Life After Bipolar & Depression, Getting Locked in a Rubber Room, Quitting Alcohol and Picking Up Crack

Matt (00:00:03):
I'm Matt Handy and you're listening to My Last Relapse. I mean, because the reality is I've sold a lot of drugs. I've gotten arrested for selling drugs to cops multiple times. No business savvy there. Let's see, every major crime I've ever committed from bank robbery to residential burglary gotten caught for. So I'm not good at criming. Yeah, I would sell drugs and I would lose money.

 

(00:00:40):
I don't know. The only thing that I can really say, and I get it from a coaching side, be like, yeah, there are definitely strengths and definitely things that are me that are being baked into this, but I really do believe that this was supposed to happen. So between me and Dr. Shah, do you know who Dr. Shah is?

 

Doug (00:01:07):
Nope.

 

Matt (00:01:08):
He was at TAP two, but he also gave a presentation, but he's our medical director.

 

Doug (00:01:12):
Oh yeah.

 

Matt (00:01:16):
He came up with a theory around chronic relapse. He's the only board certified neurologist in the country that's also an addiction medicine specialist. The only one. So the lens that he looks at addiction through is through a neurology lens. And I mean, typical recovery is you address the spiritual, you address the mental, and then you kind of stumble through the physical most of the time. And it's like the biological, the machine that gets you from A to B completely unaddressed typically. You might hear it all the time. I heard it all the time. Well, now you're clean. You should work out and eat better.

 

(00:02:00):
But it was never teach you how, show you how, tell you why. It was just, well, you should. And then everybody, it's like a very normalized thing to hear in recovery. People tell you that you relapsed way before you picked up. But what does that actually mean? Nobody's actually looking at the relapse process and trying to break down the process. They're looking at the relapse as the event and then moving forward from there. So what we're saying is, and we're developing studies around this and white papers and models, and we are really about to implement this in the residential side and then prove the model. Everything's already branded and copyrighted. We're trying to get a patent around a device that we're trying to make. And ultimately what we're trying to do is say, look, if a man, which we're men, so we talk from a man's perspective.

 

(00:02:57):
So if a man is a four-part being, there's the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical, and any one of them that's lacking has gravity and it will pull the rest of a minute, then why are we not addressing the full person? So that's kind of my premise of it is if we are trying to reach an equilibrium and we're completely neglecting one of them, then what makes anybody think that a chronic relapser or a traditionally treatment-resistant client is going to respond if we already know that they've gone to treatment 10 times and they're not getting it. So obviously, and this all goes back to, so do you know who William White is?

 

Doug (00:03:38):
Nope.

 

Matt (00:03:39):
Do you know who the Recovery Research Institute is?

 

Doug (00:03:41):
Yes.

 

Matt (00:03:42):
Okay. So he headed the Recovery Research. He wrote all these books on addiction and outcomes. He wrote Slain the Dragon. The government was giving a millions of dollars a year to crunch metadata analysis and do all of these things that point to outcomes. And so I look at a bunch of stuff that they did at the Recovery Research Institute, and it's in conflict with what's being taught and propagated in the recovery community and in the treatment industry. And then you look at that term by itself, treatment industry. William White has a book about it where the transition from the field of recovery into the treatment industry and what that actually did for outcomes and how it destroyed outcomes and really started hurting people. Not just definitionally when you look at recovery, I mean treatment industry, because that means something. Most people don't really think about what are we saying?

 

(00:04:37):
But anything that's become industrialized, there's a machine behind that. This isn't the field of recovery anymore. This is a full-blown industry where there's numbers and bottom lines and investors and owners and that whole top side of it. But then on the backside of it, we're talking about cogs in a wheel. And most of it's compartmentalized or this department doesn't know what this department's doing, this department doesn't know what this department's doing. And ultimately, the person that should be held accountable the most for the situation that we ended up in is the payers. We ended up in a situation where when it became privatized, it used to be so expensive. So treatment was like, it was for the rich and then for the really poor where they're accessing state-funded treatment, therapeutic communities and stuff like this. And so there was this whole middle ground of people that didn't have access to care.

 

(00:05:33):
Then parody came about and then it became privatized. Then the treatment industry boomed. And now we're in a situation where 98.5% of people relapse within 90 days of leaving treatment. They came out with a statistic that said that one out of 10 people will stay clean for a year. Of that 10%, one out of 10 will stay clean for 10 years, but you got to go to treatment seven times first. So a hundred years ago, two men started the program and they had almost a hundred percent success rate. How did we go a hundred years? And this is the industry that claims to be in the business of saving lives. How did we go from highly effective, highly efficient to the complete opposite? But now there's millionaires being made out of this industry that doesn't correlate. There's a disconnect between what's being promised and what's being delivered. And so Dr. Shah and I are ... And that's something that's super gross that I found out is in order to sell a treatment company and get a 5X valuation, you need a 5% success rate.

 

(00:06:38):
So 95 out of a hundred of your clients on average can go out there and die basically with the introduction of fentanyl and all this stuff. If a hundred of them are doing drugs, 95% of them can go back out there and relapse and die, and you're going to do pretty good. In order to get a 10X valuation, guess what you need? 13%. So 87 out of 100. So my question is, are we sacrificing lives to make money? I mean, the honest answer is yes, we are, because we're not in the business of saving lives. We're in the business of saving lives that can afford it. And so what that means is that you've got people out there that are mortgaging their houses two and three times, and they finally get to that point where they're broke and their son's still relapsing or their daughter's still relapsing. And the only answer that we have for them is, well, we planted the seed. And it's like, are they going to make it back? Probably not.

 

Doug (00:07:35):
Yeah. I remember working in tobacco cessation at the American Cancer Society, and so heavily researched. It was a counseling protocol on the phone, and they also delivered nicotine replacement therapy, and everything was monitored by a PhD. They had a whole research team. You deliver, research team follows up at three months, then six months, then a year, and you hit about a 23 to 25% success rate, meaning they've not gone back to using tobacco in whatever form during that time. And so if you don't hit that, then it's usually something to do with the modality. It has nothing to do with the person. In fact, there's never any discussion whatsoever about people's culpability like, "Oh, you're just not ready or anything like that. " It's always based on the numbers and what can we do to shift those success rates.

 

Matt (00:08:40):
That's crazy that they understand it in tobacco, but it's completely neglected here because in the treatment industry, what we say is they failed. Not we failed them, they didn't do it right. The client didn't do this or the client didn't do that or they didn't finish the steps or they didn't ... It's like, okay, but what about our ethical obligation? And then on top of that, and more importantly, our moral obligation to our clients. There is no medical billing code for family therapy. There is no medical billing code for physical education, nutritional education. There is nothing for that. And so if we can't bill for it and we're not going to get reimbursed for it, that means it costs us money. And if it costs us money, we're trying to cut costs as much as possible. We're not doing it. So the moral obligation, the ethical obligation, the ethical might be satisfied, but are we looking at ourselves in the mirror at night and going, "I did that today." Or are we going, "Yeah, I did what I could.

 

(00:09:39):
We checked off the boxes." And I think that that is happening more and more often, and we're seeing these statistics of people that are out there. Fentanyl hit the streets, it became the leading cause of death for people under 40 in two years. We have nothing to do with people's choices, but when they are accessing levels of care, whether it's peer support all the way up to detox, we have a moral obligation to these people. Are we fulfilling them? And I'm not saying that the person that's out there on the front lines of this battle are doing this with some kind of ulterior motive. Most of it is altruistic on the front lines. A lot of these people are in recovery. A lot of them are doing the best job that they can do. The people that I'm really accusing are owners, investors, payers. What are you guys doing?

 

(00:10:32):
Because the people on the frontline are still struggling to pay their bills most of the time. You're not. I know what you are doing. I'm going to these conventions. People are pulling up in new Porsches and all kinds of stuff, and it's like, how is this happening? You saw it, you were at TAP, Ferraris, Porsches, Bentleys. I was like, okay, but at the same time, you have people literally two miles from here that are going to die in the next year because they can't access your treatment because it's 60 grand cash.

 

Doug (00:11:10):
And it's all supported-

 

Matt (00:11:11):
For 28 Days.

 

Doug (00:11:12):
Yeah. And it's all supported culturally. Our recovery communities, they accept these rights. For sure. It's usually some level of culpability on the person who goes back to using-

 

Matt (00:11:29):
Look, I'm not saying that we're putting the drugs in their hand. I'm not saying that we are responsible for the decision that they're making, because after you get clean, it's a decision. But are we setting people up for success or are we setting them up for failure with hopes that they come back?

 

Doug (00:11:46):
And what I'm saying is they go back to communities where your relapse is your fault. You weren't ready. It has nothing to do with the fact that you weren't prepared, you didn't actually address any of the factors. I mean, I will tell you that every one of my relapses, and I've had a number of them, most of them, I bounce back fairly quickly because I've got a good support team, but all of them were preceded by some type of response. There's something happening in the world that grabbed ahold of me, got me into hypervigilance, got me afraid, and unable to live in my own skin.

 

Matt (00:12:29):
Yeah, For sure.

 

Doug (00:12:30):
And most of the recovery community has language that doesn't match that, some type of defect that-

 

Matt (00:12:39):
For sure. For sure. And so when you talk about the hypervigilance, what we are suggesting is that there's an escalation that raise it. There's a hyperactivity in the basal lateral amygdala that ends up spiraling and basically radiating out. And so people talk about you relapsed way before you picked up, and we believe it's true. And we can point to anecdotally, and there's probably studies on it that say, yeah, there's some type of mental trigger. It might be conscious, it might be subconscious, whatever. But you end up in this process where by the time using as a viable option, relapse prevention, coping skills, box breathing, all that shit's out the window. And I'm doing whatever it takes to quiet my brain.

 

(00:13:31):
And so how do we address that? There is no addressing the person who it's already a viable option. They're going to go use. Unless you circle the wagons and lock them in a room, they're probably going to go use. There is a burnout that will happen where if it is a viable option and they literally sit on their hands for long enough, it subsides. But how often are we around these people? Because it's self-reporting anyway. How often are we around these people? How often are they calling their sponsor? How often are they doing these things? They're not. So what we're saying is, let's deconstruct the process and figure out whatever it is, the initial setoff of the trauma, the fear response, whatever it is, whatever that thing is, let's address that. So now we're looking at, we're literally calling it relapse prediction. And this doesn't have anything to do with the guy that's already in such a hyper arousal state that using is a viable option.

 

(00:14:32):
It is the person that is completely unaware that they've been re-traumatized or reactivated. We need to address it right there because you can interrupt that process early enough to where you completely reverse whatever's going on.

 

(00:14:49):
And Dr. Shah, he's a doctor and he's got a medication intervention and then he's got a practical intervention. And we're marrying the two together and saying, look, and we've got a bunch of tracking processes, so all the clients will be ... They're using a mood meter every day. And anytime you seek some kind of escalation for three or more days, call us

 

Doug (00:15:09):
Right.

 

Matt (00:15:12):
If you have an escalation for one day and then you're good the next day, you're just a normal human. But if an addict has an escalation that lasts for three plus days, you're on that track. And so the dangers of relapsing today, December 17th, what's the 17th of 2025 are way different. What that implies is way different than five years ago. If you relapse two day after three months of sobriety, the likelihood of you overdosing and dying is way higher than it's ever been. And so we are in the process of developing and implementing all of these models and studies and stuff. Nice. But let's talk about you. Okay. So Doug Smith, you've written a book, you are pretty accomplished, but you have a sorted past, to say the least. I read quite a bit of the book. I listened to it. You did a great narration, by the way.

 

Doug (00:16:15):
Thank you.

 

Matt (00:16:17):
And let's get into that.

