Joe Klein

Joe Klein is a licensed professional counselor and lead clinician at Be Well Now, where he works with adults using various approaches including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. With more than 15 years of experience teaching meditation and relational mindfulness, Joe also developed the Recovery Dojo program for addiction treatment here at NRVCS and co-founded Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, which leads teen meditation retreats across the U.S. and Canada.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hey everyone, and welcome to Voices of Hope. I'm Ross Wilsie. And I'm Mike Wade. Each episode, we sit down to talk about what it means to live well, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and beyond.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

We'll look at how wellness shapes us as individuals, families, communities, and even the wider world around us.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Through real stories and honest conversations, we'll explore what hope looks like and how it grows, right here in the New River Valley. Thanks for joining us. This is Voices of Hope. Joe Klein is a licensed professional counselor and lead clinician at BeWellNow, where he works with adults using various approaches, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. With more than 15 years of experience teaching meditation and relational mindfulness, Joe also developed the Recovery Dojo program for addiction treatment here at NRBCS and co-founded Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, which leads team meditation retreats across the US and Canada. A quick note that in our conversation today, we discussed some of the details around the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. If that's a difficult topic for you, we encourage you to skip past that part. All right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining us on the Voices of Hope podcast. Um, some of our listeners might be familiar with you, but for those who aren't, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself, where you're from, education, whatever else you want to share?

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Sure. Thanks, Ross. Um, I grew up in the DC area in a big family, nine kids. Uh, I grew up during the uh later the 70s, 80s, the the racial tension and stress that was going on, you know, after after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and uh race riots that were going on, you know, my neighborhood was pretty strongly impacted by all that and racial tension throughout. So um I had the privilege to get out away from and my neighborhood and go off to college and ended up in the West Coast uh and did my undergrad work at the Evergreen State College, where I got interested in um alternative education, uh working with youth, um, troubled youth in particular. Ended up back on the East Coast doing that kind of work in DC with delinquent kids. Um and uh yeah, I ended up down here in Floyd County where I live now. I've been here for 38 years. Um I went from being a city boy to this country lifestyle that really suits me well. I'm I really enjoy gardening, raising food, chickens, hunting, keep the freezer filled every year, anything outdoors, biking, golfing, hiking. And I've had the uh privilege to get to serve as a therapist for many years, both in big agencies like NRVCS, running addiction recovery programs, and then doing one-on-one therapy now, um, primarily helping folks recover from trauma. Um my uh private practice is called Be Well Now. And uh I just feel really blessed to serve in that way in my local community again.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Yeah. Well, congrats on your on your success with your uh current practice. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

We're gonna talk a little bit more about that uh here in just a few minutes, Joe. But uh, as you noted, you are a former co-worker of ours, having done a couple of stints at New River Valley Community Services over the years. Um, but what led you to get into the field of behavioral health to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Well, again, my upraising in um a time of racial conflict was really about poverty. It was really about class. I mean, all the people living in my neighborhood, we were all the same poor, the same working class, basically. Um, but anyway, it was a place where in poverty and that kind of conflict, it a lot of youths were troubled. I was a troubled use. Drugs and alcohol, crime were um the things were easy to get into in our use. And uh again, somehow luckily I didn't end up dead or in jail and uh wanted to go back in those neighborhoods and work with those folks. Um, so again, I I had a I had a mentoring in high school, uh a soccer coach actually, that uh in his day job, he worked with troubled youth. And I really looked up to him, respected him a lot. And I found myself going, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to go. I so I when I went to college, um short a little aside, I you know, I had my trouble, little brushes with the law, and I was in front of a judge uh between graduating and going to college. And uh, you know, he says to me, What you going to college, huh? Because this is a pretty serious thing. I've got you in front of me for uh what are you gonna study in college? And I said, human development, you know, so he comes down real stern. He's like, All right, well, the first human you need to develop is yourself. I'm gonna, you know, and he he gives me the full write-off. And, you know, I didn't know then what I know now about incredible bias in our judicial system uh from a racial standpoint, you know, the privilege that I got to be told, go go ahead and go uh live your life instead of, you know, if my skin was a different color, uh I'm I don't know that that would have happened. Right. Um but anyway, I did do that. I worked my way through college and uh got my degree, started working with youth right as a as a uh as a senior in college, interning, and um when I came back into the city um right back into the neighborhoods that I grew up in had descended even into worse poverty, worse drugs, worse crime. Um so there was uh there was so much stacked against the people, my people, uh whatever race they were, the people from my neighborhood were uh having a hard time getting going. So I just I had a commitment early on that, well, I I I'm one of the lucky ones that got out, and how can I come back and help in any way?

