Life After Losing My Voice to Thyroid Cancer, Using a Karaoke Microphone To Speak for a Year, and Drinking During Drug Interdiction Missions

Matt (00:00:03):
I am Matt Handy, and you're listening to My Last Relapse

 

Ted (00:00:07):
From the very beginning of getting into this business about nine years ago and really seeing the results over the years of men coming into sober living and going through treatment. And if they're doing IOP or PHP, I started noticing, I was thinking it's like, man, why are they spending so much money on this treatment? Which is, sure, let's get the guys stable, sober. Once they get out of treatment. It really, that's when the work starts, and that's where I see a lot of the struggles. It's like, man, why aren't they spending just as much money in aftercare then than they are in the treatment itself? Because actually, if you really think about it, it's just as important or as more important than the treatment itself.

 

Matt (00:01:07):
Yeah. I tell people all the time, the magic doesn't happen in residential. Nobody goes into treatment into residential for 28 days, and they come out just a different person. You stabilize them, and it's very easy to get people off drugs. It's nearly impossible to keep them off drugs and alcohol. And so yeah, you go into this setting, it's a safe place. Your trauma is not being retriggered constantly there. You're now stabilized, you're going out, but now you're being sent out into the world. Have you seen the statistics on people relapsing the day they get out of treatment?

 

Ted (00:01:43):
No.

 

Matt (00:01:45):
It's crazy. And if they're relapsing the day they get out of treatment, they relapse within an hour typically. And so yeah, the whole idea is break the wheel and all you have to do is prove that you're saving them money.

 

Ted (00:02:00):
Exactly.

 

Matt (00:02:01):
Exactly. And if you can intervene, so if we see a hundred clients and you intervene on with all the data that they've got, so far, 30% of the people present in the way that he's looking for. So if you can intervene on 30% of the people's relapses and keep them clean for that year, you're now talking about a massive spike in success. And so all you have to do is go back and say, we have 18 months of data that says, we tracked this, we did this, we did this, we intervened this way, and they stayed clean. Now you are incentivizing them to fund the aftercare part.

 

Ted (00:02:48):
Right.

 

Matt (00:02:49):
And that's just the truth of it, right? There is a lot of people that get into the treatment industry because there's a lot of money in it in residential specifically, and you can see the product that is profits focused and we all talk about it, we all see it. And then there's products out there. There's treatment products out there that have a really good program, and then they're just business savvy and they fail more often than not, and there is no balance in there. Typically. It's either they're money hungry. I mean, you've got really good examples of this. I don't want to name names, but there's really good examples of profits over people in the treatment industry, and they're some of the most successful. And by success we're talking about turnover,

 

Ted (00:03:45):
Financial,

 

Matt (00:03:46):
Financial success, right? Sure,

 

Ted (00:03:48):
Definitely.

 

Matt (00:03:49):
As far as recovery goes, it's like unless you are educated in what's actually going on, a lot of people get sent there because of what they're sold, but then they go there, the person who needs to go to treatment goes there, and these are the people that are, they start this revolving door of going in and out of treatment, and it's like if the product was better, maybe they'd have a better shot. But the bottom line is, as long as, and we're talking about a lot of SEO stuff, right? SEO allows you to sell people on your program without actually knowing anything. A family's looking for treatment for their 19-year-old son that's addicted to fentanyl. They're going to Google Houston treatment, the first one that pops up, the first three that pops up, they're going to call those numbers, and one of those three is going to get that client. And it's like at that point, if they're pulling enough people in and it's like, have you heard me say this about the Italian restaurant industry?

 

Ted (00:04:51):
Which one? No.

 

Matt (00:04:52):
So my Ian, our admissions director, he goes, yeah, treatment is like the Italian food restaurant. There'll be this Italian food restaurant that opens up, they've got this great product, they're flying in, all their cousins from Italy, they're like making shit from scratch and then a few years down and they're doing great,

 

Ted (00:05:11):
Right?

 

Matt (00:05:11):
And a few years down the line, they got somebody in the back that says, Hey, we can save a couple dollars right here. We can save some money right here, make more money. And then they do it here, and then they do it here. And then next thing you know, the uncle's making money. So he quits working there, and then the cousin quits working there, and then the product suffers. And you could see it in the Yelp reviews where it's like people will be like, five years ago, this was the best restaurant, they had the best, most authentic Italian food, and now I just don't know what happened. Right?

 

Ted (00:05:43):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:05:43):
Treatment is the exact same way where they'll have a good product and then people will start making money, and then they start cutting corners and saving on costs. They let certain people go to save money over here and they're like, oh, we have a good product. Anybody should be able to do this next thing. The product suffers, but now they have a good reputation. The difference between the Italian restaurant industry and the treatment industry is you can go really fucking far off a good reputation.

 

Ted (00:06:11):
Definitely.

 

Matt (00:06:12):
It's like

 

Ted (00:06:12):
Definitely

 

Matt (00:06:14):
You and I have had conversations around this where it's like, yeah, well, we don't know why they have a good reputation because the product sucks, but it's like they built this reputation over time, and then now it just kind of is self-sustaining,

 

Ted (00:06:25):
Right? Yeah. No matter what they do, it's just like there's a tried and true. And so that's where we go. Everybody says so. So I think too, the other part of getting say the insurance to cover aftercare would be how do they dictate? Because at the end of the day, it's about numbers to them. How do they dictate what's covered? X amount of dollars covers sober living because you have so many different variations of sober living when it comes to low income, middle income, higher income, how do they go about payouts? And those types of things will help to be figured out, I'm sure. And again, there's models like you said in Florida that they can probably base it off of when it comes to compensation to those different entities, iops, sober living therapists, things of those sorts.

 

Matt (00:07:23):
And you do have, so with Trone, right? That was all based off the Florida model. Do you know his story?

 

Ted (00:07:30):
About his brother,

 

Matt (00:07:32):
Jason? He was introduced to recovery in Florida, and so he saw this whole machine and tried to replicate it. Here. The problem is they're not paying for it here. And so yeah, once the script gets flipped, they're going to have to start looking at, well, what is worth it to us? How do we pay this what you're talking about? And that's when organizations like trone will be a key piece. They're going to say, well, they're going to have to standardize. They're going to have to at least hit these markers, and then they'll probably look at efficacy of programming and shit like that. But it's going to be complicated for sure. But the whole goal at least, is to redirect. If we can prove that people, the magic really happens in aftercare and the supportive housing and the sober living and all that, because it's very easy to go to treatment. How many people do they go to treatment? They don't want to leave.

 

Ted (00:08:38):
Sure. Yeah. It's a safe space.

 

Matt (00:08:40):
Safe space.

 

Ted (00:08:41):
And it's only 30 days. I mean, it's sad over before you know it, then you have the rest of your life to go in the next multiple months coming. And what do I do with myself? And I think that's where the struggle is with these guys coming into the houses is a lot of times they just don't know where to go. And I think in these treatment centers, a lot of 'em, I work with a lot of really good aftercare coordinators, and then maybe new to that position. And you've mentioned before about the whole Italian restaurant. I mean, the turnover is kind of high. And so that gets lost. Connections get lost. So that's where I feel there's some treatment centers have a great aftercare program, which means aftercare coordinators, planners, whatever you want to call 'em. And there should be a standard in these treatment centers of what you should a protocol to follow, right?

 

Matt (00:09:50):
Yeah. So there's an interesting thing that I learned. What Salesforce is obviously, right?

 

Ted (00:09:54):
Yes.

 

Matt (00:09:55):
Salesforce in the way that they categorize things and the way that the notes are taken, the relationships don't follow people from organization to organization specifically in Salesforce. So if you work for X place and we have a relationship, when you leave, they lose that relationship, but it's still on their books. There are with Lightning Step, you can take all of your information with you and put it into Lightning Step, but Salesforce is massive. Everybody uses Salesforce. A ton of people use Salesforce, but when they lose somebody, they lose track of all of their relationships. It's like, so that just speaks to what you're talking to. It's like, yeah, there's within the treatment industry, a massive turnover specifically for clinical, but then also for administrative, right? Massive turnover,

 

Ted (00:10:59):
All over turnover.

 

Matt (00:11:00):
So it's like the relationships are not fluid. They start and stop and start and stop. And then it's like people will go to a different area and now they have to relearn the whole market. And then it'll be like, you try to get ahold of this person. They're like, oh, I don't work there anymore. It's like, well, fuck. They're not going to send him to that organization anymore. The relationship was with the person disconnect.

 

Ted (00:11:24):
Yeah. I mean, I get a lot of phone calls. I vet all my phone calls, come through Bodine Recovery. And

 

Matt (00:11:33):
What is Bodine Recovery?

 

Ted (00:11:36):
Bodine Recovery started back in 2017 as part of, I saw something missing in the recovery as far as sober living. And really, to me, it's an experience. Sober living is an experience that you, coming out of treatment, you're kind of in this fog, this haze, you're raw. You're not really sure what's going on, and especially if you are truly doing a deal. So I think if you're truly doing a deal, you're kind of lost. You don't know where to land next. And these Bo on Recovery was created based off of that was you want a good, solid, sober living place that's safe. And that I wanted the experience to be in a way such that if I were going to a sober living, what would I expect? How would I want it to be? And that's really how I base it off of, and it's like we're high on accountability, but we're not going to control you to death. You can have your car, you can have your cell phone, you can have your laptop, anything that's going to help you.

 

Matt (00:12:53):
You're not on life 360.

 

Ted (00:12:55):
No.

 

Matt (00:12:55):
Yeah,

 

Ted (00:12:56):
No. Again, that kind of goes back to I want you to make progress. I mean, this is all about becoming whole again, mind, body, spirit. I mean, you have to have all those working in unison to become whole again. And so if I'm holding you back in any area, and I'm tracking you all day long, I mean, this is, at the end of the day, it's transitioning. It's transitional housing. There's a lot of sober livings out there that treat them as treatment centers. Because I mean, at the end of the day, there's no handbook to this. This is what you do, this is the next thing,

 

Matt (00:13:42):
Which that could be a problem. Maybe that is something that somebody puts together.

 

Ted (00:13:50):
Yeah. Well, I think too, it's just like everybody has their own recovery.

 

Matt (00:13:55):
That's so true.

 

Ted (00:13:57):
So everybody has their own recovery, and what does that look like to them? And so a lot of times the people that decide to do sober living, it's just a reflection of that.

 

Matt (00:14:06):
True.

 

Ted (00:14:07):
So I mean, you have some people that need to go to the meetings every day, need to be just ingrained. Some of these sober living owners live in the houses. So I mean, it's helping them stay sober or whatever the reason why are they living in the house? So that was something that I made sure that I definitely would not be in the house. I don't micromanage the guys. There's guidelines set forth in the house that I set forth that they have to follow, and that's what I expect 'em to do. I'm not, I tell my guys, I'm like, this is your house. This is your house. As the house manager, you oversee the basic guidelines and rules, and if you have any ideas or any ideas you want to run across me that you want to have a certain kind of meeting, or if you want to do an outing or if you want to do anything, 99% of the time, I'm going to say yes. So just short of that, we want to make sure that you're making progress in your recovery, in your professional career, in whatever IOPS therapies, whatever it is that you're doing. In a sense, I hate to use this term, but it's like you have enough rope to hang yourself. So what are you going to do? Are you going to sink or are you going to swim? We can guide you, but we're not going to be on your back 24 7.

 

Matt (00:15:30):
Yeah, no, that piece right there. Having enough rope to hang yourself also gives you the ability to grow, right? Sure. You're not tethered so close to something that you can't progress. And so I recently went to a house where the people that own it are not in recovery. They're just in the recovery space and the amount of rules, and it was like the Life 360 thing, and you got to leave the house by seven o'clock in the morning. You can't come back until five and all this stuff. And it's like, where do you think they're going to go? What is the expectation? The expectation, they were like, well, they got to get a job, and they can go to the library, they can do all this stuff. And it's like the idea makes sense, but addiction and recovery is not logical typically. We do a lot of things that when people see it, it's like, why do you do that? It's like, well, I have to. I have to do this. And it's like, oh, okay, whatever. A lot of it doesn't make sense logically it only, it just makes sense. My program, and it's like it might logically make sense for you to tell somebody you have to leave at seven and you can't come back till five. Well, what do you think they're going to do if they don't have a job? If they're out there not going to meetings or whatever it is? And they're like, well, we got 'em on Life 360. Really? I was like, wow, I would never send anybody to your house.

