do. I'm not saying what I'm asking families to do is easy at all, but all you're doing is making their life easy so they can continue to self destruct.
And you don't want to be part of that.
No, I mean, if, if you do, then I. What I say to people is I want to shine a light on what might, what you might be doing that you want to stop. And then you got to decide if you want to stop it. I knew a family that was helping their daughter who was homeless, fix her hair every six months because it was getting matted. And so they were basically cleaning her up, helping her feel pretty, which sounds like such a loving thing to do. But it just gave her much more comfort to go out and continue to live the life she was living. They started to see that even that was lifting her to go hurt herself more.
And it wasn't that we were saying, don't help her, don't get her hair washed, don't. That isn't what we're saying and that's actually really important. I'm glad I just thought of that. Because people think in the world that you have to cut them off and kick them out or bring them in and hold them.
That's what I see in families and in married couples, it's often one wants one and one wants the other. Very often it's neither of those.
What I want families to do is find the place in the middle that says I'm unwilling to contribute.
And this is contributing to you being comfortable enough, having enough money because I've paid something to go keep killing yourself.
And I decide. I have just realized that I can't be part of that anymore. So it's about you deciding what you are doing that you want to stop.
And then it's doing it and offering help at the same time. Right. It's not cutting them off or kicking them out.
It's let's get your hair done when you know you're a month in treatment or to go to treatment. Right. So it's about.
And it's not black and white. Right. So I can't say here's the way to do it because every situation is a little different. But I just don't want people to think the only way is cut them out or kick them out. And that doesn't work either.
It's love them, lean in, love them, look at yourself, look at what you're doing. It's a. Back and forth is our process. And that's why it's very nuanced.
That's why we created a group program so we could meet people and get to know them. It's not a black and white thing. It was really hard to write the book because I didn't want anyone to take anything out of context.
I don't want anyone to feel responsible or blamed. That is not what we're doing.
Yeah.
[00:41:04] Speaker A: So what are some of the things that families say that actually makes everything worse?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: It's hard to generalize. Let's think about it.
What are some things that might make it worse or that they say? Yeah, I mean, I think that we exas. We are exasperated.
Right. We're super exasperated. You always do this.
You know, it's anything that begins with you.
And by the way, that's not. They're not wrong. You. They do always do this. Where you can shift, that is to talk about yourself when you do this. I react this way and I've got to stop doing that.
Really. That's what we want people to do is start looking at what are you doing in that dynamic that you can change, because that's all you can change is yourself.
So I find that our exasperation isn't helpful. But I want to also say it's super justified.
I really want to validate people's experience. It is maddening. It is crazy. Making it is toxic.
And the idea that people think they have to stay in that relationship or tolerate that is devastating to me.
Want people to walk away from the chaos and invite recovery. And as simple as that sounds, someone might listen and say, well, I walked away and I invited recovery and it didn't work. There's so much more to it than that.
But I do think we spill out our exasperation. To answer your question, we spill out our own feelings.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: What do we say to somebody who's tried everything and they're ready to give up?
[00:42:44] Speaker B: So I don't mean to sound cocky, but if they haven't tried what we're doing here, they haven't tried everything. That's the first thing I think of. I really. I know it sounds super confident because if I find this somewhere else, I'll be thrilled that someone else has seen this framework. So I would say there's never no hope for me. But when I hear I've tried everything, what I. This is what I interpret. I've spent a fortune, I'm completely beat up, I'm a dish rag. And I say, are you done?
Are you completely done?
Co signing the problem, thinking that you can change it, getting caught up in the drama, rearranging your entire life, thinking you're helping someone. If you're really done, then you're ready for another way to look at this, which is pull yourself out of the chaos, get your life back, get your voice back, get your money back, stop what you're doing and take care of yourself and have healthy boundaries and learn about the disease the way you would learn about any other disease.
Because the way we're going about it isn't working.
That's what I would say.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: Nice. So what could they do? You're going national.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: We service families all over the country. We're like almost a consulting firm, consulting and education. So we partner with families to do all kinds of intervention methods.
And really what we're doing is we're working first with the family to understand your family and who are the players. And likely there's fracturing happening.
One person is enabling, one person saying, I'm done, I'm done, I'm out. That happens all the time. When I meet a family of four people, there's four different places people are in. So the first thing to do is bring that family together and start having conversations without the identified person there so that you can start to have some sense of your voice. All of Those voices are right. That's what I tell people.
The person that kicked them out needs a boundary. The person that's enabling needs, knows they need a certain level of help. Put those two together and start to reshape it. It's a game changer. It's a game changer. So I tell people in the family they're not right, they're not wrong, they're not wrong. You're all right. You're all just trying to go about it. It's just adjusting those pieces so it's almost like a.