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Yeah, that's great. So, Joe, knowing you for as long as we have, we've seen your approach to behavioral health evolve. Uh, in fact, I do think you were the first person who introduced me to the concept of mindfulness several years ago, back before it became widely known in practice as it is today. Um, can you speak to how your awareness and practice of mindfulness came about?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Yeah, happy to. Uh, you know, and the first thing I ever heard about meditation, because it wasn't something anybody in my neighborhood was doing or introducing, uh, but I read a book in high school, like the Beatles had uh some guru that they went off to some meditation retreat with. And so I was reading a book by that person that was in my library, and uh, you know, um, I was interested in Eastern religions, philosophy, well, world religions really, um, spiritual kind of development. Um, anyway, this book was talking about meditation, but it was talking about from the standpoint of, oh, all the nectar and bliss you're gonna experience. And it was kind of selling it as like, this is the best drug you'll ever have. And it's in the chemistry is inside your own brain. You just have to learn how to um get higher on your own supply, is what somebody now would say. But back then, whatever it was, as a 15-year-old person who was definitely already addicted to drugs and struggling. I was like, oh, well, that sounds great. But again, there was no uh access to it, but it it planted a seed. Yeah. Um, later in college, there were a lot of people getting into it. I wasn't ready yet, didn't get into it. Then down here, I was living here for a while. Lots of people here were going off to these 10-day silent retreats, and it was a big deal that these people were doing. And I was I liked these people and I liked the idea of that, but the marathon of 10 days of silence. Um anyway, I signed up to do that four different times and canceled four different no, I canceled three times, I guess. The fourth time was a charm.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

I finally went. Um, and were you canceling because you were just too it was too uh uncertain how it would go, or you know, I I couldn't say exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