 

Ted (00:17:09):
I mean, to me, it's parenting and we're not there to parent you. So it's something that I've never put in place. I've offered it to parents or loved ones. If that's something you want to do, that's great, but we're not going to, the way I look at it is kind of like what you said. It's like if you try to control someone so much, they stop growing. So

 

Matt (00:17:38):
It's like a flower pot, right?

 

Ted (00:17:39):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:17:40):
It's only going to grow as big as you let it. You can't smother people early in recovery. Now, circling the wagons is a different thing, right? Somebody's like in a state of emergency, dude surround them. But especially for me, early in recovery, it was like I had to learn what recovery was, not what you telling me it is. But I needed to learn for myself what my recovery was.

 

Ted (00:18:08):
Sure.

 

Matt (00:18:10):
And so I know that you're a 12 step house. What if they are not a 12 step person?

 

Ted (00:18:18):
Well, that's one of the things that we do require them to do in the house. Now, they can do anything in addition to, because I did, when I first started Bodine recovery, it was, Hey, you know what? I don't care what kind of recovery that you're in, but as long as you're in a program, right? Smart Recovery, NA, AA

 

Matt (00:18:44):
Dharma,

 

Ted (00:18:44):
Just name one. Yeah,

 

Matt (00:18:47):
The white Buffalo one, whatever it was.

 

Ted (00:18:49):
And there's also a Christian one.

 

Matt (00:18:52):
Celebrate Recovery.

 

Ted (00:18:53):
Celebrate Recovery. And you just do that, man, I don't care. Right? You're doing something. But that only lasted for so long. I started seeing guys, especially the guys that, and I'm not going to knock Smart Recovery works for a lot of people, but the guys that were on Smart Recovery, they would never last. And then during the house meetings, you really couldn't hold each other accountable. Everybody was on their own thing, and it just kind of mix matched, and it wasn't cohesive. And so we really had to just say, look, we're just going to 12 Step. That's all we're going to do here. You can do anything in addition to that, but when we have these house meetings, we need to know where you stand on a 12 step basis.

 

Matt (00:19:39):
We need to speak the same language.

 

Ted (00:19:40):
So that really was helpful a lot.

 

Matt (00:19:43):
Okay.

 

Ted (00:19:45):
Early on with Bodine Recovery, my first house was off equipment, off by the light rail, and it was a pretty dangerous area. There was a beautiful house, beautiful interior. The only thing was parents or loved ones would drop by and are like, oh, no, it was rough. But at the time, that's the only place I could find that worked for me for what the situation I was in. So I said, well, this is what God's putting in front of me. This is what my opportunity is, and let's just see if we can grow it from here. I did, and I didn't have anybody in my house for eight months. Eight months it sat empty. I'm like, man, what am I doing wrong here? I'm going to all the networking events. I'm becoming part of these organizations. Tap, G-H-A-T-P, which is no longer around, and nice furnishings. I'm in it for the right reasons. Why isn't anything happening? Right?

 

Matt (00:20:50):
GHATP, that was the greater Houston area. Treatment Treatment providers.

 

Ted (00:20:54):
Yeah. So we did that. I did that, and this is eight months in, and I'm just thinking, what am I doing wrong here? And what I found in Houston, it was more of a vetting process, kind of like, who's this tech guy? What's he about? Is he going to last? Right? Let's just kind of sit back and watch and see what happens.

 

(00:21:23):
And so around the eighth month, I decided to start doing this Burgers and Bibles event. So I found a local pastor and then invited him over, and he would pull something recovery related out of the Bible, which is tons of it.

 

Matt (00:21:39):
Tons of it.

 

Ted (00:21:40):
And then there would be like a q and a after. And I would barbecue for all the guys and invite other sober livings over. At the time, I had nobody in the house. Well, I did have a few people. It was really good for community. Within a month's time, my house started getting more people in it, and then I had other treatment centers reach out and said, Hey, we love what you're doing. If you could put a house over here, we'll help you out to support you. And man, it's been ever since then, it's just been going up. So that's kind of in the beginning years of recovery, and we've expanded certain areas. And then just again, I go back to there's no playbook to this thing.

 

(00:22:26):
And I learned as I went along, and there was a lot of mistakes I made. There's a lot of things that I wish I had done differently, but that's all part of growth. And there was, when I came into this industry in 2017, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no understanding of how this worked. And so there was a few people that I reached out to and I said, Hey, look, and I'm just going to give a shout out to Ralph Fabrizio of the House of Extra Measures. I looked for the best guy out there. I was like, who's about the most respected? And they said, this guy. And so I said, cool, I'll reach out. And he goes, I said, Hey, I'm Ted. This is what I want to do this. Do you mind coming by and checking out my house, see if this is something that give me some pointers, whatever, or who do I talk to? Who do I don't talk to? Who do I avoid? Right. And so he's like, this is wild. He is like, nobody's ever done this before. Most people don't call me and ask me for help in that sense. So he was kind of taken back by that. But he helped me a lot because in the early days when there was a guy standing out in the middle of the street with his pants around his legs, what do you do? I didn't know what to do at the time. And he is drunk. And he's

 

Matt (00:23:47):
One of your clients?

 

Ted (00:23:48):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:23:49):
Oh, wow.

 

Ted (00:23:50):
And it was actually somebody I knew. He was my first client, and within about two weeks, he's standing in the street with his pants around his legs and his cars on the back of a tow truck. And I'm just like, what do I do here, man? And he is like, I call him up, Ralph. I'm like, dude, this is what's happening. He is like, do this, do this, this. And I was like, okay. Okay. So it was the early on stages just learning what to do with each situation that after a while, it's kind of like working in the er, I guess. You get these critical situations coming in of all different levels, and you just need to know how to assess each one of them. And then you build that callous up of after a while, it's just like, ah, there's another who's wasted at the front door or whatever. What do you do? So with my house managers, we promote our house managers from within. So they're once tenants. That's the best way that I find that in my years of doing this, this is the best way to get house managers.

 

Matt (00:24:59):
That makes sense.

 

Ted (00:25:00):
And so that's been very successful in that sense with that. But the thing about that is I only require a year because after about a year, it gets to be a lot. And then after a while, they start progressing in their own recovery. And so

 

Matt (00:25:19):
You talking about a year commitment to that?

 

Ted (00:25:21):
Okay. Yeah, A year commitment. If you can't commit to a year, because it's a lot to train someone up. And then really, because really what it does for the managers, is it really, it's like recovery on steroids for these guys.

 

Matt (00:25:38):
Yeah.

 

Ted (00:25:39):
I mean, you're

 

Matt (00:25:40):
A lot of responsibility.

 

Ted (00:25:41):
It is. And I would say that we have a really good success rate with all our house managers that have worked for Bodine Recovery, and they're still doing great today. One other thing that we did start doing a couple years ago is recovery coaching. So the recovery coaching is a whole different thing, adding recovery coaching to the guys that come into the house, so they get sessions when they come into the home.

 

Matt (00:26:10):
Has it upped your success?

 

Ted (00:26:13):
I was going to get to that. So it's not just recovery coaching. It's recovery coaching plus personal training. So it's a hybrid approach.

 

Matt (00:26:23):
Cool. Like physical personal training?

 

Ted (00:26:26):
It's physical personal training.

 

Matt (00:26:27):
Okay. That's cool.

 

Ted (00:26:28):
We meet the guys, just recovery where they're at. I mean, they may have a back problem, maybe they can't pick up 10 pounds, or we have young guys that come in and really want to prove something straight out of college or something. So it depends on where they're at. Our personal trainer is actually a certified personal trainer, works at a local lifetime fitness here, but he's in recovery. He is worked for many years, and they do really good. That hybrid approach really works out well. It really kind of opens you up when you're working out. And it's light workout. It's nothing heavy. And so we learn a lot from the guys during the sessions because they drop the walls down. And so we really get into digging into really kind of what's going on so we can share that information with house managers. Because a lot of times we may hear things in the session that we're not going to hear at a house meeting.

 

Matt (00:27:25):
Right. Do you work out with them too?

 

Ted (00:27:28):
I don't personally, no.

 

Matt (00:27:29):
Okay. Yeah, dude, the physical component of my recovery changed everything.

 

Ted (00:27:36):
Oh, absolutely. For me too. Got To have it.

 

Matt (00:27:38):
Most people enter recovery, and they are told, well, hey, now you're clean. You should work out and eat better. But they're never told why, and they're never showed how. Right. And then I met my mentor, and that is all he does with me now. It's like, if your body is out of whack, if you are not physically struggling to do something on a fairly often basis, then what are you doing? And I never realized how important that was for my recovery. I'd floundered in all of my recoveries, and I would get clean, and I would do the sponsor thing, and I would get to the point where I was sponsoring people and then just throw everything away.

 

Ted (00:28:22):
Really?

 

Matt (00:28:23):
Yeah, multiple times. Multiple times. I've done many 12 steps, and there's multiple things that go into this. Right. I wasn't done. I knew I wasn't done. I was just getting people off my back. And I tried to do it as efficiently and as brightly as possible to get 'em off my back, but I always wanted to still get high. I always knew I wasn't done. But then when I was done, I was going to meetings, I think we've talked about this, but I was going to meetings miserable, and I would come out even more miserable. It was just something was fucked up, and I put that piece into play and it changed everything. I was able to enjoy life on a level that I'd never been able to before, strictly just by adding the workout.

 

Ted (00:29:15):
That's pretty amazing.

 

Matt (00:29:16):
Yeah. It really changed a lot of shit for me.

 

Ted (00:29:19):
Yeah. I mean, I think too, I mean, have working now has always been part of my life. I was in the military and then just, it's just always been there. What

 

Matt (00:29:28):
Branch?

 

Ted (00:29:28):
The Navy.

 

Matt (00:29:30):
Really?

 

Ted (00:29:30):
Yeah. During the Gulf War.

 

Matt (00:29:32):
Really?

 

Ted (00:29:32):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:29:33):
My dad went to, he was in the Army in 91.

 

Ted (00:29:38):
Oh, really?

 

Matt (00:29:38):
Yeah.

 

Ted (00:29:39):
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I never saw combat, per se.

 

Matt (00:29:41):
Okay. He was in a hemmit actually launching rockets off of a truck.

 

Ted (00:29:47):
That's awesome.

 

Matt (00:29:48):
Yeah, he has some really crazy,

 

Ted (00:29:50):
So what's going on in the Gulf now with Venezuela, chasing drug runners and stuff like that with the Coast Guard? That's what we did.

 

Matt (00:30:00):
Drug interdiction.

 

Ted (00:30:01):
Yeah. Whenever during the Gulf War, we were still down in the Caribbean doing that off the coast. Venezuela. I was stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. So yeah, it was pretty amazing. We actually boarded Donald Trump's yacht back then, which was crazy.

 

Matt (00:30:17):
Yeah.

 

Ted (00:30:17):
Boarded his yacht and was told to get off right away.

 

Matt (00:30:20):
Really? By the way, why?

 

Ted (00:30:21):
Yeah. Good question. But most of the stuff that you're seeing now with the small boats and stuff like that, that's really nothing. I mean, we would board freighters and stuff like that. So big difference.

 

Matt (00:30:42):
Were you drinking at the time?

 

Ted (00:30:45):
Oh, yeah.

 

Matt (00:30:45):
Yeah.

 

Ted (00:30:46):
Well, the Navy was kind of like my introduction.

 

Matt (00:30:48):
Really?

 

Ted (00:30:49):
Yeah. Straight out of high school. I had no plan. I actually joined, I was in military school in 10th grade. When I was in high school, I was sent off to military school. But

 

Matt (00:31:06):
What military school?

