Mental Health conversation centered around 12 step recovery and related topics. We talk about spiritual living, living with addiction and growing in the 12 steps. Find us on our home at https://recoverysortof.com/. If you want to join the conversation, email us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RecoverySortOf, Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recovery_sort_of/, or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Recovery-Sort-Of-112376247161866/?view_public_for=112376247161866.
What are Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)? We talk about where the research started, what it means, and how it is informing the treatment of mental health and addiction. We take the ACEs test to see if we can ace it and talk about our experiences with childhood trauma. For more info on ACEs and to take the test for yourself, go to https://acestoohigh.com/. Join the conversation by leaving a message, emailing us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, or find us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
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11/8/20 What are Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)? We talk about where the research started, what it means, and how it is informing the treatment of mental health and addiction. We take the ACEs test to see if we can ace it and talk about our experiences with childhood trauma.
For more info on ACEs and to take the test for yourself, go to https://acestoohigh.com/
Transcript:
recovery sort of is a podcast where we discuss recovery and addiction topics from the perspective of people living in long-term recovery this podcast does not intend to represent the views of any particular group organization or fellowship the views expressed here are solely the opinion of its contributors be advised there may be strong language or topics of an adult nature
okay welcome back to recovery sort of my name is billy i’m a person in long-term recovery and i’m jason a guy also in long-term recovery what’s the chances yeah today i want to start out with a question for you i’ll kind of answer it give you a chance to answer it have you ever wondered why you’re an addict i know for me i have it kept me jammed up for a long time i thought i was smart i thought i was able to handle myself and yet kept finding myself in trouble and using and couldn’t figure out what the hell i was doing and why i kept doing it i still wonder why i’m an addict daily i think not in the sense anymore of like why me but more in the sense of i still don’t have a complete surefire picture of what causes addiction like i know we’re learning more and more and different things seem to make a lot of sense childhood traumas and and things of that nature and using drugs as a coping mechanism you know it’s not just oh we use drugs it’s like oh i needed a way to cope with life because i had no coping skills so i turned to drugs and they work but yeah i still like we don’t have a scientific way to say oh this causes addiction and you had that happen and that’s why you’re an addict yeah unfortunately most people nowadays look at it as some sort of moral deficiency or that people just are making bad choices for themselves because they like killing themselves and destroying their lives still still like i you know i mean i get we looked at it like that before but now i feel like there’s so much information out there and maybe just i’ve been exposed to all that information and other people still haven’t yeah well i think that’s a lot of it there’s tons of information out there if you’re looking for it but if you’re not looking for it and you’re just listening to the news or your local politicians they will make it seem like this is just they have no idea why people do what we do and there is a stunning amount of research on why we do what we do yeah yeah i mean i think the general consensus that you would see in pop culture or the media is we gotta fund the police to lock up these addicts and we’ll fight this war on drugs still and i think i stayed stuck using an in addiction because of that like i felt like it was a moral failing or a personal choice that i was doing these things and that there must be something wrong with me you know you say that and i try to think back i don’t know that it held me up like i remember i think even at like 17 or something my parents made me go see some sort of therapist and and they kind of described that i used it as a coping skill and that made a little bit of sense but it didn’t really help me understand that i needed to do something else at all and and i definitely felt the same way you did i i couldn’t understand my own actions people would say well why do you keep doing this and i’d say i don’t know and it was the most honest answer i had because i had no clue why i kept doing something that i knew was not working and seemed stupid even to me but i don’t know that that kept me stuck in it are you saying that like somebody could have explained to me why i did it and that might have helped me stop so i think for myself i felt like if i knew why i was doing what i was doing i could address it fix it because i was like a totally in recovery language we call it self-centered but you know i was in a place where i could handle all my problems i could fix my life i could take care of myself if someone would just give me the right information i could take care of it so somebody came along and said hey this is why you struggle with that drug addiction jason because this this and this this is the exact reasons why then maybe i would have said oh well maybe i do need to treat those instead of just thinking i had the answers that makes sense yeah i guess that’s sort of my thinking and as we get to the end and talk about some of this talk about why 12-step fellowships work you know it’s some of this sometimes seems like there’s not actual science behind it like a 12-step fellowship seems like some spiritual thing that came out of nowhere but as we’ve talked about before it it definitely has some elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and some therapeutic practices in it that we disguise as something else but and a pinch of voodoo yeah a pinch of mysticism spirituality i first learned about what i wanted to talk about today in a book called childhood disrupted by donna jackson nakazawa might have said that wrong but you know i heard this book i had listened to a bunch of different books on addiction and what it is and where it comes from and this is one of the books that came across you know my radar and i listen to it because i don’t read i just listen to audiobooks yeah so so i listened to it and fascinating talking about what’s called the aces score and this aces stands for adverse childhood experiences and it’s basically a way of measuring trauma that we have suffered that people have suffered and how that relates to different health and mental issues that people have in your education that you’ve been going through in college for your degree have you learned about the aces studies and taken aces test and heard about that information before yeah we’ve never taken the test it’s still filtering its way out into academia and into the therapy world but it is becoming more relevant as we talk about trauma-based care and so the problem with therapy is they get buzzwords right like there’s a some research or scientific based discovery about something and then this these new buzzwords come out and then insurance companies only want to pay for things that involve those buzzwords and so really therapy unfortunately gets based around whatever an insurance company is willing to pay for so when cognitive behavioral therapy started and short-term therapy like that’s all they wanted to cover even though that’s not always the most useful way but yeah you hear about it a lot now that places need to be trauma informed and deal with any aces and to explore that with anybody they see like i said where it came from was the cdc and kaiser permanente which i think is an insurance company shocking yeah did some research into these different types of childhood abuse neglect signs of rough upbringings and then tried to or fascinatingly i guess if you want to say it that way correlated it with different sorts of health and mental issues addiction cancer chronic heart disease depression suicide and they found all these links that was i don’t say proving but basically showing that as children suffered these different traumas their likelihood for like risky behaviors kind of went up you know these studies kind of help it’s not specifically about addiction but obviously there’s links to addiction in there that you’re basically trying to self-medicate or self-soothe you know from these traumas and we turn to drugs as a coping mechanism for for getting through some of these traumas it almost seems like just the more we learn like we started out in in maybe the 1940s with a.a not so much knowing what addiction was just thinking of it as a spiritual condition a self-centeredness some way that together we could get through it and the more the science learns the more we start to learn so maybe one day 50 years from now we really know exactly what causes addiction if there is one singular thing right or we know the combination of things but as we learn more we do at least learn more of this didn’t come out of nowhere there’s some genetics there’s some biology there’s some situational factors in your upbringing and the more we know about it i think the better off we are to be able to treat it maybe like you said that people are ready to go to treatment or receive treatment sooner in life or maybe just the fact that knowledge helps to some way combat it when i first got clean maybe seeing a therapist to deal with some of these aces would have helped me to stay clean that time instead of going back because i didn’t get a chance to do anything about them yeah it’s hard to take myself back to being a 17 or 18 year old kid and what i would have been willing to listen to at that time but of course nowadays i would like to say that if someone had told me at 17 like look you suffered some traumas in your upbringing that caused a cognitive impairment that caused a condition in you an impairment in your development that leads you to want to do these risky behaviors that causes you to to sort of look for things outside yourself to satisfy feeling of not feeling good enough or smart enough for all those reasons that i used and that we can address some of those things and address some of those feelings and make using not your only coping mechanism for dealing with your problems and dealing with life as an intellectual person i feel like oh that would have seemed way more helpful than what i felt like i was being told as a 17 or 18 year old kid which was you need to stop doing drugs and alcohol completely you are a drug addict and you’ll never be able to manage these things on your own and you need to go to these 12-step meetings and tell people about your problems and talk to all these strangers and at that age none of that seemed appealing whatsoever yeah i wasn’t as bad as them yet yeah i need their help they were there was something really wrong with them i think the only thing i was told was like you need to stop and get your life together it was like get a haircut and get a real job like right just get your [ _ ] together jason i’m like i want two i can’t yeah i mean obviously my family knew there were some issues with me we would have conversations about stuff but i actually ended up i guess you’d say in the legal system or in the whatever at the county health department basically court ordered a treatment at 17 so that’s when i first started hearing you’re an addict or you have to self-identify i know they don’t necessarily categorize you as an addict but you go in and you answer these 20 questions and then they’re like well if you answered yes to four of these you’re an addict you know right we won’t call you an addict but go to n a meetings right right i went to treatment at 17 for the first time so i’m sure i was introduced to the