Life After My Ex-Wife’s Death From Addiction Tore My Family Apart

Matt Handy (00:00:03):
I am Matt Handy and you're listening to My Last Relapse. Okay. So today we have Rune. Rune, what's your last name?

 

Rune Christensen (00:00:10):
Christensen. Christensen? Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:00:12):
Okay, so let's start like this. Are you in recovery?

 

Rune Christensen (00:00:15):
I'm not.

 

Matt Handy (00:00:15):
Okay. Yeah. So what do you do?

 

Rune Christensen (00:00:18):
I am a conscious leadership coach and I'm also an equine facilitator coach.

 

Matt Handy (00:00:23):
Okay,

 

Rune Christensen (00:00:23):
That's interesting. So I work with people with animals and I work with people directly.

 

Matt Handy (00:00:29):
Okay. So what got you into this?

 

Rune Christensen (00:00:33):
Yeah, exposure to addiction. Exposure to addiction. Yeah, definitely. So I've been with addiction most of my life on the recipient side or as a family member or the spouse or the father. And at some point I realized that I couldn't run away from it, so I ran towards it and I ended up with the Cenikor Foundation, which is big. And from there on I realized that I shouldn't be in the business I was in any longer doing what I was doing. So I kind of started seeking outwards to seek inwards, and then my path to seeking inwards, I landed where I'm at today.

 

Matt Handy (00:01:12):
Okay. So what were you doing before

 

Rune Christensen (00:01:14):
It?

 

Matt Handy (00:01:15):
Yeah,

 

Rune Christensen (00:01:16):
All in my head.

 

Matt Handy (00:01:17):
Yeah. Yeah. So have you ever heard the whole philosophy around the buffalo?

 

Rune Christensen (00:01:24):
No.

 

Matt Handy (00:01:24):
So in recovery, there's kind of like, and I don't know why people don't talk about this more, but they use buffalos as a symbol of recovery. The only animal that will run through a storm to get through it quicker, all the rest of the animals run away from it.

 

Rune Christensen (00:01:38):
Very true.

 

Matt Handy (00:01:39):
So yeah, that's a very not unique thing that you hear from people who are not an addict. They come into the addiction space where they get an exposure to it and they kind of feel that draw to it where they run to it. Right. It's like a very serious attraction. What was the initial attraction to it?

 

Rune Christensen (00:02:03):
I think it was just a realization that when I was like, okay, so I've spent most of my young and adult life running away from addiction, avoiding it

 

Matt Handy (00:02:13):
In what ways?

 

Rune Christensen (00:02:15):
Not facing, what was my reality? Not facing my reality. My dad was an addict, died from that, not facing that. My ex-wife at the time was an addict. And avoiding it, not facing it, not addressing it, not calling it out, but just sort of complacently living with her in that and, and then at the same time where she passed away from her addiction, self-inflicted overdose, I realized that there was something bigger out for me, something else that I needed to step into in order to deal with all of it. I've spent my whole life pushing this away. And so the path of facing it was also my path of healing.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:08):
Absolutely. Absolutely. So how long have you been in this space specifically now?

 

Rune Christensen (00:03:13):
About six years.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:15):
Okay. Alright. And let's talk about the equine.

 

Rune Christensen (00:03:19):
Yeah, so horses are amazing. So I got into equine about two years ago, a lady named Beth Anstandig from California.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:29):
Wait for the people who don't know what equine is, what is equine?

 

Rune Christensen (00:03:32):
Horses.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:33):
Horses and it's horses as a modality of therapy for people with trauma.

 

Rune Christensen (00:03:39):
Well, for a lot of different things, but what it really is, is you don't ride the horse. So it's not traditional horse therapy, as we've heard about for young people. It's really about you're in a pen or an enclosure with a horse with a facilitator. That could be me, it could be somebody else. And then you just get to spend whatever it is that you come in with. You get to spend some time with a horse, with whatever's inside. And the horse has this magic, I would almost call, I'm a scientist my whole life and I've had to surrender to that. There's something in between, not by force, but by experience. And so the horses, let's just call 'em that. Instead of the equine, I think it's a little bit friendlier. They're prey animals. So they've spent, they've genetically geared towards harmonizing their energies. When they're in a flock, synchronizing their heartbeats, they can hear another horse's heartbeat 30 feet away.

 

Matt Handy (00:04:40):
Wow.

 

Rune Christensen (00:04:40):
They can hear your heartbeat 10 feet away. They can hear that in their mind.

 

Matt Handy (00:04:46):
That is crazy.

 

Rune Christensen (00:04:47):
And so they can also see or feel what's going on inside of you. So if you're coming in incongruent, so you're presenting a certain way, but there's something else going on, they actually will pick up on what you are not willing to show. And this makes a big difference because they're also able to see if you're trustworthy, are you coming in with sincerity? Are you coming in or are you a potential threat? So they're always analyzing that. And then when they see, and this is what we see with people who are coming in with heavy emotional, let's call it back, for lack of better word.

 

(00:05:28):
What they see is that there is this vulnerable part of ourselves that are in there that's hurting, and they have some sort of a way to pick that up and get close to it. And we talk about sometimes what is it that they're actually doing and why is it, it's so magical. And one of the things that are really cool is that there's this thought of they're actually able to carry some of that burden for you and they can release tension. So horses are really good at carrying tension and releasing it, carrying tension and relieving it. Most people's issues or problems is the tension built up, but there's no release. I imagine addiction is the foundation of that. And I don't know if that's just the tension builds up inside and the release is through whatever the behavior is.

 

Matt Handy (00:06:24):
Yeah, unfortunately, the coping mechanism of addiction is the symptom that we talk about the use and abuse of drugs. And unfortunately, there's still no release in that. You might feel soothed, but there is no actual release for that tension still. And so it's a steady, still just a steady buildup. You're now just stacking additional things on top of it.

 

Rune Christensen (00:06:53):
So it's for a lack of being able to release. The only way that I think that I'm going to release is by doing X, Y, and Z for sure. And then I'm like, well, that didn't

 

Matt Handy (00:07:00):
Work. It's relief. It isn't release, it's relief, it's temporary relief, right.

 

Rune Christensen (00:07:05):
But it doesn't address the underlying

 

Matt Handy (00:07:07):
Thing by far.

 

Rune Christensen (00:07:08):
And so that's what I see with coaching clients, and I coach people in all walks of life. So it's anything from Wall Street equity research companies to just somebody who's just struggling with depression. And I'm not a therapist and I will never step into the therapist works. I have deep respect for that boundary as a coach. However, I will say that in the equine, you're kind of in between

 

Matt Handy (00:07:34):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (00:07:34):
But what we never do is we never, as facilitators with horses, I never tell a client what to do, what to think. They actually come up with that themselves by being in the presence of the horse. So I'm just guiding and keeping them safe and the experience,

 

(00:07:49):
And then let the magic unfold that happens in there. And I wish I could say, oh, it's X, Y, and Z that's causing this transformation that can happen after being in sessions with a horse for a while on and off, but can't, it's just an experimental thing. But what we're seeing is it doesn't really matter what come in with the horse is capable of being some sort of vehicle a vessel. I think what's really there is that you walk up to a horse when you're not scared of it, and you also don't have judgment from it. So there's nobody that's not like, oh, the horse going to think that I'm X, Y, and Z. And so that allows you maybe to get a little bit more vulnerable, to allow the insight to come a little bit closer to the surface. And that's what we see happening is that people are a little bit guarded first, then they loosen up, and then after the second or third session, they really can come in and they can just

 

Matt Handy (00:08:46):
Play with the horse. Really.

 

Rune Christensen (00:08:47):
Absolutely.

 

Matt Handy (00:08:49):
And this is a lot of touch, right? They're touching that very much. Yeah. Okay. And do you think there's an exchange of energy?

 

Rune Christensen (00:08:55):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:08:56):
Okay. And you think it's both ways?

 

Rune Christensen (00:08:58):
I think it's more an exchange of energy from the human being to the horse, because the horses are really good at releasing tension,

 

Matt Handy (00:09:06):
Ok

 

Rune Christensen (00:09:07):
Like legit, and we see that, we'll see them roll, we'll see them. They'll make horse sounds like we're used to, that's a very typical way. They will leak, they will chew, they'll change how their ears are turned and so forth. So there's all these tiny little signals that shows that the horse is actually very relaxed and they're need based. Horses instantly are need based, so they go for their knees. Now, when you put reins in a horse, some things changes. Training is now in play. So you put a saddle on a horse, the horse is like, okay, we're going to be riding. Somebody's going to be on top of me and we're going to go somewhere and we're going to do something. I'm now in sort of an under command scenario. What we do is we take all of it off. So we let the horse be without anything physically on them.

 

Matt Handy (00:09:53):
Literally unbridled,

 

Rune Christensen (00:09:54):
Unbridled. That is when the horse, in the beginning, when we go to places and horses have never been, they've just never been in the round. And they're like, they start like, oh, we're going to run some circles. What are we going to do? And they realize they get to do whatever they want to do, and then they're like, oh, okay. So then they become needs-based and they're back to being needs-based, like if they were hanging out in a big pasture with some other horses where they're very much need-based and that's survival, but it's also community. So they naturally want to have a connection with something that's in the pen, but they need to trust it before they can get there.

 

Matt Handy (00:10:30):
Okay. Okay. So let's say I'm traumatized. So I have sexual trauma in my past, and I've always been, how do I say this? Okay, I'll start like this. I've tried everything. Okay. I've done, I've done every type of treatment. I've done Synanon based treatment, work, therapy, treatment, 12 step. I've done it all right. And trauma is a really hard thing to address for people who don't know how to, there's no vocabulary around it. And one of the things that I see all the time is that people are very unaware of their traumas because they don't know how to express it and haven't been honest about it. They haven't talked about it. They've never trusted somebody enough to talk about it. For a situation like that, for people with sexual trauma, that's a very shameful, guilty, embarrassing situation. Do you see people that come in and they're able to, what is actually going on? Are they healing their trauma or are they just able to release the tension?

 

Rune Christensen (00:11:40):
I have trickled PTD, basically trickle trauma that's created PTSD for me.

 

Matt Handy (00:11:46):
Okay, what is that?

 

Rune Christensen (00:11:47):
So basically it's just that extreme abandonment and dealing with my dad's a alcoholism and all that stuff over years slowly just created some really hard triggers for me

 

(00:11:58):
That will show up unexpected, which I would recruit myself or I would really, really hide from the world. It perfect place to hide in the server room, whatever. I mean it is. And now I'm on the flip side of that, which is basically like, okay, this is really amazing. I'm sitting here, for example, would've never 10 years ago, never happened. No, never. So yeah, so what's happening? When I've stepped in, the first time I stepped in with horse, it was like, it just sensed that it felt like it could feel my pain. And so I allowed my pain to come forward. And there wasn't like, okay, Rune. Now here's a question or have you reflected or have you, there's no talk, right? So I got to just be with the horse first and really allow it to come forward without fear. It was like a silent form of communication that took place. And then when I started rationalizing it, which is one of my protectors come forwards that start shutting it down, the horse would step away. It's like, okay, we're done here. And then they're like, what's going on? Then I went to pet it, and it's like it doesn't want anything to do with me. So I'm starting to get to get a little frustrated,

 

(00:13:24):
And it happens four or five times. This is a mayor, it's a female horse. And this picture of my mom moving out with my two sisters and leaving me alone with my alcoholic dad popped into my mind and this old ancient sense of rejection, this core rejection came out and this little boy was standing there in this hallway trying to scream, no, but he couldn't. He didn't know how to express it. He had learned that screaming was bad, so my anger was not allowed, and I was right there with all of that. And I walked out and I told the guy who I'm now co-facilitating some of these things with, I was like, this is fucking bullshit. I'm done. And I walked out of the barn and I waited 20 minutes. I came back in and he just sat there and he's like, Hey, ready to go back in? And I was like, no, are you just going to leave her alone? He played on me, right?