 

Ted (00:31:09):
God, Chamberlain and Hunt Academy in Port Gibson, Mississippi. And it was either that or the boys, some kind of brother school ran by brothers and nuns.

 

Matt (00:31:23):
Really?

 

Ted (00:31:24):
Yeah. It was like, you have a choice.

 

Matt (00:31:25):
You got church or military,

 

Ted (00:31:27):
Right. So yeah, my mother remarried, and it was the stepfather really kind of hammering down. And I was mentioning, I'm from Houma, Louisiana, and born in Baton Rouge, raised in Houma. And then we spent, I was telling you earlier, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans my weekends. So there wasn't really heavy stuff back then. It was just mainly people smoking weed and drinking stuff like that, or Bourbon Street was full of whippets all day long, kind of. But that's really it. You never really saw anything else.

 

Matt (00:32:05):
Okay.

 

Ted (00:32:08):
So yeah, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans, just grew up on weekends. There we're 30 minutes south of New Orleans. So yeah, it was drinking in Louisiana, growing up in that lifestyle, it was just part of the culture.

 

Matt (00:32:26):
So you're talking about the swamp lifestyle, right? Yeah. So was it like gator hunting and all that shit?

 

Ted (00:32:36):
Although home in Louisiana was just, it an oil and gas, but it has a lot of history too, from sugar cane plantations.

 

Matt (00:32:46):
Oh, wow.

 

Ted (00:32:47):
Yeah, tons of sugar cane out there. And so there's country clubs there. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bunch of swamps and stuff like that. I mean, it is, but there's also, there's the upper crest there too. So because they're all oil and gas related, there's a lot of money there. So a lot of, if you're going to go offshore, you're going to go through Louisiana or home of Louisiana. And so I grew up with two sides. My father's side of the family was living down the Bayou by the swamps, and then my mother's side of the family lived in the city, so to speak, and were affluent in that area where they were country club people. They were the affluent types. They had money. He worked for the oil and gas. We was a big CPA firm.

 

Matt (00:33:45):
Okay. Yeah. Like I said, I had recently gone down to Louisiana for the first time down to New Orleans, and growing up in California, we have a picture of what it actually is, or we have a picture of what it is. And then seeing it for the first time, it was way prettier than I thought it was.

 

Ted (00:34:04):
It's so cool.

 

Matt (00:34:05):
It is really cool looking.

 

Ted (00:34:06):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:34:07):
It's a really, really interesting, and that city's so amazing,

 

Ted (00:34:10):
So much to see.

 

Matt (00:34:11):
Yeah,

 

Ted (00:34:12):
It is, man. I know a lot of people go to there to party,

 

Matt (00:34:16):
Right? Yeah, I'm sure they do.

 

Ted (00:34:18):
And they do. But if you go and don't party, right? I mean, there's so much to see. There's so much, so much, so much. History is insane. You have Galveston here. That's about the closest vibe you're going to get to New Orleans, but it's like magnify that by a hundred. And that's New Orleans.

 

Matt (00:34:39):
We did the hell, hotter than Hell Tours.

 

Ted (00:34:43):
Oh, really? What's that?

 

Matt (00:34:44):
So it is like the premiere tours where they have all the contracts to do all the best tours or whatever. And we did the VIP tour and they showed us a bunch of really cool shit about the city, and then taught us about the vampires and that history, rice

 

Ted (00:35:05):
And all that.

 

Matt (00:35:06):
And Rice. And then Lamar, that was his name, right?

 

Ted (00:35:10):
I think so. Yeah. It rings a bell.

 

Matt (00:35:12):
Something like that. It was the guy that people thought was an actual vampire.

 

Ted (00:35:17):
Oh, I can't think of it. But yeah, I know who you're talking about.

 

Matt (00:35:22):
I don't remember the name right now. And then they showed us, have you seen

 

Ted (00:35:26):
Voodoo, the Voodoos,

 

Matt (00:35:28):
All that too?

 

Ted (00:35:28):
Yeah. That's cool. Voodoo.

 

Matt (00:35:30):
And then that show, American Horror Story. Oh, yeah. Have you seen it?

 

Ted (00:35:37):
Yeah. I mean, and also there's a lot of haunted places there. Yeah. I actually did tours of that too. It's pretty

 

Matt (00:35:43):
Cool. Really? Oh, yeah,

 

Ted (00:35:44):
Yeah, yeah. Really. I love New Orleans, man. It's a lot of fun.

 

Matt (00:35:48):
Yeah. My wife and I were down there. We were like, we could live there other than the weather. But I mean, it's comparable to here.

 

Ted (00:35:56):
Yeah, it's a different lifestyle for sure. So it is dangerous.

 

Matt (00:36:02):
Is it?

 

Ted (00:36:02):
Oh, yeah. Yeah, dude, if you're not street smart, it can be very dangerous for you.

 

Matt (00:36:08):
I could see that, actually. Yeah.

 

Ted (00:36:09):
Yeah. You really have to be able to read the street

 

Matt (00:36:12):
Pretty good.

 

Ted (00:36:13):
So especially certain areas, just like any city, but where most people go, you have to watch yourself

 

Matt (00:36:20):
Down in the French Quarter.

 

Ted (00:36:21):
Definitely in the French Quarter. Yeah. Just don't go down any alley and think you're just going to take a leak in the alley.

 

Matt (00:36:27):
Okay.

 

Ted (00:36:28):
You might not come back. You're not going to come back with everything.

 

Matt (00:36:31):
Well, and they were telling us about the Katrina shit and all of the ripple effects of what happened, and everybody left. And then it was a very grimy, the people that were left stayed there because they had no options. And it was like murder rates rose astronomically, and then gangs took over and shit like that.

 

Ted (00:36:56):
Yeah, it's taken years. But man, I tell you, it's just like the politicians man, and everybody seems, everybody that goes through there seems to be crooked. At one point,

 

Matt (00:37:07):
They were telling us about what's going on right now with the mayor, and some other people are like, holy shit, this is another world. The one from Katrina

 

Ted (00:37:15):
Guy arrested. I mean, it just got put in jail. I mean, it's like, come on. It's like they're all crooked in some one way or another.

 

Matt (00:37:21):
Yeah. Think that's just politics.

 

Ted (00:37:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, going back to what you were saying, you asked about outcomes of the houses with the recovery coaching and stuff. I will tell you, our retention rate is way higher since we started doing recovery coaching. And we do have, and this is another good stat, is we have a protocol where if you're caught using, or if you don't pass a UA or you slip up, whatever like that, we don't kick you out of meat. We kick you out immediately at that point, but you have a second chance and you can come back, right? As long as you stay in contact with us, your sponsor go to meetings and you

 

Matt (00:38:13):
Do a three day thing, or

 

Ted (00:38:15):
It's a seven day thing. So if you need detox, we will find a place where you go to detox, detox you out, come back to the house. Now, if it's not, you have to stay at a safe place. A lot of times your emergency contact, but I would say 70% of the time, the guys, 75% of the time, the guys come back, which is, and this way the kind of incentive is you don't lose the, you get a second chance. You don't lose the month rent, and you get to stay in the house and correct your ways, because if we're just going to kick you out, the odds of you staying sober,

 

Matt (00:38:57):
It's almost none

 

Ted (00:38:57):
Dramatically dropped. So getting that second chance a lot of times really saves a lot of guys, and I think that's really notable.

 

Matt (00:39:06):
Yeah. I mean, so I stayed at specifically one, did I tell you about this? So in San Diego, I got out of prison and my family was like, you can't live here. So they got me sober living. Well, this lady had people living in the backyard in tents. That's

 

Ted (00:39:26):
Surprising.

 

Matt (00:39:27):
Every room was packed. She lived there as well and was having sex with the residents.

 

Ted (00:39:35):
Wow. Worked out for her. I guess.

 

Matt (00:39:37):
I never gave 'em a clean test. And I was there for months. I never gave 'em a clean test. And I was tested once a week, something like that.

 

Ted (00:39:43):
As long as you pay

 

Matt (00:39:44):
As long as you pay.

 

Ted (00:39:45):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:39:45):
Yeah. It was like, okay, I found a system that I could exploit and manipulate, and it worked out for me. And I think I overdosed two nights after I got there. There. Woke up the next morning, my roommate was like, dude, I had to CPR for, this is pre Narcan, this is in 2012. And I was like, why did my ribs hurt? He was like, dude, you OD'ed last night. I was like, fuck. Did they find out? They were like, no. It was like a bunch of the roommates had came in and kept me

 

Ted (00:40:17):
Alive. Oh my God.

 

Matt (00:40:19):
I was like, fuck,

 

Ted (00:40:21):
I'm going to be kicked out. No, you're not. No.

 

Matt (00:40:23):
Yeah. I was like,

 

Ted (00:40:25):
Right.

 

Matt (00:40:25):
No house meeting about it. No, nothing. And it was like everybody knew, But everybody was using too. They were all drinking or using something.

 

Ted (00:40:33):
I think obviously in every city there's the sober livings, that kind of stuff still goes on. And like you were saying before, trying to putting that system in place where we do have regulation on it so that we can get insurance paid for. Hopefully, you're always going to have those sober livings, right? No matter what. And because one of my big complaints is I get phone calls all the time where people just can't quite afford sober living. They either don't have a job because I specialize in men coming out of treatment centers. And if you're not coming out of a treatment center, most of the time the phone call is either, I don't have a job, I don't have any money. And that's where I've always thought about some type of nonprofit to help these guys. Terrible. How many guys I turn away. And there are nonprofits out there right there. There's just not enough of 'em. And it's unfortunate that we have to do that. That's the sad part of it. And because sure, big government can step, or I've always referred them out to the sobering center of Houston or the re center, or God, what's the other one in Pasadena? There's another one. Well, there's scor, but this is more of a sober living, the wheelhouse.

 

Matt (00:42:02):
Oh yeah.

 

Ted (00:42:03):
So I'm always referring 'em to there, and they're always probably full. But it would be nice for some of these guys to be able to experience the sober living like ours and not just be jam packed. They just came out of jail and went right back in. That's what it's like.

 

Matt (00:42:21):
Yeah. Dr. Shah talks about the importance of sober living. He says Sober living saved him. Right. Have you heard that whole talk

 

Ted (00:42:28):
About it? No, I haven't.

 

Matt (00:42:29):
So if Dr. Shah wanted to stay, Dr. Shah, he had to do certain things, right? Because he

 

Ted (00:42:35):
Oh, sure.

 

Matt (00:42:36):
And so one of the things they told him was like, you're going to go to sober living. And he always says that. He goes, do you know who I am? I'm Dr. Shah. I don't need sober living. But he says that was the key to his success with sober living. And it wasn't just because it was somewhere that he had to go. It's because of the accountability and the community and the bonds that you can build. And it's like it wasn't just 28 days, it was nine months or however long you stayed there, a decent enough amount of time to actually connect with people. Have people that you trust that are in your community, that you can look 'em in the eye and feel good about what you guys are doing there together. But one thing about Texas that just blows me away is that how little people think about how important that is. You got the Florida model. Their entire treatment industry is based off of sober living California. That is something that everybody talks about is sober living and how important that is. So important to the point that if they can't afford, so I was involved in Y Paw a little bit.

 

(00:43:48):
One of the things that I noticed is if they couldn't afford to go to a sober living, they were all pooling together and getting an apartment and sardine eight of you guys in there together just to have that community and that accountability. So it's massively important, but it's almost like an afterthought here in Texas. It's really crazy to me

 

Ted (00:44:16):
The way I look at, it's like if you could just give this person three months of sober living support so they can get a job so they can better their lives, or they can just concentrate on themselves, or they need the time and space that they need. And again, that goes back to the sober living as far as what's going on in the house. You don't have to go to work. You have the space this free time. What are you doing? And I think that a good sober living house should be able to address those issues. As far as, like you said, there's a guy that doesn't want to get out of bed. What are you going to do? There's so many things that could be going on with him and finding out what do we need to do next to help this guy out? But at least I think the three month thing is a good starting point. We're not asking for you to support this man for six months, three months I think should, could be a good standard.