 

Doug (00:16:19):
Sure thing. Where shall we start?

 

Matt (00:16:21):
So it's called My Last Relapse. I typically like to talk about that at some point, but let's start at the beginning with you.

 

Doug (00:16:30):
Yeah. My last relapse was actually about two months into writing the book. Wow. I mean, it lasted a day or two, and I don't think I quite understood how traumatic the past really was.

 

(00:16:50):
I knew it was traumatic, but I didn't realize the extent to which I was going to relive it. And so getting the words on the page just brought it all back up to the surface. And so I was walking around feeling sick from head to toe, rigid, ruminating, all of that. And went on a business trip and that was the ... I mean, it was just sort of a sitting duck, called my support network. Everyone rallied, altered some medications, got connected with people who were supportive and non-judgmental and was back on track and managed to get back into the writing process. So I didn't avoid it, but relapses happen. I don't track my days in recovery. Me neither. I make my days count. I quit counting my days. Exactly. And it can be devastating. If that's something that you're so proud of at three, four years, that's great and life hits you and you relapse the blow to you, the crushing blow of what you've lost.

 

Matt (00:18:03):
There's a fallacy that's being propagated in the recovery community around ... And there's an actual term for it, but it's a fallacy around the zeroing out of your worth based on your relapse.

 

Doug (00:18:15):
Exactly.

 

Matt (00:18:16):
And ultimately, do you know Jason Pullen? No. He is the president of Trone. It's a certification board around recovery homes for Texas. But he tells a story about a friend that he had or somebody that he knew in recovery that relapsed and committed suicide four days later because of just the guilt and the shame of going back into the room. That's a real thing. And it blows my mind because it's like you would think this is the treatment industry. We should be the compassionate, forgiving the loving people that we would want if we relapsed, but that's not it.

 

Doug (00:19:01):
No. And I mean, the loss is so much. I mean, my couple days of relapse that didn't erase anything, I've got a good support network, figured out that it was writing the book that was causing it. I realized I needed to take care, meaning I'm going to write pieces and then take care, take some breaks, check in with my support network, things like that. And it also became very valuable because the material came alive. I'm like, oh yeah, this is an actual real experience worthy of putting on the page because ...

 

Matt (00:19:37):
Absolutely. Yeah. It makes total sense to me that you would be in a hypervigilant state writing that book.

 

Doug (00:19:43):
Oh, yeah.

 

Matt (00:19:44):
Yeah, for sure. Because it isn't a soft issue.

 

Doug (00:19:51):
No, no. You know what's funny is I started it as a lark. Oh, I read this book called Extreme Ownership by Joko. Willing? Yeah. And it was great structure. It was like a seal operation gone wrong. So excitement, little bit of some heartbreak and a commander owning responsibility, implementing it and how it affect the people around them. It's perfect story structure.

 

Matt (00:20:20):
Did you listen to it?

 

Doug (00:20:21):
I didn't listen to it. I've listened to this podcast.

 

Matt (00:20:24):
It's amazing.

 

Doug (00:20:25):
Oh, I got to listen to it. But I was like, I'm sitting there reading it and I said, sorry, this is for the nature of this podcast. I said, hold my beer. I have a similar story. There were turning points in prison either before or after, and I brought them into the world, was able to do pretty magnificent things. I worked for about six years at the state capitol working to end mass incarceration, create reentry opportunities for people post-release and actually focus on what is it that we could do at that point in which people intersect with the police officers or before then that can divert them or deflect them out of the system.

 

(00:21:15):
So that was my career and I developed a whole staff, ran the adult policy team. I created an internship program where I'm just investing in just a continual stream of people coming out of schools of social work from across the country. And it was like I would not be this leader had I not gone through that experience, had not experienced the utter complete devastation of everything that I thought was important in my life, all of the ways in which I was hiding, who I truly was and what was happening inside. Had I not gone through that and had the complete erasure of the things that were stopping me, there's no way I could have been effective. And I was like, "That's a great story structure,

 

(00:22:07):
So let me do that. " But then I started to fill in the backstory what that descent was like because the before picture, it wasn't just I was screwing up in my career. I was suffering. I was going in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I was finding the medication mix that works with me, but I was combining it with alcohol, which made it a lethal mix. That was back in the time where doctors are like, "Oh, he's got anxiety, so let's give them Xanax." God, I hope they don't do that anymore, but ...

 

Matt (00:22:52):
More than you'd expect.

 

Doug (00:22:54):
Oh my God, because just imagine the MIGS. I'm drinking alcohol in the evening, all of these other meds and now you're going to throw on Xanax, just absolutely catastrophic.

 

Matt (00:23:05):
Well, the average MD, by the time they finish their residency, do you know how much addiction medicine training they have?

 

Doug (00:23:14):
Well, it used to be pretty low. Where is it now?

 

Matt (00:23:16):
It's still six hours.

 

Doug (00:23:17):
It's still six hours.

 

Matt (00:23:18):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:23:19):
That's ludicrous. Yeah. I used to hear it said that the most dangerous initials to someone with substance use disorder are MD. And so evidently that's still true. I actually don't see psychiatrists anymore. I do have a bipolar disorder. I hate to name the diagnosis, but my symptoms are consistent with bipolar disorder, major depression, anxiety disorder, all of that. So part of my treatment regimen is also psychiatrist, but I don't see a psychiatrist. I go to a nurse practitioner, nothing against psychiatrists, but the nurse practitioner, I got a 45-minute session. I know I can see her anytime. I can tease out, all right, what's actually something that can be treated with medication versus something that's happening internally that I could better address with my psychotherapist or just my family or through a lifestyle. I'm just not working out enough. There's all sorts of options to help you to deal what's happening internally. So we're not going to reduce it to a psychiatric issue that just needs medication.

 

Matt (00:24:40):
Correct. Yeah, because that is typically, unfortunately, because it's such a soft science. Psychiatry is such a soft science. There is no hard evidence based on statistical data. Everybody, it's so individual. You can have a thousand people with the same diagnosis with completely different symptoms, baseline the same, but the way that it's being acted out in real time, they look totally different. So I mean, it's such a hard thing that they lean heavily on something scientific, which is the medication, and it is crazy. And that is interesting that you're accessing care through a nurse practitioner. It makes total sense to me.

 

Doug (00:25:25):
Absolutely. I mean, I've met some good psychiatrists, the doctor you mentioned earlier. I mean, I talked to him at the TAP conference and I talked about my treatment regimen and he gave me thumbs up on some and thumbs down on some. So I went back to talk to my nurse practitioner and we agreed. So yeah, psychiatrists are fantastic, but it's like you said, it's kind of a soft science. They're kind of guessing and they don't probe what are the other factors, everything from exercise, from support network, things like that because they don't have time. It's a 15-minute session.

 

Matt (00:26:04):
For sure. And it's 15 minutes once a month at best. How do you understand a person's lifestyle in 15 minutes? Even if you're meeting with them once a week for a year, really understanding, because something that happens all too often, people go into treatment, they're coming off drugs or alcohol. Of course they're depressed. Of course they have anxiety, and then they end up with these diagnosis and these medications, and they're leaving treatment with five medications and two diagnosis. And it's like, why are we diagnosing people who have been off drugs for 24 hours? That sounds crazy to me, but it's happening across the board.

 

Doug (00:26:46):
Yep. Yeah. And diagnoses, I mean, they're just words, right? For sure. And words are completely inadequate for describing a set of behaviors and symptoms. And so my treatment professionals don't talk to me about diagnoses. They might talk to my insurance about it. I go out of pocket on a lot of things, but a lot of people can't because I've had a really good career and moved on from public policy. I'm now in private practice. I do leadership development with certified mental health peers, recovery support peers, reentry peers. So I'm paid by states to work with whole cohorts of people. And just so that because peers are sort of on the frontline, they create their own peer-led organizations, things like that. I work with the Judicial Commission on Mental Health, which is part of the Supreme Court. So we go into communities and we examine what's happening that leads someone, either a kid or adult into the justice system, and what can we do at different points in the process to intercept and provide a different resource in a different way.

 

(00:28:03):
So this is kind of what I do now. And so consulting's great. A lot of people coming out of a treatment center, they're not there. So I'm fortunate to be able to go out of pocket on the things that work. A lot of people don't have that, so I recognize limitation.

 

Matt (00:28:26):
Yeah. It's the healthcare system. I don't know. It's just if you want the best care, you've kind of got to pay for it. And you can access some really good care through insurance, but you're still limited and restricted to whoever they're in network with or whoever they want to pay. I know therapists, clinicians, psychiatrists, a lot of them, they don't take insurance. They will not because it's just such a pain in the ass.

 

Doug (00:28:56):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:28:57):
So it's crazy.

 

Doug (00:28:59):
Yeah. So you were asking about the book, so we kind of got rolling into it.

 

Matt (00:29:05):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, okay, let's talk about your childhood.

 

Doug (00:29:09):
Yeah. I think the roots of a lot of substance use disorder are in childhood. Some of it, obviously, it's genetic. Honestly, I'm just not sure everyone really knows.

 

Matt (00:29:26):
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely markers that people can point to. Dr. Shah says that all the time. Nobody escapes their childhood unscathed. There's something. But I just interviewed Randy Grimes and he had a great childhood, an amazing childhood, picture perfect family, American is apple pie, still became a full-blown addict through injuries and then no real medical oversight, just access to pills. Addiction doesn't give a fuck what we look like, what we smell like, who we hang out with, demographics, socioeconomics, doesn't care. It wants all of us. And so yeah, childhood is a good indicator, I think. When you're talking about ACEs, it's a pretty good indicator, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you are doomed to a life of addiction.

 

Doug (00:30:18):
Yeah. And I think in some ways I was, and in some ways probably it could have been intercepted. I did suffer abuse at age four, and I don't have to go into details, but it was enough of an adverse childhood experience to impact the rest of my life. My father left when I was 12, and I've struggled throughout my life. I'm like, I had one year of abuse and a father who left. I was not a foster child. None of those things. And I've kind of come to realize there's no trauma Olympics. It's simply experiences that are way beyond your ability to cope, that aren't sort of met by the people in your life to normalize, to help you to complete it, to process it. And that was what it was true. A lot of it either got unnoticed or I had parents who were very limited in their ability to address it. There was more sort of defensive like I shouldn't have. That should never have happened to you. It was, boy, I'm feeling really guilty. And parents make mistakes, but you're just not met. And for me, that sort of culminated, got in middle school. It was just terrific. And then my first wave of clinical depression came hit.

 

Matt (00:32:07):
At what age?

 

Doug (00:32:08):
That was about 12.

 

Matt (00:32:10):
Wow.

 

Doug (00:32:10):
Yeah. Hit me like a hammer.

 

Matt (00:32:13):
Wow. That's really young.

 

Doug (00:32:14):
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it's about the age. A lot of mental health symptoms hit on average around between about 12 and 14. So became suicidal trying to attempt suicide. And that was sort of a lifelong pattern. I was in and out of depression throughout my childhood and early adult. By the time I got to about 17 years old, I was introduced to alcohol. And just so many people with addiction, it was like, okay, I can experience life again. I can breathe. Sunlight has shown through the clouds. That's what alcohol does. It's your first try, tried some other drugs, things like that. And it's strange because I didn't follow the normal pattern of you use and then the downward slide happens. I used, I'd stop using, use, stop using. I was able to ... I kept on having suicidal bouts, but I was a motivated person. I worked at the suicide hotline in Austin, taking my lived experience and trying to help other people. I pursued a career in social work, got my master's. I was able to do a lot of big things in my life despite having it.

 

(00:33:50):
It's just that it was interrupted frequently by psychiatric hospitalizations or excessive use, things like that. And by the time I got into my 30s, the running all the way down the toilet bowl happened.