I would say now uh because I work with internal family systems, there were protector parts of me that said, you aren't ready to be sitting still and having all of your trauma history and everything else uh come up all at once in that silence. You you're you're not gonna be ready for that. Um, so it turned out I, you know, in that interim, I ended up getting involved in some counseling myself. I I had I cleaned up my my addiction problem. Um, well, it would just say that's a process. I started that process. You know, it took me from my uh late 20s, early 30s. Uh, it took me a good 10 years to fully uh free myself from the chains of addiction. But uh having that, doing that work on my own trauma, and then getting introduced to uh another form of meditation in the intro. So I eventually did go and do 10-day and even 20-day and 30-day silent retreats. And those have been nice things to do. Uh, I gained a lot, um, especially as I was preparing to start teaching mindfulness. But let me just take it back to it's not that complicated. I ended up getting introduced to a form of meditation by some folks right here in Floyd that's called passage meditation. I didn't have to go away and spend 10 days in silence. I it was a half an hour, or it was an hour-long program that we met once a week and we only meditated for half an hour. So that began, that was like what I was getting like here. Can you can you devote a half an hour of your day to your spiritual, your emotional, your mental well-being? Um, and here's a method, and here's a method that works, and it's called passage meditation. So I'll share that with anybody if they're interested. You can go to um eswaran.org and uh we'll spell it out e-a-s W A-R-A-N.org. That's the teacher from India who brought this method to America. Passage meditation, you learn and memorize passages from all the different worlds, faith, and wisdom traditions. And you can start with the ones that are specific to your faith tradition. So I came from a Christian background. I was doing the prayer of St. Francis and then the prayers of Saint Teresa Valvala and Saint Teresa Louis. You learn these passages and you just repeat them silently in your mind for 20 to 30 minutes. And that's all you're doing, is saying the words. You're not trying to think about the meanings of the word, meditate. But what it does is allows your mind, especially your thinking mind, when you get lost in thoughts, it's word-based. You're off in thought and a thought chain. Well, instead of fighting against that to try to just like follow your breath or be in the present moment or be still in your body, you're actually just letting your mind repeat these words. So the part of your brain that often would take you out of meditation is working with you to help you go deeper into concentration. So that's called passage meditation. Still to this day, the most effective, uh, accessible form of meditation. Uh I teach all the time and share it with with clients, with friends. I share it yearly at different retreats. Um, so that got me going. And I got into that. Um, you know, a couple years into that, I was able to go to a 10-day retreat with no problem. Sit silence 10 days. Oh my goodness. Uh like, but I primed it. I'd been doing that plus therapy for a bunch of years in concert. Where it really took off from me though, and branching into the concept of mindfulness, as soon as I started seeing things like DBT and things like this, I recognized well, the roots of all of those are in these Eastern religions and philosophies and these teachings and these practices. But to bring them into the secular world as a mental health and stress relief and stress management uh tool is brilliant. Um, and so I got interested in the work that John Kabatzin was doing with secular mindfulness and um so star started doing that as well. So I had my passage meditation practice and then uh this more secular mindfulness practice, both were growing. And then what happened was I was that was during my first stint at NRVCS, and I'd been um working primarily with youth, um, both as a therapist and also as a uh person teaching um in our prevention wing, doing school-based programming. But I was also, you know, James at that time, James Pritchett was uh in charge of our crisis intervention team, and he was my direct supervisor, and he seemed to think that I had some decent clinical skills. So he started mentoring me to be a part of that, even though I didn't even fully have my license yet. Um and he and I did several pieces of work. Um, you know, it was uh a murder suicide that happened at Virginia Tech, and we worked with that department for a while. Then there was the uh few other pretty big crises that uh that took place that I got involved in, and then we had this shooting that happened at Virginia Tech. What I found when I was beginning to do the work that I was asked to do by James was that my mindfulness practice, my meditation practice, was the thing that was making me the most effective in that intense experience. I could empty out myself every day of my own insecurities, like none of us were prepared to do that work. We all were overwhelmed by the severe um enormity of the of the trauma and the stress. But I could get to empty out of that every day and then go back in the next day ready and empty out and go back in the next day. Here's an example of that. Before I even went over to do the work, the shooting, the day the shooting happened, I was serving really pretty disturbed angry boys in Floyd elementary school. Those are the kids on my caseload. And I was in working with a group, and then I would come back, go to the uh counselor's office, and she would get my next group, and I'd go back. But what happened was all of a sudden all the adults in the building were glued to screens, whatever. They were like everybody knew something was going on. And they're like, Look at this thing, this thing has happened. I'm like, Oh yeah, that's and I knew, okay, well, James will be giving me a call at some point. Is it gonna be day tomorrow? I don't know. We'll we'll be we'll be responding. Meanwhile, who deserved my attention in that moment was that next boy, that next group of boys. And I said, Okay, thanks. I I don't have any more time to look at that with y'all. Can you get my kids? And then I went in and worked with those kids for an hour, brought them back. Oh, it's even worse. You know, it's like, okay, thank you. Give me the next, and I was able to keep my focus where it was with those kids right there then and do the work that I was doing. I went home, I didn't watch any news. I did my self-care routines, um, took care of myself. I knew when I when the call comes, I'll I'll show up and I'll go do my best work. So I was able to do that already. It was three days later when I was called, we were all went over to start doing the work. And I was able to be present in a different way than I saw a lot of my colleagues at the time. Like it was everybody was in like adrenaline stress mode. And um, I just remember just kind of hanging back a little bit and watching not just how the students were, we were all at the inn at Virginia Tech. Um, and there was this, we all were in this big, huge hall, and the professors were talking, and and we were all there. And the plan was uh, in order for anybody to be able to get access back into the hall to go get their laptops, their phones, their personality, they first had to go through some debriefing uh therapy session. So we all spill out of this big auditorium into sort of the hallway to where people are supposed to then get assigned to rooms. And and we as therapists didn't even know where our rooms were yet, let alone who we were gonna be assigned. And anyway, I'm just kind of hanging back and watching the cluster, and I start hearing several of these students over here just, I don't want to do this. You want to do this? Hell no. I don't, they're gonna send me in this room with these people I don't even know. I want to go in a room with you guys. We were in the same classroom together. Why aren't we able to stay together? And and anyway, I was just kind of hearing that and just kind of checking out a member saying, I just kind of made the connection like, you guys seem pretty disturbed. What's your concern? Like, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, well, I don't I don't know if that's possible. I'm not an organizer here, but I'll see. Well, it turned out this group were there was 22 of them. They were one of the classrooms that had more survivors than fatalities. Um, only two fatalities in that classroom, and uh quite a number of others shot. But uh, they were the ones that all jumped out of the second floor window. Right. First of all, just let me take a moment as I'm just saying this, as I'm describing and talking about this, am I triggering anything for you and what's what's going on?