 

Matt Handy (00:14:30):
Yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (00:14:30):
He was like, are you going to be your mom? I was like, no. Did he say that? It was hard. And I stepped back in and then he asked, what's here right now? And I said, I'm feeling rarely abandoned. And then the horse came right back up to me. And that's when I realized that when I'm most authentic with what's happening inside, inside of the pen with a horse, the horse will automatically do something that is in service to me. And that's the magic. It's like I wish I could scientifically explain it. I saw I have been seeking the science, and that's when I said earlier, I just have to admit that there's something going on and I can't prove

 

Matt Handy (00:15:12):
That's interesting. I have this internal struggle going on right now. I am not religious,

 

(00:15:21):
And I was raised in a very religious situation, and because of that, I rejected religion and I couldn't separate religion from God for a long time. And so I rejected God for a long time. And I find myself at 36 years old in a situation where my logic is pointing me towards God more than ever. And there's things that I just cannot justify anymore, things that I just can't. But I also can't explain it. It isn't like a feeling. There are things that I'm being, and I say that it's a logical thing. The only thing that makes sense, which probably doesn't make any sense. The only thing that makes sense at the end of the questions that I have is God. And it's like, this has never made sense to me before. It's never been a viable option for me before, but now it's the only option that makes sense. And I've spent a lot of time around horses. If you look at my Instagram, I have a bunch of pictures of horses. I spent a long time on a working ranch with horses, and it was 10,000 acres with a couple thousand head of black Angus beef.

 

Rune Christensen (00:16:31):
Nice.

 

Matt Handy (00:16:31):
And spent a bunch of time on horses and with horses. And that was my real first exposure to horses and never realized how much personality a horse has. And then right next to our ranch was another ranch where they rescued from kill pens. And these horses are so individual, they all interact with each other, but they all have their own personality. They have their own position within their society or whatever it is, their group. And you watch these things interact, and it's like these things love each other. They care about the people. And it's like we were in rehab. Part of our therapy was, you're going to go clean. You're going to go to the farm next door, and you're going to help them whatever they need. We're going to feed the horses, we're going to clean out the pens, we're going to mow the lawns, we're going to do whatever Ms. Lunda asks, go over there and do it. And then there's the rest of us over at the working ranch, and we're working with animals. And we had a pig and a bunch of goats, and this is in the mountains of San Diego. We have mountain lions out there, and we have bobcats. There's wildlife out there.

 

(00:17:48):
And we come out in the morning and it's like half our chickens were dead. But one of the things that I learned during that period of time was I could never put my finger on it. And I always heard about equine therapy. I could never put my finger on it, but some of the people who had the best experiences, there were the people that we're working with the horses on a daily basis and very personal relationship with them. Everybody names their pets, but when people name horses, it's a very unique to their personality name typically. And there was the one that I really liked. Her name was Pepper, and she was a tan horse with black tail and Black Mane. And just the best personality though.

 

Rune Christensen (00:18:39):
Love it.

 

Matt Handy (00:18:40):
And really, really, if certain people didn't come, it was like she knew who was there, and she knew when somebody wasn't there. And then they came the next day, she would give them extra attention, and it was like, wow, there's something else going on here. And then my mother-in-law has horses up in Washington state, and I just got back from there when we pulled up, the first thing you do, the horses are out and they're looking at us. So we go up and we spent five minutes just touching them and communicating with them, really. And it's like I'd never understood until a couple of years ago that they can communicate with you. There is some kind of connection. And when you think about the history of horses in America, right? It's like the introduction of horses happened very recently. And it's like, okay, you think about historical America, you think Indians, horses, conquistadors, all this stuff. And it's like before that, no horses,

 

Rune Christensen (00:19:38):
And

 

Matt Handy (00:19:38):
It's like the Middle East was built on the backs of horses.

 

Rune Christensen (00:19:43):
Oh, absolutely.

 

Matt Handy (00:19:45):
The majority of society has been built on the back of horses up until very recently

 

Rune Christensen (00:19:51):
With horses. Well, until industrial revolution, horses were the horsepower,

 

Matt Handy (00:19:55):
Right?

 

Rune Christensen (00:19:56):
The range horsepower. And

 

Matt Handy (00:19:58):
It's like humans have been very attached to horses for a very long time. Do you know how long?

 

Rune Christensen (00:20:06):
I imagine Thousands and thousands. Thousands of years. It must be,

 

Matt Handy (00:20:11):
Yeah. I mean, when you look at the dinosaur scandals, it's like, yeah, those are actually horse bones. Have you heard that? No. Yeah. It's like a lot of the actual bones that are on display that they say they're dinosaurs is actually horse bones.

 

Rune Christensen (00:20:24):
Oh, really?

 

Matt Handy (00:20:25):
And they arrange them in certain ways or whatever, but that's another conversation. But yeah, horses have been a part of the human experience for a very long time. Transportation, connection, companionship, all these things. So it's funny that we are so removed from it in Western society. When people hear equine therapy, what are you talking about? Right? It's like, no, these things have probably been our friends longer than dogs. It's like dogs had to be welcomed in and tricked into being our best friend. These things have probably been our best friend since they were invented.

 

Rune Christensen (00:21:00):
I think there's an amazing relationship that's happening for those who are willing to step into the relationship with a horse. Now, I've seen my share of people who write horses who are very utilitarian, their connection with a horse specifically in dressage, which is a popular sport in Europe and also in the USA. And it is the fancy, I call it the fancy prances horse.

 

Matt Handy (00:21:25):
It's

 

Rune Christensen (00:21:25):
When they do all these fancy steps and all

 

Matt Handy (00:21:27):
Stuff. Now they put weights on them and then they put,

 

Rune Christensen (00:21:29):
Yeah.

 

(00:21:30):
And the reality is that we've had hundreds of years probably since maybe around 1000 and forward in Europe particularly, where the relationship to the horse wasn't very friendly. It was very much like, you either do this or work horse or you are going to be fodder. It was either A or B. I think what's happening now is that there's a big hole in draw towards nature for many people. I feel that there's a bit of a rebound, and I think nature is healing in its own way in so many ways. But I love this piece that you mentioned about the God piece before because one of the things that I'm sitting with is this thought of there's religion and then there's spirituality for sure. And my judgment is that if you, you're spiritual, you can create a beautiful connection to the horse. If you allow yourself to be spiritual, if you're religious, then you're basically most likely coming in with some level of doctrine that is programmed into you,

 

(00:22:36):
Which may not be authentic, but pretentious in some form of capacity. So I spent 15 years with my ex-wife in the Catholic church, never became a Christian. I'm still not a Christian. I'm neither anything, but I am spiritual. I'm naturally spiritual. So I find my spirituality in biomimicry, in nature, in hugging a tree symbolically, maybe even practically sometimes to just appreciate that, hey, there's all this life that's constantly being created nonstop and we're not in control of any. And we spent so much time controlling it. And we have moved away from a lot of that, I would say. Yeah, we were farmers. We spent so many thousands of years being farmers one way another, and we've lost being a farmer. We've lost being out there. We're lost touching what we're eating before we eat it,

 

(00:23:32):
Whether that's an animal or whether that's some sort of a crop. We just go to the supermarket and all those things. So I think there's, there's something right there, which is the nature piece. And the people that I see a lot of these changes to is people coming from the city and they come out to the range, they come out to whatever it is, wherever we're at, they come out. All of a sudden they see this a whole different energy in the space. Things are slowing down. It's not like you got to go, go, go. And that in itself can be matching to just see people just being in the space. I had my son up in Portland at the range where we do a lot of work out of at this long weekend. We just had, and he's never seen a horse. He's never been with a horse. And he was just smiles. Here's this 16-year-old kid who's like TTA 4 kind of stuff and all that. And all of a sudden he was just enamored with these beautiful animals. And this child came out in him. And I think that that's where they're capable is that they just have the ability to step in and let your inner child come out.

 

Matt Handy (00:24:41):
So evolutionarily, if the working theory is that they spent thousands of years with us, I think there is some kind of instinctual pull to them. I don't know anybody that's ever, I know people that are scared of them, but nobody ever looks at a horse the same way. They look at a bull where they're like, oh, horses have a majestic. They do. Do you remember? How old are you?

 

Rune Christensen (00:25:09):
I'm 50.

 

Matt Handy (00:25:10):
Okay, so do you remember that Disney movie, the George of The Jungle with Brendan Frazier? Yeah. There's a scene in there where he's running with the horses. Do you remember that? All the girls are standing there,

 

(00:25:22):
Right? It's like, yeah. Was it him or the horses? Right? It's like people are really drawn to horses. So that other farm that I was talking about, they rescue these horses from kilowatts. And it's like you were talking about people look at them utilitarian in, a lot of people do. Right? And as part of that removal from evolutionarily who we are, we weren't made to be okay with all this. We really weren't. Not only were we not made to be okay with this, it happened really fast. Normally things change over the course of thousands if not tens of thousands of years. And if horses were there, and you look at the world, all these different types of horses, working horses, all these different types of different, what are they called? Categories that these horses fit into. And then you see the wide spectrum, whether it's the Budweiser horses, what are they called?

 

Rune Christensen (00:26:23):
Draft horse,

 

Matt Handy (00:26:24):
Draft horses, all the way down to a Shetland horse.

 

Rune Christensen (00:26:26):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:26:27):
Massive

 

Rune Christensen (00:26:28):
Differences. I had Shetland horses when I was a kid, my stepdad had,

 

Matt Handy (00:26:31):
And at that ranch, there was that wide spectrum. Actually, one of the horses that she had rescued had won the triple crown at one point and it broke leg. Guess what? It lost all of its value.

 

Rune Christensen (00:26:45):
So

 

Matt Handy (00:26:46):
They rescued it from, it was sold to the lot, and they stepped in and bought it. But guess where that horse was going? I know it's going to Mexico on one of those kill trains. And it's like there's these horror stories that I started hearing about these trains, these trips to Mexico, because in the United States it's illegal to eat horses, but in a lot of other places it's not. And they use them for all kinds of stuff, including to eat. And that's an interesting thing to me. It's like horse thieves were hung 200 years ago. If you stole a horse, they were going to hang you. That's how important they were. It was like, there was, I think three things that you could actually without a judge with just me. And if we caught somebody that were stealing a horse, killing somebody or raping somebody, we could just take 'em out back and hang them. So they were that important to us. We could sum really execute somebody for stealing one from us. They were that important. But this horse just gets discarded because it broke its ankle. And it's like, are we really that removed from who we are as humans? I think so. It's crazy, right?

 

Rune Christensen (00:27:57):
Unfortunately, I think so. I think that money talks much more than anything.

 

Matt Handy (00:28:01):
Yeah. Do you pay attention to horse racing?

 

Rune Christensen (00:28:03):
I do not. Actually. I'm not a big fan of using animals. Imagine in raising period or fighting or anything.

 

Matt Handy (00:28:09):
Okay, makes sense. So at the time, I don't pay attention to it either, but it was like a big thing. There was this horse that was winning everything. So you have this crown jewel of the racing community, but if it broke its leg, it means nothing. And when I think about all of the different therapies, you've got equine therapy. There's this place up in Colorado that does, it's a wolf refuge where they rescue these wolves. It's like our connection to animals so much deeper than we realize, and we are so desensitized. We have these lights, we have these cameras, we have this computer in our pocket. We don't pay attention to our kids anymore. We're now being disconnected from humans. Of course, we're going to be disconnected from things around us. You said tree hugging. It's like, so I grew up in the nineties where that was something offensive that this is how funny

 

Rune Christensen (00:29:06):
It was. I know. He's a tree hugger.

 

Matt Handy (00:29:07):
Yeah.

 

(00:29:07):
Oh yeah. Today people don't even say that. It's like, do they even know what a treat? Do they even know the reference anymore? No. They're so removed. Everything is just so removed from who we are. And you can see it. It spirals into our politics and into our day-to-day. And it's like the influences from 10 years ago don't even matter anymore. It's just an interesting time that we live in. And to bring it back to the horses, it's like for me, all these life lessons that I've had, and I'm in recovery. I was living under a bridge five years ago.