 

Matt (00:45:17):
In California insurance pays for sober living. In Florida they pay for sober living. There is a precedent for this already, and it really confuses me why that isn't a thing here, or at least why it isn't a more prevalent thing or why doesn't it get approved? It's like sober living is such an important part of people's aftercare. So when you talk about the hierarchy of what needs to happen after they leave residential and they're back in the real world and now they're struggling with, this is the other thing is you got a family that sends their loved one to treatment and they're just for the last year just worried about if their son is going to die or if their brother's going to die or whatever, their sister, their uncle, their aunt, whatever it is.

 

(00:46:09):
And then they go to treatment and now they're sober, and now they're just pissed off at 'em. They're pissed off because of whatever, they fucked them over in some way or another. So now they're just pissed off at 'em, and you expect us to send them back into that situation. We're not doing that right. It's not going to be a recipe for success to send them into a sick situation. So the alternative, we send them to sober living, it's a safe place with structure, with accountability. And then, so the hierarchy in my mind is PHP would be right after. It's the continuum. It's built in that step down for a reason, but they don't put that piece together for you where it's like, if you don't have somewhere safe to go to sleep, how are you going to get there? It's just as important as the aftercare step down parts of treatment is this living component.

 

Ted (00:47:06):
Sure. Yeah.

 

Matt (00:47:08):
So we're failing in that. I feel like we are failing in that because if we don't have an option for them to go, so that's what I'm dealing with right now. And you know this, right?

 

Ted (00:47:20):
Yeah.

 

Matt (00:47:21):
It's like we are missing probably a lot of opportunity for clientele to work with clientele because we don't have a supportive housing system. And it's like we keep getting told you need to have a supporting housing system. People are asking like, oh, well, do you have sober living? It's like, no, they're asking these questions. They want it. But even if we said Yes, well, can you afford it? That's the next question. Right. And if you can't afford it,

 

Ted (00:47:47):
Oh well. Oh, wow. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. That's the other number. You think that, well, I just say it's all about money with the insurance companies. And when you see, let's just say take a patient that's coming in and out of treatment centers, I don't know, three times in a year or two times in a year, or you would think at least there would be type of, which is common, you some kind of indicator that, okay, this guy's been in treatment three times this year, right?

 

Matt (00:48:18):
Yeah.

 

Ted (00:48:18):
So how does that make sense? If we could just send him through at a complete aftercare program and sober living the outcomes of that. Like you were saying before, it's like if we could show outcomes because you're actually going to be saving money, but for whatever reason you're not seeing it, I don't know, because you're going to keep getting these guys back, or you're just hoping that they're going to pass away. I'm not sure of the whole idea behind this.

 

Matt (00:48:46):
Yeah, it is very common. When somebody is in that cycle of going to treatment, people are going to treatment multiple times a year, not just once, twice. I know a kid when I was in treatment last time, he had been in treatment for 15 months. He would leave treatment relapse and go right back to treatment. And he had been going from California to Texas to Arizona, back to Texas. He was doing a tour, right? And then do you remember that kid on Dr. Phil? He had been to treatment 150 times.

 

Ted (00:49:18):
Oh yeah. Remember that crazy

 

Matt (00:49:19):
Amount? I was in treatment with him in California. The first time I ever went to treatment. He was there. His name was Jesse, and that was his thing. He was like, oh, I'm treatment resistant. I've been 150 times. This isn't going to work. It's like,

 

Ted (00:49:35):
You're right.

 

Matt (00:49:36):
You are absolutely right.

 

Ted (00:49:37):
What are you doing here?

 

Matt (00:49:38):
So it's like there's obviously a disconnect. There's a disconnect between the information that people are getting about the efficacy and the solution around treatment. Treatment's not going to fix you. Right? Aftercare, the step down models, we're talking about PHP and IOP and supportive housing. Those places are where magic starts happening because you leave treatment, you leave the safe space, you stabilize, you go in there, you're in a bubble, you don't leave. Typically, the only time you're leaving is to go to meetings. And then you're under someone's thumb. You're in a very controlled environment. It's very easy to be successful in there. And you look at these people's charts, they're all doing really well in treatment. They leave treatment and now they're dealing with their family dynamics. They've lost their job, their wife, their kids, all of this shit hits the fan for them. And that's another thing is I think people are sold an idea of what treatment does for you. This is what I was told. I was told you go to treatment and you'll get all your shit back. Life just gets better. And all of these problems will go away. If you go to treatment, they'll drop these charges. I've heard that so many times. Right? It's like the reality of what actually goes on is you go to treatment, you get out and shit normally gets way worse.

 

Ted (00:50:59):
It does.

 

Matt (00:51:01):
And everybody that I talk to that I say that to, they all agree. It's like, yeah. They'll be like, oh yeah, when I went to treatment, shit got worse after. Yeah, that's typically how it goes. So why don't we tell 'em the truth? It's like, yeah, this is going to suck, dude. This is going to hurt. But if you do it, if you stick out, if you make it through the painful friction points, it does get better. Everybody that I know that gets through that first year gets through that. Sometimes it takes years though, right?

 

Ted (00:51:32):
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I learned about myself early on was, and I tell these guys, I'm like, look, 12 steps going to, if you want to choose to do 12 step, that's amazing. Statistically, it's one of the best routes to go, and

 

Matt (00:51:54):
Which speaks volumes because the statistics are still heartbreaking.

 

Ted (00:51:59):
So when I stopped drinking, I basically had to look at my whole self. And for me, I understood. I'm like, okay, sure, I can stop drinking. Okay, now, and I have this conversation with all the guys that come through the house and actually have, I got a guy in the treatment the other day having this exact same conversation was You're going to stop drinking and then also, or you're going to stop doing whatever it is that you're doing. I said, but each one of us is an individual and no one's the same. So let's just call this guy Mike. Mike, what is it about you that's different than everybody else? Why does Mike keep doing what Mike is doing to himself to sabotage himself?

 

(00:52:51):
What's the self-sabotage about? And I would ask guys this, and just like I asked myself was like, I don't know. I have no idea if I knew I wouldn't be doing this to myself. So I think that's a big key that it's missing. And maybe there's treatment centers out there that are doing it, but there's a lot of 'em that are aren't. And they're like, because once I explained this, I'm like, look, you need to really, because I did some therapy. And really what it came down to was what is the root causes of why you're doing what you're doing? What's causing Ted to think Ted thinks and what's not working for you? And so he kind of broke it down and really went through from the point of my life when I could start actually remembering things that happened that were traumatic and major events, breakups, divorces in my family, anything that was traumatic that stuck out. And we talked about each point. And once I found out that there was these emotional, I don't know how to put it,

 

Matt (00:54:02):
Friction points,

 

Ted (00:54:03):
Friction points that I start realizing like, oh, that's why I do this. Oh, that's why I think this way. Or that's why I feel the way I do about myself. And so no wonder I'm not proud of myself. So those types, all of those things in conjunction with aa 12 step, not drinking, not using those two things in parallel, you actually have a shot. And what that does, it builds hope. All we want is hope. Can this person actually be healthier and better and live a fruitful life if they understand what actually is at the root cause of this? And I think that piece is missing a lot because many times I hear guys like, man, I've never heard it put that way. I was just told I had to go to meetings. I'm like, well, that's not going to work. I mean, it might work for some, but for me, Ted, I needed to know what was going on with me.

 

Matt (00:55:06):
And you say it might work for some people. This is what I think. I a hundred percent agree with you. As a matter of fact, I say it in the trailer for this podcast, the band-aid is cool. You might be able to stop drinking with just a Band-Aid, but the only way that you're going to stop doing whatever it is that you're doing is if you figure out what's causing it. And a lot of what we do in the industry is just put band-aids on shit.

 

(00:55:35):
And I went to treatment last time and I was sold on this program. They deal with childhood trauma. This is what I was told. You're going to go to this place. They're going to deal with childhood trauma. I get there, one of the first questions I ask is, when do I get to talk to a therapist? And I was told twice a week before, I got there twice a week, childhood trauma. When do I get to see my counselor? They're like, well, it's Friday, so you're probably not going to see 'em until Wednesday. Okay. So I'm like, okay. In my head I'm like, okay, maybe it's like Wednesday, Friday, something like that. So the weekend goes by, Wednesday comes, I see my therapist and I'm telling her like, okay, well when do we get to dive into this? Right? She was like, what are you talking about? I was like, yeah, I was told that you guys specifically are, this is your thing, is childhood sexual trauma. And she was like, we aren't going to talk about any of that while you're here. I was like, what?

 

Ted (00:56:36):
That's crazy.

 

Matt (00:56:37):
My mom was on the phone during this phone call and the therapist literally told her like, oh yeah, we're not going to talk about any of that while you're here. And in my head I'm like, why am I here?

 

Ted (00:56:50):
Why?

 

Matt (00:56:50):
The only reason why I'm here is to start addressing these things that I'm 30. So at the time, I'm 35 or 34, and I had just admitted this for the first time a week ago, and in my head I'm like, if I don't start addressing this shit immediately, I'm probably going to use again. This is how my mind is working at the time. And it's like, no, we're not going to address any of that. It's like, okay. So I leave there, I stayed there for three weeks. I leave there, but before I leave there, I immediately find a therapist that I can go into this room and really start uncovering this stuff that maybe this is why I am fucked up, right?

 

Ted (00:57:33):
Sure.

 

Matt (00:57:35):
But if I didn't have that hunger to heal, it would've never happened.

 

Ted (00:57:41):
Exactly.

 

Matt (00:57:42):
It would've never happened. And nobody was facilitating it. I had to do it for myself. And it's like,

 

Ted (00:57:50):
That's what I told a guy on the phone before he went the treatment. I said, dude, you're going to have to take action. Because nobody, it's, and I think that's the other part of treatment centers too. It's like a lot of people think that, well, I'm just going to send my son, my husband's going to go, my wife's going to go, my whatever's going to go and they're going to fix him. And so a lot of times there's not a lot of, I guess maybe the intake when it comes to, again, if it's a quality place, quality treatment center, it's just like aa, if you don't take action, it's not going to work. Right? So that's the same thing. I told this guy, I'm like, look, when you go in, you seek out. I said, you can sit in these process groups. You can sit there and listen to and they can try to crack you open there. I said, but it's going to take a one-on-one for you to sit down and say, look, I need to talk about this. This is what's going on with me. You need to help figure this. Help me guide me so that I can understand myself, and I think that piece is missing a lot. I said, but it's going to take you to do it. I said, don't sit there and just think they're going to give you a bunch of information and it's all of a sudden you're going to go, oh, okay. That's what it is. No, that's different. Everybody's different.

 

Matt (00:59:05):
Yeah. You cannot think your way out of a problem. You acted your way into it. It isn't logical to think that you can, but then when it really comes down to this recovery thing and treatment specifically, it's like you're only going to get out what you put into this. I know this is something that's constantly said, and people hear it all the time, but until you experience putting in the work, it never really clicks what that means. Then the second you start really to put in the work and it's painful, it doesn't feel good. Everybody wants to avoid it because you're going to cry. It's going to hurt. You're going to be embarrassed. I was embarrassed about some of this shit, right? It's like these words are going to come out of your mouth that I told myself would never come out of my mouth, but in order for me to get where I'm sitting today, that had to happen, or else I might be back under a bridge. This is just how this works. And the AA structure, the way that works, it really lays out a good plan for you to understand this is what I have to do. But it's still up to you. How many dishonest four steps and fifth steps have been done? Probably way more than honest ones.

 

Ted (01:00:22):
Yeah, for sure.

 

Matt (01:00:25):
So it's an individual thing. If the individual does not buy into this, and this is another thing, the people that are going into treatment for the first time, if we can sell them on the idea of recovery, they have a good shot. If they can buy into it the first time. But if they don't get it the first time, there's a guarantee almost that they'll go to treatment multiple times. They'll just keep going through.

 

Ted (01:00:48):
I think too, there's also a big disconnect where there's no one telling him the reality of it.