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Yeah, I mean, I I clearly remember um that time and just the immense sense of tragedy and grief. Um, so yeah, it was it was a bit overwhelming, you know? And I and I do sometimes still find myself trying to put my head around what happened during those times. But uh but yeah, I appreciate you checking in. But uh but yeah, I think I'm good.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yeah, I'm good too. I mean, there my wife, she was my girlfriend at that point, but had a friend who was in one of the classrooms that I believe didn't have many survivors. Um so that I'm thinking about that. And I'm also thinking about a friend of ours who's an ER doctor who was one of the first responders, and just the difficulty that would have been. So I'm okay though. So thank you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

So the the the the thing about this that's connected to how I got an up-close, in-person, direct experience of the value of my mindfulness practice, not just for me personally, emotionally, but for me to have something actually of real value to share with my clients, whoever they are. Well, it turns out when these kids found that they were gonna get to do what they want to do, then they started getting all their buddies. And instead of me being in a small little side room with like five people, I now had 22 and growing number that I was gonna work with. So anyway, we ended up going back in the big auditorium and began to do our work, which which what was this supposed to be? A 30 to 45 minute debriefing session, right? And we all had the tool belt of how to do a uh, you know, set your anchors and do a debriefing, but that wasn't how it was going. Yeah, and again, my presence, just being in the room with these folks, there was so much palpable stress coming off of their nervous systems. And I'm just sitting there in the room. I didn't go through the trade, and I'm sitting there feeling it, and my own heart rate starts going on, my own body's doing this thing, and I'm like, and I'm present to it. I'm like, wow. And because we were in that big auditorium as we started working, I just started by getting the go-around and say, well, before we go trying to talk about anything that happened on uh the other day, we're gonna talk about what was your life like, you know, before this, what were your ways of handling stress and managing stress? What were your coping? Who who who were you as a day-to-day? What was your routine and how did you take care of yourself? And we went around and you know, people were sharing that. But what was happening is they started going around, half of them didn't even hardly know each other that well. They'd been in a class together, but they had never really said word one to half the people in class. So they got familiar with using their voice and talking to each other. Well, meanwhile, because of the chaos that's going on, there were constantly people like opening a side door, this door looking in, is this where I'm supposed to, where am I supposed to? Because people are going up and down the hallway. And every time a doorway opened and shut, everybody in the room had a panic attack.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Because they'll know what what the shooter did before going into class. He went up and down the hallway and opened doors and saw who was there, and then went back and decided where he was going to start shooting. So, and again, I was unaware of this, but I was I was present enough to know like what's going on every time the door opens for you guys. And they were like, That's what he did. I'm like, wow, okay. So we have to recognize, are we even safe in here when when doors are opening? And then, you know, there were so many doors. At first, I went out to say, is there any way to go around and close, stop people from coming in our door? And it turned out that didn't stop, it just kept happening. But we began to use it as a like, each time it happens, let's all take a breath together. Okay. And now we're doing it together. So we just started this way of connecting in real time with like, all right, so if this is what's going on in my body, what's going on in your body? The second round was like, I brought them into the present and into their body. Nobody trained me to do that in any crisis debriefing class. Nobody, you know what mostly what was happening was my own presence of what felt appropriate and authentic. So we end up, the me and this group of students, they're all engineering students, by the way. They've never been involved in counseling, never done anything like this. Uh, they were very logical and linear. I was able, somewhere in the middle, to start talking about, so what's happening for you? What's happening for you? And they were all having these very what we now know, post traumatic uh stress. Uh responses in their nervous system. And I was able to say, oh, so what's happening is your adrenaline, your amygdala is firing, your adrenaline is firing, your cortisol is firing, and it's been jacked up for three days, right? Have you slept? No. No, you two, you haven't slept. Oh, what have you done? This wink is like, well, what I used to do was drink before to handle stress. What have you been doing since? Nonstop drinking, right? Yeah. Um, what