 

(00:29:45):
I felt like a reject for society. I was, for all intents and purposes, I was homeless doing drugs, and I was the outcast of society. I was the dregs of society. People would see me and walk the other way. It's like horse doesn't have that. Understand that, right? There's just like you said, they survive, right? And through that, the way that they survive is energetically and for some reason when humans who are traumatized interact with these other beings, what else do you call 'em? Creature. But they're being, there's something in there that's much deeper than just a cat. Cats are pretty crazy too, I will say that. But in order to be able to heal trauma in that way, it's like, how do you think that happened? How do you think they became what they are?

 

Rune Christensen (00:30:47):
So horses, and you'll see these in flock animals, if you notice, if you look at it a flock of deer, it's almost like they all turn at the same time. How do they all turn at the exact same time?

 

Matt Handy (00:31:01):
I will say this, I'm from a city, so I've never seen a flock of deer, but I've seen the representations of it where everybody, there's a car, shines a light, and there's bunch of deers look or

 

Rune Christensen (00:31:14):
Fish do the same thing, for sure. Fish like sardines that are rallied up by tuna, all of a sudden they can turn all at the exact same time finding. That's a great example of it. I think

 

Matt Handy (00:31:26):
I know where you're going with this.

 

Rune Christensen (00:31:27):
So there is some sort of synchronicity happening.

 

(00:31:31):
I don't know what it is, but all the horses that are together in a group will co-regulate their heartbeat. That is weird. What do you mean? So co-regulating means that they will sink their hearts up. So if they're all just grazing, this is what they do. 90% of the time they just stand in graze. If they're out in the wild, they do a lot of different things. But most horses on a pasture, on a farm, ranch, they graze most of the day and basically as a survival, they're synchronizing their heartbeat. So let's say their heartbeats are, they're all the same, but imagine they're just grazing. So now it's like one of them picks up something, a fourth channel is what we call it. The fourth channel is what's happening around us. They pick something up and in that second, there's just a spike in their heartbeat and it immediately transfers through the whole group and they're like, whoop. And we've seen this. We had an incident, we had a dog that kind of ran loose on the ranch a couple of weeks ago in the evening. And horses that were right next to the dog got spooked. And horses that were two football fields down started pacing back and forth like crazy.

 

(00:32:54):
Not because of the dog, but because they saw the signal up there, Hey, something's not right. So I got to be alert. And that's what they do.

 

Matt Handy (00:33:03):
So it's like a hive mind kind of thing.

 

Rune Christensen (00:33:05):
Absolutely. Okay. So that's the survival mechanism that allows them to graze all day because there's always somebody in the periphery that immediately will pick up something if something comes along.

 

Matt Handy (00:33:18):
So if humans had that ability, let's say hypothetically, we could do that. There's a name for that already. It's the ESP, right? Do you think it's that level of communication?

 

Rune Christensen (00:33:32):
I think what attracts us to community is to be able to tap into some energy field. I think what builds community, I think why human naturally builds community in the stranges of places with people that they've never known. They can build community incredibly fast. I think it's the same fundamental thing of let's create community, which starts with creating a level of trust. If I can trust the people around me, I feel safer. I feel stronger. I feel braver. For me, that's how I see a community. So whether you

 

Matt Handy (00:34:05):
Also, you can learn

 

Rune Christensen (00:34:06):
Exactly, but in the core survival mechanism, I think it's the same. And that is that as a flock, we are safer and we get to survive longer. It's almost like we've got to go down to the most primal way that we are.

 

Matt Handy (00:34:24):
Can humans connect with a horse on the level to get an oxytocin release? I

 

Rune Christensen (00:34:30):
Humans get oxytocin released when they're with a horse.

 

Matt Handy (00:34:33):
Really?

 

Rune Christensen (00:34:34):
When you huck a horse, when you give a horse a big hug, and the horse is like, yeah, I'm giving you a hug back, which means they're just letting them, which basically means they'll allow it. If they're like, I don't really want you to touch my neck, they're just going to be like bye. They will leave you. But if they're there for the hug, it's Hudson amazing. It's better than the biggest dog. So massive. It's 1200 pounds of this beast that can lift a foot halfway up and knock you over in a heartbeat. But it trusts you and it actually wants the connection just as much as you want it.

 

Matt Handy (00:35:16):
So do you know who Dr. Shah is?

 

Rune Christensen (00:35:18):
No.

 

Matt Handy (00:35:18):
Okay. So Dr. Shah has this cutting edge theory around addiction,

 

Rune Christensen (00:35:25):
Right?

 

Matt Handy (00:35:26):
He's writing a book right now called Why It Works to counteract how it Works of the 12 step program. And he's got this theory that an overactive amygdala causes the fight or flight scarring on the amygdala is specific to trauma. The trauma is accumulated for addicts many different ways for people in general, many different ways. But if there's a scarring on the amygdala, there is a hypersensitivity also a signal misfiring or disconnection that causes, it's a radiating energy that it starts going out. So it's going out. And what happens is you get into a fight or flight and you can elevate. For addicts specifically, it elevates and elevates and elevates, and it gets to this point where they'll relapse to combat the biological reaction to the reactivation of trauma. One of the things that he says balances and shuts that down faster than anything is oxytocin. When somebody is in a safe place where they trust somebody and they're getting that oxytocin dose, whether it's men and women, get them in oxytocin in different ways, but one of the things that he drives home is connection. If you can connect with somebody in a safe way where you feel loved and trusted, you get this dose of oxytocin that he's saying that he can predict and prevent relapses this way. And I ask if there's an oxytocin release because there are people in recovery coming into recovery out of their addiction that have these deep core traumas with humans. And it's like they can't connect with humans for whatever reason. There's a lot of reasons people do fucked up shit to people all the time.

 

Rune Christensen (00:37:22):
I just don't trust a human being. That could be the starting point, right?

 

Matt Handy (00:37:25):
Yeah. And so if we could get the same level of oxytocin released from a horse, that's beneficial. That's interesting.

 

Rune Christensen (00:37:37):
I think all the animals has the same ability to provide that.

 

Matt Handy (00:37:42):
I think he did say something about dogs, cats. I doubt it. So selfish.

 

Rune Christensen (00:37:47):
Look at service dogs. I mean, you have service dogs that can pick up and if you have high level of anxiety, you of service dogs, it's like, oh, I'm picking up that you're starting to have anxiety, so I'm going to come up and cuddle you a little bit. They

 

Matt Handy (00:38:00):
Can detect heart attacks and stuff. Exactly.

 

Rune Christensen (00:38:04):
So that's just a dog. That's dogs for us. They have all these senses that is not just the smell. You have dogs that can pick up a spike in insulin.

 

(00:38:17):
Don't think that there's a smell attached to that. How do you know? It's so weird. It's reading the signal of anxiety before the person even gets to the self-awareness, the typical whatever there is. So there's something there too. And that is that we are as human beings, I think we used to have the connection. I think we used to have an ability beyond what we have today. I think so too. I was lucky enough to spend some time with the Maasai people in the Maasai Mara really in Kenya.

 

(00:38:50):
And we were out on the safari and the was hosting it. And in the far, far distant, I see something and I got 2020 vision when I have my glasses on. So I'm like, something's over there. I pull up my binocular. It's like a 10 by fifties. It's like a really long one. And I see what looks to be an elephant. And I said, I think there's an elephant over there. And this young girl, she's in her twenties in Masai dress, and she looks over and she goes, oh yeah, that's an elephant bowl. And hold on. I couldn't see it. She could see it. Wow. She could see so much better than I could because maybe genetically they rely on it. They take their cattle out into these areas where there is all the predators of the cattle are out there. They take 'em out there. All they have is the spirit of protect them. And so they have acclimated to it. We have done the reverse.

 

Matt Handy (00:39:52):
We

 

Rune Christensen (00:39:53):
Passed in modern societies, we have created cities and enclosures that keeps us away from all this whatever energy or nature or life force, power force, whatever you call it. But we strip ourselves from it slowly. And in just 150, 200 years, we've really moved away from it for sure. Very

 

Matt Handy (00:40:20):
Quickly, have you heard that theory about when we befriended the dog, we then were able to learn how to read and write or to, so what it was was we used to do this and then we invited dogs in and there was an exchange. You'll watch my back and now I can focus down. And then we stopped looking up.

 

Rune Christensen (00:40:44):
That's interesting.

 

Matt Handy (00:40:44):
And that was one of the pieces that allowed us to become who we are, is actually dogs allowed us to be safer without having to be hypervigilant about what was around us. And so to go back to that is I literally can't see more than 15 feet around me right now. I don't have to. Not only do I not have to, I cannot see through these walls. They have nothing. They're free of the obstruction. It's like, do you think we could retrain ourself to see that far?

 

Rune Christensen (00:41:17):
I think we can reprogram our entire communities that we're in to be different.

 

Matt Handy (00:41:22):
Yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (00:41:23):
I honestly believe that. I think it's so simple. And that is that if we were willing and open to really embrace nature more, first you start with a big stuff. Oh, there is whatever. There is a bear or there is a buffalo, and then it gets smaller and smaller. Right now, most people in Houston know exactly where the F ends live in their lawn that they know, but they don't know what else lives in the lawn. They don't know all the other stuff. They don't necessarily notice all the birds that are around. They don't notice how different plants give away different seasons or temperatures to come. There's so much we've lost in this, which is we used to be so in tune. Well, we used to depend on it

 

Matt Handy (00:42:15):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (00:42:17):
The reality. I mean, the indigenous people in Australia, they knew that when a certain flower would bloom, it also means that a certain type of fish would be down by the beach,

 

Matt Handy (00:42:28):
Really?

 

Rune Christensen (00:42:28):
So they know that now is the time they would come in. They didn't keep a calendar.

 

Matt Handy (00:42:32):
Wait, literally that is a

 

Rune Christensen (00:42:34):
Thing. That is a thing that is so

 

Matt Handy (00:42:35):
Crazy.

 

Rune Christensen (00:42:36):
So they relied because somewhere somebody had drawn the correlation and then that gets told in the stories and verbally. So tribal folk rely on this. The people who live in the Amazon jungle, the smaller tribes can identify more than 250 sources of protein and know which protein to go for depending on what's going on inside of them.

 

Matt Handy (00:43:04):
Really.

 

Rune Christensen (00:43:04):
As an example, this is the thing, and if you look at medicine is half of it is coming out of the Amazon. Nature has everything that we need and want to a degree. And I'm not saying we need to go all the way back to that. I'm just saying, what if you just open your heart and your mind to allow yourself to see more, to see more, to notice things differently? And that's all I've done and that's what it's opened me up to is I get to see things. I saw, I was down in Kemah, boardwalk marina, and typically it's pelicans and all this stuff. And two days, three days ago, I look up on a mast and there's an osprey. He's just sitting there and then all of a sudden he just starts skimming his cloth, like this giant osprey. And I was like, never seen an osprey in Texas. I've been there for 20 plus years. So it was kind of cool. And those small gifts starts coming in, and that just shifts little by little. So we don't have to necessarily come in as some over sweeping revolution, but what if we can just draw the attention a little bit over there?

 

Matt Handy (00:44:13):
That's funny. You say attention awareness is a big thing that I've been looking into lately working with this doctor. One of the biggest problems that we have is not having the ability to talk about what's going on. We're just not educated on how to express what's actually going on in a time where there's a lot of shit going on. There's a lot of really crazy things that are happening societally to humans in general. And one of the things that I talk about all the time is rap. You got this culture that is pervasive and has been perverted as well. Rap today is not hip hop of the eighties. We'll say that, but it's been embraced on such a crazy level culturally. There's at least a bleed into all these subcultures in every mainstream culture. You have rappers that are talking heads on the news now. It's like when we look at the influences he's having on our kids, and I'm 36, these kids that are coming up there, the 16, 17, 18 year olds that are killing each other. It is like, how are they? When I was 16, 17, 18, I was doing something very different. It's like, how are we moving in this direction so quickly?