 

Matt (01:00:57):
A hundred percent agree

 

Ted (01:00:58):
What you said. It's like, and I told this guys like, dude, the first year I'm going to tell you it is going to suck. It's going to hurt. You're going to be uncomfortable because you're being put in the same positions or put in positions where it's super uncomfortable and you're not going to know what to do with yourself, or you just want to be out of the situation. And too many times people relapse because they just don't want to feel uncomfortable, and because it hurts, it doesn't feel good. So the easy solution is to do whatever it is that you normally do, but just know the first year is going to be tough. You're going to have to miss maybe Thanksgivings and Christmases and maybe your own birthday, or there's the things that you're just going to have to skip out on because that's going to save your life.

 

Matt (01:01:42):
You

 

Ted (01:01:42):
Need to decide what's more important, those people's feelings or your

 

Matt (01:01:47):
Life. Your life.

 

Ted (01:01:48):
So it's not saying, oh my God, go to treatment and the blessings are going to happen. That's a bunch of bullshit. I mean, you have to be speaking in reality terms with these men and women because it's not like they say rainbows out there

 

Matt (01:02:11):
And it's an industry, and I feel like there is a lot of dishonesty between the industry and the clients coming in where they just want them to come in. Right?

 

Ted (01:02:23):
Sure.

 

Matt (01:02:24):
And it might have good intentions behind it, but from my experiences, I was set up for failure almost. I was believing that it was going to do something that it just doesn't have the capability of doing. It cannot fix you. It cannot do it. You have to fix you. And I thought like, oh, I'm going to go to treatment. And so the first time I went to treatment, it was like, I'm going to go to treatment and my family's not going to be mad at me anymore. I'm going to go to treatment, and all of these problems, they're going to forget about them because now I'm sober and I'm doing what I need to do and everything's going to be okay. I know I'm going to have to probably say sorry or whatever, and that might suck. But the reality is a lot of people go into treatment and their family's just worried about them, and they want to heal. They want them to not die, so they go to treatment and then their family's just mad at them.

 

Ted (01:03:24):
Sure.

 

Matt (01:03:25):
They're pissed off. And it's like, that situation sucks. How many times have you seen it where it's like they go to treatment and they lose their job? Right?

 

Ted (01:03:38):
Sure.

 

Matt (01:03:38):
I know people enter early recovery, and especially people coming in off the streets. They come in, they enter early recovery, they get the little nine to five job, they're flipping burgers or whatever, and this is what happens. They go into the rooms or they get sober, they enter recovery, they get this job, they can't pay their bills, they don't have a coping mechanism anymore. Everybody's mad at them. They're being isolated. They can't connect with their sponsor, whatever it is. All this shit just piles up and they go, why am I doing this? And they give

 

Ted (01:04:17):
Up. I thought everything was going to change,

 

Matt (01:04:19):
And they give up way before the miracle happens. Right? And coming from, this is what I did. I did this, and I totally understand why other people do this. I did it, but what they failed to do, where the disconnect is, if you'd have just told me that this shit's really going to suck and it's not going to feel good, and I'm not going to have a bunch of success off the bat, all you got to do is wait a year, maybe two at the end of it, it will get better, but it's going to suck up front. That would've made a big difference for me.

 

Ted (01:04:53):
I think so too.

 

Matt (01:04:55):
And you just don't get that typically from the industry?

 

Ted (01:05:00):
No. I mean, I see guys. I mean, when they come into the house, there's a couple of categories. I look at these guys and you can see the ones that really want to do the deal. You can see the desperation in their eyes. It is very relatable. You're just like, okay, this guy, he's probably got a shot. And then you have the guys that come in and they're just put there by the whatever, the parents,

 

Matt (01:05:24):
The cord, the nonchalant,

 

Ted (01:05:25):
Yeah. They're just kind of like, eh, I'm here to just be here, man, whatever. And then there's guys that are on the fence.

 

Matt (01:05:32):
Yeah.

 

Ted (01:05:33):
They're kind of like, man, I really want to do this, but I don't know if I'm ready to stop. But it looks super attractive and I'm tired of myself, and I'm tired of doing this, tired of all this lifestyle and everything has put everybody in, and I know I've hurt my family. I'm about to lose my wife. I'm about to do all these things. And it's like, those are the guys you really want to pay a lot of attention to. Try to push 'em on the good side if you want to say that.

 

(01:05:59):
And that's where you really see the benefits. Man. When you see those guys, you're like, see, I mean, if you just understood, the other interesting thing, especially with, actually, you could probably say this for everyone, but mostly men that are in relationships or women are in relationship. It's the codependency, and we can talk all day about that. It is just as bad or even worse than the addiction itself because that is a huge driving force between parents and their children or wife and husband and boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. I see that a lot

 

Matt (01:06:43):
A lot of those relationships are built off fear. Even the parent child relationship, the majority of what's going on is fear. And then specifically with the boyfriend girlfriend thing, if they're sober or they're a normie and you are the fuck up, there's just so much dishonesty in the relationship, and it's so hard to tell somebody, Hey, you should probably cut the relationship loose. Right? It's like talking to a brick wall. That ain't going to happen. But then the first sign of any kind of friction and they're off drinking again. It's one of the most detrimental things, and I feel like a lot of the times they know it. They know that if they're going to drink, it's going to be over this relationship, but they can't let the relationship go. Then the wife and the marriage situation, that's a really hard one, especially if they have kids.

 

Ted (01:07:41):
Exactly.

 

Matt (01:07:42):
Because typically when it's already gotten to that point, the relationship's so fucked up. It's very high likelihood that it's damaged beyond repair. If you're in that point where you have to go to sober living and separate yourself from your family, it's already past that point. And now they're in there to try to fix that. That's the only reason they're in there typically. And it's like there's a high likelihood that if that's the reason why you're here, it's not going to work.

 

Ted (01:08:13):
Yeah. I have guys, it's funny how that works sometimes because I've learned through over the years. It's like, well, I want to be in this sober living because it's close to my family. And after about a week or two, you start really finally like, okay, this guy's just hanging out his house because he finally got sober, and now I have this laundry list of stuff my wife wanted me to do. So now I'm at the house fixing the garage door or fixing a toilet or whatever it is that I can do to show my worth to just be there at the house and be around all of my loved ones because I am now completely better now,

 

Matt (01:08:49):
Right? Oh, yeah.

 

Ted (01:08:50):
And we started realizing that and making sure that, or I have to go pick up the kids. My wife is relying on me now. And I think through our whole conversation here, I've noticed that family comes up a lot. And I think that a good treatment center, in my opinion, which should have a really robust family program for sure, because otherwise everything we just talked about, it doesn't work. You have to have that. Do you know the understanding of what's going on with your loved one? And like you said, everybody's angry, everybody's pissed off, and it's just like they need therapy just as much as you do.

 

Matt (01:09:34):
Exactly.

 

Ted (01:09:35):
And they need to go through and understand what's going on with you, what to expect next. These are things that, again, that goes back to the whole programming of the aftercare and how hopefully maybe some of these insurance companies will start coming into this side of it, because if you can get that message across that it's not just this guy that's in treatment, it's the whole family in treatment. So how do you cover that?

 

Matt (01:10:02):
Yeah, that's a good point, right? It's like typically the family aspect of definitely family support groups, all that shit's free, right?

 

Ted (01:10:10):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:10:11):
Because it's free, that means it costs us.

 

Ted (01:10:14):
Sure.

 

Matt (01:10:15):
Right? Because we got to have people facilitating it. Typically, they are trained in that kind of dynamic work, and they're expensive, but if you want to have success with the individual, you've got to treat the family. So when it comes to the family dynamic, typically the addict is the fuck up, and that's the person that everybody's pointing at. And the second they can't point at that person anymore, they just resent them. Right. So in my family, I'm the oldest of 10 kids. I'm the oldest of 10 kids, and the biggest fuck up probably, and I'm the oldest grandchild out of, I think it's either 28 or 32 grandchildren as well. And then all of us, my grandparents have probably 40 great-grandchildren.

 

Ted (01:11:07):
Wow.

 

Matt (01:11:08):
There's just

 

Ted (01:11:08):
Huge family.

 

Matt (01:11:09):
A shitload of us. Yeah. 106 people have moved here from California.

 

Ted (01:11:13):
That's crazy.

 

Matt (01:11:14):
That's just like my immediate family. Our families like our in-laws and families, and then maybe one degree of cousins.

 

Ted (01:11:24):
Wow.

 

Matt (01:11:24):
It's like 106 people. So there's a shitload of us. I'm the oldest grandchild, so I was the first, and I was raised kind of side by side with some of my aunts and uncles, and my family dynamic played so much into me and what I became, it took me getting clean and really getting into the work to be able to point out, okay, this was my role. I was the guy that everybody pointed at

 

Ted (01:11:57):
This is what not to do.

 

Matt (01:11:58):
This is exactly, yes. I was the example of what not to do, and that was my role. That was what I did. But then I get clean and I didn't talk to my family for a

 

Ted (01:12:12):
Decade. That's crazy.

 

Matt (01:12:15):
And so I come back in, I don't know, my brothers and sisters, I left. I had little kids at the house. I don't know. My brothers and sisters, they don't know me. There's a couple of my siblings that I had spent a lot of time with, but they've got families and they grew up and they've got careers or whatever it is that they're doing. And it's like I come in thinking that the situation that I came back into was nothing like what I thought it would be. Right. They've moved on with their lives, and I'm expecting that. It's like, I'm going to have to come in here and try to fix all this shit from 15 years ago. It's like everybody's moved on except for a couple people. And those couple people though, have poisoned my ability to reconnect with a lot of my family.

 

Ted (01:13:02):
Wow.

 

Matt (01:13:03):
And it's like that's all it takes is one person to poison the well for you. And if you don't have the determination or just if your desire for recovery is not up to par with their determination to not let you back in, it will drive you out. And that's a very hard thing for a lot of people to face. It's not easy to come as a healing, not a healed person, but a healing person to go back in a really sick situation. The chances of them surviving that is probably none. And it sucks. But yeah, A lot of the treatment facilities that I've seen with a really robust family support group, but then also a family therapy plan, yes, it's a great program. Yes, they've got it in place, but now you got to convince the family to come.

 

Ted (01:14:00):
Yeah. That's tough. Yeah, because I mean, you're the one with the problem. Fix it. Why do we have to spend our time and our evenings?

 

Matt (01:14:08):
Yeah, you are the fuck up. Just go fix yourself. My brother went to treatment too, and my mom went to the family days. That's just her favorite, though. Never came to anything for me until I got sent to that three-year program. I got sent to a three-year program, and I hadn't seen my parents in a decade, and they flew out to California to see me. That was the first time that my parents ever did anything like that. I'm talking about, I was the varsity captain my sophomore year for my water polo team.

 

Ted (01:14:47):
Really?

 

Matt (01:14:48):
And they never went to a single game.

 

Ted (01:14:52):
So this means a lot.

 

Matt (01:14:53):
Yeah, no, it meant a fuck load for 'em to come. Right. But the program that I was at was a fucking cult. So it was like, I mean, literally it was, you know what Synanon is?

 

Ted (01:15:04):
That sounds familiar.

 

Matt (01:15:05):
Okay. So it was based on Synanon. I went to Delancey Street.

 

Ted (01:15:09):
I think I saw something on TV about

 

Matt (01:15:11):
That. There's a documentary

 

Ted (01:15:13):
Fix. That's crazy. You were a part of that.

 

Matt (01:15:14):
Yeah. I went to one of their break off treatment centers. It was like the only reason why we had that family day was to convince them that this is such a great place, and we were regurgitating what they told us to say and shit. It was crazy.

 

Ted (01:15:31):
They based off big donors and stuff like that. That's That's their whole thing,

 

Matt (01:15:37):
Chuck. Yeah. Yeah. The guy who started Synanon had an amazing, a brilliant business mind, and started these nonprofits and realized I can make as much money as I want and not get taxed on it as long as I spend it all. So it had exploded, dude. There was synanon groups in every state. They had all the celebrities. Their first Synanon group was in Santa Monica, California.

 

Ted (01:16:05):
Yeah, dude, this is crazy. Yeah.