have you been doing? Well, I used to always work out. What have you been doing? I've been going to the gym every day. Great. Um, but anyway, you all have these nervous systems that are like car alarms that got triggered and they're still going off doo doo do do do do do do do do do like three days later. So we need to understand the basic physics and engineering of how this thing works and how to engage the parasympathetic. So anyway, I gave them the basic stuff that I had learned that I was doing and practicing, and began to have them regulate, downregulate, and then begin to share with each other. Our session ended up going about two and a half hours. I don't know what the average was, but about an hour and a half into it, I'm like, well, we're supposed to finish up and be wrapping up now. How are you guys feeling? No, no, this is like this is the best I've felt in three days. Can we keep going? I'm like, all right, well, I'll go find out if we can keep going. So we did. And then as we were starting to wrap up, they're like, so you know, I've never been involved in counseling before, but is this counseling what we're doing? Is this therapy? I was like, Well, how do you feel? Has it been therapeutic for you? Yeah, all right. Well, this is good. I want to keep doing, can we keep doing this? Um, so they being engineers went into engineering where they organized an email list and a phone list and started coming up with places where they might want to meet. Um, and uh we did we met twice a week for the next six weeks. Um, part of the time at NRVCS and part of the time over at Cook Counseling Center. And um yeah, it was some of the most therapeutic, uh, emotional, uh deep work I've seen a group of people do. They they all were in post-traumatic stress, but I don't think very many of them went on to post-traumatic stress disorder. I they I watched them like heal themselves and each other in the process. And I might have done a few things that you might consider, you know, mindful mindfulness, but I never taught them meditation. I I mean I did teach them lengthening the breath and exhaling, you know, and using using the breath as a as a way to activate parasympathetic nervous system. But more importantly, again, what I was able to do is empty out every day, go back and serve the kids back in Floyd schools, and then come back there. I was I was coming there two nights a week. I worked with some police officers, I worked with two sons of one of the professors that was killed in one of the classrooms. So I worked with those two boys. Um I realized then that mindfulness and meditation wasn't something I people needed to start being taught after the fact of something like this. It was something everybody needs all the way through. So the segue is to say again, I I it I became aware that one of the most important tools I had on my belt for helping people was not all my counseling skills and techniques. And it was the presence that I could bring into any room and the presence that I could invite inside of those people that I was serving, the their presence to their own body and breath, their own nervous system, their own brain, and um and the simple way that people can learn to take ownership and inhabit the the brain, the body, the nervous system that's that's given them as their greatest tool for resolving and coping with stressful situations. So I knew then that uh I wanted to be teaching that I I had started sharing it with my students at at uh that I was working with at at Floyd County High School and Floyd Elementary and those other places. I I I I would bleed it in through like games. I would find mindful, mindful games, ways to make them feel stressed and then recognize what muscles were tense or um anyway. There were ways to do it, but then I realized I I want to do more of this. Um I I want to do less band-aiding people who are gushing trauma and family dysfunction and just putting them back together enough so they were less disruptive in the classroom for the teachers. That was like it's time for me to actually learn how to teach this stuff and make it accessible across the board, all ages and groups. So as you know, it you know, there's a period of time, I guess it was about 2008 or nine, when I left the agency at that time to go full-time into teaching mindfulness. And I formed a nonprofit specifically taking teenagers on meditation retreats, taking them out to these places in nature, put their cell phones in a bag. And that was back then, and you think it was bad. It's like you're gonna turn your cell phones off for a week and you're gonna learn how to listen to each other and talk to each other and tell your real story, and you're gonna learn how to pay attention to what's going on inside here. Um, so it was this combination of uh facilitated communication and facilitated uh presence and awareness inside and outside to nature. So that's what I began doing and uh formed this nonprofit that eventually grew into this national thing. It's uh I eventually got enough grant money to hire other people to run it, and I could just be a teacher. Um, but it's serving nine different locations in the states now. There in it's in Canada, it's in the UK, it's called Inward Bound Mindfulness. Um, and that's a very successful program that I'm still really proud of. And