 

Matt (00:34:09):
So the foundation kind of fell out?

 

Doug (00:34:12):
It just fell out. And I guess that was inevitable. I wasn't addressing the core issues there. By the time I got to ... I remember I attempted suicide, I think I was about 36, 37, and I stopped drinking. And of course, I wanted to come out of my skin because it's hard to just suddenly stop drinking. And I was still clinically depressed, so I just absolutely crashed. And one month later, just this thought hit me. I'm either going to commit suicide or I'm going to find something that makes me feel better. And I went out on the streets in Austin. I was a social worker. I know where to go. And I was so called out to this guy sitting on a park bench. He asked what I was looking for. I said anything. And he jumped in the car. We drove to a housing project nearby and he walked in, came back out and introduced me to crack cocaine.

 

Matt (00:35:22):
Oh yeah, that'll do it.

 

Doug (00:35:23):
Yep. Within two and a half years, I was in the back of an ambulance about six times, ICU three times. I went to three psychiatric hospitals and voluntarily committed. Did a couple stints in rehab and intensive outpatient. I lost my marriage, my right to parent my child without adult supervision. I was in the back of three police cars. I was in a rubber room inside of county jail.

 

Matt (00:36:01):
Yeah, that part of the book, I've been there.

 

Doug (00:36:04):
Yeah. How have you?

 

Matt (00:36:05):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, that was the ticket to going to the outside hospital in San Diego.

 

Doug (00:36:13):
Oh, was it?

 

Matt (00:36:14):
Yeah. And I was scheming. I just robbed the bank and they didn't know. So I was like, I need whatever I have to do. I was faking seizures. I was crazy. This was the height of COVID. And I was just like, I need to get to ... Whatever I have to do to get to a hospital, I'm going to try it.

 

(00:36:31):
And then another time, that was such a dumb thing, but yeah, I was in a situation and instead of getting in trouble, I then thought, oh, okay, I know what I can do. I can tell them that I'm suicidal. Instead of going to the hole and getting this charge, I could just tell them I'm suicidal and homicidal and they'll put me over there and I'll be all right. And that was regretful for sure.

 

Doug (00:36:58):
That was regretful.

 

Matt (00:36:59):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:37:00):
Yeah. I should have just taken the charge. I know. I mean, all of our jails are set up to, since Sandra Bland, they ask, are you suicidal? And they're going to do something about it. But I can't imagine today, hopefully never go back to jail, but I would never say, yes, I'm suicidal.

 

Matt (00:37:20):
For sure.

 

Doug (00:37:21):
Absolutely not.

 

Matt (00:37:22):
Were you in the suicide vest?

 

Doug (00:37:25):
I was in a paper gown.

 

Matt (00:37:27):
Okay.

 

Doug (00:37:28):
Yeah. It was bad. Freezing. Yeah, so freezing. They also put me in a metal chair and locked me into it like a dungeon device until they could get me up to the room. Yeah, absolute nightmare. Yeah. Absolute nightmare.

 

Matt (00:37:41):
It's crazy.

 

Doug (00:37:42):
Yeah. But eventually six years in prison, got a 15-year sentence bank robbery, convenience store robbery and a hotel robbery. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, I had it bad.

 

Matt (00:37:57):
Yeah. You know what's funny is you said convenience store and bank robbery, right?

 

Doug (00:38:03):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:38:04):
The bank was probably easier than the convenience store, right?

 

Doug (00:38:08):
Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't laugh at this. Honestly, in fact, I really shouldn't because it sort of betrays some lack of accountability and definitely have some accountability. But I did use a highlighter marker and wrapped a T-shirt around it, just like Godfather part two when he Robert Denio, that's what I did. And the convenience store clerks were not willing to determine whether it was a real or not. Yeah. What unit did you do time in?

 

Matt (00:38:47):
I was in California. Oh,

 

Doug (00:38:49):
Okay. You were federal.

 

Matt (00:38:50):
Yeah. So the Feds investigated it because I also told the bank that I had a bomb in my backpack. So this was in December of 2020. And so the Feds investigated it. And when they came and interviewed me, they were like, "Look, we don't give a fuck. You got less than 10 grand. We really don't care. We want to know where the bomb is. " I was like, "There is no bomb. I wasn't even wearing a backpack." And they were like, "All right." And they didn't pick it up. The state prosecuted it.

 

Doug (00:39:18):
Okay. Yeah. And how many years should you do?

 

Matt (00:39:21):
So this was the miracle around ... 33 years was the deal. My max exposure was like 84 and I got sent to a residential program for three years.

 

Doug (00:39:32):
No kidding.

 

Matt (00:39:33):
Yeah. Damn. Yeah. I always knew, so I had a friend that got two gang-related murders. They were trying to wash him up and he went to this program and they dropped all the charges because he successfully completed. And then I met him in prison for other shit, obviously. And he always told me, "If your back's ever really against the wall, and I mean really, you got 10 years ... They're not even going to look at you if you have less than a life sentence basically." Well, I was looking at doubling my lifetime in prison and he just made it very clear, "Don't waste this bullet. Only put it in if you really need it. " And so I really needed it and I wrote them. I was the first person that they were allowed to interview after they started letting people back in from the lockdowns and I got in.

 

(00:40:30):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:40:30):
Look at you now. Yeah. They made the right choice.

 

Matt (00:40:34):
Yeah. I mean, it was interesting too because a childhood friend of mine, they actually have a TV show about him now. He was the first person that was prosecuted, charged with murder for selling fentanyl to somebody who then overdosed. And they interviewed him at the same time. And I hadn't seen this guy in 15 years. And so we got to talk or whatever and they accepted me and they didn't accept him.

 

Doug (00:41:01):
Yeah. Well, I did six years.

 

Matt (00:41:05):
Okay. Yeah. And that was for a bank convenience. So three different 211 ... Or I don't know what the penal code is here, but strong armed robberies.

 

Doug (00:41:14):
Yeah, so they dropped it to second degree. And I think I lucked out being in Austin, somewhat more progressive, not wanting to completely throw people away. But the victims asked for 15, I got 15, but they dropped it. And I remember being on the ... When they were signing the plea agreement, they almost forgot that part. And so I had to speak up. I was like, "It's being dropped to second degree, yes." And it was almost like it had never been decided. The prosecutor's like ... And so the judge dropped it there. And it's really significant because with Texas, that means you're not going to do half. It means you're going to come up for parole at roughly a quarter, probably a little less than that. Okay.

 

Matt (00:42:09):
And they will. If you don't speak up for yourself in those situations, they will write it down. And once it's on that paper, it is set in stone. I mean, the appellate process and all that stuff, to try to get that reversed is a nightmare.

 

Doug (00:42:24):
That's it. No. So I would've done seven and a half before I ever came up for parole. And instead I came up at a quarter, I got turned down four times, and then I got it on my fifth, but that's five years, eight months.

 

Matt (00:42:39):
That's not bad.

 

Doug (00:42:40):
So got out for four robberies.

 

Matt (00:42:43):
And what was it? Again, it was a bank, a convenience store.

 

Doug (00:42:47):
Two convenience stores and a hotel.

 

Matt (00:42:50):
Oh, wow. Yeah. Getting inventive there, huh? Was it like the night auditor or something?

 

Doug (00:42:56):
I guess so. I was pretty crack crazed at the time.

 

Matt (00:43:01):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:43:01):
Yeah. They didn't have a window or anything like that. Okay. So yeah, nightmare.

 

Matt (00:43:09):
So the guy that went in that you met up with that day, did you end up developing a relationship with him?

 

Doug (00:43:16):
Nope.

 

Matt (00:43:17):
Never saw him again?

 

Doug (00:43:18):
I did not. Yeah. In my crack use, I had this thing where I wanted to do it with other people and doing it with other people meant I was going to hang around with people who- Smoke crack. Yeah. And who want to manipulate you for more crack. So yeah, I was a sitting duck. I was not, I didn't have street smart.

 

Matt (00:43:42):
Yeah. The compassionate social worker out there smoking crack with basically people who are eligible to be clients.

 

Doug (00:43:50):
That's it.

 

Matt (00:43:50):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:43:51):
Yeah. I mean, and I was genuinely interested in them and their loss. Yeah,

 

Matt (00:43:54):
For sure. I could see you. I could just see it. Now what happened when you were four? I'm okay. Yeah, here you go. Go to the bank. Okay. That's

 

Doug (00:44:05):
It. Yeah.

 

Matt (00:44:07):
Yeah. Crack wasn't the everyday for me, but it was the weekend drug. So I slammed heroin for 17 years and smoked meth and slammed meth for 10. And I would binge use crack a couple times a month, but it was too ... The toll on myself, that crack, I can't pay that toll every day.

 

Doug (00:44:33):
No. Yeah. I mean, I was also a binge user because I was also trying to-

 

Matt (00:44:40):
Work?

 

Doug (00:44:41):
... get sober in my life, all of those things. And so I could make it about a month before using again. And so when the urge to use, it was like I could not resist it. Absolutely couldn't.

 

Matt (00:44:57):
Yeah. Yeah. That is a really loud voice.

 

Doug (00:45:01):
And every time I used, it brought me some degree lower every time. There was some loss that I couldn't ever get back each use. And by the time I used again, it was that the only thing available to me was either dying or going to prison because I'd knocked everything else off.

 

Matt (00:45:28):
Okay. So how long did the heavy use go on for?

 

Doug (00:45:34):
That was about two and a half years.

 

Matt (00:45:36):
Okay. Yeah. And then prison is basically where that stopped?

 

Doug (00:45:42):
It's where it stopped. I've used crack a couple times post prison. It usually has something to do in fact, working in the advocacy community, it can be pretty traumatizing. Traumatized people act out their trauma. And so being in community with folks who are well-needing but can also be horrible, they're humans. I'm not blaming anyone, but those were the precipitating events. But compared to other times before prison, I had a better sense of the help that I needed to get after those relapses, and I got really good help

 

(00:46:33):
And was able to ... Yeah, I like to say I remember when after one evening of use, I felt so horrible that I wanted to kill myself, talk a bottle of Vicodin. And fortunately, my girlfriend at the time, she caught it. I called out to her. She and another friend got me the help that I needed. And I remember waking up in the hospital bed and I immediately started to apologize to them and they're like, nope, we're not having that. You need to look at every single thing you've done during prison and after prison to create a life for yourself. You have nothing to be ashamed of. This was a relapse. That's all it was.

 

Matt (00:47:32):
Okay. That's really good.

 

Doug (00:47:35):
Yes.

 

Matt (00:47:35):
Yeah, that is not normal.

 

Doug (00:47:37):
Nope. In fact, all of the times ... I remember after the suicide attempt prior to prison, I remember I was laying on the ICU and I could hear someone behind me talking to the nurse and the nurse did something painful and I called out and that person said natural consequences and the nurse laughed. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that person walked down the hallway and I heard another voice say, "Does he have no conscience?" This was after a suicide attempt. So my wife and my friend showing up at my bedside and refusing to allow me to descend into dream, that's become a rule in my life. I will only surround myself with people who don't shame. That's our mantra in our household, my wife and I say it, we do not do shame in this family.

 

Matt (00:48:46):
That's amazing.

 

Doug (00:48:47):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:48:51):
Okay. Let's talk about one of the first lines in the book is this is a book about leadership.

 

Doug (00:48:59):
Yes.

 

Matt (00:49:00):
Let's talk about whatever it is that you're doing today around coaching leadership and all that, but also philosophy and leadership.

 

Doug (00:49:09):
Yeah. So I could have called this book the autobiography of a leader because all it is is just a book about connecting with who I was all along. I did pretty remarkable things prior to prison, even when I was going through when I was going through hell. I worked on public policies to shore up safety net programs, to do workforce development programs. That's me. That's who I am. I'm capable of doing pretty big things.