lingo i know i was told to go to a n a meeting they had h and i i had that introduction but it was still i think from people who weren’t in that field like what i heard the rest of the time that i wasn’t in a detox somewhere was you need to get your life together why can’t you get your life together what’s wrong yeah well and some of what i understand of the aces studies are exactly that there are cognitive neuro scientific reasons why you couldn’t get your life together right your development well i don’t know no i’m assessing you i don’t know what your score would be so what’s the highest one i think 10. oh mine’s probably like 14 so to get your aces score what i’m talking about is the original study was done back in 1990s sometime and they had these original 10 questions to identify different types of trauma you would take the test and then of course the higher number that you are the more at risk you are for different alcoholism depression suicide different things like that since that they’ve expanded it out now they include different types of trauma different things about like racism the community you grow up in and those sorts of things is also being potentially trump traumatic for kids growing up in certain areas in certain situations but the original test was these 10 questions they’re basically yes or no questions that you would answer and then you get a score at the end based on your number of yes answers so today i wanted to see if you’d be willing to take the test we’ll kind of go into a little bit of i mean i would like to discuss a little bit of our personal history behind each of the answers that we have for yes yeah absolutely and see what our score is and see what it all means yeah i mean this stuff is hugely relevant so for anybody that that doesn’t know and i mean obviously this information is not being given out to the masses in any quick fashion as i mean billy just mentioned this original thing this study was from the 1990s like that’s been 20 some years since then and we’re just now maybe putting the focus on it which is incredible and that’s only in communities where people are focused on this topic like the average person has probably still never heard of aces if you go talk to somebody in cecil county about ace they probably think you mean the hardware store right and so i mean this stuff is relevant this is real we know this we know that there’s children who come from a home where there’s no love and you can’t really quantify love but there’s no affection there’s no attachment there’s no ability even if the parent cares about their child to really provide these things because they weren’t provided for them and we’ve watched in case studies where children will eat the amount of calories they’re supposed to eat but not gain weight it’s kind of like the run of the litter in a sense that like there’s nothing they can do about it they can tube feed them whatever the child will not gain weight and they will remain malnourished because they’re not receiving something completely different and we’re just like oh no if you feed people they’ll get bigger that’s not true so we’ve watched these case studies where you take this child that won’t gain weight and put them into a nurturing loving environment and instantly basically everything’s fine and it’s like well how the [ _ ] and they’re eating the same amount of calories and so we know that these situations that children grow up in highly affect their internal chemistry their biology the ways everything interacts and so i think it’s hugely relevant that we’re learning and finally getting the information out there that as you’re growing up in this environment your brain is not being programmed right and i think you related before we started talking today about if you stab somebody they bleed right and this is kind of a similar thing like if you treat someone a certain way in childhood they have their own version of bleeding maybe they’re bleeding their ability to have comfort or something and then they seek that comfort for the rest of their life like this is hugely relevant for the mental health slash addiction community yeah and we’ll look at things like well occasionally a child makes it out of that okay or occasionally there’s a success story that they pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get their life together and they don’t suffer all this trauma but what the evidence shows is that nine out of 10 of those kids are not gonna end up that way you know nine out of ten of them are going to end up as addicts or with eating disorders or chronic heart disease or depression or on some kind of anti-depressant medications we know that most of them are going to suffer and yet we’ll look at the one exception and go yeah see you can do it right why don’t the other nine do it just like you did and we don’t know any of the mitigating factors in that right we don’t know if that guy had like a goddamn uncle that was super supportive that helped in building his resiliency right we don’t know if he had a teacher in second grade that really emphasized that he could do this and that’s why he had it like we don’t know what support actually caused that resiliency or maybe none did maybe he’s just the one out of ten genetically you know different that was able to pull himself up but that’s not the case and and you’re right we just judge by this one case and say why are the masses not able to do what this one person did which is ass backwards because if it happens to 90 percent of people then you say damn what can we do for these 90 of people yeah as you said like there are some things we’re learning through the aces sciences through these different studies that have developed as a result of the original study that there are things you can do we can hopefully interrupt that developmental process i mean in my mind hopefully earlier in adolescence when you can start to identify some of these things in young adults if we can introduce some of these healthier behaviors they won’t need to resort to some of the more high risk compulsive impulsive