um, but what I saw was when you combine mindfulness, self-awareness with mindful communication, what we call relational mindfulness, that becomes an incredibly therapeutic modality that you don't even have to call therapy. And I was really proud to do watch so many of these teens recovering from anxiety and depression and even addiction just from coming to these meditation retreats and feeling a sense of connection and belonging. So I was really curious about that, how to bring that back into the mental health field. Um, first I came back home and for uh helped create another nonprofit to have an alternative high school in Floyd. We always had talked about it. The principal and I, Barry Holmesworth and I, and the different superintendents along the way, had talked about we really need effective alternative education in that school. Presence and self-awareness and emotional intelligence, connection to nature and hands-on learning and a sense of community and belonging are as important as all the other academic um uh things that are being focused on. And so that's Springhouse Community School, and it's still going well and strong. But um, it was halfway through that that I realized I'm ready to try bring this back into the mental health field and see as an actual clinical modality, how will it stack up? But then it came time where it's like, okay, we need this new program. We don't have any uh partial hospitalization program in our continuum of care. We need that. Would you be willing to create that? And so I created a program that integrated mindfulness, like right at the center of it, um, connection to nature, connection with each other, this relational mindfulness piece, along with, of course, education that we need to understand the way the body works, the way the brain works, the way addiction happens when the brain gets disordered. Um, and so we we created the recovery dojo to see can we create the kind of therapeutic modality that incorporates mindfulness, self-awareness, connection to nature, connection to each other, the fellowship. You know, so the main four components of recovery dojo are food. You got to have good nutrition. We were actually cooking breakfast with them every morning when we were based behind New Life. You got to eat, you got to understand the first drug everybody takes is what you're putting in their mouth. And if you're not eating the right amount of proteins, fats, like giving the brain the basic building blocks of the neurobiology it needs to uh manage emotions, you're never gonna have enough serotonin up here. I don't care how many antidepressants you take, you have to eat the right things for your body to manufacture the right things for your brain to even have a possibility of helping you regulate. So food and then fitness, you got to move your body. If you don't get out and move your body, you don't get your basic, most important mental health uh chemicals that are already available, readily available to you in your own pharmacy. Then fellowship, you need to have a connection to other people. You need to be able to really trust that you can be authentic and tell your own truth and that you that you can listen and support each other. And it's different than what happens in 12 steps. There's other ways of doing it that you can have fellowship that may not be just 12-step fellowship. I still support and always encourage everybody to go to as many meetings as we can. If AA doesn't work or NA doesn't work, there's smart recovery, there's uh Dharma recovery, there's refuge recovery there, but you need some kind of fellowship. And then sober fun and peace of mind. Like the brain needs novelty, it needs to be doing something new, something novel, something unpredictable. Uh, and again, so play. We we we engaged in a lot of play uh and art and creative creative kind of pursuits. So to me, to be mindful is all of that, is to be a whole human being with the whole brain, left brain and right brain, your heart, your head, your soul, you know, we have to encourage the and welcome the flourishing of that whole human being. So to me, that was the milieu we tried to create in the recovery dojo. I think it did okay. I I don't think we did a great job, a good enough job of addressing the the individual and personal trauma that everybody coming in there with has. So, you know, what do individuals with trauma really need? And what what is the one the misconceptions about addiction? We now know to be trauma-informed, says to ask people, not what's wrong with you, why do you keep abusing your kids or ignoring neglecting your kids and choosing drugs over your kids? Like what's wrong wrong with you? But when we ask them what happened to you and how did you get into the state of being so addicted to just dopamine, dopamine, pleasure, pleasure reward, pleasure reward. You're stuck in that loop in that cycle. What we know is 90%, if not more, of the people with addiction problems have trauma first. Not all of them. There are the few that will just love feeling good and start off just love getting high or love being a rebel and breaking the rules, but then they get chemically addicted too. So, you know, but the majority of them are not choosing to be uh uh addicted to the pleasure reward cycle. They're stuck in not knowing how to feel good naturally anymore.