 

(00:49:49):
I was an adjunct professor. So I think part of the whole recovery process was someone asked me once, "What would you tell that guy who was 30 on his way down?" And I just simply say, "You and I are exactly the same. You just don't know it yet. You have all of the capabilities of fulfilling your life mission, realizing the vision that you have. " Acting out that deep, deep core impulse to be a social worker, you've always had that. And there's plenty of examples of you demonstrating that in your life. And all that got interrupted in prison, of course, I found opportunities to lead. Oh yeah. Yeah. But that's what it is. Leadership is really connecting with that innate capacity to actually do pretty incredible things in your life like yourself to envision an entirely new model of treatment and recovery care. You did it and I'm sitting within the results of that.

 

(00:51:02):
That was always there within you. It's only been three years since you were involved in the justice system and you did it and you brought others into that vision to support it. It's leadership. You probably had that all along. If I asked you when did that quality first show up in your life, you'd probably be able to tell me, I don't know, second grade, kindergarten, whatever these qualities are, they have always wanted to be expressed.

 

(00:51:37):
And so for me, the philosophy of leadership isn't about training leaders. We're all leaders. It's really looking at what's happening that keeps us stuck from accessing that inequality. And so that requires us to look really honestly at the results that we're actually producing. We talked about the treatment industry. It's that hard, honest, accountable look at what's working and what's not working and what's going on internally that's creating that result, whether it's success or fail. You could take the sting and shame out of fail. It's either success or it's fail. If it's fail, what's happening inside? If it's success, what's happening inside? So that's why I'm not ... I find conversations when someone's successful and I ask them how they are and they say things like it was just luck, it was the right time as wanting to go deeper into that.

 

Matt (00:52:54):
Okay. So I will say this, I don't believe in luck. It's just colloquially a really easy thing to point to because I could explain this to you, but I don't want this to be about me, but I will say this, my definition of luck is preparation and good timing.

 

Doug (00:53:11):
Exactly.

 

Matt (00:53:12):
Okay. So I mean, there was a lot of things that built up to this and there was a lot of conditioning, there was a lot of circumstantial preparation. And then there was just the lesson and painful moment after painful moment after painful moment after pain. I mean, it just on and years, almost two decades of just going through things, having the opportunity to learn a lesson, not learning a lesson, and then just continuing to go through the same thing one day after another, after another, after another. And then finally, I mean, really what it was was I didn't want to give up the drugs.This is the consistency that I found in my life was I never found ... To this day, drugs are more consistent than people, and it is what it is.

 

(00:54:05):
And I found this level of consistency and comfort and ease of the pain and all this stuff that I was like, I just don't want to deal with the things that I have to deal with in order to do the things that I need to do.

 

(00:54:17):
And so when I was ready, I always said, when I'm ready, I'll go back. And then a couple things happened. I fell out of love with the drugs. They stopped working around the same time. Ironically, they stopped working. I fell out of love with them. But for a couple years before I got actually clean, I didn't know what to do. Because recovery is a long string of decision-making and it all starts with one decision. But how do you have follow through with that one decision around putting down the needle or putting down the pipe or putting this down? For me, I knew that I would have to go to prison. I just knew it. There was no getting around it. And I always talk about this, but in the California prison system and in the San Diego jails, they've got this Bible. It's a Spanish Bible and there's cuffs and one of them is closed and one of them's open and the Bible says, rescued, not arrested, but in Spanish.

 

(00:55:16):
And I always thought about that. And I always understood that my life, the life that I've led, the things that have become normalized to me, the only way that this is going to happen, I'm not going to go to rehab and get clean. I have to go back to prison in order for this to happen. I didn't realize at the time that it wasn't the prison, it was the arrest. I needed to get rescued in order to send me on down this path.

 

(00:55:45):
And so I do tell people, I just got lucky. I'm in the backseat of my own life. I do believe that is partially true because a lot of the stuff that is happening, people are like, "Oh, it must have been so hard to get this off the ground and going. " And it's like, it really hasn't been a struggle and I haven't had a hard time at all. A lot of this stuff is really snapped into place between the hiring, the implementation. My whole thing about this was I accessed a lot of treatment and I've seen treatment rise and fall. And my whole thing was if systems are going to be the thing that drives success, then let's build the plane before we put it in the air. And so it took longer to get it off the ground, but by the time we put it in the air, it was flying and it was great and everything was in place.

 

(00:56:38):
And I know that not a lot of people have that opportunity because they need to immediately start making money. And so I'm fortunate, everything just fell into place for me to be able to implement a quality program in an effective way where a lot of people have financial restraints and time restraints and all this stuff. It could have tooken me two years to get this off the ground and it probably would've been okay.

 

(00:57:05):
We opened in January, I mean in July and then November before that, it was just an idea. So it happened pretty quickly, but we were able to really put the pieces in place and strategically hire, strategically build out, really put one thing one step after another instead of trying to skip steps and work on it in the background.

 

Doug (00:57:28):
Yeah, I love it. No, that's such a great example. One of the things I also say is, and I say it in the book, is mental health recovery is leadership. It's just like you said, it's the series of decisions you make. It's sort of like success stories in and of themselves are kind of boring. Have you ever noticed they're kind of boring and inaccessible?

 

Matt (00:57:55):
Yeah.

 

Doug (00:57:56):
What people actually want to hear about are these decisions you make along the way. So if you're in rehab right now, what's triumphant about that is these decisions you make about how you engage in group and connect with recovery community. All of those, it's just one decision after another and you're making them and that's powerful. And because every time you make that decision, it impacts you, but it starts to radiate outwards and that's it. Leaders radiate outwards.

 

Matt (00:58:36):
Yeah. So I'm involved in the peer support world. I teach a certification course. And one thing that I always try to get those people to understand is that the people who are going to access that kind of care that are going to come to you for sober coaching, they are not in the same place as you. We're peers. All that means is that we're a little bit further down the road, but there was something that really changed my perspective was small wins or big victories. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be that I tied my shoes correctly. I made my bed, I turned the light off when I left the room, I put the toilet seat down after I peed. These are all things that I never recognized that I did right. And by the time that perspective change happened, I realized that by the time I leave my front door in the morning, I've done a hundred things correctly.

 

(00:59:28):
Instead of focusing on all of the negative things that I was doing or all the failures on a daily basis, it was like, I do more things correct than I ever do wrong.

 

(00:59:38):
And then in my recovery, the way that that evolved was like I have a mentor and he says, "We are incrementally trying to live a perfect day." And as that it's a systematic tightening of the daily process, you will work towards a more perfect day. And in order to continue to justify that, it's this Self-reflection and what didn't I do correctly at the end of the day? Okay, correct that, move on. But it isn't the wallowing in the past that's going to save your future. And I tell people all the time, it's nearly impossible to move forward if you continually look back. So whatever it is, whether it's the incremental tightening of the daily processes or you're working the steps, whatever it is, when you're working the steps, you're going forward. It's the forward perpetual motion. It's like that scientific law, whatever it is, an object emotion tends to stay in motion.

 

(01:00:38):
If you get that momentum, don't slow it down to let something fester that ultimately has no bearing on your doings today.

 

Doug (01:00:47):
Yeah, I love that. I also like what you said about self-reflection. This is why people in recovery are such phenomenal leaders. Because they have this practice, it becomes part of their recovery or their way of living in recovery of reflecting on, how did I show up today? What are the results that I produced? Where do I need to make some adjustments? This is all about just authentic, accountable living, which is great. It's like a foundation of leadership. It's astonishing how people who aren't in recovery don't have that practice.

 

Matt (01:01:34):
I know. I think it's funny. You got these Fortune 500 titans of industry and they never have to look at themself. They never have to. And I tell people all the time, those people stay in the solution. They just stay there. We're coming from the problem towards the solution. And so our perspective is just 100% different.

 

Doug (01:01:57):
That's it. I mean, a person in recovery, when something goes wrong in their job, whether they're a supervisor or just an independent consultant, whatever it is, if something goes wrong, they're more likely to self-reflect, find their part of it than someone who doesn't. So therefore, a person in recovery is going to always get to higher levels of innovation. They're going to create stronger teams. People are going to want to work with them because of our authenticity, their vulnerability. It's just such a magical mix.

 

Matt (01:02:36):
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's three real human superpowers. One of them is childbirth. That's a superpower. And then high level math is definitely a superpower and recovery.

 

Doug (01:02:50):
And recovery. Recovery is a superpower. I love it. And it's something we can all do.

 

Matt (01:02:56):
Yeah. And I mean, the superpower part about it is the ripple effect of one person entering recovery. I don't know the effect that I'm going to have. You don't know the effect you're going to have. Nobody understands what happens when they get clean. Just the massive effect it has on the community around them, their family, how it radiates out from there. It's literally a drop in a pond, like a stone in a pond where you can see that. And it's hard to see it as the person, the actual things that are going on around you, but everybody else can see it.

 

Doug (01:03:27):
Yeah. I have a family member and he's in active use and has done some stuff that should have landed them in prison in my circumstance. And they're not moving forward. And so it's become impossible for me to sustain a relationship with them. And I kind of get a lot of grief like, "Look, why are you not forgiving him?" I'm like, "I don't know about forgiveness. All I know is I don't have anything to hold onto. I don't have any accountability to hold onto. He's an act of use and he has to make a decision." But I'm like, if he ever wound up in prison, I'd be the one to put money on his books and show up every weekend. If he went to rehab, I'd be there for every family day. I would write to him and meet him afterwards. It's because when we make these decisions in our life that are oriented towards recovery, everyone flocks to it. Yeah.

 

Matt (01:04:38):
Yeah. I mean, the boundary setting is also another benefit of recovery that a lot of other people ... We live in a day and an age, like December 17th, 2025, where nobody's taught healthy communication skills anymore, which is the foundation of healing. It's a foundational piece of healing, probably the cornerstone where it's like the healthy communication starts, the healing process, the language around it, a lot of us are ignorant of it. And the rest of the world outside of the recovery community, they never participate in it because they don't have to. And so when you look at the epidemic of silent suffering, which I'm sure you've heard of, men today are devalued, emasculated, all this stuff that puts them in this box that says, "You are good for one thing."

 

(01:05:28):
And if you don't do this one thing, which is provide, you're no good to the world. The reality is there's a whole consortium of men out there suffering on a daily basis silently who have something to offer the world that they just are put in this box and they end up relegating themselves to staying in this box. We live in a world of boxes. We live in boxes. We actually physically live in boxes. We travel in boxes, but we also tend to put people in boxes. We put God in a box constantly. People tell me all the time what God will or will not do. The creator of all things, and a human tries to tell me what that thing, whatever it is, is capable of or is willing to or not willing to do. And I'm like, this doesn't even make sense to me.

 

(01:06:17):
But around the healthy communication part, that is another benefit of recovery. We learn the language to express ourself in a healthy, meaningful way to be able to express whatever it is that we're going through to people who also speak the language and we get to progress in these healthy manners that it isn't taught in the home anymore. You've got mom upstairs and the son downstairs and they're texting each other. You've got the dad that's grinding all day and coming home tired, maybe drinking, maybe not, whatever. And then the deterioration of the family unit where it's like the average person isn't being ... Today, the average child isn't being raised in the same situation that they were 50 years ago, 20 years ago. And so it's all of these deteriorating momentums that we've ended up in and these processes that we're all partaking in that are really pointing us in this direction of complete chaos.

 

(01:07:21):
And addiction is tied to this, mental health is tied to this, outcomes for children is tied to this. All of this stuff is really tied to when you break it down to its most basic form is the lack of healthy communication that starts in the home.