 

(00:45:33):
It's really, really happening really fast. And it's like there's this generation of kids that are coming up right now, right behind those 16, 17, 18 year olds. We're talking about the 11, 12, 13, 14. Somehow they have picked up on all of this craziness and they are making these very adult decisions to stay away from drugs, stay away from alcohol, stay away from premarital sex, all these things. It's like my parents tried to get me to do that when I was that age, but I felt like they were trying to force me to do that. I wanted to do it more,

 

Rune Christensen (00:46:11):
Of course.

 

Matt Handy (00:46:12):
But these kids are coming up with these decisions by themself is what's being claimed. I don't know any of these kids, but the claim is that they see how fucked up we are and they're moving in this direction consciously by themselves. It's like that is very impressive. It's like if kids that age can do that, and this is a long shot, but it's like why can't the adults move in a better direction? It's like, I get it that there's a lot of money involved, there's a lot of power involved. There's social currency, there's a lot of social currency involved today in just the day-to-day where we're like, when you think about people, let's say, who's the guy from Amazon? Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, right? I use this as an example. At least I think about this all the time where it's like that is the example of a man who came from nothing, who built a literal empire. One of the richest men, they'll probably ever live. Also one of the most influential men that ever lived. Everybody knows his name, at least maybe not influential in the way that maybe Trump would be or Elon Musk would be influential, actually having an important difference in lives. But this is somebody that people, every house, it's a household name,

 

(00:47:35):
Major recognition. But we're living in a time where somebody could literally go from nothing to owning the world, at least owning a piece of what makes the world today move. And so there's a lot of power involved. There's a lot of money involved, a lot of sex, just a lot of things that go into this. And it's like why would they give that up? Why would they want to give that up? What is the incentive? The thing is that you see the people with the money do revert back to this stuff. I was at Mount Rainier and it was like, yeah, since COVID the waiting list to get the permits to do that hike, they're years long now.

 

Rune Christensen (00:48:13):
I know

 

Matt Handy (00:48:14):
Since

 

Rune Christensen (00:48:15):
I just looked into it, dude,

 

Matt Handy (00:48:16):
It's crazy. And it's the same shit with all of these other

 

(00:48:21):
Very hippie things to do. It's like now all of a sudden only the rich people have access to it. When historically it was the people without money were doing it because it was free. Right Now it's like it should be free. It should be free, of course. I mean, it literally should be free. And I understand the permits around doing the hike around it makes sense because they want to know where people are. That makes sense from a safety point of view, but the amount of money that's going into it, and then I heard that it's a lottery. You have to enter the lottery and then it's like a 30,000 to one chance that you're going to get it. But they were selling, selling those tickets. This might not be true. I don't want to, but the thing is, that is a very real possibility. Even if it didn't happen. That's something that is a very real thing that happens.

 

Rune Christensen (00:49:14):
It could be the next richness is twofold. So that means that you've got some folks that are making a lot of money being coaches or healers or whatever, and get all these followers online and all that stuff. And then there's access to nature, access to just access to the ocean

 

Matt Handy (00:49:38):
For

 

Rune Christensen (00:49:38):
Good luck. Finding something that many places that hasn't been privatized, right? Nature is getting privatized

 

Matt Handy (00:49:46):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (00:49:47):
Ski resorts, this ski resorts as being privatized or monopolized perhaps between

 

Matt Handy (00:49:54):
Definitely industrialized conglomerates that are coming in.

 

Rune Christensen (00:49:58):
What's become disneyfied as the, I call it Disneyfied. That's a

 

Matt Handy (00:50:01):
Good one.

 

Rune Christensen (00:50:01):
So all of a sudden you're in a place in let's say Colorado and you have some or IL New Mexico.

 

Matt Handy (00:50:07):
Well, yeah, great. You got veil, right, with the epic and that whole movement there,

 

Rune Christensen (00:50:11):
And the locals can't afford to go skiing, right? So anyway, I think what's interesting about all of it, the nature, I really like what you said about the amygdala getting hijacked and getting scarred from the hijacking self-awareness. Just from your perspective, how big is self-awareness in the process of not relapsing

 

Matt Handy (00:50:43):
The upfront? The major issue is the lack of awareness. I taught a group the other day and I went through a bunch of stuff and I was like, how many of you guys have experienced this specific thing? They're like, oh, none of us. They're like, no, no, I haven't. I haven't. Further on down the lesson, it was like, how many of you experienced this thing? And they're like, the relapse. Well, all of us. And then we back engineered it. And what we find is that every single person goes through a process in their relapse, but they're completely unaware of it. So bringing awareness to that process allows you to arrest the relapse process. But the problem is, when you talk about relapse prevention, and this is a problem that I have with the recovery industry, is that when you talk about relapse prevention as a whole, really what they're doing is checking a box off that the insurance company needs checked off in order to get paid.

 

Rune Christensen (00:51:44):
I know those, yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:51:45):
They're not actually teaching you relapse prevention. They're teaching you whatever it is that was approved. But for me, relapse prevention has nothing to do with coping skills.

 

(00:51:56):
It has nothing to do with, because the reality is once I'm in that elevated state, to that point where using is a viable option, I don't care what the book said I'm going to go use. And so the awareness around the relapse process and then the vocabulary to express what's actually going on to major components around the avoidance of the relapse that we are just completely lacking. And then another thing that I kind am vocal about that a lot of people, whatever, but it's like we are in a time, a very dangerous time. The introduction of fentanyl to the drug supply, we're talking about life or death on a different scale five years ago, totally different. Today looks very different. The landscape of addiction has changed, and we're putting people in dangerous situations where we're forcing them to go to treatment

 

(00:52:59):
And we're just checking off these boxes. And it's like, you're sending this kid out there, he's 19 years old, you guys know he's going to relapse, and this is the leading cause of death for people under 40, right? It's like, are we hurting people? Are we helping people? Right? There is a disconnect between what we're being told about the treatment industry and what's actually going on. And by that, I mean, you look at the statistics, it's like, did you know this? If you're trying to sell a treatment center, you get a five x valuation at a 6% success rate. So success rate is how many people can you keep clean for a year? So if six out of a hundred stay clean for a year, you get a five x valuation at 13%, which is 13 out of a hundred, you get a 10 x valuation. But in any other industry, these are failing businesses. And so what you're saying to me, what the industry is saying to me is that we are failing so much that a viable, valuable treatment center can keep 13 out of a hundred clients clean for a year.

 

Rune Christensen (00:54:09):
Yeah, it's a pretty stark

 

Matt Handy (00:54:12):
Dude. It's staggering.

 

Rune Christensen (00:54:14):
I imagine if those are the things, those are the statistics you just gave us. So there is perhaps with a lot of the people involved in the recovery prevention, a sense of hopelessness because we're bound by all these rules over here. We're bound by the insurance guidance, we're bound by the treatment owners that wants to, Hey, we just need to get it past 10 x, then we're good, then we're out, or whatever. I imagine that, yeah. So the drive, the real human wand to not have somebody relapse, to support somebody fully, to maybe even I've cracked the code, but it's outside of the scope that we're allowed to work inside.

 

Matt Handy (00:55:04):
Yeah. The thing is, it's like there is incentivized things within the medical industry. Medication is one of them massively incentivized. The other thing is that I've heard this pretty often is that a treatment center's bread and butter is their relapsing clients, right? It's like we are surviving off the people that are relapsing and coming back. It's like, what are you talking about? Are you serious? Yeah. And the insurance company, they just try to keep their costs down. And what's crazy to me is they will send somebody through treatment however many times they need it, but they fail to understand that. It's like you guys are investing in the, and I probably shouldn't be saying this, whatever with the industry that I'm in and all the people that are around me or whatever. But the reality is, here's the reality for me. I don't care what the bottom line looks like. If our job here is to save lives, why aren't we doing a better job when everything points to we're failing, we are completely failing. Another statistic that I point to that I heard somewhere along the way was one out of 10 people will stay clean for a year of that 10%, one out of 10 will stay clean for 10 years, but you got to go to treatment seven times first before those statistics are real. I'm like, what? You have to go to treatment seven times

 

Rune Christensen (00:56:43):
Chance to relapse six times before statistically you actually have a chance of staying sober from whatever,

 

Matt Handy (00:56:53):
For anything,

 

Rune Christensen (00:56:53):
For anything.

 

Matt Handy (00:56:54):
And it's like in order for that person to stay clean for one year, they got to go to treatment seven times. And then it expands after that. And it's like there's a disconnect. There's an obvious very real disconnect between what's going on in treatment and what people are thinking. Because I know for me it was like, oh, you're going to go to treatment for 28 days. Mind you, I'm slamming heroin, living under a bridge crime, been to prison multiple times. It's like, you're going to go to prison. I didn't think this way, but this is what people are being told. You're going to go to treatment for 28 days and you're going to come out a different person. You're going to come out a different person. All that shit that happened, life's just going to get better. You family, you're going to get your family back.

 

(00:57:38):
And it's like, no. All those bridges that you burned, all of those consequences you've been running from the car note, you haven't paid in months. All that shit's about to catch up to you. And in order for this to have any effect, you got to get real about it, and you got to sit with it. It's like nobody says that. It's like there's an attraction. They want to attract people. And because of that, they're literally just dishonest about a lot of it. It's like, why can't you just be honest? This was my thing. It was like, why can't you just tell me how shitty it's about to be?

 

Rune Christensen (00:58:14):
Because the insurance business doesn't operate, doesn't operate that way. And it's like, and all private insurance takes Medicaid and multiply by three and it's their read, right?

 

Matt Handy (00:58:24):
It's something like that.

 

Rune Christensen (00:58:25):
It is

 

Matt Handy (00:58:26):
Something like that. I know in Colorado, I think it's four times. Okay, four times.

 

(00:58:29):
And it's like here, it's closer to three, but it's like, so you got all this incentive, and then there's machines at work here, industrial machines where it's like there are treatment centers that have billion dollar valuations. They're tied to investors, they've got boards they have to satisfy. And it's like they're now talking about people over, I mean, profits over people. And it's like the one effective thing that you used to do, you now no longer do, because it was too much overhead. And my admissions guy talks about this all the time. Treatment is the Italian restaurant industry. He's like, yeah, there'll be that one Italian restaurant in town where it's like their cousins are flying over and they're in the kitchen. You got grandma in the front taking care of people and they love what they're doing and they're bringing a good product to people.

 

(00:59:22):
But then the cousin in the back says, Hey, we can save a little bit of money and we can put that in our pocket. If we just stop making the cheese, we could buy it. And next thing, they start making all of these executive decisions from the back and it's affecting the product in the front. And then you can see it in the Yelp reviews where it's like five years from now. It's like all these reviews are like, I don't know what happened. This place was the best. They had the greatest food uncle, whatever Benicio used to be in there. And it's like, we don't know what happened. It's like, I'll tell you what happened. They started putting profits over people

 

Rune Christensen (00:59:59):
And now it's just Olive Garden.

 

Matt Handy (01:00:01):
Now it's just Olive

 

Rune Christensen (01:00:02):
Garden.

 

Matt Handy (01:00:03):
And you've got these amazing products in the treatment industry, which I'm sure you've seen. You've got an amazing product, you're doing really good work. And then the captain of the ship changes or they sell or whatever, and now all of a sudden, completely different mission. And it's no longer that altruistic human to human connection focused, actually evidence-based, real individualized treatment. It's not that anymore. Right now you're just stacking and packing people and numbers in numbers out, and it's like the product suffered. Now guess what? The people suffer. And now you're running off this reputation that you used to have, but it's not even the same organization. It's a shell of what it used to be because none of the people are there. The integrity isn't there anymore. I mean, it's tough. It is. It's really tough. I

 

Rune Christensen (01:00:53):
Remember when I was with scor, it is a tough, tough numbers game with the commercial insurance. It is so tough. And yeah, they're brutal and they're withholding and they're pulling

 

Matt Handy (01:01:07):
Clawbacks

 

Rune Christensen (01:01:07):
Denial, denial, denial, denial. And I think they had two people. All they did was sit in appeal for That's crazy. Yeah. That's all they did. Just full-time appeals job. That's crazy. I'm curious if people who have the 50 K for a month to send somebody to a private place if the success rate is any higher.