behaviors it’s incredibly frightening to me because these are kids who are having adverse childhood experiences in typically normal loving suburban homes right like where parents are there where they still have love for the kid and are doing the best they can they just maybe have some misinformation or maybe don’t have the abilities to give to their kid what the kid really needs like this is happening there at an incredible scale and rate and yet if you ever work in like child welfare or any of these impoverished communities you see that these situations not hopeless but like well more devastating and it’s more the norm than the exception to the rule and it’s like holy [ _ ] where are we headed in 50 years 20 years yeah and after we go through the test i wanted to get into a few minor statistics i won’t bore everybody with a ton of statistics but just to give a little background on that the original study was done on it was 17 000 kids all in like the california area and these were middle class to upper middle class predominantly white families right so the initial study wasn’t done on like poor communities or impoverished communities or addicted communities it was done on suburbia middle class america and the results were still pretty shocking you know and how bad the results were even to people that had seemingly quote unquote good lives or plenty of opportunity right so if you’re someone who has struggled with addiction or alcoholism or whatever you’d like to call it our mental health or you are the earthling that doesn’t have any of these why do you care about this for me personally i would say one better understanding of this information is just hugely crucial for me getting better at all times the more i learn about me and the things that have gone wrong for me the better chance i have it examining them and moving forward and not having them inform every life decision i make unconsciously right like without me even knowing and then two as a parent i want to know what not to do right like i don’t want to screw my kids up any more than i already obviously have a little bit you know some of that [ _ ] gets passed on before i even know it but the more i know about how not to act the better off i’ll be to set them up for a less unhealthy life i guess yeah that and how we can approach our communities to be in better position to deal with some of these things i mean as you talked about could have been an uncle or someone at a school that sort of became a support or a mentor or whatever for a kid in their life if you’re aware of some of these traumas that can be happening to kids at home you know and you’re aware of some pretty what i’ll say are fairly basic minor things that you can do to support that kid and give them another avenue to deal with their issues you can become a positive role model in your community to other people as well i dig it yeah so where we want to take the test is that what we’re doing we’re going to take the test this episode has been brought to you by voices of hope inc a non-profit grassroots recovery community organization located in maryland voices of hope is made up of people in recovery family members and allies together members strive to protect the dignity and respect of those that use drugs and those in recovery by advocating for treatment support resources and mentoring please visit us at www.voicesofhopecilmd.org and consider donating to our calls we’ll start with question number one did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you insult you put you down or humiliate you or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt i feel like we need a likert scale for this not just yes or no like you know zero it never happened ten this was your life yes absolutely i i had that and and look i don’t wanna i’m not trying to like diss my parents here in this statement i actually want to try to be compassionate to my parents because my parents both loved me greatly and i knew that they loved me and that still didn’t change the fact that they had maybe awful upbringings themselves or terrible information to go on or their own mental health issues this didn’t happen in a home where i was like hated by my father like he loved the hell out of me right he really cherished our relationship and yet that still took place daily yeah and that’s how it was with my mom you know i really feel like she loved and cared about me and did the best that she could but people hear all the time like there isn’t a book or a class on parenting well there are plenty nowadays but back then there didn’t seem to be you know a one-size-fits-all guide to parenting and my mom did the best that she could parents are too busy both working jobs to keep up with the economy and they can’t take those classes who’s got time for that [ _ ] well when i was a kid my mom was a stay-at-home mom she you know we were a middle-class family so she stayed at home i mean it didn’t help the anger or insults too much money made it worse maybe she needed to go to work she needed to get out away from his kids we drove her nuts but there’s another thing too i don’t know maybe in some of your education they may have talked about or addressed this but does it matter so much whether it was a reality or whether it was perceived for example you know does it matter if my mom occasionally insulted me but my memory or recollection is that i was insulted daily no it doesn’t matter whatsoever because what we understand is that everybody’s got a different tolerance kind of like if you put 10 people in a row and then started turning the temperature up and said leave the room when you can’t bear it anymore they’re not all going to walk out at the same time it might be close times right it might be a close temperature maybe it’s only a 5 degree difference that humans can tolerate but it will be varied and so if somebody’s threshold for taking criticism just happens to be lower it doesn’t matter if you only criticized them once a week that felt like all the time to them then that felt like all the time to them like we can’t argue