SPEAKER_02 33:45

So, do you think that is the biggest misconception that people have about folks who struggle with addiction?

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Yeah, that we still moralize it and say that they're just choosing this. They're just and again, by the time some most people's addiction has gotten really bad, they are gonna lie and and cheat and manipulate and steal. And um, and so for many of them, they need a controlled environment. They need a therapeutic environment in a jail setting to start the recovery. I right one of the last ideas Lori Trail and I had was, you know, you really should let me take the dojo and put it inside of NRBC at New River Jail, where I have people for three months that I know I'm gonna have, and they know I'm gonna have them, and there's no more game playing. You that you want this, then we're gonna we're gonna give you the possibility of when you leave this place, you'll actually have a brain and a mind capable of learning how to feel good naturally again and beginning to set yourself up for success. So that's the biggest misconception that there's there's an amazing amount of trauma. So then what do people need? Um the impact is it's it's really significant because then when you develop addiction on top of trauma, now you're gonna have even more trauma. You so many of these young women who were sexually molested in their childhoods, then end up using drugs to feel good in high school, and then put get themselves in these horrible situations when they're uh under the influence and get re-traumatized, reslexually abused again. So there's trauma on layers of trauma. Um, yeah, 95% of the women that I treated for addiction had been sexually abused. Well, most of them in childhood, most of them by a family member. And then it started being a huge percentage of the men as well. Anyway, I I can go on and go on, but I love doing that work. I'll do that work again someday, who knows? Um, right now I'm getting to do work one-on-one with people. That's really rewarding because I'm watching people and I and I've I have a number of women right now in their 80s. Really? That's about another growing quarter of my my um private practice. They have never addressed their childhood sexual trauma and they're in their 80s. But one of them started doing it and was getting some support. She told one, she told one, and they're coming in and they're doing it. They're so brave, they're so courageous. They've never told their children, they've never told their grandchildren. And they're and they're beginning to do the work. EMDR, it doesn't take rocket science to train and properly resource a therapist. EMDR works, internal family system works. You know, that to me, you know, I know you want to ask about okay. My personal wellness is all the things that I said. I'm outdoors every chance I get. I play, I sing, I dance, I cry. I have to empty out like this. I still hear the worst trauma stories. I thought I'll never gonna hear worse trauma stories than I heard sitting in the dojo every day, but I keep hearing them every day in here. Um, so I gotta let that, I gotta see, you gotta let that back out of your nervous system, out of your heart and mind.

SPEAKER_01 37:14

I'm just curious, what do you have a favorite personal wellness um tool that you use, or or is it just being in nature for me? That's probably what I would pick if I was picking a favorite.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Yeah. No, it absolutely is. Um long walks in the woods. I I I disappear sometimes on a Saturday morning, tell my wife I'll see her at dark, and I'm I'm leaving at no eight, nine in the morning, and I'm I can go out my back door down the escarpment. I'm in a valley where I don't see another human being all day and just hang out, you know, walk around the waterfalls and hang out with the deer, the turkey, the bear, whoever else is around on the land. Yeah. Very cool.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Well, yeah, let's just let's get right down to it, Joe. What does the word hope mean to you since you're on the Voices of Hope podcast?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