 

Doug (01:07:37):
Yep. No. Yeah, we didn't have that in our household. I think even asking for help would have been ... It just would've been dismissed or the person who heard it would probably make me feel guilty for saying that. For sure.

 

Matt (01:07:57):
I mean, I think most people have ambivalence within themself around asking for help. They might understand they need it, but they're hesitant to ask for it. And I think it's multifaceted. There is guilt and shame around not being able to do it yourself, but then there's also the language factor where they don't know how to ask for it. But then additionally, the average person doesn't know how to respond to being asked for help. So it's a complete situation that's set up for failure.

 

Doug (01:08:28):
Yeah. I think about it in childhood. There's some key things that happen in adulthood, but I think about in childhood, oftentimes I'll say that the person I wrote this book to is actually 12, 14 years old. That's who it's for.

 

Matt (01:08:44):
That actually makes sense.

 

Doug (01:08:46):
Yeah. And because I'm thinking about other 12 to 14-year-olds. I'm a boy, so I also think about the boys who are isolated, not being seen, people not attending to pretty major symptoms and feelings of alienation, and also being shamed for how they show up in the world that seems too anxious or whatever, just making themselves targets for bullies and things like that. This is what a lot of boys contend with. Girls in their own way deal with similar things, but that's who I'm writing it to. It's the 12 to 14-year-old boy who was completely unseen and therefore went into adulthood without key developmental things happening. I remember when I was working at the suicide hotline, been a frequent caller of the suicide hotline, didn't know how to cope with life and my symptoms.

 

Matt (01:09:54):
You were calling yourself?

 

Doug (01:09:56):
I was calling. I was a frequent caller of the suicide hotline. And then I graduated college. I finally got some psychotherapy to start to connect with who I really was and work through some of the trauma of the past. And they accepted me, the suicide hotline, to train as a counselor.

 

(01:10:16):
And so a lot of it is just life skills that they don't teach, like active listening and things like that. I remember about a couple months in, I was having a conversation with someone that I just felt really good around. It made me feel like I'm talking to a kindred spirit and I was just feeling that all over the place and I finally got it what she was doing. So she was asking me questions, listening to what I said, and doing follow-up questions. And I realized, oh, she's demonstrating interest of me. She's listening. I was like, how did no one teach me this? This is actually how you make friends and get girlfriends and things like that or boyfriends, whatever. That's how you do it. We don't teach that. And that's what the 12 to 14-year-old needs, is someone to listen, to ask questions, to get interested.

 

Matt (01:11:30):
Yeah. Yeah. So motivationational interviewing is a more normalized thing now. In the counseling world before, there was a lot of guilting and shaming and all that stuff in the SUD world at least. But motivational interviewing is a powerful tool to be able to cross that ambivalence bridge where the person you're interacting with or motivationally interviewing gets to come up with their own solutions.

 

(01:12:01):
One of the things that I talk about all the time is that there is no ritualistic symbolic crossing out of boyhood into manhood anymore. Nope. It just doesn't happen. And there are communities in our society at large that do have this kind of process. I was raised Mormon and they have the mission process.You're 18, you go on a two-year mission, you leave your family, no phone calls, nothing. And you go out there and you're put in leadership positions and you're literally getting doors slammed into your face multiple times a day. And it's like the rejection and just the continual process of evolving out of a boy who's never had these life experiences into this man who has now experienced rejection on a big scale, leadership, responsibility, self-sustaining practices, like washing your own clothes, washing your own dishes.

 

(01:13:05):
And so by the time you come back in that community, you left a boy and you come back and everybody respects you as a man. Well, I mean, you look at historically the way that men have become boys, and there was always this kind of ritualistic thing that we did, and now we just don't. You just get told now you can vote or now you can ... 18, you graduate in high school, that's kind of a thing, but everybody does that. If you finish high school, everybody does that. And the boys, the girls, everybody. And then you used to be able to buy alcohol. That was a thing at 18, and that changed in the 80s. And then you used to be able to buy cigarettes, and that was a kind of a thing, and that changed again.

 

(01:13:47):
And it's like now we're moving the bar. And that's a sad thing to even look at in and of itself where it's like, well, you can buy cigarettes now or you're a man. Have you seen the Breakfast Club?

 

Doug (01:13:58):
Of course.

 

Matt (01:13:59):
Okay. You remember that part where he is like, "What do you want for Christmas?" And he gave him a pack of cigarettes and you remember that. And I think about that and I'm like, okay, as sad as it is, that is more ritualistic around being a man than anything that we're doing effectively as a society today.

 

Doug (01:14:21):
Right. Yeah. I mean, I come from a family of divorce, so I didn't have a role model along those lines. There was no coach or anyone who taught me what that was. I think I'm sort of figuring it out. I'm about to be 57 and I'm starting to get some clues what that means and that I can feel comfortable in my own skin, proud to what it be, what it means to me to be a man. It took me a long, long time.

 

Matt (01:14:57):
Do you have kids?

 

Doug (01:14:59):
I do. I have a daughter and I have two daughters and a stepson.

 

Matt (01:15:03):
Okay. And then the child that you lost custody of, are you back involved with that?

 

Doug (01:15:10):
I am. She's my youngest. Okay. Yeah.

 

Matt (01:15:13):
Your youngest is who you lost?

 

Doug (01:15:15):
Yeah. So well, my other kids are with my new wife, and so her daughter didn't really have a relationship with her dad, so I went through the formal adoption process with her. My stepson does have a relationship with his father, so that's why. So when I say I have two daughters, one's adoptive. So when I was going into my downward spiral, it was just my one daughter.

 

Matt (01:15:48):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm adopted. My dad adopted me, but my brothers were also adopted. So it was me and my two brothers are from my mom's first marriage. My dad, it's such a special thing to see this. I never knew it until much later on in life. I seen examples of it as a child too, but my brothers would've never known that they were adopted. There was no difference. And I'm the oldest of 10 kids. So he had seven other kids with my mom that he was not the biological father of. My brothers would've never known that they were adopted if I didn't tell them. And the only reason why I knew is because I have memories of my biological parents together. But to be able to take on some adopt kids and take them on and really treat them like your own kids is not an easy thing, I don't think, but it's also not a normal thing.

 

(01:16:51):
Most adopted kids can tell that they're adopted. And I have friends who talk about it. They're like, the difference between the way that they were treated and their siblings who were full brothers and sisters of the same parents, whether it was the mom or the dad that adopted them, they always could feel the disconnect. They could always see the disconnect. So when I meet people who adopted kids and really treated them like their own kids, I have a lot of respect for that.

 

Doug (01:17:22):
Yeah. Yeah. No, I absolutely adore her. I will say that I'm kind of learning my kids are in their 20s and I'm still learning fatherhood.

 

Matt (01:17:33):
Oh, I'm sure. For sure.

 

Doug (01:17:35):
My father, he left at 12. I sustained a relationship with him. He was abused as a kid. He felt like an outsider. He didn't understand how to relate with others in any type of normal way. So the only example he had was his example. And my daughter actually called me on this, my youngest. So when it came out that I was going to publish the book, that was really hard for her because it meant I was going to be talking on social media about some things that were extremely painful, and I thought we were good. My daughter was ... She's remarkable. It took us a few years before I could completely talk about where I was.

 

(01:18:29):
Within weeks of her learning where I was, she actually looked for opportunities to start doing counseling with kids of incarcerated parents, wrote a brilliant college essay that got her into University of Texas at Austin within weeks. So I saw her moving beyond the story.

 

(01:18:52):
And so it really hit me when she didn't want to be at the book signing. This edge was growing between us. She wasn't calling me back. I didn't have ... My relationship with what we call God is somewhat limited, but I got down on my knees. It's like, God, you got to do something here. And we went for a walk and we talked about it, how painful this was, but she also brought up how I am as a dad. To me, that's like we get together and we go do things and sometimes I give sage advice, but there was a deeper connection that a girl in her 20s or a young woman in her 20s wanted that was more vulnerable deeper. And I was completely unprepared for that. I was like, I thought this was what being a father was supposed to be. I thought I was doing okay, but the only example I had was my father.

 

(01:20:07):
So I'm still kind of untangling it right now. What does it mean? Because she's about to graduate University of Texas and she's going to go live in San Francisco. I'm like, I better get on top of this.

 

Matt (01:20:20):
Yeah. Yeah. I have a four-year-old, a four and a half-year-old daughter, and a three-week-old today, and I wasn't a girl. And I'm fully, fully convinced that the responsibility of raising a well-adjusted female, it falls squarely on the shoulders of their fathers. Because I know plenty of prostitutes and strippers that they all say the same shit. "I hate my dad. I have my dad problems, this and that. "You can see them reliving and reenacting their trauma with other men. So I mean, very rarely, I'm sure it happens. I haven't heard it, but I have heard it across the board that it's the dad's fault. And very rarely is it ever like I had a bad mom. It's always the dad's fault. And so I'm looking at this going, first of all, this is what I get for doing all that fucked up shit to girls when I was a teenager. But then also put that aside, it's like if I want to do this correctly, which what does that even mean?

 

(01:21:36):
I really need to either, A, learn from other people's mistakes, which historically I've been terrible at, I mean absolutely terrible at, or I need to learn from my mistakes because I mean, I tell people all the time, smart people learn from their mistakes, wise people learn from others and I was neither. I have multiple prison terms, I mean 40 arrests probably relapse after relapse after relapse and just situations that I relived over and over and over. And it's like, I can't afford that because if it's my fault that these people end up fucked up, then I don't really have much wiggle room for ... The margin of error here is very small.

 

Doug (01:22:22):
Right, exactly. Yeah. I don't know, where should we go from here? It's funny, as we're talking about it, I'm still sort of stuck on my relationship with my daughter and I just felt this sort of wave head to toe and it sort of took me out of my body. I'm like, oh no, I want to attend to that more. So it's so funny, I'm just like, I had something more to say about that, but all of a sudden I'm having a full body reactions.

 

Matt (01:22:52):
Yeah, I actually had that happen. My last relapse was coming up on two years ago and I had a two-year-old daughter. And I remember being at treatment and waking up and going, I don't need to be here. I need to be with my daughter. And it was just everything else after that, in one ear and out the other, and all I could focus on was like, I need to be there.

 

Doug (01:23:21):
That's the thing that ... Yeah, that was what I was going to say. So we're going to get it wrong as dads. We're just inevitable. Parents get it wrong. We're growing up and discovering what it means to be a parent right along with them. We didn't do the course.

 

Matt (01:23:39):
I mean, it's like one of the most important jobs that an adult human can have and there is no standardized text. That's

 

Doug (01:23:48):
It. And what I'm discovering is that the relationship actually gets built in the mistakes. It's what we do with the mistakes when we repair them. When we're honest, I really missed that. I didn't get that right. I want to do better. That whole repair process that, again, so many people miss, so many. How many relationships do you know that they never repair? They just sort of move on to the next thing. So that's relationship and that's the skill that we don't teach. It's how do I repair after rupture? And what's the profound impact that that has? Because our kids are going to see that and then they're going to do that with other people throughout their entire lives and that's it. I think I've heard someone tell me that 70% of human interactions are a misfire, like 70%.

 

Matt (01:25:02):
Wow.

 

Doug (01:25:03):
I mean, notice in all of your conversations how you're trying to find a way to sort of common understanding or common connection and how often that gets missed. It's missed in minor ways and you just try harder in your conversation and it's happening in more major ways like defensiveness or in its worst case, just sort of aggression.

 

(01:25:35):
Where the relationship actually gets built is repairing. So that remaining 30% that we do is what solidifies really healthy relationships. That's true of leadership too. I hate to shift off of the conversation, but that's true of leadership. The only thing people really want of a really great leader when things go wrong is for them to own it and say, "I want to do better."