 

Matt Handy (01:01:28):
No,

 

Rune Christensen (01:01:28):
My experience, personal experience that it wasn't, no. My ex was twice in a private center in Kemah area. I'm not going to mention it, but you can look it up. There's probably just one. And yeah, at that small group, 12 inpatient, 12, 15 people, lots of caretakers, lots of support. It didn't change anything. And I think what you just brought up before with this, I forgot his name, but that is, yeah. If you're not, because my ex would come out, self-awareness, never learned about the self. Just, just don't

 

Matt Handy (01:02:05):
Are you're talking about Dr. Shah?

 

Rune Christensen (01:02:06):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:02:07):
Yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (01:02:09):
That whole piece, the awareness piece to build resilience comes from knowing how you operate. And those people who have the highest level of resilience are also very much in touch with all of their emotions. And they're in touch with how they operate. They know how they operate. They know when and how they get triggered. And if you don't learn those things, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's addiction to a substance that kills you or it's addiction to food or it's addiction to something else.

 

Matt Handy (01:02:40):
Yeah,

 

Rune Christensen (01:02:40):
Some media games or something that doesn't have a DSM five code yet. Right?

 

Matt Handy (01:02:45):
Yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (01:02:46):
I mean, the DSM five code for pornography is thankfully out there now, because that's a big thing, especially in the last 10 years, 15 years, where it's just everywhere. Right?

 

Matt Handy (01:02:56):
Look at the access. Right.

 

Rune Christensen (01:02:57):
Well, that's the thing, right? It's just as accessible as alcohol is in this country, right? True.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:02):
Probably more.

 

Rune Christensen (01:03:03):
Oh, of course.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:04):
Probably more,

 

Rune Christensen (01:03:04):
Yeah. At a younger, much, much younger age, right?

 

Matt Handy (01:03:07):
Yes.

 

Rune Christensen (01:03:07):
Yes. So all those things. But again, back to this piece of, yeah, if you don't understand what your patterns are, and if you have something where you're like, well, fuck it, because everybody's not going to like me anyway. You've talked about being under the bridge alone. Nobody wants anything to do with you. How do you get back in community? How do you get, because you've got to be in community before you can have self-awareness.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:37):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (01:03:39):
You have to have community.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:41):
You

 

Rune Christensen (01:03:41):
Have to be in a place where the people who's going to teach you about self-awareness are people you actually trust. And the reality is, my two sense is that most people do not trust a treatment center. Very

 

Matt Handy (01:03:57):
True. For a good reason. Unless you are going through for the first time, there's a huge level of disenchantment with the process. First of all, it failed in your mind. It's like this has already failed me. I want to touch on something really quick. I work with a man, his name is Taylor Kavanaugh ex-Navy Seal. After he got out of the Navy Seals, picked up a crazy fentanyl habit and just spiraled. Very successful guy, but just spiraled,

 

(01:04:33):
Then join the French Foreign Legion, and now he helps people. One of the conversations that him and I have pretty often is the social calibration of our moral compass. Self cannot critique self. And for people like me who have a off my true north is different. I've done things that people normally wouldn't do. I'm willing to do them. I have done them, and I'm able to do them. And so for this specific person to be able to calibrate my moral compass, it's nearly impossible. So in order to get that, I have to have the social calibration of it, where men that I trust are able to critique it and say, this is wrong. The way that you are thinking is wrong.

 

(01:05:17):
What you are doing is wrong. We inherently know when things are bad. I should not be doing this. I'm still going to do it. I don't give a fuck, whatever. So we know when things are bad, but how hard is it for a person who is already skewed to look at their patterns of behavior, their thought patterns or the decision-making patterns and say, this is probably unhealthy. And it starts in the micro that evolves into the macro. And you look at sexual tendencies as far as risky behavior, where it's like things start off innocent enough in high school, let's say high school. It kind of starts off the way that it starts, but then by the end of it, it's exploded into this massive problem. And it's the same thing with a lot of people's exposure to substances. A lot of it is fun. At first in high school partying, college partying, there's a party going on, and then the tears separate from the, whatever the saying is. What is it? The tears from the wheat.

 

Rune Christensen (01:06:25):
That's one of those that I didn't learn

 

Matt Handy (01:06:27):
That it's back in the day that used to use horses and donkeys to stomp on the wheat, and it would separate the tears from the wheat.

 

Rune Christensen (01:06:35):
Oh, okay.

 

Matt Handy (01:06:36):
Right.

 

Rune Christensen (01:06:36):
Got

 

Matt Handy (01:06:36):
It. But we kind of separate ourselves out where it's like I'm the person that the party would end on Sunday, and I would still be using on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday until I couldn't, or whatever, until I had to go to school because I'm ditching all the rest of the days. It's like these problem behaviors become manifest pretty quickly for some people, sometimes not. But so it starts off very innocent. It evolves very, for me, very quickly into not so innocent, but I'm already so desensitized to certain things where it's like, I think I'm doing something fun still. I tell people this story all the time. I didn't realize I was an addict until I was 21, but this was after losing a marriage, losing a kid, going to prison, getting out of prison, and using all through that. Everybody around me probably knew I was an addict. I didn't. Right. So how can this person who is just so delusional and just so unaware of what's actually going on, how do you expect this person to calibrate their own moral compass in an effective way?

 

(01:07:46):
Is it possible? I don't know. I have not been able to do it. And what it really takes is that insertion to a core group of people that not only do you connect with, but you trust. Because it's easy to connect with people. It's hard to trust them, but that's work, right? It's intention, it's work. It's not easy. And it's like if it was easy, it wouldn't be called work. I think work is a very intentional word. Normally it's hard. And so when you're talking about this group thing, and we could, I guess, tie this all the way back to horses even, but it's like for people who are damaged in that way, for people who are hurt in that way, traumatized. It's a very hard thing. First of all, to be reinserted back into these communities. It's even harder when the community looks at you and can point at you and say, you are that person. You are that fuck up. You are that person. It's like, I want to hide, right? I don't have that reaction, but I've seen it many, many times and it's like, we're damaging people. We're damaging people with judgment. And the other thing is addicts and alcoholics are very sensitive to shame and guilt.

 

Rune Christensen (01:09:11):
I would go as far as they're also addicted to that piece.

 

Matt Handy (01:09:14):
I would say so too.

 

Rune Christensen (01:09:15):
The shame addiction cycle, very much cycle.

 

Matt Handy (01:09:19):
It feeds a cycle.

 

Rune Christensen (01:09:20):
So I've been in that with pornography. I've been in that for sure, and spent some time in SA and all that stuff around that. And for me, shame was an anchor. It was so familiar. It had it since it was a kid, I could tap back into this and speaking what you said, moral compass, familiarity as disrupted, as disruptive as it is to feel the shame, felt familiar. It even perhaps creed some odd connection to my parents. I don't know. And until I became aware of how my shame operated, I wasn't able to love it, to love the shame. One that inside of me, and I love to love. I learned to love the part of Rune that create shame and felt shame. And it was only when that little young shameful boy got hurt and seen that I was able to shift out of the shame.

 

(01:10:19):
i mean, it's like

 

Matt Handy (01:10:21):
I talk about this, right where it's hearing you say this. So listen, this is what it was. I found a consistency in drugs that I'd never found in humans to this day. It's just a very consistent thing. And I tell people that I found a level of peace. What I realized listening to you right now is I didn't find a level of peace. I found a level of solace in my shame and guilt. It wasn't peace. I was able to familiarize myself with these feelings that it's consistent. So I'll just go back to it because it's comforting to be consistent. It's like, wow. And most people in the world that don't have to deal with process addictions or substance abuse addictions and sexual traumas, all these stuff, they stay their whole life in the solution, and they avoid the problem at all costs.

 

(01:11:17):
For people like us, we're coming back from the problem to the solution. So our point of view is very different, especially after we can get ourselves calibrated and we can get ourselves on the right track, get ourselves calibrated, and get ourselves in the mode of helping other people. We have a very unique point of view and way of living. And I feel so I used to tell people that even addicts, non-addicted people would benefit from a 12 step program. I still think that, right? I think that non-addicted people could benefit even more greatly, even because they're never forced to be aware. They're never forced to look at themselves in a truly self-reflective, critical way that's meaningful. A lot of people are critical about themselves, but it's meaningless. It's like, oh, I need to lose some weight. Or Why does my hair always do that? Or whatever. And it's like, no, who did you fuck over? What was your part in this problem? They're never forced to do that because they stay in the solution, right? It's like

 

Rune Christensen (01:12:26):
Very, very true.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:27):
Yeah. I mean,

 

Rune Christensen (01:12:29):
That exercise about making amends, dude, I mean, if that was all people did, if they just walked into those rooms and said, great, give me a list of everything that you've done now, write letters of amends to all the people you've heard.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:43):
Yeah

 

Rune Christensen (01:12:43):
That is a very, very, very difficult exercise. You have to face yourself. You have to see how did you co-create and take responsibility?

 

Matt Handy (01:12:52):
And for people who don't have to face these issues, I think it's impossible because the adversity, and I'm not saying that people who aren't addicted don't face adversity. They do. This is a different level of adversity, and especially with sex addiction. Sex addiction is a very unique one in the world of addiction.

 

Rune Christensen (01:13:15):
It's an emotional addiction. It is not a physical dependency in that regard, right? That's what separates it.

 

Matt Handy (01:13:22):
Yeah. I mean, you talk about process addictions, like food eating disorders, gambling, stuff like that. And it's like, no, this is above all of that. This is something that now you're dealing with two humans. Your actions, when you're using drugs, you're affecting everybody around you. There's a ripple effect and all that stuff. But now you're abusing another person to satisfy whatever it is that's driving you. It's like, wow, there's a lot of people in the world. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in the news right now where people are using sex as a domination force for power, for influence. It's a really hard one to address, to approach all this stuff. It's a very sensitive subject in a lot of places, and it's like, but I had an uncle who, a really good dude addicted to pornography, and this destroyed him mentally, physically, he was bipolar, addicted to porn, the manifestation he would get physically sick, throwing up, right? It's like I never understood it as a kid. Now I look at it as an adult with my background and my experiences, and it's like that. I would never, and I slammed heroin for 17 years, and I'm a 36-year-old man. I've seen porn. But to have to battle that demon, that is a demon. I can't just pick up my phone and order heroin today. But to constantly have that connection to your addiction would be so crazy. It'd be so terrible. It's like, now we got these kids. How young, young would you say?

 

Rune Christensen (01:15:12):
I don't know, kids. I think kids starts in early middle school. They start looking at porn. Dude, it's crazy. If not earlier, depending on what they have access to, dude. And depending damaging, this is a big thing. This is a big thing. So I was the youngest. I learned a lot from my sisters a lot about life, listening in a conversation. And so kids who have older siblings, they learn earlier. So that's a fun,

 

Matt Handy (01:15:39):
I'm oldest of 10. I'm the oldest of 10, so I have a lot of kids behind me that were heavily influenced. I

 

Rune Christensen (01:15:46):
Know. No, it's really fascinating. The type of coaching I do is called conscious leadership, and leadership means both leadership in the real world. It's in professional leadership, but also self-leadership. Self-leadership. Okay,

 

Matt Handy (01:16:06):
Let's talk about that for a second.

 

Rune Christensen (01:16:07):
Both. So the concepts that I work around is that we create patterns. Some of them we learn when we're infants. So we create patterns.

 

(01:16:22):
And the patterns become, when a pattern exists, there's a form of normalization for sure, whatever it's, it doesn't matter what it's, and if people ask, how do you work with clients? I identify patterns. I'm really good at tracking because of my logistic background and upbringing I'm really good at. And tracking patterns kept me safe as a kid. So I would notice the pattern in the house, the rhythms, the patterns, my dad's behavior, the drinking, my mom, where she was, what she was doing. I noticed all their patterns and that then I knew how to navigate in and out of that to keep myself safe, right? From an emotional safety. I was lucky enough not to have parents that were physically unsafe to be with

 

(01:17:17):
But that's the core. So the first thing that I look at is, well, what's the pattern in a person? What are they coming in with? What are they speaking of? And where's the pattern? And then I don't say, well, here's your pattern, right? That's like, because that ain't going to move anything.