feelings as a society i think and and i’ve found myself in this place we will tend to minimize our experience like said well my mom never really cussed me out she just maybe called me stupid or maybe told me i was an idiot or maybe told me she was gonna you know smack me upside the head like things like that but she didn’t actually do it so that makes it okay yeah i don’t i only got the wooden belt i didn’t get the steel belt right i wasn’t it wasn’t as bad as some of these other things we found ourselves dealing with something similar with sexual abuse so we my daughter suffered some sexual abuse and because it only happened once and we found out about it and stopped it and put it into it we actually had people say things like well that’s really great that it only happened once or you know maybe not in that exact way maybe that’s not what they said that’s [ _ ] what it sounded like when they said it but they would say things like you know well it could have been worse it you know and it’s like wait a minute my [ _ ] kid just suffered this trauma and you’re going to tell me that it could have been worse like i’m supposed to be grateful that it happened at all like what the [ _ ] is wrong with people where we can’t look at this and say that’s pretty traumatic it’s terrible that your parents told you you were stupid or called you an idiot or there’s a great short video it’s a bernay brown thing it’s a cartoon you can find it on youtube it’s not hard any search words about what i’m saying will probably bring it up but basically it shows the difference between trying to keep a positive attitude like that which is very dismissive if you’re always trying to look on the bright side you’re actually dismissing other people’s concerns and then how to do empathy instead and how it looks a little different and feels so much different so check that out if you don’t understand those differences because that’s crucial we went through question number one which is basically where your parents pretty mean to you on a regular basis yeah did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often push grab slap or throw something at you or ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured yes okay so i would say yes to that as well that was how you discipline that yeah there’s a lot of people that still argue that we should that’s why the world’s messed up because we stopped doing that yeah we need to beat our children beat them more and that’ll be better spare the rod spoil the child yeah there’s just not enough education out there it really isn’t but there are truly i i hear it all the time i see it on facebook there’s people who think that that’s when the world went bad was when their parents stopped spanking children yeah and if you’re curious if you look there is a lot of research out there on physical abuse and how that is definitely not helpful to educating children on behaviors that you want most of the time what that leads to are things like bullying and violence and domestic violence more importantly there are actually zero research studies that prove that physical deterrence are the best way to handle anything there’s none right it doesn’t exist right they may be effective but they aren’t good yeah they’re they’re effective short term right so are drugs yeah you’re right drugs get rid of the pain for a little while yeah all right so three did an adult or person at least five years older than you ever touch or fondle you or have you touched their bodies in a sexual way or attempt or actually have oral anal or vaginal intercourse with you yes i would be a yes as well and i don’t know how much you want to talk about but i was physically molested by an older male family member an older cousin who was like a teenager when i was i don’t remember the details sometimes so i feel like that makes it easy to dismiss it right right but i was probably between five and seven five and eight and it was somebody that i looked up to and admired and thought they were just the coolest i mean i don’t you know there’s not a whole lot of detail to mine i had a sister that was like seven years older i was like five or six she was 12 or 13 and it became some kind of show and tell touchy game and i’m like i always dismissed it because i’m like we’re dudes we’re supposed to like that i got an early jump right and the more i explored that in therapy it was like nah that probably [ _ ] me up my case since it was a male like i was really confused about whether that made me gay right it definitely wasn’t growing up in the 80s and 90s it wasn’t like okay to be gay not like it is today yeah it’s a little more accepted now so i might have been more willing to talk about it but since there was all this fear that well i might be gay or i could be gay and i don’t even know because i’m freaking seven like i don’t understand sexuality yet but trying to figure out some of that and then being totally unwilling to talk about it admit that it ever happened even probably acknowledge that it even happened living in some form of denial of like well it wasn’t that bad and it could have been worse and and all that stuff that we tell ourselves wasn’t anything that i really ever wanted to address i’m three for three right i’m batting a thousand yeah that’s not necessarily good so four did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special or your family didn’t look out for each other feel close to each other or support each other yes i don’t know i feel like i’m going to get the mvp award here rookie of the aces year yeah so on that one i would have to say no i didn’t experience that i felt like my parents loved me and took care of me and you know i had supports in my life through family my mom’s family was all really close to each other and then even growing up we were close to both sets of grandparents on both sides of my family yeah but what was the last part of it your family didn’t look out for each other feel close to each other or support each other there was just an underlying current of not close in my family like my mother and father