 

Matt (01:26:13):
Yeah. I mean, when you really look at the situation that we're in today, there are mega corporations out there, I mean, multi-billion dollar corporations out there, but you think about the ones that people actually talk about and they've all got somebody that they can point to, like the Elon Musk and these types of people where it's like, that is the person that we can blame. And we watch these people stumble through their leadership where they're continually course adjusting publicly at least. I know that they're doing their job, performing probably at the peak of their performance. This guy's creating rockets and running all kinds of different stuff.

 

(01:26:57):
But you look at the Jeff Bezos, you look at the Steve Jobs, you look at these people and they became the face that people could point to and say, "This is this person's fault." And really it probably isn't. But the ability and the willingness for them to be able to put their face on it and say, "I'm the person that you can point to. " When I work for somebody or when I am in a situation where somebody is leading me, if they make a mistake, that's all I want, is for them to acknowledge it and course correct.

 

Doug (01:27:29):
That's it. Yeah, I actually get a lot of clients or people who want to be clients, organizations, corporations who want me to come in and coach someone who is having performance issues or oftentimes just because of the fact that I have a social work degrees and I'm a coach, the person is having trauma responses within the workplace, but it's a leadership team wanting me to come in and work with that person. And I'll look kind of sideways at them. I'm like- How are you not doing this? Yeah, you're the one creating the system here. You're the one who does the communication, creates the environment. You're the one. And so you want me to come in and make this person show up more effectively and then they're going to come back to a system that doesn't support that.

 

Matt (01:28:31):
Yeah. I mean, this mirrors in the recovery industry. I tell people all the time, how do you expect to start somebody on a healing journey? And now you've got a healing person, you're going to send them back into a sick situation. And what I'm talking about is the complete neglect of the family dynamics. It's like it doesn't make logical sense. You're going to send this person back to the scene of the crime and nothing has been fixed. Nothing's been fixed. The ball hasn't even been started in motion, and so doesn't make sense.

 

Doug (01:29:07):
Yeah, I do. I was talking about my work with Judicial Commission on Mental Health, which is awesome in some of the best work I've done in my career, but we do a lot of work looking at the juvenile system and various small counties across the state. I was just up in the Panhandle.

 

Matt (01:29:26):
Do you work with Fort Bend at all?

 

Doug (01:29:29):
Well, so they haven't requested any help from Judicial Commission or maybe they got help prior, because you know someone in Fort Bend have them call the Judicial Commission.

 

Matt (01:29:42):
I know I just interviewed her. She has the juvenile mental health court And she was on here asking me, what is the thing that we can point to to say that will really move the needle on working with juveniles? And I said, I had mentorship. And she was like, "Well, let's talk about it. " I was like, "Okay, but now I'm going to point her in your direction."

 

Doug (01:30:07):
Well, yeah, absolutely. The thing I would add to that is the number one thing that comes up in almost every county across the state is the lack of family engagement. That's the thing that derails the whole process.

 

Matt (01:30:23):
That's interesting too, because I just talked to the CPFS court judge. She was just here last week of Harris County, and we are talking about trying to do some kind of parental ... Because she's done actually both sides, the advocacy for the child and the parents. And one of the things that's severely lacking is advocacy work around the parents.

 

Doug (01:30:46):
Right. I mean, and there are models. Actually, it's kind of my mission in life right now is to get what's called certified family partners. So it's a form of peer certification, but it's family members of kiddos with mental behavioral health challenges who have lived with it with a child and navigated to someplace where they can support the child in an effective way and also also take care of themselves. So they'll get specialized training and they're normally within what's called local mental health authorities, like the Harris Center here. And they'll pair them. So a child on the first episode psychosis caseload, they will pair a family partner with that family member and help to normalize what's happening with the child, normalize treatment navigation, help them to think about all of the other supports that the child and they will need. So implementing education

 

Matt (01:31:54):
Around language and accessing care and stuff like that.

 

Doug (01:31:57):
Absolutely. So my mission right now is to see certified family partners actually within juvenile services departments. So working with parents to help, again, to reduce the stigma, access services, stay engaged, find ways to stay engaged. So that's what a certified family partner will do. And I'm utterly convinced that we're going to see better outcomes for kids if we can do it.

 

Matt (01:32:26):
Yeah. So the government has kept statistics for the last forever. And one of the interesting things that I've started looking into is they have statistics of every type of study that they've ever done around outcomes for children. And one of the things that I read that just blew my mind, it said that it is better for a child to have both biological parents in the home, even if one of them is abusing them than to be raised in a single home family. The outcomes are just better.

 

Doug (01:32:57):
Yeah, it's horrific. Same thing in foster care. So out of home placement, there's better outcomes if the child stays in the home where there's abuse and neglect.

 

Matt (01:33:09):
Isn't that crazy?

 

Doug (01:33:10):
It is crazy. So both outcomes are sort of unacceptable.

 

Matt (01:33:16):
For sure. Yeah.

 

Doug (01:33:18):
So that's why certified family partners need to be working with parents who are going through the CPS system.

 

Matt (01:33:26):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm definitely pointing both of them in your direction.

 

Doug (01:33:31):
Absolutely. I want to see it. I haven't been involved in legislative advocacy for a number of years, but I'm really passionate about this. So I'm thinking about trying to find a member of the legislature who would carry this and see if we can get some funding for it.

 

Matt (01:33:47):
Okay.

 

Doug (01:33:48):
Yeah. So I don't want to be a one-man show on that, so I'll have to organize some support, but I really want to see this. And I'd like to see it studied by a university so that when we see the outcomes, it can become a best practice.

 

Matt (01:34:02):
Yeah, for sure. So it's Judge Matthews in Fort Bend.

 

Doug (01:34:09):
Okay. And

 

Matt (01:34:10):
Then Judge Griffith here in Harris County.

 

Doug (01:34:12):
Awesome. Well,

 

Matt (01:34:14):
Yeah. Connect him should- Definitely will. ... send it my way. Yeah.

 

Doug (01:34:18):
Love to talk to him.

 

Matt (01:34:19):
I want to talk about your prison experience.

 

Doug (01:34:21):
Okay.

 

Matt (01:34:22):
Six years is not a small thing.

 

Doug (01:34:24):
Nope.

 

Matt (01:34:26):
And I'm not really exactly sure how the prison system in Texas works. I do know that there's different levels of prison here as well. I'm just used to the California judicial system. So did you start off in higher levels or lower levels or what was it like?

 

Doug (01:34:45):
Yeah, there's no high, low level.

 

Matt (01:34:48):
Okay.

 

Doug (01:34:50):
They have a classification system and that generally results in them being placed in a particular unit. And the unit where I was based, it was called the Walls Unit. It's the Huntsville Unit in Texas, got a 30-foot wall-

 

Matt (01:35:06):
Wait a minute.

 

Doug (01:35:07):
... around it.

 

Matt (01:35:07):
I'm going in Ellis?

 

Doug (01:35:10):
Well, Ellis is in that county.

 

Matt (01:35:12):
Okay. Is it? I'm going there tonight, actually.

 

Doug (01:35:16):
Oh my God. Yeah. So yeah, I was in the Huntsville unit, which is colloquial called the walls because of the huge wall. There's really no difference in terms of level of offenses, types of offenses between the Huntsville unit and say another unit in Cofield, but Cofield is known or Ferguson known for being somewhat more active in terms of- Gang activity and drugs. Yeah. So I don't know how it is that they create this outcome that some of the more active participants in criminal enterprise wind up in one unit versus the other because offense-wise, we're all the same. We're all in it together. So I just happened to land on a unit that was a little bit more calm. I can't explain it. That's where they do the executions on the Huntsville unit. So it might be that they wanted to make sure in that unit that they have people with a somewhat less likelihood of rioting.

 

Matt (01:36:34):
Sounds logical. That actually probably doesn't make sense for the prison system though, because a lot of that stuff is completely illogical.

 

Doug (01:36:41):
It's illogical. I can't tell you because I don't know what happens behind the scenes in those. But in answer to your question, is there a level system like maximum, medium to minimum? No. Okay. There are opportunities for becoming a trustee, and so just working outside of the gate. But beyond that, it's prison. Prison is prison. Texas prisons, 70% of them have no air conditioning.

 

Matt (01:37:15):
Yeah, I keep hearing this.

 

Doug (01:37:18):
And it's widely considered to be a human rights violation.

 

Matt (01:37:22):
Really?

 

Doug (01:37:22):
Yeah. The human rights clinic at University of Texas Law School has made that a primary issue for themselves. They go after dictators around the world. They also went off to the Texas prison system for this abuse.

 

Matt (01:37:39):
Wow. It's on that level of human rights abuse.

 

Doug (01:37:42):
Yep, it is. It's not just that it's hot, right? It's also humid here. So there's no way for your body for the moisture to evaporate. So therefore your natural cooling systems don't work. You're placed in a cell where there's very little circulation, and so it just compounds. So I don't know the number of deaths because they can code deaths however they want, but-

 

Matt (01:38:12):
Do you think there's deaths linked to-

 

Doug (01:38:14):
There have been actual deaths linked to it.

 

Matt (01:38:16):
Wow.

 

Doug (01:38:17):
Yeah. Someone with body temperature- Regulation issues. Above 106 died in the cell. Yeah. And there are a number of instances like that, but heat is really hard on people who take psychiatric medicines, who have chronic illness, things like that. So death could be like they had a heart attack or something like that, but it was heat related and they don't code as heat related. Of course.

 

(01:38:44):
But it is pretty widely considered to be a human rights violation.

 

Matt (01:38:48):
That's insanity.

 

Doug (01:38:50):
Yeah. So that's one thing about Texas prisons. I'm happy to tell you more, but yeah, my experience, I was only assaulted once and I'm glad of that. It was only once.

 

(01:39:09):
I never had to get into any altercations after that. I was also a 40-year-old and they called me school, which get old school. So I kind of realized right away that they're calling me school that I'm pretty much okay. No one's going to mess with school because what would be the point? It's like hopping on an elderly person.

 

Matt (01:39:32):
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

 

Doug (01:39:33):
Yeah. So I think those factors made my experience a little less dramatic. And it also allowed me to focus on just being who I told you I was. And so that was volunteering to do sexual assault prevention training.

 

(01:39:55):
I was a 12-step sponsor. I volunteered in the chapel. I was on the drama team. I wrote skits. So I'm not trying to make it seem like this glorious summer camp. It was awful. But I found ways of just being myself because all of the ... I basically had the benefit of my life of everything I cared about being erased. And so then I got to live my life without all of that crap. No attachments, no nothing, just live my life. And so what that looks like is me doing what's natural for me, going to serve others. Okay. Yeah. I kind of learned to be a social worker.

 

Matt (01:40:44):
Okay.

 

Doug (01:40:45):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:40:46):
You talked about you had leadership opportunities in prison. My head automatically went in a completely different direction than I'm assuming you went, but obviously now I hear you're doing these classes and teaching sexual assault prevention and doing 12-step work in there and stuff like that. How would you describe the leadership opportunities that you had?

 

Doug (01:41:12):
Yeah, so it's once you create yourself, you're not supposed to ... Officially, no one in prison is allowed to be in a leadership role, particularly over anyone else. So it needs to be more of a natural expression. So in the sexual assault prevention training, I realized we weren't doing it particularly well, and there wasn't going to be any resource out there that was going to help us to do it better. So if we were going to do it better, then I had to create a system of training and practice and feedback to help us to get better at that. So again, that was natural for me. I was a former adjunct professor.