 

Matt Handy (01:17:36):
Not at all.

 

Rune Christensen (01:17:36):
That's like going to wage washers. And they go, here's the don't eat this, but eat that and then come back in a week. Great. We're now an accountability organization. That's all we are. In all honesty, accountability is great, but it only sustains as long as the accountability partner is there. When that accountability partner disappear, you're going to go right back to where you were because you've never changed the pattern. You're just abstained from it. So you're not recovered. I think that's a good way to put it. I view abstinence as a temporary state of being. I do too, very much. So If I'm in abstinence, then yeah, that's temporary. It just means that you have some sort of a temporary power, temporary control. You believe you controlling it. It's when you're not controlling it that you're in it, and it's when you surrender control of it that there's an opportunity to change your pattern. That's very much, I think it's aligned similar to AA in some ways, which is we acknowledge that we don't have control. But then what I bring in is no matter what situation you created for yourself, the first thing I point at is where are you reacting from? Are you from threat? Is there a threat to you? Because when we upset ourselves, when we create suffering, that's a threat. There's a threat to these basic things, which is approval, security, and control,

 

(01:19:04):
Which is what we spent most of our mind jocking on as soon as we become adults.

 

Matt Handy (01:19:08):
Three things again are

 

Rune Christensen (01:19:10):
Approval, security, and

 

Matt Handy (01:19:12):
Control,

 

Rune Christensen (01:19:12):
And control, okay? Approval, validation, belonging, community. I want to control everything, but I want approval, but I want to control everything if I can. Kids want to control immediately, but they also want the approval security. I want to have enough money, or I want to have enough love. So I become a love addict. I want to have feelings that are great, so I become an addict of other things. I want to control it. So I believe that I'm in control. So I continuous deny anybody who says that I'm not in control. I wouldn't admit that I'm in control. So that's what I call where below the line. So there's a line, and when you're operating from a threat to one of those things, you've lost trust somewhere, and now you're being reactive instead of being curious and open. And how can there be learning in something no matter what. I've been through the ringer who hasn't said that. In these rooms, in these walls, everybody's been through the ringer. No matter what. Even the person who grew up with perfect parents and never was exposed to anything carries the scars or the wound of their mothers and their fathers. That's just how I think we are as humans.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:34):
Yeah. One of my favorite Joe Rogan quotes that he always says is, the worst thing you've ever been through is the worst thing you've ever been through.

 

Rune Christensen (01:20:42):
So I will never discount somebody coming in and says, oh my God, my best friend just told me something horrible. I don't know if we can be friends anymore. Alright, this is a real big problem over there. I could be like, come on, you should try losing your daughter. That would be mine, right? It's like, try lose your 17-year-old daughter. Now come back and talk to me. I wouldn't use it because I can see over there, it's a human being that's having a real experience in their world. That's the real experience no matter what. It's, so once we kind of see, okay, where are you? Then I look at, well, are you willing to acknowledge that that's where you are, that you're operating from threat? Can you accept that you're operating from threat? That's a really tough one. And then we go into, what would it look like if you were to take a hundred percent control for why you are where you're at? How did co-create this situation?

 

(01:21:40):
What is your peace in it? And then we look at, are you willing to feel everything, your anger, your sadness, your fear? Those are the three core. I tend not to go beyond those because it gets too complicated when we use the emotional wheel. So many emotions, very much so. I'm like, I don't know, somewhere between this and that. So I just say flat, you have anger, great. Your sadness, great. You're scared. One of those three. And then are you willing to reveal to the parties involved what's really going on? And that's my core, that's the cylinder that I work around now with a lot of nuance, of course, become individual. You adapt to the individual and how they operate, where they come from, the language they speak emotionally, logically, and so forth.

 

Matt Handy (01:22:25):
But the core of emotion logically.

 

Rune Christensen (01:22:27):
Exactly right. And sometimes you're going to teach them.

 

Matt Handy (01:22:28):
Sometimes

 

Rune Christensen (01:22:29):
They have to learn the language also.

 

(01:22:31):
And again, it doesn't matter because the person that is the combat veteran that I'm working with was PTSD. From having seen 17 of his best friends being blown up, three of their heads laying in the sand next to, because they got cut off him. And then the New York, I mean the New York executive, they're coming in. They're coming in with the same thing. They have patterns. So I think this, again, build their awareness around how am I operating when I am in a place of trust? I can see how I'm operating, but as long as there's a threat to one of these things, then I'm not going to expose myself. I'm going to stay guarded and I'm not going to learn. I'm going to shut down.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:23):
It's so interesting that you're talking like this. I really would like to introduce you to Dr. Shah. He's my medical director because he's introducing this theory around a biological component to addiction,

 

(01:23:38):
Which isn't typically addressed, right? We understand that we are human, we are biological, but what they address is the spiritual and the mental. Typically. Now he's saying there's a biological indicator that says this person is in a high risk situation all centered around the amygdala. That is a cause. These manifestations that you could see in somebody's patterns, literally in their patterns. It's like one of the pieces that kind of fell into place for this was he had a client, she was a young girl, and her dad was an engineer, and that's what he did. He recognized patterns for a living. And he told Dr. Shah, he was like, I think I can predict when she's going to relapse, and this is way early on. And Dr. Shah was like, okay, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And here's your Al-Anon meetings, right? He's like, go to these Al-Anon meetings. You can't predict a relapse. You're crazy.

 

(01:24:39):
But the thing is, through all of these different experiences he's had and years of really thinking about this stuff, it's like the relapse pattern. It's just like every other pattern. And for people who are chronic relapsers, you can identify a pattern around that relapse, just like you can identify a pattern around their healing, just like you can identify a pattern around their insecurities, around their love patterns, around their feel good patterns around the feel bad patterns. Relapse is also identifiable as a pattern. And it's like when you break it down in a logical way, it's like, this makes a lot of sense. And the trauma that's at the root of all of these causes, it's like this is a problem that I have with the industry as a whole. It's like we do trauma-informed care. What is trauma-informed care? Oh, well, we have these experts that they've been trained in school to identify trauma and address it. Okay, well, what is the addressing of the trauma? Well, we talk you through it, and it's like, okay, but how is this going to help me?

 

Rune Christensen (01:25:52):
That's a very valid question.

 

Matt Handy (01:25:53):
It's like, we don't actually know how it's going to help you, but in the past, it has helped other people. And it's like, how did it help them? Well, well, they didn't manifest these problems anymore. Well, did it help them or were they able to alter their patterns? Recovery is a good bandaid. I mean, abstinence is a good bandaid. It's really easy to stop somebody from drinking. How do you stop them from picking it up? How do you keep the jug plugged? It's like you have to heal the trauma. Well, how do you heal the trauma? Everybody's different. That's the real answer. Everybody is different. It's like you have to invest the time. You have to invest the energy. You have to invest the love to help this person heal. How many of us have that time for that? Well, if this is your job, you have the time for that.

 

Rune Christensen (01:26:45):
No, because insurance companies is for sticking how much time I can spend with you? Bingo. We only have 45 minutes this week. So sorry. So

 

Matt Handy (01:26:53):
There's

 

Rune Christensen (01:26:53):
All these

 

Matt Handy (01:26:54):
Disconnects, right? And the thing is, I just found out that billable hours for insurance a day is three groups. That's three hours a day, plus the individual therapy sessions and some of the other stuff. And it's like, okay, what are you doing for the rest of three hours? I would go to treatment. I went to this treatment center, high-end treatment center. Cash pay was like 38 grand a month, which is average. I mean, when you look at the reimbursements rates, but if you're going to pay cash for that, that is an expensive treatment center. And it's like, okay, I go to high-end treatment center. I get advertised and sold on the idea that they deal with childhood sexual trauma. I get there. The first thing that I'm told is, oh no, we're not going to even address that. It's like, what? It's like, yeah, yeah.

 

(01:27:43):
We don't do that here. Okay, whatever. So I sit back, start participating, whatever, and the very next day, this is the third day that I'm there, we're supposed to have a relapse prevention group that's led by one of the clinicians. Clinician comes in for five minutes. She says, Hey, you guys are going to lead this group. You're going to do a book study. And in my head, I'm going, aren't we here to hear you guys? Aren't you guys the experts? Why are we teaching ourself right now? This doesn't make sense to me. Right? It's like all of these questions became answered once I was plugged into this industry on an ownership level, I started finding out all this stuff. And it's like when I tell these stories to people, they're like, that is not supposed to be happening. I know it's not supposed to be happening, but it does. How do I know this happens often? I've been to seven different treatment centers, and this happened at every single one of them.

 

Rune Christensen (01:28:42):
So you're the statistic that worked

 

Matt Handy (01:28:45):
So far, right?

 

Rune Christensen (01:28:47):
I know. But the data time,

 

Matt Handy (01:28:49):
Just because it worked for me this time, there's that person out there that has failed 20 times. They have those news stories. Dr. Phil had this kid on there or whatever. I was in treatment. This kid, he'd been to treatment like 150 times. It became his identity. That treatment doesn't work. But then there's that person out there. I know this kid. He got drunk one time. One time. He was 16 years old, Oceanside, California, got beat up by some Marines, got hospitalized somehow at 16 years old, was able to put together, I am fucked up. I can't do this. A normal person entered recovery, started going to meetings, and never drank again. And those are the two extremes of what we're talking about here. But the average person, the average person are the people that you and I are dealing with. These are the everyday day-to-day problem people that have these issues. And even if they're not addicted, you're talking about regular people coming through for leadership training

 

Rune Christensen (01:29:52):
Ever.

 

Matt Handy (01:29:54):
They're coming in

 

Rune Christensen (01:29:54):
Suffering.

 

Matt Handy (01:29:55):
Suffering.

 

Rune Christensen (01:29:56):
That's the best way to put it,

 

Matt Handy (01:29:57):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (01:29:58):
Everybody I coach with, everybody I had to spend time with in a pen, everybody that's so funny.

 

Matt Handy (01:30:06):
In the pen,

 

Rune Christensen (01:30:07):
That's what I call it, that it's a round pen. It's where all the horses do it in the round pen. I'm not there is they get lunged, which is basically somebody's holding a long line to them and they run in circles, and it's a form of exercise.

 

Matt Handy (01:30:22):
Is that where they're standing in the middle and then

 

Rune Christensen (01:30:24):
Circle around the middle and it's go around? I call it the round pen. And so it's only when I'm in there or when Brad, who's the facilitator I work with or has circle of experience of in Oregon when we're in there and we take the Holter off, and then they get to be like this. They don't know what to do. And that's because their pattern is that this is where we do this. And so I break the pattern for the horse, which gives the horse an opportunity to be like, oh, I'm just going to be a horse now. I don't have to be a horse under command. And we operate the same way.

 

(01:31:01):
We all have our round pens in life. We step into round pen after round pen after round pen. Doesn't matter what environment we step into, we have already created a pattern.

 

(01:31:11):
If go to work, I'm going to be this way. When I'm hanging out with John next door, I'm going to be this way.

 

Matt Handy (01:31:16):
It's the masks, right?

 

Rune Christensen (01:31:18):
Yeah. How often are we allowed to be truly authentically ourselves in society? There's not capacity for too much variation. And so back to what you said before, it's like, Hey, I'm a little bit different. My true north is a little bit different. And guess what, buddy? That's not allowed in this society. So we're going to frown upon you and we're going to send you outside. You don't get to play with us. And that's what we've created also in this society is sort of like this boxed in that you have to follow a very narrow line of being. And if you're not there, then you're a little wacky and we don't like you. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Even, and I've seen this firsthand, even in the house of God, in the Catholic church, dude, where it's like, oh my God, this person is not wearing a dress shirt. What's wrong with him?