 

Matt (01:16:07):
And all of the stars and shit that were going,

 

Ted (01:16:13):
Yeah, I remember seeing this on TV now. It's just funny you're talking about it.

 

Matt (01:16:16):
Yeah. Yeah,

 

Ted (01:16:17):
Man.

 

Matt (01:16:18):
So Kamala Harris, when she won the nominee for vp, she had her party at our facility.

 

Ted (01:16:27):
Oh, really?

 

Matt (01:16:28):
Yeah. It's like that connected politically. There was a voting cycle while I was there, and they made you vote for specific people. If you did not vote for them, they didn't let you vote.

 

Ted (01:16:42):
Oh, wow.

 

Matt (01:16:43):
Yeah. So they were like, who are you going to vote for? Are you a Democrat or are you going to vote Democrat or Republican?

 

Ted (01:16:48):
Really? They brought that into it, huh?

 

Matt (01:16:49):
Yep. Yep. They're like, are you going to vote this way or this way? I'm like, oh, I'm going to vote Republican. They didn't take us, but if you voted blue, they took you to go vote.

 

Ted (01:16:58):
That's crazy.

 

Matt (01:16:59):
It's funny.

 

Ted (01:17:00):
So yeah, man. One thing I was wanting to talk about too is I guess it's more of a testimonial, so to speak, and it has to do with something I experienced and actually went through once I got into opening a sober living. So in 2017, it was March of 2017 is when I stopped drinking, and then November of 17 is when I started Bodine Recovery.

 

Matt (01:17:34):
That was quick.

 

Ted (01:17:36):
And I just saw something that was missing, like I said, in the recovery industry for sober living.

 

Matt (01:17:44):
What was it? And was it based on experience?

 

Ted (01:17:51):
It was more so that I, through my own growth and what I mentioned about the root causes and also my fitness, that I complimented it. And also I started getting into meditation. And so really kind of like all three of those mind, body, spirit. Also, I started reading a lot of Buddhist philosophy books. So growing my spirituality at the same time. I was really excited about that, and I wanted to give others experience of what I went through. I felt like there was a lot of those areas that were not being touched, like we mentioned prior. It's just, okay, here you stop drinking, go to these meetings and just have a good

 

Matt (01:18:43):
Life. It's all very surface.

 

Ted (01:18:45):
Exactly. Yeah. And so I opened the sober living, and then April of 2018, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. So I was just working out one day doing an overhead pull down, and I felt a lump in my throat. I thought it was my collarbone pushing against, I don't know, or my chest muscle against my throat. But I felt there, and it was a lump there. And so I go to get it checked out. Sure enough. Well, they just said it was a

 

Matt (01:19:21):
Cyst.

 

Ted (01:19:22):
No, it was a six centimeter in diameter, I think. Some kind of node, I forget what the terminology, but it's basically like a cyst. And I had about three other ones on the same side. And

 

Matt (01:19:35):
So six centimeters, what? Is that the tip of my finger?

 

Ted (01:19:39):
Yeah, it's about that big. And it was right here on the front, right side of my thyroid.

 

Matt (01:19:46):
Could you see it? It was a ball under the

 

Ted (01:19:48):
Skin, barely.

 

Matt (01:19:49):
Okay.

 

Ted (01:19:52):
So I go and go to the doctor, get it checked out, and basically after they did an ultrasound, they said, Hey, it's quite large. So even if we did a final aspiration, if it was cancerous, we wouldn't even, there's a good chance we may not even hit it, but it's large enough it needs to come out. And the only reason that I went ahead and had it done so quickly is because at the time, my wife's insurance was changing, and we had paid the deductible, and I was like, Hey, you know what? Let's just knock this out. And so September, 2018, I went and had the surgery done, found out, it was like the surgery lasted three times longer than it was supposed to. And why did complications? They tried to, they realized that, which I found out later was cancerous cyst, if you want to call it that. It was entangled into the thyroid itself. They tried to dissect it away and they just couldn't. And it got real messy, real fast. They actually busted it. And so that spread throughout my neck muscles, so the cancerous material would spread throughout my neck. So they were really diligent on trying to get that all out after it had busted apparently. And in the process, they paralyzed my vocal cord. So your vocal cord nerve runs right along the side of your thyroid. And that was severed. Of course, after surgery, I come to go home and then realize,

 

Matt (01:21:41):
I can't talk.

 

Ted (01:21:42):
I can't talk.

 

Matt (01:21:43):
No way. And they didn't say anything.

 

Ted (01:21:46):
Well, they just said that you're going to feel numb, but they said that there was complications with the vocal cord nerve, but that doesn't mean that it can't heal itself, kind of thing.

 

Matt (01:21:58):
Okay.

 

Ted (01:21:59):
That didn't happen. And then I was called to the doctor. I had a doctor's appointment about three days later, and that's when I found out there was cancer. They got the pathology reports back, and it was a papillary carcinoma stage one. And I was like, man, if I had not taken advantage of the insurance running outs, I don't know if I would've even had it taken care of anytime soon. So that was a really good thing that happened. But again, the vocal cord nerve. So from that point on, I really couldn't talk more than a whisper. So essentially what happens is your vocal cords, two of 'em. One of 'em basically is paralyzed and collapsed. So over time, just because I have a good muscle structure in my neck, I would really force myself, which was very hard to do. So I got some decent projection out, but it wasn't really that great. And I would wear out real fast. But this was over a course of a year. I had no voice for a year, and this was right when I started sober living. And so I literally had to go and buy a microphone, a karaoke microphone that had a speaker on it. It was built into it, and that's how, it was kind of ridiculous. But that's what I walked around the house with.

 

Matt (01:23:39):
Do you have it still?

 

Ted (01:23:40):
Yeah, I do.

 

Matt (01:23:41):
Yeah.

 

Ted (01:23:43):
And I would hold meetings at the house, and it was rose gold, and it was like a kid's microphone, man. But it was awesome. It had a speaker built into it. And yeah, I would hold the meetings, the house meetings with that. And so that went on for several months. And even our burgers and bibles, I had to use that whenever we would host that, but a year later, they had to wait for the surgery to heal before they could go in again and do another surgery. Ended up putting in a, it's an implant essentially, and it's pretty wild. The surgery, your voice comes back immediately.

 

Matt (01:24:30):
Really?

 

Ted (01:24:30):
It's so wild. I was like, man, can you make it sound cool? Something different? Unfortunately, can't do that.

 

Matt (01:24:38):
Is it the same voice?

 

Ted (01:24:39):
Oh yeah.

 

Matt (01:24:40):
Okay.

 

Ted (01:24:40):
Yeah. Yeah. But again, that was wild. They actually put you under and wake you up with ketamine actually, so that you're in the state that you're not feeling anything. But they wrapped me like a burrito, basically. So I couldn't move. My throat is wide open, and just to make sure they had it right, right. Implant

 

Matt (01:25:04):
To say something.

 

Ted (01:25:04):
The implant. I had to talk. And so they bring me, I come to, and I'm strapped in this thing, and I'm staring at the ceiling. I was kind of looking around going, wow. I was like, am I in surgery? And they're like, yeah. And I was like, the walls are full of fur. What's going on? It was, anyway. And they're like, oh, well, you're going to feel a little funny. And you start talking. They all laugh, saying weird things. But then I was put right back under, and then it was amazing because the next day I could talk.

 

Matt (01:25:40):
That's so crazy. That's how LASIK was

 

Ted (01:25:43):
Really.

 

Matt (01:25:44):
I mean, the next day it

 

Ted (01:25:45):
Was amazing.

 

Matt (01:25:46):
I could never have read any of that.

 

Ted (01:25:49):
Yeah, I can't read that

 

Matt (01:25:51):
Dude. This right here would've been blurry. I couldn't see shit. And then I had two astigmatisms and dude, the next day I went in at nine in the morning, I went home.

 

Ted (01:26:05):
That's so cool.

 

Matt (01:26:06):
Yeah. I went home that day. I slept. I woke up the next day, took off the things, and I could see everything.

 

Ted (01:26:12):
Was it painful, the surgery? Not at all. Not at all.

 

Matt (01:26:14):
Not at all.

 

Ted (01:26:15):
Yeah. So I continued going to, because what happened is they left some microscopic cancerous material in there, obviously, because it kind of busted. So yeah, I went to MD Anderson, which is, I dunno if you've heard of MD Anderson Big cancer center for the past, the five years after that. And this kind of goes into, again, really taking charge of your own recovery. And that as in every aspect, when I had no voice, I felt like I still had a voice with my recovery with the sober living. And that, I mean, it really isolates you, man. You have no idea what it's like. I mean, it's basically you avoid everybody. Yeah. You can't talk to them. You can't. In this quiet room, you could hear me talk, but anything outside of here, you couldn't even hear me talk. So I would just avoid people, avoid situations, avoid meetings, avoid a lot of things. And so it was not being able to hear me or being just forcing myself so somebody could hear me was frustrating enough. But the mental part of it was really challenging,

 

Matt (01:27:38):
I imagine.

 

Ted (01:27:42):
And especially my mother dying of cancer in 2016, a year before I stopped drinking, I saw that I saw the cancer. I saw eat her a alive basically. So when I was diagnosed with cancer, for me, that was it. I was like, oh my God. So this is what it's going to look like. So immediately as they say, the stinking thinking comes into place. And it's great. The tools that I've learned through the 12 steps that I was able to work through it and then get through to the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day

 

Matt (01:28:22):
Without drinking.

 

Ted (01:28:23):
And so it's that again, going to MD Anderson. So we get to MD Anderson, and then I go through their process, and then I notice about my third visit after doing, of course, now I know I have cancer, what can I do? Right? Because it's the same thing with recovery. It's like, what can I do? Because if I'm just going to go to treatment, or if I'm just going to go to some therapist and just have them talk at me, they're never going to be able to help me if I don't speak up.

 

(01:28:58):
Same thing goes for, and this is what I tell everybody out there, and the audience is when you go to your doctor, you have to be proactive and ask them questions. And even at MD Anderson with all their elite status and how great of a surgeons they are, I had the best of the best. After my research that I did online, I realized that there's a lot of things I could be doing that they're not telling me to do. And one of those things was, what am I putting into my body? Why did I get cancer in the first place? Right? Who knows? I have no idea.

 

Matt (01:29:39):
Did they give you any scenarios that could have been possibly the cause of it?

 

Ted (01:29:44):
No. No. All they care about just like is how are we going to treat this? And I said, well, I have microscopic, microscopic, is it growing? No, it's not growing as it moved any. No, it hasn't moved. And so they were like, we want to do radiation. And I'm like, radiation, huh? I was like, okay. So I go back home, researched research, watch YouTube videos and this. And man, I tell you what, it scared the heck out of me. I was like, there's no way I'm doing that. Unless there's cancer all over my neck. I'm not doing it. And because I could be breathing through a tube right now, I mean, it totally burns your esophagus. It burns everything. And so when I went back again, doing more research, and what I found was after I told him, I was like, look, I have to sign. I waiver refusing treatment from 'em. And so I go on to do more research. And what I did was found out what foods I was allergic to. Went and got tested,

 

(01:30:47):
Cut out gluten, cut out dairy, minimized sugar as much as possible, caffeine, and went all organic, ate nothing out of a box or a wrapper, no fast food, pretty much everything I cooked at home. It was all, like I said, raw from the butcher. I wouldn't even buy things out of the wrapper in the meat section. And again, with the fruits, vegetables, all organic. And I went on a very, very strict diet. And then also took as far as holistic black seed oil and turmeric, anything that, and that's why it's important to find out what you're allergic to food wise is because what it's doing is causing inflammation in your body. And if you can reduce the inflammation in your body, you have a very good fighting chance that you're going to stop feeding the cancer. And I eliminated all those. And then also in addition to meditation, environmental stress, any type of hypertension or stress that I'm causing to myself in a year's time, it was gone.

 

Matt (01:31:54):
That's amazing.

 

Ted (01:31:54):
Cancer is gone.