I don't know, I don't play chess, but I just pictured a chess game. When I think about meeting with a family system, we want to rearrange the family to see where they're accommodating and start to make some changes. And then we can address your loved one professionally guided conversation to help them look at things differently. That's what I think people can do, is start to. First of all, they can start with my book Dear Family by Kate Duffy. Yep. It's called Dear Family, why your loved one won't accept help and how to help them anyway, because you need to help yourself in order to help them.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Then you have the training. The $97 training.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Yep. Which actually you can also get for 27 on when you buy our ebook. So we have video training series that again, was difficult to record because as you're hearing me, it's not black and white. There isn't a this is not a quick fix. This is not a do this and get that result. This is a pathway with a framework that's been worked for 10 years that works.
It works to untangle you from the chaos. It works to give you a better way to connect with your loved one, to reach them, a far greater chance that they'll get on a path because everyone around them is getting emotionally sober is what we're doing.
So they can. Yes, the training is a great way to start the training in the book.
And the training is called Stop the chaos.
The book is called Dear Family. And then if you want more help than that, you can join a group program which is all held over zoom people from all over the country.
More help than that would be a private custom.
Our family needs you to come here to our kitchen table and help us and guide us for months.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: So would that be with your independent, certified interventionist?
[00:46:56] Speaker B: Yeah, we have a team of interventionists. I'm one of them and there are a few others. And the services are really case management for the family at all levels.
And it varies. The degree that we lean in depends on the situation.
Wow.
[00:47:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that's so cool. Are you working with treatment centers?
[00:47:18] Speaker B: We are working with a few treatment centers and looking to do more of that next year. So treatment centers issues are a little different. There are two problems that we help them solve. It's a high rate of people leaving treatment early.
Across the industry there's a rate, it's called ama leaving against medical advice. A lot of people listening might have a person that went to treatment, got uncomfortable, called them up, get me out of here, and we go pick them up for various reasons. And leaving treatment early is a problem. The second problem treatment centers have is, I don't know the way they describe it, but I call it over involved families, families that call a lot. Families that need a lot of attention, families that are unwell and they don't have the bandwidth to manage that. Right. And I don't know what words they'd use, but that's what I see. I would have been, I am one of those. I'm going to call the treatment center. I'm going to be chasing down my person. I mean, I've done that.
So we partner with treatment centers to run a third party service. They hire us to run a family program for them and then we hold the families so the loved one goes to treatment. It's my absolute dream model for the world is I go to addiction treatment and the family goes to treatment too.
Because then you're sending a person in recovery home to a system that knows what they've been doing in treatment, that has been doing similar things themselves. I mean, come on, that makes so much sense.
[00:48:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Because if there hasn't been healing on the family level and the person of concern returns to the family system after treatment and they're still angry and pissed off and obsessed.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: Well, and what, here's what I hear. She just did it again. She just drank again and she's been home two days. And I say yes, she did exactly what she needs to do with the disease that she has.
And so the expectations are off.
Who's. Why is the. Why are we not educating families on what they're going to learn in treatment and why one time's not enough and why they'll need more and more what to expect. And so when we partner with treatment centers, two things happen.
People stay in treatment longer, which is a win for the treatment center and obviously a win for the individual and clearly a win for the family.
The second outcome that we see is if people do go home and relapse, that relapse is shorter and they get back to treatment faster.
So help everyone around the person that's really struggling and they struggle less.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: That's so cool. And you told me last week that you are tracking these numbers.
[00:49:56] Speaker B: We are. You know, it's client reported sobriety, levels of recovery. We need to pull that together. Hoping to get a grant or something to get a whole project to take our last five years of data and improve. Maybe the way we're asking the questions, put together a report. Because my hunch and the way I look at this data is it's really outstanding.
And my wish is for this to be adopted because nothing changes if nothing changes. And having the person with this complex layered high rate of recidivism illness is not working, is not working.
So something has to change. And I believe the family system can become that sort of putty. I think of it as like putty between the systems.
There's so many loving, meaningful programs. Right. They're pouring resources into helping at all these stages.
But I picture these like earthquake sized cracks in between them where people are falling in.
And when you recover the community, police departments, fire departments, and I mean recover them, learn the same framework, the whole civic community, then we become that filler in between because we respond to the person differently. Just think about it. Police, fire, all responding differently.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:18] Speaker B: Can't that help? I mean it's a big, it's a big task.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: Or the family themselves. I was thinking the ideal model would be to have, you know, peer recovery specialists the way you were when you were called into that emergency. But not every family can afford that to pay.