 

Matt Handy (01:32:13):
So without singling out a church, because my journey with God has been a issue of boxes. People have tried to tell me what God can or cannot do, or will or will not do. And I'm like, how do you know what God can or cannot do or will or will not do? That sounds crazy to me for you to say that God can or cannot do this. It's like you bring up these philosophical questions about can God build a rock so big that he can't lift it? In that answer, there will always be something that he can or cannot do. But it's like when a human is trying to tell me what

 

Rune Christensen (01:33:00):
We'd assume that he's lived it,

 

Matt Handy (01:33:03):
Right? Well, and so this is the thing, right? In addiction, we put people in boxes. In religion, we put people in boxes, and we put God in a box. But dealing with addiction, when we put these people in boxes, what we're assuming is that they fit into that box. And instead, what we're really doing is trying to fit a square into a circle and say, well, this worked for this person. That means that this could work for you. Well, it could. Well, what happens when it doesn't? Oh, well, you are doing it wrong. The addict is doing, oh, you didn't do the steps, or you didn't do this right? Or you didn't do this. Well, how do you know that this is what I'm supposed to be doing? Well, it worked for him. It's like, okay, but I'm not him. And one of the things that I dealt with for myself that I'm now dealing with trying to help with other people is you are an expert in your own life. I'm going to trust that you know what you need, right? I'm going to listen to you. You tell me how you can achieve your goals, and I'm going to help you do that. Instead of, I'm going to tell you to do this and this and this because this person did it and this person and this person, and they've got two years clean. Now it's like, that's not individualized treatment. You've got these industry talking points where it's

 

Rune Christensen (01:34:23):
Process treatment like, Hey, we're going to treat you like everybody else.

 

Matt Handy (01:34:27):
And I don't think it's effective. If it was effective, we wouldn't have a 10 x valuation at 13%.

 

Rune Christensen (01:34:33):
No. Is that crazy? Or a statistic average of seven relapses before you actually stay in a chance of being successful. Seven, relapses, staying in recovery for a very, very long period of time. So this is the core. This is really the core thing you have. And I'm so curious because controversially, I

 

Matt Handy (01:34:57):
Love this.

 

Rune Christensen (01:34:59):
Okay, I'm going to get really controversial right now.

 

Matt Handy (01:35:01):
I don't know if you can tell, but I don't have a traditional,

 

Rune Christensen (01:35:03):
Okay, psilocybin,

 

Matt Handy (01:35:06):
Nothing controversial

 

Rune Christensen (01:35:07):
About this. Drugs can help people get off drugs. Okay. Are you asking me? I'm curious. What? I'm just curious. I'm going to toss it out. Okay. So studies are currently being conducted maps. Well, there you go. Okay. Okay, great. So you're fully, you understand what they're doing with maps,

 

Matt Handy (01:35:27):
Fully aware, fully bought into fully, I wish. So I'll start like this. Suboxone saved my life. I was going into the rooms being told, you're not sober. I'm like, fuck you. I would be on a needle right now if I didn't have this medication.

 

(01:35:49):
Constantly told, you're not in recovery. You're not in recovery. You're going to relapse then all this shit. And it's like, A, that's not true. B, who are you? You are an alcoholic. Who are you to tell me that I'm wrong? This goes against all your principles. Whatever. Then see, the problem is people don't read for themselves. Religious structures, breed, dogma. Unfortunately, a lot of recovery has become religious. It's just one person telling the person behind them what the person in front of them said. And then it's this chain that just goes, it's a perpetual thing. If they read, especially, I point to the vets all the time, our heroes, our unsung heroes at that. Our children are being sent off to wars to die in the name of democracy and freedom. And then they come back and we treat 'em like shit.

 

(01:36:48):
We look at this specific demographic of people who have a shitload of trauma and baggage, and I mean stuff that they were not born to do, we forced them to do or allowed them to do. Kids that can't drink legally, sending 'em off to war to be blown to smithereens. And it's like, then you've got these scientific advances that say, we have a way to heal your trauma with a medication. We have a way to reconstruct your prefrontal cortex. We have a way to rewire all of your neurological pathways that were singed and disconnected and damaged your synapsis. We can repair all this

 

Rune Christensen (01:37:28):
With a single cell organism that grows on the ground

 

Matt Handy (01:37:32):
With a natural, something natural. We don't have to do any chemical alterations to it. And they're going to tell those people that they are not sober. What are you talking about? It's like, okay, now.

 

Rune Christensen (01:37:49):
And it's proven to be non-physical habit for me.

 

Matt Handy (01:37:53):
I've never done mushrooms one day and been like, if I don't do mushrooms today, I'm going to freak out.

 

Rune Christensen (01:37:59):
Well, you can't because the neuroreceptors gets burned down. If you take a dose, a hero dose, your receptors are out for the next six weeks. So you can't get the hit the next day. You can't get the hit.

 

Matt Handy (01:38:16):
And when you look at,

 

Rune Christensen (01:38:18):
And I want to really isolate psilocybin in this. I know there are other psychedelics I

 

Matt Handy (01:38:22):
Do too.

 

Rune Christensen (01:38:23):
LSD and MDMA, which are chemical compounds, they

 

Matt Handy (01:38:27):
Ketamine, which is also super effective, right? We're talking about clinically depressed. We could talk about this for hours. We can create a

 

Rune Christensen (01:38:37):
Whole new episode.

 

Matt Handy (01:38:37):
Tms, do you know what TMS is?

 

Rune Christensen (01:38:40):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:38:40):
So did you know that TMS is the last resort 50% recovery rate? They're saying that it has a 50% efficacy rate on clinically depressed people who are medication resistant. Why don't you start with that? It's like, oh, the pharmaceutical industry is tied to the medical industry that's tied to the industry. It's like

 

Rune Christensen (01:39:01):
Absolutely.

 

Matt Handy (01:39:02):
All this shit is a, I hate to say scam, but it's like, dude, what are we doing

 

(01:39:08):
When we know that TMS machines are this effective? Why are we not using that as the first option instead of putting 'em on SSRIs that do further damage? That totally disconnects what makes us human from the soul in the body. We sever that with these drugs, and it's like you think that person is sober, but the person who microdosed MDMA and is no longer depressed is not. It's like things are so crazy. And then we've got the stigma. The war on drugs did a number on what is actually effective with humans. And there was a major disconnect between, well, I'll put it this way. The criminalization of effective chemicals was such a good strategy by the pharmaceutical industry because monetized people suffering in a way that I don't think we've ever seen, and we've got massive world wars where people's death and suffering was monetized. But this is a different scale we're talking about. So there's 320 million adults in the United States. Have you seen how many of them are at SSRI? There were more prescriptions for SSRIs written than there are people in the United States last year.

 

Rune Christensen (01:40:31):
That's insane.

 

Matt Handy (01:40:32):
Isn't that insane? Yeah. And then this might be a hot take. I don't know if we'll have to take this out or whatever, but the number of people who commit mass shootings that are on SSRIs is almost a hundred percent. It's like you guys can't connect those dots somehow that there's something going on there. You listen to these people talk about it. It's like, I felt like I was in a video game. What are you talking

 

Rune Christensen (01:40:58):
About? Yeah, the complete disassociation.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:00):
Completely.

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:00):
Yeah,

 

Matt Handy (01:41:01):
Completely. And it's like you take them off the SSRIs. I watched this show. Have you seen Ozark?

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:08):
I've only seen the first two seasons.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:09):
Oh, man, I can't even say it then.

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:11):
ok

 

Matt Handy (01:41:13):
They addressed mental illness in one of the later seasons.

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:16):
Oh, good.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:17):
And it is one of the most, you've got to watch it. You've got to watch it. It's like one of the most accurately portrayed situations of bipolar that I've ever seen on the screen. It is heartbreaking, and this shouldn't ruin it, but this guy's on SSRIs, and there's a part in it where he says, this takes everything that's human out me.

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:49):
It does.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:50):
It's like a total

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:50):
Disconnect for many people. It does,

 

Matt Handy (01:41:51):
Dude. It's a total disconnect.

 

Rune Christensen (01:41:53):
And I've been privileged enough to experience people where it's been really helpful and

 

Matt Handy (01:41:58):
In the short term.

 

Rune Christensen (01:42:00):
And I've also seen, well, the downfall, which I experienced with my mother's children, who, that was her segue into bars with Xanax for those who don't know that and so forth, and then steamrolled from that and moved into other, and then she learned all the tricks when she went into treatment. Isn't that crazy? Then she went to treatment. She learned all the tricks, and then she went to jail for being pulled over or something, and then she learned the rest of the tricks and how to source and all that stuff. And then it was just, maybe it was an expedited. I mean, I'm sure you learned

 

Matt Handy (01:42:40):
Criminal university man

 

Rune Christensen (01:42:41):
Spent

 

Matt Handy (01:42:41):
Nine

 

Rune Christensen (01:42:42):
Years in those systems. I was shocked to see it was such, it was 18 months basically of just all the way down from just basic alcohol.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:53):
Yeah. It's funny how the exposure to these institutions can put your addiction into overdrive. It's like, how does that happen? California Department of Corrections is now the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. There's no rehabilitation going on in there. And you'll find those needles in haystack of a special kind of person that goes in there and works on themself. But this is the exception to the rule, the exception to the rule. And I feel that treatment is a lot of the same way. You'll have that rare person who went to treatment once they relapsed, never. They entered recovery, and they call 'em a one chip wonder. It is. They never relapsed. And I look at these people and I'm like, wow, you're like a unicorn. It's like, how did you do it? I don't know.

 

Rune Christensen (01:43:50):
And they're also the testimony for them, right? It's like, oh, we had this one come in and look at them now.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:55):
Yeah,

 

Rune Christensen (01:43:55):
Of course. Here's

 

Matt Handy (01:43:56):
Worth the example.

 

Rune Christensen (01:43:57):
Here's our 6%. Yeah,

 

Matt Handy (01:44:00):
This is 1% of our 6%.

 

Rune Christensen (01:44:02):
I know, right?

 

Matt Handy (01:44:04):
But it's heartbreaking. And it's like we are in the business of saving lives. We're not in the business of healing people. For some reason though, it's like that should be intricately woven when you hear things like, oh yeah, our bread and butter is our relapses. It's like,

 

Rune Christensen (01:44:19):
That's sad.

 

Matt Handy (01:44:20):
Whoa, what did you say? It's like, yeah, we have so many retreads a year. And it's like, that is crazy. That is heartbreaking. This is an individual focused issue, but the ripple effect of the addiction is just as crazy as the ripple effect of that single person going into recovery. The ripple effect that it has. I mean, it's limitless to how many people it could touch. I know for myself, go ahead.

 

Rune Christensen (01:44:48):
No, go ahead. I think we're coming into something I actually wanted to segue into also, which is the people around the attic.

 

Matt Handy (01:44:57):
Oh, yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (01:44:57):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:44:58):
So I'm the oldest of 10 kids because of my decisions. I was 16 when I was kicked out. So I had 3-year-old, five-year-old, 7-year-old, 8-year-old, nine, a bunch of little kids. My siblings that they don't know me to this day. We don't know each other. I came back into the family a couple of years ago, and it's like I've got all these siblings, blood siblings that I don't have any relationship with other than blood.

 

(01:45:28):
It's like the ripple effect that I've had on them and the things that they remember. And then you look at me as the individual addict, the effect that I've had on the community around me and interactions that I've had with people. And it's like the majority of my life. It's just damage. It's just damage. And it's like you got these people that come into recovery. They're now the healing person, and we try to send them back into a broken situation, and we expect them to stay sober. It's like you have to do the family work. You have to impossible to send a healing person into a sick situation and expect them to stay healed or to continue with their healing

 

Rune Christensen (01:46:12):
Because they're being met with, I don't trust that you're going to be okay. I don't trust that you're going to stay sober. I think you're, it's just a question of time. You're ticking MB bone, and in fact, I don't really want anything to do with you because I can't have more of that shit in my life.