would argue and then they would be like standoffish for like three or four days in a row where they almost barely talk to each other only for functional purposes and then i always felt like i couldn’t enjoy my parents together i had enjoyed this one or enjoy that one and then as i was enjoying that i felt guilty because i felt like i was joining a team a lot of times it’s just it was a [ _ ] up environment yeah now that you say that i i guess i didn’t feel close to my family and i still don’t feel close to my family maybe i got to give myself a half of i don’t know if i can get a half for that one but yeah i mean i felt like my family loved and cared about me but yeah i don’t feel like they yeah we weren’t what i would consider close yeah there’s degrees of this stuff so five did you often or very often feel that you didn’t have enough to eat had to wear dirty clothes and had no one to protect you or your parents were too drunk or too high to take care of you or take you to the doctors if you needed it now see and this is where it’s i think it’s easy to answer yes to almost any of these because it seems like there’s always a part that fits right like a lot of that doesn’t apply there was always food in my house i always had clean clothes i did feel a lot of times like there was no one to protect me but it wasn’t really my parents fault right it was from getting bullied at school and stuff every once in a while i’d talk a little bit about it with my parents but i didn’t really want them to intervene like i just felt like i would get further bullied for them intervening and i everything those kids were saying would be true oh i’m a wimp i had to get my parents to come down to school and talk to him right so it’s almost my fault i don’t want to blame myself but it’s like it’s almost my doing but i still felt that way i felt unprotected a lot in that sense and i’m thinking so it’s it’s almost like you talked about earlier like does it really matter whose fault it was or whether it was your i mean it doesn’t necessarily say that it was your parents fault that that happened it says did you feel this way if you felt that way it was traumatic yeah and that’s where i feel like every one of these is like a list of three different things and at least one of them applies yeah even if all of them don’t i mean i would say for me i didn’t feel like any of that applied to be honest like there wasn’t anything in there that i could say yes like the other one i could think about like man i didn’t really feel that close to my family but i felt loved and cared about that when i don’t feel that way maybe we’re just such traumatized people we just think it’s normal like this is normal everyone goes through this [ _ ] you know yeah at least everyone i know because everyone i know is a [ _ ] addict there you go so six were your parents ever separated or divorced separated for how long like legally separated like living in different places or we left the house one night because it wasn’t safe to be there and didn’t come back for a day or two i don’t know i don’t know either i guess it’s your perception it’s like you said what was your perception like mine was no i do my parents never separated or divorced my perception was that at long periods of time my parents were living together and not together here’s what it seemed like like they they were almost like enemies a lot it was it was always a lot of tension always tension between them and i felt like the adult a lot of times was trying to like can we just sit down and talk about what everybody needs yeah see and i didn’t have that in my house i mean my parents got along my mom was kind of bullyish and my dad was a little more submissive but they weren’t like at odds i mean occasionally they would argue but never anything like where [ _ ] was getting broke or things were getting thrown around or people were leaving you know it’s nothing like that yes that we had some of that i think at one point there was talk of divorce too for a three month or six month period it was like well we look like we might be going this way or you’d be all right with that blah blah blah blah and so yeah i’m just going to say yes because i you said it’s all about how i feel so [ _ ] it i felt like we were separate my parents did at one point talk about separating but it never really happened and it wasn’t it was like a minor blip of things my dad was drinking probably a little more than he should not that it affected our family really because he wasn’t what i would consider an alcohol even now it wasn’t anything like what i consider people that have a drinking problem he just he was running a business so he would go out a lot with friends and do businessy things and drink and she didn’t like that she wanted him to come home all the time and i think you just know all the worst alcoholics and so you’re looking at him you’re like yeah yeah you’re right that’s a high functioning alcoholic seven was your mother or stepmother often or very often pushed grabbed slapped or had something thrown at her or sometimes often or very often kicked bitten hit with a fist or hit with something hard or ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or a knife that’s incredibly descriptive yes wow did anyone ever take their fingernail along your mother’s eyeball like what the wow see this is where it gets tricky like often what the [ _ ] is often somewhat often every once in a while when there was an explosive situation like i don’t feel like that happened daily or weekly or probably not even monthly but every once in a while there was a physical interaction yeah saying in my household i never saw any physical violence like that once twice three times a year maybe yeah so then it’s up to you do you consider that often or not often i consider myself [ _ ] up so i yeah that’s all yeah it was traumatized i mean i was gonna say it sounds like it was traumatizing if it was once a year to sit as a 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 year old knowing i can’t do anything at the top of the steps and hear them