 

(01:41:52):
And the leadership part of it wasn't just that I could do that. It was like, how do I bring multiple men together to lock in on that goal and achieve it? And that's leadership. It's just sort of a natural expression. I talk about in the book, my final day with the peer educators, we went to a conference at another unit, learned about Prison Rape Elimination Act, things like that. And then they had this big competition about knowledge and skill around being a peer educator and our team just won hands down. And I just remember the looks on their faces. We're driving back home and this deep sense of accomplishment we get no benefit for. For sure. None.

 

Matt (01:42:57):
There's no recognition.

 

Doug (01:42:59):
None.

 

Matt (01:42:59):
And outside of those walls, it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

 

Doug (01:43:04):
I put it on my resume.

 

Matt (01:43:06):
Really?

 

Doug (01:43:06):
I sure do.

 

Matt (01:43:07):
That's dope.

 

Doug (01:43:08):
Yeah. Yeah. And I can also point to the numbers. I know how to find the numbers and the rate of prison, the rate of reporting, that's what you want to see. That's how you know you're successful at sexual assault prevention is that the report rate goes up. And the report rate doubled during our time in prison. Not saying it's just me, it was just our unit, but it doubled during my time in prison. It doubled again when I got out and it's close to doubling again. So people are actually reporting sexual assault and they're prosecuting sexual assault against people who commit it, who are in white and staff members.

 

Matt (01:44:01):
So it's a prevalent thing in the Texas prison system.

 

Doug (01:44:05):
Well, it's prevalent in every penal institution.

 

Matt (01:44:09):
So I mean, coming from the California system, maybe it just is not reported and it isn't talked about, but it wasn't something that ... But also, we have heavy racial segregation. There's really, really intense prison politics, and everybody's so worried about literally surviving. I don't know. But it's an eye-opening thing to hear because coming from where I come from, you kind of hear about it everywhere else where everybody's like, there's that kind of just an assumption in the real world that it just happens. And in my experience, it was like, I never even heard of it, but that's amazing that it's ... So how long have you been out of prison?

 

Doug (01:45:04):
About 11 years.

 

Matt (01:45:05):
Okay. So it's doubled how often?

 

Doug (01:45:08):
I believe it about three times.

 

Matt (01:45:10):
Okay.

 

Doug (01:45:10):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:45:10):
So every three years it's doubling.

 

Doug (01:45:12):
Yeah. Well, this was, I'm counting all the way back 17 years.

 

Matt (01:45:17):
Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's kind of cool. It is. Have you been able to go back into the prison system?

 

Doug (01:45:26):
I've gone a few times. I didn't particularly like it. I felt kind of like a weird trauma response going back in prison, so I resisted it for some time. But this last fall, I went for some rallies for recovery, which was awesome. We just did presentations on recovery stories and fed them food and it was really great music. So I did that on a couple of units and that was really uplifting. So I'm kind of over my apprehensions about going back into prison now and I'm like, okay, let's do it. How do I do this more frequently?

 

Matt (01:46:03):
Yeah, yeah. I've been trying to find a way to get into prison advocacy, but I've just ran into a ton of walls. How do you mean prison advocacy? Just going into prison, talking to people who are coming out of prison, gang involved in prison that are trying to get out of it, whatever. Anything really. Just going into prison and giving back to those people.

 

Doug (01:46:28):
Gotcha.

 

Matt (01:46:28):
Because that's where I'm coming from. And legitimately, if it wasn't for whatever greater hand is operating all this stuff, not allowing me to experience the full consequences of my decision-making, if it wasn't for that, I would be in prison for the rest of my life probably. So yeah, I feel like I owe it to them to go back in and whatever it is. Amazing.

 

Doug (01:47:03):
Oh my God. It would be so great if you get back in. Yeah, I don't know the magic way to do it. Ministries in because they have a relationship with the chapel, or the chaplain. But sometimes really cool programming, they can get it in because of who you know in either the rehabilitative division of TDCJ or just a good relationship with a warden. So I know that those two things work. If the warden's interested, then they're going to make it happen.

 

Matt (01:47:37):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know anybody like that.

 

Doug (01:47:41):
Yeah. Well, then you're going to go to the Ellis unit tonight. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a good opportunity to-

 

Matt (01:47:50):
That's a good point.

 

Doug (01:47:51):
Yeah. The warden isn't likely to be there, but have some conversations with the officers, see if you can get them to give a good word to the warden, whatever it is.

 

Matt (01:48:03):
Yeah, definitely.

 

Doug (01:48:04):
Yeah. Because if you've got some really good programming or the mentorship you want to provide is going to be valuable to them, particularly you mentioned working with gang members, there is a gang renunciation program, I think on the Ellis unit. I might be wrong about that. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, no, they'd love you.

 

Matt (01:48:28):
Yeah, I would love to do it.

 

Doug (01:48:30):
Yeah,

 

Matt (01:48:30):
I really would.

 

Doug (01:48:31):
You have to do a volunteer application, but yeah, just do that and find a good warden or the chaplain.

 

Matt (01:48:43):
Yeah, definitely going to try that.

 

Doug (01:48:46):
Yeah. Awesome. I hope you do it.

 

Matt (01:48:48):
I mean, I'm going to do it at some point. It's just a matter of when and how.

 

Doug (01:48:53):
Were you in a gang. Okay.

 

Matt (01:48:56):
Yep. I had some situations in ... So I didn't go into prison as a gang member, but I was a drug addict and I was the youngest person on my yard. And it became very apparent very quickly that if I was going to continue to do drugs in prison, that I was either going to end up really fucked or in a gang, and I ended up in a gang.

 

(01:49:20):
So it ended up, that's the direction that I went. And then I ended up having a blast, my first prison term. And then, I mean, I had so much fun. There was no deterrent. There was no negatives at all other than I wasn't around girls. That was it. If there were girls in there, I would've stayed in there for the rest of my life. But then my second prison term happened, and I saw some things and participated in some things where I was like, "I don't want to do this for the rest of my life." And then my third one, I was like, "I'm fucking over this shit. I don't care what happens. I'm never coming back here." And then my life played out and I was like, I guess I have to go back. And then just circumstantially and then the blessings of the universe, I didn't have to.

 

(01:50:13):
And so now I am very, very convinced I will never go back to prison. And it's because I understand the consequences of my actions. This is the thing, as men, two sides of this, a man who can't control his emotions will be controlled by his emotions, and those are dangerous men. So I'll put that aside. I have the right and the ability to do whatever I want. I can hurt people, I can rob banks, I can do all that stuff. Fully understanding the consequences of my actions. And if I know what the consequences of it and I make that decision to do it still, then nobody should be able to tell me what I can and can't do. I'm fully convinced of that. If you want to do something and you're fully aware of the consequences and you still choose to do that, I will stand behind you. That is your choice. Go ahead, do it. But if you don't understand the consequences of your actions, you are playing with fire.

 

(01:51:19):
You don't understand what you're actually doing. And now what you're telling me is that you are acting out of your emotions and there is dangerous roads ahead if that's the situation that you're in. And so I learned years and years and years ago that as long as I understand the consequences of my action, nobody can tell me what to do.

 

(01:51:41):
And that kind of fed into this whole me making the decision to go out there and not participate in recovery and not ... I'm the oldest of 10 kids, I have a great family unit. I knew that if my choice was to go do drugs, that I can't play this half in, half out game with them because I was going to burn these bridges to the point where when I was ready, I couldn't come back. And so I didn't talk to my family for a majority of them for 10 years because I was doing what I wanted to do right now, and I don't want my dirt to bleed onto you. And so I just continued to make my own decisions, fully understanding the consequences. There was very little decision-making that I ever made where I didn't fully understand the consequences. And because of that, I thought I'm making decisions as a fully informed man and I accept the consequences.

 

Doug (01:52:34):
Wow, There's so much. I hate this term agency because it feels scoldy, but you do have agency. For sure. You understand if I do this, it's going to cause this and I'm going in fully knowing what I'm going to do.

 

Matt (01:52:51):
Yeah. I just think that the lack of thought process that's involved in the majority of the crimes that you see, I feel like if they would've really had the ability to play the tape ... I know this is really, really harped on as playing the tape through, and I feel like it's cheapened because now everybody says play the tape through and it doesn't really hold weight. But if they could really analyze what's about to happen, really think about the decision that you're going to make. You're going to go rob this bank. What does this actually mean? What is the damage you're going to do to that person? What is the situation that you're going to end up in? Are you willing to run? Are you willing to do whatever it takes not to go back to prison? Are you just willing to go back to prison?

 

(01:53:36):
Whatever that means, but not very many people, it's very impulsive. A lot of crimes that you see nowadays, especially violent crimes, a lot of it is knee-jerk reaction based on an emotional touchpoint or friction point that they had where somebody said the wrong thing, and next thing you know, they're facing life in prison because they took somebody's life.

 

(01:54:02):
And this is all the trickle-down effect of the lack of healthy communication.

 

Doug (01:54:11):
It's interesting. I have a lot of clients who are ... They'll talk about ways in which they're stuck or that they keep doing the same thing that they want to stop doing, and I kind of don't buy it. If you're doing this thing over and over again, then that's actually what you're committed to doing. I know you're committed to doing it because you're actually doing it. If you're committed to doing something else, you'd be doing something else. And so it's like how do you get a person accept I actually am working in a job where they don't notice me, they don't give me paid raises or anything like that, and that's going on for a year, two years. How do I accept the fact that that's actually what I want? And that I want it for a reason. It could be like I'm afraid that if I actually did get the position, then I'm on the hook for possibly failing, possibly having my team rebel against me.

 

(01:55:22):
So I'm taking this lighter position below my own capabilities to do it. And it's sort of like beginning to look at yourself and looking at the results that you're producing around you as a matter of choice. You're actually choosing that. I'm not talking about abusive relationships or anything like

 

Matt (01:55:45):
That. No, I get what you're saying.

 

Doug (01:55:47):
But where we are in life generally is a matter of choice. And we do it for logical reasons that we're not necessarily aware of. When people have experienced trauma, they oftentimes do things that are really destructive in their relationships, their careers and things like that. And when I ask simple questions about, let's just say the thing you're doing isn't actually a problem, that it actually serves a purpose for you, when did you learn that? And automatically it's like that it's probably around the adolescent who was looking for safety and started to do this thing that worked for them, that created safety for them. And then they carry it into their adult life and they keep doing the same thing. So it's always served this purpose for them. It's just that it's no longer working to pray what they want. And you can't change a pattern like that until you at first accept and appreciate where the pattern came from, vank it and-

 

Matt (01:57:08):
Move on.

 

Doug (01:57:09):
... move on. You don't change a behavior by self-discipline, things like that. That's all great. You do it by appreciating, why did I do that? Why did I use drugs? Okay, for sure. I used it to save my life.

 

Matt (01:57:24):
Yeah. Yeah. Dude, yeah. Yeah. I've never had real major pushback around me saying that drugs saved my life. Drugs kept me alive for a long time. I never had somebody actually tell me that they didn't believe me, but I know when I say that, people look at me like, "Come on, really? " It's like, yeah, for sure. But I think there's a misconception around failing where I think people think that when you fail, you fall, but I've seen massively successful people over ... I mean, history is full of them where they fail up and it's just one mistake after another after another, and they end up a titan of industry. They accidentally end up in these ... I accidentally ended up here.

 

(01:58:17):
If you asked me five years ago, literally almost to the day, five years ago, I know I could tell you almost exactly where I was five years ago. If you told me then, "Hey, this is what you're going to be doing in five years," I would've laughed at you, I would've never believed you. It just was not on the menu at all. Five years ago today, I was contemplating a lot of crazy shit. It was a different time for me, for sure. But dude, people have this misconception around failure where it's like they try to avoid it at all cost. When the reality is, I think that the failures of the world has really pointed us in the direction of all the good shit that we ended up with.