 

Matt (01:31:56):
Yeah. It amazes me that the medical industry is so incentivized to put chemicals into you when the reality is you can proactively fight a lot of things. Right. Addiction is another one. You know what I found out through all of the formal training that a regular MD has, do you know how many hours of addiction medicine training they get?

 

Ted (01:32:19):
Probably none.

 

Matt (01:32:20):
Six hours.

 

Ted (01:32:21):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:32:22):
Six hours.

 

Ted (01:32:23):
Yeah. Not much. I know or nutrition.

 

Matt (01:32:27):
Oh, really?

 

Ted (01:32:28):
Yeah. That's the thing. That's what I was going to say. Next time you go to your doctor, ask them, why aren't you asking me what I'm eating?

 

Matt (01:32:36):
Oh, yeah.

 

Ted (01:32:36):
Nobody's ever asked me what kind of diet do I have? And then it's like the doctors over at the cancer center, I said, this is what I'm doing. Do you think that has anything to do with my readings? Well, it could be. I'm like, what kind of food should I be eating? Well, it balanced diet. What does that mean? That's what you hear. And that's the same thing you hear from a doctor eat a balanced diet. What does that mean? So not knowing anything about your body, what you're allergic to is causing the majority of your problems.

 

Matt (01:33:10):
Yeah. I mean, have you heard about the sugar industry scandals and Oh,

 

Ted (01:33:15):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:33:16):
I mean,

 

Ted (01:33:17):
It's an everything

 

Matt (01:33:18):
Dude. And the medical industry rubber stamps that, right? Where they're like, when it comes to cholesterol in the heart or the sugar industry, or they said, don't eat red meat. And really what it is is what you're eating with the red meat. But the reality is you eat a carnivore diet. A lot of people get really healthy on that, but they'll tell you, don't eat red meat or only eat six ounces, or whatever it is. It's like there are people out there. I did the carnivore diet for about 11 months, and I'd never felt better in my life, but if you tell a doctor that, they'll be like, oh, your cholesterol and all this stuff. And it's like, no, it's not how it works. It's the breads that you're eating. It's all the fucked up processed shit that you're eating. But they don't ever want to say that. They don't ever say that. It's crazy.

 

Ted (01:34:11):
Yeah. I mean, because think about it. You fix that, then they don't have any business. There's no medication to sell.

 

Matt (01:34:18):
The medical industry is not based on healing. It's based on suppression of symptoms. Otherwise, if they healed everybody, they would have no return customers.

 

Ted (01:34:28):
Exactly.

 

Matt (01:34:29):
And the treatment industry is guilty of the same shit. I feel like a large contingency. I don't really see that here in Houston where they're like, actually, I can't even say that. Somebody recently told me the numbers about how they're actually surviving on the people that are relapsing and coming back. That sounds so fucked up to me. It's like, I don't know, whatever. Sure. The success, the way that people measure success is always different. The way that we are measuring success is probably different than everybody else, but the amount of people that don't come back is a level of success that I want

 

Ted (01:35:14):
For sure.

 

Matt (01:35:14):
It just doesn't. And then it's the feast or famine mentality and then the scarcity mentality that everybody has. It's like

 

Ted (01:35:22):
In the past nine years, it's never changed. It's up and down all the time. It is never a consistent thing. So I mean, maybe, well, I can't even say that. I think that people would say there's a season for recovery. They do. And it's just the holidays, the summers, stuff like that. But then again, whatever happens in treatment is usually a trickle down effect of what I'm experiencing too, in sober living and whatever's, like I said, if anything's happening in treatment, I feel it a month later, essentially. So it's a constant up and down.

 

Matt (01:36:16):
Did you see that thing that Trump just did? He made it federally legal. They did this in California, I think four or five years ago. No, I guess it's been almost six years ago, but it's now federally legal to involuntarily commit people to treatment,

 

Ted (01:36:33):
Really

 

Matt (01:36:34):
Homeless people. So they'll go to homeless people and say, you can go to treatment or you can go to jail. If you deny the help, we'll take you to jail. Well, they did this in California in San Diego maybe six years ago. And what happened was there was a shitload of people that went to treatment, but then they filled it with the treatment centers, and then they had people waiting in the jails.

 

Ted (01:36:58):
That's funny.

 

Matt (01:36:58):
And then slowly, everybody just left. Everybody just left the city. And so it immediately solved nothing. But in the long run, it got homeless people to just go somewhere else. But what it ultimately did was it choked up, and it wasn't like they were getting sent to quality treatment. They were going to state funded free options, all that. And some of my most successful treatment experiences, one of them was Salvation Army, and the other one was a free faith based one. I been to boutique treatment. We had our own bedrooms in our own house. There was three people in our own house and then a live-in chef. And the whole nine didn't get shit out of it. The successful one that I think I actually participated in was Salvation Army. It was because of, it was a long-term thing. I was there for seven months. We worked every day. They made sure that we addressed certain things, and we were there for long enough to address it. 28 days is not enough time to address shit. And that's why it blows my mind is you are frontloading all of your cost into stabilization.

 

Ted (01:38:26):
Yeah. I think that I saw a medical term, the medical term for being sober is basically you're in remission. Right? In remission. It just sounds so funny that they just think that it's not coming back, cured it.

 

Matt (01:38:46):
The whole terminology around it relapse makes sense, right? But have you heard the whole new political correct way to say it? It's a return to serious symptoms.

 

Ted (01:38:59):
Oh, boy.

 

Matt (01:39:00):
Right. So that is another thing is you guys have given us, so when I got sober, really sober, I had to go through and redefine a lot of shit for myself, and I had to get rid of two words that I cannot use them for myself anymore. And it's triggers and cravings because a trigger for me really is just a desire to use. I just want to get high. And now I could point at that and say, well, I had a trigger. I was triggered. So I used, you know what? Yeah, it's

 

Ted (01:39:33):
A scapegoat. It is.

 

Matt (01:39:36):
It's a terminology that you have allowed me to point at that now I have to take the power back from it in order to really have accountability to myself. I cannot say that I have cravings or that I have triggers, because the reality is at the baseline of it, that's just a bandaid. The word is a bandaid. The cause of it is, I just wanted to get high, and now I can point to this as an excuse. So I had to get rid of those two words. I cannot not. The way that I talk about my recovery, the way that I talk about what I'm doing is I cannot use those words to, because it takes the power out of my choices.

 

Ted (01:40:16):
Right? Yeah. I mean, it's amazing how words, the language behind it and just about behind recovery. One of the things that someone said to me was, stop saying I know

 

Matt (01:40:34):
Why.

 

Ted (01:40:34):
Because you don't know. You don't know anything. You really don't. So the fact that you're just saying, oh yeah, I know, I know. Or someone's it's a conversation. It's just you're telling yourself that, I guess a lot of things that you really don't. So I mean, you'd be surprised if you really think about or if you pay attention to that. Most people say it more than you think. I still do too, but it's just trying to remember. I don't know.

 

Matt (01:41:08):
Yeah. So we've been conditioned socially to say certain things to each other. When people see each other, they'll be like, oh, how are you? But they don't mean, how are you? It's a greeting, but that actually means something when you ask somebody, how are you? And we've cheapened it to the point where you can now ask me like, oh, how are you? And my automatic reflex is just, oh, I'm okay. I'm good. How are you? And you do the same thing back, right? It's like the way that our society is being conditioned and programmed. We have cheapened our communication down to a point where it's almost meaningless, and it's gotten to the point where civil discourse is broken down to the point where nobody can talk anymore in a meaningful way. Nobody's so true, can disagree, and nobody can agree because we just don't understand each other anymore. And then imagine trying to come into recovery. You already don't know what's going on. You don't have the language around it. Everything's fucked up and you can't communicate either. That makes it so much harder.

 

Ted (01:42:19):
It does.

 

Matt (01:42:20):
Not being able to communicate your needs is already a thing. The average healthy person can't communicate their needs. So imagine an unhealthy person trying to heal who does not know how to express their needs. We need to reeducate people on how to, and that's something that is talked about, but it's never actually done. The clients leave with the same amount of ability to express themselves as when they came in. I feel like the majority of the time we need, and this is sober coaching, right? Sober coaching. I believe in it. I am part of an organization that certifies sober coaches. So next week, I teach all next week, and it's a certification course, but sober coaches can move the needle. I believe this a hundred percent. And one of the things that the 12 step programs got, I mean, perfect. It got a couple things. One of the things that got absolutely perfect was the sponsor sponsee relationship, the accountability, the responsibility, the ability to have somebody that you connect with in a meaningful way. And for the people who are not choosing aa, sober coaches are the very next best thing I feel like.

 

(01:43:41):
And then the reason why I really love the program, the curriculum that we teach off of, so I'm A-C-P-F-S specialist, so it's certified peer and family specialists. There's this whole family part that we go over and we talk about how important the family work is not just obligated to the client. And I think that's something that's just not talked about enough. You're obligated to the family too. There is a lot of work that is just not being done, and we're failing our clients, failing their families. When you look at interventionists, so I did a bunch of intervention training. I thought like, oh, this is going to be fun. I have a bunch of friends that did intervention work, and they're talking about these stories and these fun things that they did and some of the crazy shit that happened.

 

Ted (01:44:32):
It doesn't sound like fun. I don't know.

 

Matt (01:44:33):
Well, the way that they, so back in the day, they had done it years and years ago, and some of the stories I was like, oh, that sounds actually cool. You're really like, that is frontline saving someone's life. And then you go to different states and meet different people. It sounded fun. And then I went to the trainings and I very quickly realized that if you fuck this up, there's a good chance that you're fucking somebody up really bad. So there's a lot of responsibility in it. But then also 95% of what you actually have to do is you're going days in advance before the intervention and you're working with the family and you're getting in there and kind of deconstructing family dynamics so that when the intervention happens, who can sit next to them, who to sit across from them, who's not allowed to talk, who's allowed to read? And you have to go in and deconstruct this family. And I started hearing all this shit. I was like, oh, fuck this. I don't want to do this. But they have a lot of understanding about how this was the aha moment for me. This was about, I started doing this about, it was October of last year,

 

(01:45:46):
And this was the eye-opening moments where I was like, oh, how important the family work is. Otherwise, it's like the family will dictate whether this person's going to heal or not, unless they're completely cut off. That's almost the best situation is if the family just completely cuts them off, they go do their healing, and then they get a good foundation of recovery underneath them, and then they can go back and deal with it with a couple of years under their belt. But that's not typically how it works out.

 

Ted (01:46:17):
No, I mean, I think too, and understand how valuable sober living is, I think a lot of people don't understand that. And I think as a whole, sober living carries the stigma behind it. And just like an addict carries a stigma behind it, I think there's a big gap where people understand what a real sober living is versus a halfway house or a threequarter house and what that looks like. Because I can tell you that majority of the people out there do not understand it

 

Matt (01:46:56):
For sure.

 

Ted (01:46:57):
I mean, unless you've gone through a treatment center and you've been recommended to one of these sober livings that's been vetted through them, that is what you probably, I mean, that's probably the closest you're going to get to really a decent sober living. Otherwise, you're just kind of a house with some beds and there's a bunch of people from prison in there and bunch of weirdos and they're flop houses. And I think that people don't really understand how important, again, like you said, being an interventionist and being on the front lines, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, you mentioned you go to 30 days of treatment and then we get you, right? I mean, it's kind of like a flip of the coin. Who are we going to get? And then also, what kind of family members are going to be coming with this person? Who do I talk to on the phone? And you get all the various levels. You get people that are just, you can see where the behavior comes from, and then you just don't even have to meet the people. You can just hear 'em on the phone. And then you have the helicopter parents and the wife that causes a lot of problems, or the girlfriend that calls a lot of problems. And so there's so many variables and different, there's a lot of drama and it comes in various sizes and shapes and trying to, they all don't fit in the same box. I mean, basically we're getting people that nobody wants to deal with anymore.

 

Matt (01:48:42):
That's a really good point.