[00:51:31] Speaker B: Right? Right.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: For that level of service. I don't think insurance is paying for that yet.
[00:51:36] Speaker B: Not yet.
If my belief is these outcomes will say are saving insurance companies money.
And I did have a conversation years ago before I formed the company with an insurance company who was impressed with the outcomes at the er. And that's really, that's why I started the company.
I personally felt ill equipped to build this business until I became certified as an interventionist, brought other interventionists in.
And when the insurance company started asking about this being better outcomes, I thought there's no question, we need a better way.
Yeah.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: So families, until health insurance can pay, they need the serenity prayer, the courage to change the things they can. The things they can is to get educated.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: Yes. And you know, when you break down that serenity prayer a few years ago, I realized our entire framework is built around that. So our framework is three part. Understand the Addict, Untangle yourself and find the two paths. Okay.
So God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. That's my addict.
Understand them the cards. To change the things I can.
That's me.
And the wisdom to know the difference is which path is which is mine and which is theirs. So we let this program literally is the Serenity Prayer 100%. And saying that, by the way, works.
Saying it all day long works. You get some grounding and you get some clarity. But yeah, to your point of people can't afford it, it's super important to me. Super important to me, which is why we've not grown any bigger than we are. That people have access to free and scholarship recordings.
So that's why we lowered the price to $27. And if somebody needed a scholarship for that, we would give them the trainings. The goal here is for families to be educated 100%. And going to fellowship meetings, which are free, are another way that you can take the book. I tell people all the time, if you want to do this for free, get the book, the training, and go to fellowship meetings. Lots of them.
[00:53:41] Speaker A: Fellowship.
[00:53:41] Speaker B: Fellowship, meaning aa, Al Anon, codependence, Anonymous, adult child of alcoholic.
All of those Anonymous meetings.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: Yeah, because there's some people I know who have lost family members and who used to go to Al Anon and they just felt Al Anon really wasn't working for them. I mean, I'm just speaking for this one woman I know, but that she went to AA and an open AA meeting. Open meaning you don't have to qualify as an alcoholic yourself, but you can go to the meeting and get to educate yourself on how the addict.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: Open AA meetings is a great suggestion.
And I know people that have actually gone through the 12 steps as a non alcoholic in an open AA meeting, gotten a sponsor and used that step program.
Yeah, if. If one isn't working for you, find another one. There are so many right now. Way, way more than there used to be.
[00:54:33] Speaker A: Yeah, there's an Anonymous for everything there is. There is better is Anonymous. Yeah, there's everything.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: I've always erred on more of the first part of the Serenity Prayer. The. Okay, it's not my problem.
I've been working the steps and realizing that I have an avoidant side to my personality.
And.
And so I love that first part of this Serenity Prayer. But it's the second part, the courage to change the things I can that I'm working on now.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: That'll be a great question for us. To ask. We're forming some forms for people to fill out when they first come in. I actually really like adding that as a question. Which part do you like better? Because it tells a lot. Right. And we have a. We have a framework walkthrough when you get the book you can get for free. That shows the whole framework. And people say, I, oh, I understand the alcoholic. I just. I'm working on me. And it's the same thing, the two parts of the Serenity Prayer.
But which one do you like better?
It's. It reminds me of how happy people are when Mel Robbins wrote the book Let them.
Because people want to just let them. Let them. And there's more to that theory, and there's more to our theory, which is allow them to have their experience so they can feel the consequences of their addiction, but help them lean in. And. And when we work on us that second part, that's where we can help meet them where they're at.
And. Yeah, so what you're describing is there's some fear around leaning into that second part of the Serenity Prayer.
That's okay.
[00:56:03] Speaker A: I was so afraid of being controlling.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: That you went the other way.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: So I went into avoidant.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: I don't think there's any person that's ever joined our program and not been afraid.
Right. It's like, are you afraid and spiraling down, or are you afraid and you want to. And you're ready to lean in afraid. So I say to people, come. Afraid.
The woman that was telling me that she jumped in front of the car, you know, I was telling her, look at all the barriers to why people aren't getting well. She said, I. I'd like you to study the families that don't make it as a result of. That's how much pain she's in.
And I'm sure we hear heart. We hear afib often in our family batch, so, you know, our family pool. So the. The point I want to make is it's taking everybody down.
You know, families become really sick, medically sick, as a result of stress. High cortisol, fight or flight, ptsd. It's all real.