 

Doug (01:59:05):
Yeah. And you're also doing it all the time.

 

Matt (01:59:08):
Failing?

 

Doug (01:59:09):
Yeah. Yeah. We all do it all the time. This last year, I lost two contracts for mistakes, fails. One should have been anticipated, the other one wasn't anticipated. I've lost two. I've got a dozen more. And in the year prior, I'm sure I lost another one because I charged too much. There's just fail all the time. Every time I do a training, I'm failing at least one or two times and truly connecting or truly listening to someone. That capacity to just fail in front of people and show people, "Here's how you work through fail." It's like, I'm not Not defined by them, but I will tell you that every big one has made me better at what I do, particularly when it hurts. Oh yeah. Because when it hurts, then it creates an emotional memory and I'm not going to be okay until I've done something about that.

 

Matt (02:00:23):
I'm a man. Women might be really good at this too, but what I've noticed is that men are really, really responsive to shame and guilt if it's used in a healthy way. And so I've seen it many times where somebody did something, fucked up, failed, whatever, and that was used as the launchpad to really propel them into success. And it was the failure that marked the success.

 

Doug (02:00:51):
Yeah, I know. I can think of a dozen examples. I think I do conflict training for some organizations and man, I bombed at that training multiple times. It just did not land with them. And I realized my relationship with conflict is not fully formed. I do not want to be in conflict. I tend to sort of blow it out of proportion. I've realized I'm- In your own head. In my own head, in my relationship with my wife, we've literally had to throw a lesso and bring the conflict down to earth. And so my relationship with conflict was really strained. And that's why I was failing at that training. So if I wasn't really willing to look at that, what are the roots of that failure? I wouldn't be able to work through it. So I worked through how we do safe effective conflict in a relationship, and now I can train it all day long.

 

Matt (02:02:03):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how deficiencies become strengths often. Yeah. That's why I hope this whole fatherhood thing, I do okay, because it's definitely deficiency right now.

 

Doug (02:02:20):
Are you sure?

 

Matt (02:02:21):
I think so. I mean, I think about some of the stuff that I say in front of my daughters to my wife, and I'm like, "Oh shit, I probably shouldn't have said that. " Because my wife and I, we used together. We were homeless together. We've been together for coming up on nine years. And so our relationship is not your fairytale, romantic, super lovey-dovey relationship. We have a real friendship, and then we have our marriage and our romantic relationship second to our friendship, which I think is great for ... We have a really good partnership, but we also joke with each other probably inappropriately. We are really hard on each other, which I think is a really good thing because a lot of other people, they just are not willing to say the hard things to their partner at all. But I think that we do it in such a raw, not typical way that sometimes I think if people saw it, they would think that we hated each other.

 

Doug (02:03:29):
I love it. Yeah. I love it. And you talk about fail. I'm sure y'all aren't failing. There's a couple of you've got nine years, so that's cool. But that's where it's that relationship thing. It's the life skill thing. When your kiddos hear you say, "I missed that, " or, "I got that one wrong, and I want to apologize." Or they see you in your relationship repairing after a fight. It just has profound impact. You take skills of relationship.

 

Matt (02:04:08):
I'm sure it does. My wife and I don't fight. We have nothing to fight over anymore. Between the drugs and relationship problems that we had because of the drugs and none of this shit is that serious anymore. It's just like, I trust you, you trust me. After that, it's like whatever.

 

Doug (02:04:28):
Yeah. So you've had some interaction with the justice system while you've been together. How did you sort that out when you got home?

 

Matt (02:04:41):
So she's seen me arrested probably 25 times, and it just turned into one of those things where it was like, "Oh, Matt got arrested." It's like, "Yeah, it's Tuesday." And then the last time I got arrested, I was separated from them for a couple years because I was in treatment for a couple years and I went to jail for a few months and all that stuff. And I was raised in the system enough to know that you don't lose your girl, you just lose your turn. And I know her well enough that she hates men. So I'm like, okay, that's fine, whatever she's doing.

 

(02:05:27):
But we had a daughter. We found out she was pregnant. I got arrested a month later. And so she was dealing with the consequences of being a drug addict that got pregnant and having a child and then also doing it on her own. And then when I came out and I was able to and to interact with them, it was in very small bites at first. It was once a week at church, we could see each other for a few hours. So it built back up very slowly. It was introduced again. I met my daughter when she was a year and a half,

 

(02:06:07):
And then slowly it was like now I could go out with them on the weekends for eight hours on Saturday and see them on Sunday. And then it was, I could see them every day, but I can't go home. And then I could go home on the ... It was a very gradual reintroduction. And so there was no thrown right back into the fire and hope that you can make it or whatever. We got to have hard conversations. We got to have the, "You did this and you did this and I did this and I'm sorry." And then the separation of that week where it was like, "Fuck, I just want to be around her or whatever." So it was really this perfect setup to be able to, by the time I was able to go home and stay home, we were able to heal and work through the problems and talk about shit.

 

(02:06:52):
And so she's a full-blown drug addict. I'm a full-blown drug. We're just full-blown drug addicts. So we just had a baby. She had a C-section. And we had for months conversations around the medication, talking to doctors, talking to each other, talking to other family members. And it was like, this isn't normal. Having these conversations around, what do you do if you have to take this medication? Normally it's just like, I got this medication and it is what it is or whatever. And it's like, but no, we had conversations about, what are you going to do if this happens? Are we going to just accept that you're going to take it or are we going to talk about it to the doctor? So then we talked about it to the doctors, really laid it on the table, this is what's going on. And many conversations with medical professionals around this stuff and options.

 

(02:07:48):
And so it was like we have a level of communication that is not normal.That is just not normal. And so it's like, yeah, we might not be holding hands on Saturday night walking down the moonlit street and singing happy songs, but we have a level of communication and relationship that I don't think many, many people have at all anymore. It'd be fun to see. I'm sure. I'm sure people are very entertained by us. Yeah. We have these conversations that are wild.

 

Doug (02:08:20):
I know. All of these weird rules around relationships and recovery because that's like what you're describing someone would, probably that wouldn't be their first idea of what a success for a lawyer relationship would be. Definitely not. And I got engaged to my wife. It was about a month and a half after a relapse. And so again, I'm not following the script. In fact, I'm probably breaking the whole- Going off the script.

 

Matt (02:08:53):
Yeah.

 

Doug (02:08:54):
Yeah. I actually got married to her at the finish line of the Kerrville Triathlon.

 

Matt (02:08:59):
Oh, wow.

 

Doug (02:09:00):
Yeah. I ran it and she was in a different category, so she was behind me. She got to the finish line. I had the ring.

 

Matt (02:09:09):
Like a full triathlon?

 

Doug (02:09:10):
Yeah.

 

Matt (02:09:12):
Holy shit.

 

Doug (02:09:13):
So that's where I did it. And we've got a great relationship. She manages to not be codependent. She's like, "If I see you doing your thing, that's your thing. If I see you not doing your thing, things are going to get- Out of whack.

 

Matt (02:09:32):
Out of whack. Yeah. Yeah. Relationships and recovery are ... I always tell people nothing will fuck up a good recovery, like a bad recovery relationship. I think there's this another misconception around people in recovery want to get with people in recovery. And I try to tell people that I work with, it's like if you have the opportunity to not be with somebody that's in recovery, take that opportunity and run with it because now you're dealing with two people's very severe problems and everybody's got problems. Relationships are ... There's no garden variety, just the standardized relationship. But when you're putting two people that are so similar in their problems together, and now you are adding sexual components to it, you're now playing the fire around the likelihood of re-traumatizing each other or abusing each other emotionally or all this stuff that's going to really point you right back to the solution to your problems.

 

Doug (02:10:37):
That's helpful nuance.

 

Matt (02:10:39):
Yeah.

 

Doug (02:10:39):
Yeah, I can appreciate that.

 

Matt (02:10:41):
Yeah.

 

Doug (02:10:41):
Yeah.

 

Matt (02:10:42):
I don't know. And I've seen it work. I've seen it really, really work, and those are great relationships, but it's just when you look at the statistics, it's like it's probably not going to work. And when it doesn't work, what typically happens is you go back out and if you're trying not to do that, then maybe we should look at this and not get in this relationship.

 

Doug (02:11:05):
Absolutely. Yeah. So I feel like I've kind of lucked out.

 

Matt (02:11:12):
Is she in recovery?

 

Doug (02:11:13):
She's not.

 

Matt (02:11:14):
Okay. Yeah, for sure.

 

Doug (02:11:17):
She's great. I actually knew her years ago and we worked on various contracts together. I would pull in the money she would implement. So we were work spouses.

 

Matt (02:11:29):
Oh, wow.

 

Doug (02:11:30):
We worked brilliantly together. And I got out a prison, Facebook friended her, stayed in touch. I realized she liked triathlons and cool things that I like.

 

Matt (02:11:45):
Triathlons are insane. Insane. I've done a mini triathlon.

 

Doug (02:11:50):
Have you?

 

Matt (02:11:51):
It was the spring triathlon in San Diego, and it was a 10-mile run, a one-mile swim, and a 30-mile bike ride.

 

Doug (02:12:03):
Yeah. It's not a mini. That's pretty good. That's a ...

 

Matt (02:12:08):
Yeah. I mean, it took all day.

 

Doug (02:12:10):
Yeah. I think a half Iron Man is not that much more. It's like two and a half mile swim.

 

Matt (02:12:22):
That is a long swim. And I'm a swimmer. I played water polo.

 

Doug (02:12:27):
Oh, did you?

 

Matt (02:12:27):
Very competitively.

 

Doug (02:12:29):
Yeah.

 

Matt (02:12:29):
Dude, that swim is not fun.

 

Doug (02:12:31):
I was a swimmer too.

 

Matt (02:12:32):
Okay.

 

Doug (02:12:33):
Yeah. Yep. Competitive swimming through high school. I didn't go to college with it, but yeah, I loved it. And I loved being in my 40s racing all these younger guys and just- Smoking them. ... believing them in the dust. It was so good.

 

Matt (02:12:50):
Yeah. I have bad knees. I was born pigeon toed.

 

Doug (02:12:54):
Oh, really?

 

Matt (02:12:54):
Yeah. And I have terrible knees. And so water sports just kind of made sense, but then I ended up ... I'm 5'5". I'm short. I'm not a small, I'm not a big guy. And turns out that you don't need to be big to be good at water polo. You just need to be aggressive. So I was pretty good at it. I was actually the captain of my varsity team as a sophomore.

 

Doug (02:13:18):
Oh, wow. That's awesome.

 

Matt (02:13:21):
It was cool.

 

Doug (02:13:22):
Cool.

 

Matt (02:13:23):
Yeah.

 

Doug (02:13:23):
Yeah. This was good.

 

Matt (02:13:25):
Yeah. I appreciate it, man. I'm glad you came in.

 

Doug (02:13:29):
So funny. While we've been talking, my daughter called, so it's perfect timing.

 

Matt (02:13:36):
Absolutely. Yeah.

 

Doug (02:13:38):
Yeah.

 

Matt (02:13:39):
Okay. Well, thank you for coming in. You can come whenever you want. You got an open invite to come on.

 

Doug (02:13:43):
Thank you.

 

Matt (02:13:43):
So just let me know when you're in town.

 

Doug (02:13:45):
This was great.

 

Matt (02:13:46):
Yeah. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for listening to My Last Relapse. I'm Matt Handy, the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health, Houston, Texas, where our mission is to provide compassionate, evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. Find out more at harmonygrovebh.com. Follow and subscribe to My Last Relapse on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you like to stream podcasts. Got a question for us? Leave a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength and help is always available. If you or anyone you know needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 888-691-8295.