 

Matt Handy (01:46:27):
So here's the thing. This is what I think happens is all these people that were worried about you, they're now just angry at you. They've got all these gripes and these resentments from all these years of damage, and it's like, okay, well, yeah, you're better now. But what about me? I'm fucked up because of you. And it's like,

 

Rune Christensen (01:46:45):
And they never got to express it, and it's never been in a, Hey, let's bring them together in a facilitated environment so everybody gets to say their peace.

 

Matt Handy (01:46:55):
Yeah.

 

Rune Christensen (01:46:57):
I think,

 

Matt Handy (01:46:57):
Dude, it's so important to heal the family, and

 

Rune Christensen (01:47:00):
That's lacking major. So as a family member of an addict, regardless of what all there really is, is either the groups that are directly correlated or only related to the institution where the addict is currently in treatment, inpatient, outpatient, they will have family groups for the family members of those who are in treatment. When they're no longer in treatment, family groups are gone. So as the family member, you only get support while the person who's an addict is in treatment. So, oh, it's a relapse. Great. I get to be in relapse in my group work, and maybe I'll get something out of it this time. But after three or four times, you're like, I'm not going to show up to these groups

 

Matt Handy (01:47:44):
Desensitized,

 

Rune Christensen (01:47:45):
Because there's this bullshit then, and Al-Anon has this, you brought it up. It has a religious component. It's the same. We're being asked as a member, we're being asked to do the same 12 steps, but for ourselves in some capacity. And then you take that and the history that you may often experience that somebody who is married to or in a relationship with an alcoholic, most likely was exposed to somebody in their own family who's an alcoholic. So they may be adult children of alcoholics, which there's a separate AA group for that same principles. That's the support system. There's nothing else. There's not a space where you can say, look, we're just open house, and if you're this and that, then come in and we'll support you. But it's always directly related to the success or lack of success, depending on what support you get. For

 

Matt Handy (01:48:49):
Sure. So I a hundred percent agree that we are neglecting a huge component of the individual's healing. And it's like, yeah, there's a simple solution. We offer the support groups. The problem that I see is that how many of the family members are aware enough to understand that they're contributing? Okay, now we talk about codependency and enabling. When the mom has to look at herself and say, I've enabled my son to kill himself over these years, or I have allowed my brother to abuse me, or whatever, manipulate me. It's like, that is super hard to approach. It's super hard to address, and it's super hard to admit. It's like, okay, all of these berries have to be broken. It's so messy. It's so messy to really do the work. And it's like how many people want to do it? How many people want to facilitate this? How many people have the time? And typically, people aren't paying for this. They don't understand the importance

 

Rune Christensen (01:49:56):
Of it, and there's no reimbursement for it. For nature. There's zero. There's no DSM code for being a family member of an addict. There's zero reimbursement. It doesn't

 

Matt Handy (01:50:02):
Exist. So

 

Rune Christensen (01:50:04):
There's probably 25, 30 different DSM codes, which is the diagnostic codes for people with mental health stuff. And addiction is one of them. And so there's maybe 30 different codes for addiction, if not more today being subdivided.

 

Matt Handy (01:50:19):
Yeah, I think the DSM five is more updated. I think the DSM four was super lackluster when it came to this. The DSM five is more updated, so it's all going to be free. So that means that an organization like Harmony Grove has to be willing to say, we don't want any money for this. Because first of all, you don't understand the value. You're not going to be willing to pay for something that you don't understand is super important, because to you, it's not important. So this has to be free. And then you have to sell 'em on these ideas of introspection. How many people that are not addicts want to sit down and say, I have fucked up in a very real way that now I cannot blame my son. Now, I cannot blame my brother for their issues in and of themself. I have to now take accountability for what I had done. And unfortunately, and this is something that I talk about really often, is the manifestation of these things look two ways. Typically, it's codependency and enabling. And when you rob somebody of their opportunity to suffer, you have now solidified or reinforced the negative behavior.

 

(01:51:37):
So when you take responsibility for somebody, you have taken responsibility from them. And now this is your fault. Whether you realize it or not, this given situation is your fault. So when the sun calls and says, mom, it's raining. I'm living outside. Can I just come inside this one time? Or whatever? It was like this one time 30 times ago. You never know if that was the last time that they would've suffered enough to come inside forever. And as you perpetually take responsibility from them, it's solidly reinforced that I can do this because I know, and this is talking about money. This is talking about security, this is talking about, and unfortunately, very complex. Very complex. And unfortunately, people love their loved ones the wrong way. It's like we have to teach them. We have to bring this awareness around it. And there's a way to love your loved one who is suffering without robbing them of their opportunity to grow from their, but it's boundaries. And humans today have boundary issues.

 

Rune Christensen (01:52:51):
Well, we don't learn boundaries at all. Where do we learn

 

Matt Handy (01:52:53):
Boundaries at all? None. Well, when you look at the core component of what's supposed to teach you boundaries is the family

 

(01:53:00):
That's been eroded. That ain't happening no more. And even in a healthy home today, there's so much dysfunction. You have parents that are raising their kids in front of TVs. There's just a massive disconnect. The family unit of a hundred years ago is non-existent. It just looks so different today. And it's like men are weaker today than they've ever been. Women are more masculine today than they've ever been.

 

Rune Christensen (01:53:25):
I would go as far as saying men are not initiated into adulthood.

 

Matt Handy (01:53:30):
That is a massive problem. That is a

 

Rune Christensen (01:53:32):
Massive problem. Nothing that is the core, particularly, I can't speak so much for the women, but for men, I encounter men your age, my age, older even. But mostly when they're younger, where they're men, but they're boys, dude, they're operating from, they're operating as I would think, a 13-year-old absolutely with entitlement, with all these different immature, toxic masculinity, which is almost worse than a mature toxic masculinity

 

(01:54:05):
Or an adult toxic masculinity. But that is a whole different game there.

 

(01:54:10):
I don't know how that affects in the addiction game massively, how that shows up. We are taught as men how they're victims of everything. For sure. And is that a driver towards addiction? Like poor little, I don't want to put it, I don't like using the word victim. It's just in my vocabulary. That's how I see it. But it's called victim consciousness, which is I bring from the state of mind that things are happening to me in the world, and it is not fair, and therefore I'm going to cope with that doing X, Y, z. Pornography is a great exemplified.

 

Matt Handy (01:54:45):
Huge. And then also, you look at the pervasiveness of the pornography issue, we're now disconnecting from the opposite sex. So I mean, it's these, it's messy. It's really crazy. The situation that we find ourself in, and when I really look at it, it's like this is the consequence of poor decision making. This is the consequence of poor leadership. This is the consequence of us. This is the consequence of us giving up our ability to make decisions to ourself for security. It's like we make these trade-offs. We say we're going to vote, and that social contract dictates certain things. But what that dictates almost as a secondary thing is that a lot of the decisions that we make as parents are stripped from us. And it's like we're in a very seriously critical time as a society, I think, where it's like, if shit doesn't change, stuff's going to go really, really wrong for the next generations. And luckily, we do have this awareness in this upcoming generation, not the one directly behind me.

 

Rune Christensen (01:55:52):
There's an emotional awareness in the younger generation, for

 

Matt Handy (01:55:55):
Sure. It's weird.

 

Rune Christensen (01:55:56):
Or at least they're putting names to it. They may mislabel it, but there is a lot, I dunno where it was. I saw it was something, it was a fun thing. It was talking to the boss, and it's like, I'm unsafe. I feel unsafe in our conversation right now. And it was a play in it, but it was a magnification of what I noticed was like, oh, there's a vocabulary around mental health that is really growing in, I would say college age and younger right now.

 

Matt Handy (01:56:31):
Maybe even a little younger. I would say high school and younger.

 

Rune Christensen (01:56:35):
And what I do appreciate it is even though they mislabel it, they're naming it versus being clueless about it.

 

Matt Handy (01:56:44):
For sure.

 

Rune Christensen (01:56:44):
It's like something's going on inside of me. I'm not really sure what it is. Often it's like, oh my God, I have trauma from something. And maybe it's exaggerated, and maybe it is trauma, maybe it isn't, but that's not important. The point is that, yeah, awareness. There's a hopefulness around the language.

 

(01:57:03):
I grew up as a teenager that was in my eighties, and therapy wasn't even in my radar. That doesn't exist. It, we had doctors and dentists, and that was pretty much it. There was no psychiatrist. Maybe saw patients in New York and would yell films and shit like that. That was how I learned about psychiatry. And so it's wood yell. That's so funny. Those classic psychiatry movies that he was doing. And so it's like this, yeah, so far further ahead. So there's hope in that. And just speaking of hope, there's hope in that there's an increasing amount of psychiatrists that are waking up to, we can't just sit and dish out scripts like dollar bills in certain places.

 

Matt Handy (01:57:59):
Man, that's crazy. So we're wrapping it up. We're going to have to do this again. I could tell because this is going to be a series of conversations. I guarantee it. So just kind of in closing, what do you think has to happen in order for the social awareness to raise to the point where people are able to accept their part in this societally? What do you think that's going to take for us? Because here's the thing. We're trying to give a social prescription for an individual issue. We're trying to fix homelessness. We're trying to fix addiction instead of, we have to fix the individuals. What do you think it's going to take to get, and what I'm really trying to get at, I guess, is there's this 24 billion scandal that happened in California. They issued 24 billion in grants and initiatives and stuff to attack the homeless crisis when this all started, when the funds started going out, there was 30,000 homeless people in California. Five years later, 24 billion later, there's 162,000 homeless people, and the federal government's going, what happened? Where did all this money go? What happened? There's a total disconnect, and when you bring that down to a family scale, it's the same shit. It's like, we're going to send Johnny to treatment. We're going to spend all this money. And it's like,

 

Rune Christensen (01:59:38):
And we believe he's going to come home and be fixed and go straight back into the rhythm and the patterns that our family have had for the last X amount of decades, thinking that that's going to be it,

 

Matt Handy (01:59:54):
And that he will fit in

 

Rune Christensen (01:59:55):
And we're going to have a great Thanksgiving

 

Matt Handy (01:59:59):
And Christmas.

 

Rune Christensen (02:00:00):
That's the hope. I think what I would like to see more of is what I've seen, and never in my wildest life would I ever think that I would bring up social media as a positive view. It traditionally as a

 

Matt Handy (02:00:16):
Net negative.

 

Rune Christensen (02:00:17):
Yeah. However, there is people, there are influences or whatever on Instagram that talks about some of these things that gets followers that I see something about men in their childhood wounds coming up with a hundred thousand followers. Well, that's a hundred thousand people if it's real accounts. There is the same place where these young folks learn mental health vocabulary and self-diagnose themselves with four or five diagnoses online on some app that somebody crashed out on AI or something like, oh my God, I just realized that I am neuro divergent and I have, right? It's like, okay, yeah, maybe one or two, but definitely not all of those. That's just not possible.

 

Matt Handy (02:01:07):
They're actually conflicting. You can't have those two.

 

Rune Christensen (02:01:10):
Yeah. But there is that. There's hope in that. There's hope that we continue to explore the edge of addiction treatment using psychedelic drugs as one of the pathways

 

Matt Handy (02:01:26):
For sure. As part of the future of addiction medicine,

 

Rune Christensen (02:01:29):
Changing the first line treatment to something like TMS. Like, Hey, let's work on something that opens door first. Ketamine opens the door. Ketamine gives you a three week from the time you take it. You have three weeks to work on some stuff. If you're not working on stuff in those three weeks, the door closes again, and you just feel better. But you're going to have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, and you'll be doing Ketamine for life. That's not the solution.

 

(02:02:02):
It's great temporary bandaid. But what ketamine really is, it's a door opener. There's room for me to look at myself now because maybe the amygdala is not triggered so heavily. So there's something there, but it starts with legislation.

 

Matt Handy (02:02:20):
Yeah. Well, all right, man. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Let's do this again. 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@harmony.com. Follow and subscribe to my last relapse on YouTube, apple Podcast, Spotify, and wherever you like to stream podcasts. Got a question for us, leave a message or voicemail@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.