[00:57:05] Speaker A: Yeah, Chronic stress. Apparently, stress that lasts longer than six months is considered chronic.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: I mean, insurance will and should cover all of this because everybody gets really impacted by addiction. There's no question there.
Someone did just say this to me today, too. It was in a call. She said, I just want you to know all the bad things my husband says, because I don't want him to convince you that he's fine.
And I said, so what you're telling me is you think us and the interventionist that's working with her has 15 years experience. So I said, so what you're saying might be the wool might be pulled over his eyes. That's how jaded she is.
And then. And she said, I know, I know. That makes no sense. I said, no, it makes a lot of sense. It just shows how cornered you are with this disease.
And I just want people to know that it doesn't matter your situation, doesn't matter how bad you think it is.
We've seen it and there's still absolutely hope for all of it.
I said, you're not. Your husband's not unique. I'm sorry, I know he feels it to you, but it's not.
And we don't believe anything anyone tells us when we meet them because that's how we start out with the addicts. We just don't ever. So don't worry about us believing your loved one, they are not going to pull one over on us. You can't bullshit a bull sitter.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: I love what you say. Addiction isn't the problem, it's the solution.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Yeah. The substance is their solution.
[00:58:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: So people are spiraling and you're saying, stop doing that. And it's the one thing that I found that's helping me cope with life. So until I get other ways to cope with that, I'm not putting that down.
[00:58:40] Speaker A: So enabling is our. As a family member. Enabling is our.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: Our drug.
[00:58:45] Speaker A: Is our drug.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: Yes. Anger is a huge drug.
It's a, It's. We get a lot of dopamine and a lot of adrenaline and we stay. We feel empowered because of anger, but we're actually not. It's hurting us physically, medically.
But yes, enabling is us. And that's very, it's a very parallel path.
That's what we're helping families do is see what are you addicted to? What is the trauma that you're repeating?
I mean, it's not an easy thing that we're asking families to do, but it's people pleasing the fawning. Yep.
We have, we have tools for all of that, concrete tools for all of that to, to unpack that separate from it.
And life gets better. And you know this from the work you do. Life gets better.
[00:59:35] Speaker A: There was a guy, there's a kid whose mother is an alcoholic. The sister is a crack addict. And he is staying in the house because he needs to help his mom because mom can't handle it, because the daughter's making crack in the house.
So he's mowing the lawn, fixing the house.
And I. And I said to him once, why don't you leave? You're in this mad house with, you know, the crack addicted sister whose boyfriend comes and he's violent and he's like, if I leave, I'm afraid of what's going to happen to my mom.
[01:00:10] Speaker B: So he's literally holding that house up.
Yeah, that's.
[01:00:15] Speaker A: And he was working. He had a job. He was going to work every day, like 6 in the morning.
[01:00:19] Speaker B: So if people are listening who are in the situation like that you just described, what I want people to know is you start somewhere if you want to reach out and talk to me and our team, we are not going to drag you in and make you stop all that because a person with that amount of pressure can't see how to just stop it all. It's just like the deeper we get in our addiction, we can't just stop at all. You. It takes layers and steps, small steps. So a person like that might just benefit from someone to talk to about what they're going through so they don't feel the heaviness. Like you with your shame and guilt. You had to start to peel that off before you could get stronger to do the next thing.
It doesn't all have to be done all at once.
[01:01:06] Speaker A: I think for me, what was really big was cleaning up my environment and gave me giving myself a safe place.
[01:01:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that you created the safe place externally and then you were able to work on the internal. That's really cool.
[01:01:19] Speaker A: Well, it's how I clean up my house. I like to create spaces that are really beautiful and then they grow.
[01:01:25] Speaker B: I love that.
I love that.
[01:01:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
So. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're at time, but thank you so much, Kate.
[01:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Diana.
[01:01:36] Speaker A: And. And I'll put all of your. The links in the show notes, your website, your book.
[01:01:42] Speaker B: Appreciate it.
[01:01:44] Speaker A: And anything else you will give me. Thank you.
[01:01:48] Speaker B: You're welcome.
[01:01:49] Speaker A: Before we wrap up, I'd like to thank Oliver Kiker for the jingle and Gwendolyn Christian for the backup support.
Also, a quick reminder, these interviews are not a substitute for professional medical, legal, or psychological advice.
Always consult with a qualified professional for any major decisions in your life.
And thanks for joining me in exploring the connections that make us human and learning insights and strategies to help us build, heal, and nurture relationships, including, and especially the. The one with yourself.
It's been an honor to share this time with you and to bring you conversations with some of the brightest minds who deserve more recognition. Remember, life's too short to take too seriously, so don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Get outside, and let's continue this journey of life together.
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