 

Ted (01:48:44):
And it's a lot to deal with on our side too, but we have a better understanding of like, okay, I get it, man. You're this, this and this, and yeah, you're not crazy. There's so many things that you're saying I can relate with, but they're not going to understand kind of thing. It's refreshing for those guys. But at the same point, there's a lot of times we get guys that's never been in sober living, it's intimidating. So it could prevent people from going just because it's intimidating. Now. We do like a door to door. If you're coming from a treatment centers, I mean, it's typically a hundred percent you're going to come into the house unless there's some type of schizophrenia or extreme bipolar, or you don't pass the background check, so to speak. But then again, you probably have already been through a background check at the treatment center if that's the case. It's just really getting someone fresh out of treatment is always something that's heavy on us and heavy on them. So you just have to approach each situation as it comes in. And working with the families, I find that, again, it's like you have ones that really want to help the loved one, and then you have other ones that just don't have anything to do with 'em.

 

(01:50:12):
And I think it's very important. So I do a lot of referrals. I get a lot of phone calls, not only with the men in my house, but just people who call me. I like to, because I've been in the business for as long as I have, I get a lot of phone calls, people looking for women, sober living, people looking for therapists. But you have to take the time to talk to that person, even though they're not going to be a client of yours. But it's like, Hey, what can you afford? Maybe just you're okay, you're a female. What can you afford do? You don't have any money. So I just kind of direct 'em where they need to go and help 'em in that sense. If anything else, same thing goes for therapists. I mean, a person coming from Austin or I don't know Wisconsin or wherever you're coming from, you come into Houston, you're not going to know a therapist that's going to have maybe an addictionologist or a medical or a good therapist that has addiction or an LCDC counselor, because most of the time you don't even know where to start.

 

Matt (01:51:18):
And a lot of people don't know what an LCDC is or that there's addiction specialists or anything like that. They know that their family member is using drugs every day or using alcohol every day. One of the things that I teach the sober coach, the coaches that are going through the certification courses, the majority of what we do is we become resources. We become a resource center for people. And so if you are in any given market and you don't know what's going on, then you're kind of a useless resource. And so for people at you that's been in the business and people trust you and they know your name and stuff like that, it's like you have an obligation to be a resource to these people.

 

Ted (01:52:03):
Absolutely.

 

Matt (01:52:04):
And I hear these stories constantly where it's like I answer our phones too, and I've experienced this too, as a matter of fact, when I was looking for treatment like 18 months ago or whatever, I'm still getting emails back from places and they're like, Hey, we wanted to just see if you got help. It's like, dude, it's been over a year. It's been a year and a half.

 

Ted (01:52:28):
That's the call center.

 

Matt (01:52:30):
And it's like, I hear it constantly where it's like once they know that they're not going to be a client, they're trying to hang up as fast as possible. It's like you're failing in your obligations. But I also look at who says that? And I'm like, okay, you are here for a paycheck. And a lot of it is a lot of non therapists, non frontline workers. They're like the background people kind of. But it's interesting. It's such a, there's so many dynamics that go into play for a single organization and you're like a one man show, and it's like, I don't know how you're doing that. It sounds crazy. I know I couldn't do this by myself.

 

Ted (01:53:21):
Oh, no. Yeah. Mean I do wear all the hats and boat on recoveries, with the exception. I mean, without my house managers, I mean, obviously I need those guys and they do amazing work. My coaches do great work. We also do case management too, so

 

Matt (01:53:40):
That is a very important part of what we do. I won't say the name, but there's a treatment center around here that does no case management. They're like, their therapists are trying to double as the case management, and it's like, how do you expect them to do BD work, clinical work, and case management? It sounds impossible.

 

Ted (01:54:08):
Yeah,

 

Matt (01:54:09):
It sounds so crazy to me.

 

Ted (01:54:10):
Yeah, that's a lot. It doesn't sound like they're really doing it, so to speak.

 

Matt (01:54:16):
Yeah, no. You know what mean. Yeah, it's

 

Ted (01:54:18):
Interesting. Yeah. So it's always trying to see what we can do more. And I've thought of doing some, we do have some therapists that we refer to that do online type of therapy,

 

Matt (01:54:36):
Like telehealth,

 

Ted (01:54:37):
Telehealth kind of

 

Matt (01:54:38):
Stuff. Like actual therapists.

 

Ted (01:54:40):
Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt (01:54:42):
When I toured your house, I think, did you guys have a the, oh, that's what it was. It was like a telehealth therapist, right?

 

Ted (01:54:49):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:54:50):
Yeah.

 

Ted (01:54:51):
I mean, it's a little bit more than most sober livings do, but it's just something else

 

Matt (01:54:56):
You offer a lot more than, so I told you when I toured yours, yours was number six, and I did all of the local ones right here, and I walked into one. I was with my brother. I walked into one, and Jericho was like, what the fuck? What is going on? They were getting high in the house, right down the street from here. And then we walked into yours, and Jericho was like, oh, okay. This is how we would do it. A good program. It's a nice house. It's like that sense of, for people in early recovery, being able to have somewhere nice to lay your head at night that's safe and clean.

 

Ted (01:55:41):
You don't want to get up and run out or worry about stuff getting stolen or whatever.

 

Matt (01:55:45):
There was only one other house that was actually clean, and it still was kind of a shithole, but it was at least clean. Some of these houses are so run down and

 

Ted (01:55:56):
Filthy,

 

Matt (01:55:56):
And it was like, we charged 200 bucks a week. You charge 200 bucks a week, you pay weekly. It was like, okay, why? It was like, well, because some people are in and out. It's like, oh, it's like a turnover thing. Okay. It's crazy.

 

Ted (01:56:11):
Extended stay.

 

Matt (01:56:13):
Yeah,

 

Ted (01:56:15):
It's like you're checking in, checking

 

Matt (01:56:16):
Out. And it was like, I think there was six bedrooms and 14 people in the house. I was like, oh, this is crazy.

 

Ted (01:56:26):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, there's no book, no handbook, nothing to go by. So I mean, in the city of Houston though, they tried to put us as group homes. We had to go through that whole process. Now I think what there's a lot of, they went through, I think it went up to city planning, and it looks like they're not really doing anything right now because there's nothing set forth for, say, sober living homes. They did try to come in and make you do a certificate of occupancy like you would a commercial building. They were making it really hard on us. For what reason? I have no idea. Just about collecting money really day for sure.

 

Matt (01:57:18):
They're justifying their own existence.

 

Ted (01:57:21):
So it's like, look, if you can come up with a sober living criteria and some kind of certification, we'll be happy to do it. But don't put us as a group home. Don't put us as something else just because you don't know where to put us. So

 

Matt (01:57:36):
Because that'll damage the model. Right? For sure. And it makes zoning. I mean, it makes where you can put it a lot harder.

 

Ted (01:57:46):
Definitely. Well, the American Disabilities Act really kind of protects us it pretty much for anything really.

 

Matt (01:57:54):
So because it's addiction?

 

Ted (01:57:56):
Yeah.

 

Matt (01:57:56):
Wow. It's a

 

Ted (01:57:56):
Disease. Yeah.

 

Matt (01:57:58):
Okay.

 

Ted (01:57:59):
So we're protected by that. So really no, HOA nothing can really supersede it. They can give you a hard time and make you want to move out, but that's about it. But legally they can't do anything.

 

Matt (01:58:15):
Plus the fair housing too plays into that. Right, right. Okay.

 

Ted (01:58:19):
Yeah. That's why it makes it tough when if you try to rent a sober living house, it's just always better to buy one. But I always go back to people that really call me to try to find out, Hey, I want to do a sober living like yours. What do I need to do? And too many times once we have a conversation, I would say nine times out of 10, it's not a good fit. And I say that because you have to really, it costs a lot more than most people think, and you really have to have a passion for it, and you have to be in it to help people. I think too many times if you stay in a successful sober living house, it's very misleading because they don't understand how much work goes into becoming a successful sober living house.

 

Matt (01:59:18):
It costs a lot more than just money. There's just a lot that goes into it, a lot of time and energy and effort. It is not an easy, well, we don't want to do it.

 

Ted (01:59:29):
I mean, you have to do it. You have to have a purpose. And that's where I felt that the reason I did what I did, or opening Bo on recovery was I felt I had a purpose and I gave up my career in oil and gas and been doing this full time since 2017 because it is no better feeling in the world than doing something that you feel that you have a purpose to do.

 

Matt (02:00:00):
For sure.

 

Ted (02:00:01):
And no matter the outcome, like I said, I had nobody in my house for eight months. My wife is like, what are you doing? You're going to break us if you don't do something soon. And I'm just like, wait, just one more month, one more month. And then sure enough things start happening because it's like I look back on that time period. And for me it was that learning lesson of what if Ted would've gotten too much too soon? This is more of a testing period, more or less is the way the lesson I learned in it was too much too soon, may not have been good for you. So testing my faith to this is what I was put here to do. This is my purpose and what are you willing to do to get there? And it's like, for me, that's the lesson in it for me is that I stayed in something that I knew that wasn't doing well, but I felt like it was where I belonged.

 

Matt (02:01:04):
There's a feeling to having a calling, and they always say, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. But that's fucking not true. That shit is hard work.

 

Ted (02:01:16):
It's hard at the same time. Yeah, the success story, sorry, success stories. I had a guy walk up to me at the gym the other day, I hadn't seen him in probably three years. And he's like, Ted, he's like, Bo on recovery. And I was like, yeah. And I recognized his face, but I couldn't recognize his name.

 

(02:01:39):
And he is like, dude, he is like, thank you so much for the time I spent over there at Bodine Recovery. He is like, it saved my life. He's like, man, I'm getting married and I have a really good job now. And I was like, dude, that's so great. And he's like, yeah. And then this guy, Eddie that he was with, he's like, we moved in together and he's doing great. He got married, he's got a great job. And he goes, man, that place saved our lives. And so when you hear that kind of stuff, that's when you're just kind of like, man, that's the reward right there. That's so cool. It's amazing when you hear that kind of stuff.

 

Matt (02:02:10):
Yeah. There's a treatment center in San Diego that has a terrible reputation because it was started by the Hell's Angels. And originally they had started it to send their own people there so that they can just fuck around or whatever. And then one thing kind of led to another, it's still kind of like a biker. There's a biker culture there. They started a Christian bike club, it's called Set Free, but when I was growing up, there was two treatment centers that everybody talked about. It was always set free and victory outreach. And I ended going to set free. I ended up in the program and I'd never experienced anything. It's a faith-based program,

 

(02:03:14):
But I'd never experienced anything like that. And I had never felt like I owed people more than when I went there. And that's part of how I ended up here. How I ended up doing what I'm doing is because when I left, I left that Synanon program and called my PO, and I was like, I can't fucking do this. This is fucking insane. She was like, find somewhere, get in somewhere, and if you don't go back. So I called this place in San Diego, I was in LA called This Place in San Diego. I was like, I need to be there for 28 months. They're like, we are not a 28 month program. Kind of went through this negotiation process with them and they're like, look, come and we'll work something out. And then four months in, they were like, you can stay here, but you got to work for us. So I ended up becoming staff there and it was just, they had the ability to work with me in such a way that nobody else could have, I think. And I still feel like a lot of what I do is to help pay that back.

 

Ted (02:04:17):
That's awesome.

 

Matt (02:04:18):
Yeah. I mean, there are programs, there are things that people run into in their early recovery or as part of their journey that it's like, make a massive difference

 

Ted (02:04:29):
And we hope we do that too. And same goes for you.

 

Matt (02:04:32):
I do. I hope that this is a program that really makes a difference in people's lives.

 

Ted (02:04:39):
Yeah, I think so too. I mean, you guys are doing amazing work, so thank you. It's going to be a part of that.

 

Matt (02:04:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the only, well, I don't going to say it.

 

Ted (02:04:52):
Yeah.

 

Matt (02:04:54):
Well, okay. Hey, you want to add anything?

 

Ted (02:04:58):
No, man. I think I'm good.

 

Matt (02:05:00):
Cool. Alright, man. I appreciate your time.

 

Ted (02:05:03):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

 

Matt (02:05:04):
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 needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 8 8 8 - 6 9 1 - 8 2 9 5.