You know, hope for me is that you have an aim, uh, something in the future, uh whether it's an intention for yourself, uh, an intention for some some gift you want to give to the world, or some intention for helping others. Um, when you have an aim and you skillfully direct your attention in the direction of that intention to me, um, that's what keeps me feeling hopeful uh about the possibility of um things getting better. There, there's a there's a future place I'm aiming at. And because of my you know, practice from mindfulness, the the basic mantra is wherever attention goes, energy flows. So if I can direct my focus in a in a way that feels hopeful, feels skillful, I'm you know, I'm uplifted. Whenever I start feeling discouraged or frustrated, you know, um jaded, I have to ask myself, well, where am I spending my attention and energy? Like, am I spinning my wheels in frustration of things that I can't even control? All the people who've been in the dojo will know the circles of control tool is the first thing everybody learns about. If I'm putting my attention and energy in the circle of things I cannot control, I'm just gonna spin my wheels in frustration, anxiety, depression, all of it. If I extract my attention and energy from that and just give it to the things that I are in my circle of control, can I take care of my body today the best I can? Can I feed my body the best options available to me? Can I drink the right amount of water, fluids? Can I serve in the ways I'm invited to serve and then let go of the outcome of what's gonna happen? Um, so for me, hope means having an aim, having an intention, and then devoting my resources, what's in my sphere of influence, my circle of control in that direction. Um and I know that I, like all of us, are currently living in a culture that has we have generations worth of unprocessed, unresolved trauma, racial trauma, financial, you know, uh societal trauma from uh the the poor staying poor, sexual trauma. So basically we still have a problem of equality and the gender issue. Um and because there's generations of that, that's the milieu we all have to recognize. If we're going to create a culture in which any of us can actually rest and feel well, we have to address the legacy burden that anyone's coming in with. The majority of the folks that you're treating for addiction are second, third, maybe even fourth generation opioid addict or second or third generation myth addiction. But alcohol is the still the most abused and most destructive uh addiction we have in our culture. And that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. So hope for me is about getting an aim to know where I've I've been, where we've been, and still gather our resources and as skillfully as possible aim and intend in a direction where we can see benefit.

SPEAKER_02 41:42

Well said. Yeah. Well said. Well, Joe, we're running uh short on time, but uh did want to give you a chance to offer some final words of wisdom if you have anything to share.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Yeah, so the interiority of each human being and each thing that lives is really special. It's really sacred. It's we spend too much of our attention and energy on the outside, flashy things. Will I get enough money? Will I get enough accolades? Will I get enough that? But the interior dimensions of a human being, of a human heart and mind are where the most precious uh richness exists. And if more of us can learn how to come inside and and and dwell there and work from there, live from there, uh we'll be way more content. Um and the outside things that seem so shiny won't be so addictive anymore. That sounds magical.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

I love it. Yeah, for sure. I will say I wrote a lot of things down on this piece of paper from today's episode. Um, so I learned a lot. And I can't wait to look some of these things up that you mentioned. Um, and I know our listeners will have learned a lot after listening to this as well.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

So yeah, yeah. There is one final piece I want to mention, and you it one of the questions was like, what advice would I have for somebody considering trying to like get into this field? Because it still seems yeah exotic to some people. It like there are all these apps out there now, and people are trying to learn through an app, and that's okay, but really get a good teacher and a good method and recognize that it's gonna take some time. Like, you're not gonna learn the piano in a sitting, you're not gonna go there and say, Well, the piano didn't work, you know, music doesn't work. So to if you're gonna give it a real try, meditation and mindfulness, don't like try it on an app 10 times and say it didn't work for me. Find a method and a teacher and really devote um, you know, 30 to 90 days getting a momentum.

unknown 43:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:49

That's great. Thanks for sharing that.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Oh, you're welcome.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Well, Joe, it's always great catching up with you. Um, learned a lot about you today that I didn't know before. So thanks for being so open and sharing. With us, and uh we appreciate all that you do and look forward to hearing more about the great things that you're doing uh in Floyd and in our in our region. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

Really good being with you guys both. Take good care.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Thanks for listening to Voices of Hope. If you enjoyed today's conversation, we'd love for you to rate and review the podcast and help us spread the word. Voices of Hope is a production of New River Valley Community Services. To learn more or listen to past episodes, visit nrvcs.org slash podcast. And remember, hope grows when we share it. So keep the conversation going, and we'll talk to you next time on Voices of Hope.