scream at each other and loud crashing sounds of which you don’t know what is and who’s doing what and who’s fallen and who’s hurt or who might or might not be breathing tomorrow yeah that’s [ _ ] traumatizing yeah and i could say as a person who’s never witnessed or or seen like physical abuse of my mother like if i ever had seen that like even [ _ ] once it seems like that would have been pretty traumatic yeah you know like i couldn’t imagine seeing my dad push my mom down or punch her and to think of someone else seeing that is like wow that’s [ _ ] traumatic but if you’ve seen that like you said even a couple of times it’s like well what happened just not that much like right what the [ _ ] you mean it happened but not that much like that’s pretty bad that’s pretty traumatic you know to live in that i don’t know i’m sitting here guessing whether i should have said yes or not and then i described the situation i’m like yeah but that’s what we do i mean that’s our survival mechanism like i can minimize this i can make it i can normalize it to be like yeah everybody goes through this kind of [ _ ] and then you hear like no some people actually don’t go through any of this stuff like some people have never had any of this happen in their life if you can imagine that i’m over here like no wonder you can meditate 10 minutes a day you didn’t have to study that eight did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic or use drugs or use street drugs no i am see i don’t know yeah i’m kind of i’m thinking i my father was like a dry drunk though like he would drink every friday and saturday night while he listened to music and it didn’t seem out of control but i was always asleep before he got to the end of it so i don’t know what it looked like at the end but the the anger like all that stuff we look about in and when we talk about dry drunks or alcoholics who just stop drinking and don’t do any work on themselves all that stuff was present i relate that to he struggled with depression very greatly and maybe some other mental health stuff that wasn’t diagnosed but he would have those bouts of like raid and outbursts and all those things that whole life of discontent just at all times just never really happy with what was going on in life i mean i say he didn’t drink excessively but like all the behaviors are there what’s the difference but i’ll say no like in my household so my mom never well she occasionally drank but maybe like twice a year random occasions at someone’s wedding or something right but she almost never drank she never did any sort of illegal drugs or mortified by even smoking pot my dad said he went through a period i don’t know if it’s a phase or what you call it in his probably late 30s early 40s where again running a business he was out with friends and business things and going to conferences and seemed to drink a lot at one point he got a dui but then it’s like when the negative consequences started to come he just stopped he just he got his dui he stopped drinking they made him go to some meetings he would go to aaa meetings occasionally and he did all his court stuff and he actually didn’t drink during that whole time which to me was astounding because like i would get a dui and it was like all right how the [ _ ] do i get around this situation like because i’m not going to stop drinking i’m going to keep drinking and i just have to figure out how i can do it without getting caught again right whereas he actually just said oh no i’m going to stop i’m not actually gonna drink anymore and he didn’t and and now like he’s a normal person he did all his court-ordered stuff he went through all that he did whatever with my mom to get through that and now he occasionally drinks like a normal person you know at holidays or occasionally when he goes out with friends but never to the excess that i ever sure sign that i am an addict or alcoholic whatever you’d like to call it would be that if i got a dui i would go to drivers anonymous to stop driving driving’s my issue man i gotta stop driving right i’d rather just not drive that seems better nine was a household member depressed or mentally ill or did a household member attempt suicide i think i just answered this yes yes and yes so interestingly enough and i don’t know how i would answer this because i would identify my mom as suffering a mental illness i didn’t identify that as a kid though and i don’t think i identified this till way later in life actually in talking with my wife and and things she’s like well you know your mom’s mentally ill right which you know she had suffered some incredible abuse as a kid you know she was probably a 10 to 10 on all these things right you know and never got counseling or any sort of therapy never went for a psychological evaluation no she wouldn’t go to doctors or any of that stuff to tell her she was crazy but now in hindsight looking at things you know my wife has pointed out well you can see all these areas where she’s like bipolar and see these things in her behavior and how she acts and what she does so i guess i’m not sure if it would matter if i identified her as having a mental illness or whether suffering the results of a mental illness even if you didn’t know what they were yeah i don’t think it matters i i would say what i take out of what you just said is that anybody out there that’s in a pretty long-term relationship or a marriage or you have a partner that’s met your family ask them objectively without harshly taking it and crucifying them over their opinions but they have some insight into your family of origin that you do not i just i definitely like i can think of things i know about my wife’s parents and she definitely has pointed out some stuff that was a revelation to me when i was able to finally see it i was like huh that’s interesting that other people are more able to see the unhealthiness in our family so don’t just dismiss that [ _ ] that that might be real yeah and and it helps that like i know my wife very much loved my mom and and cared about her and you know she was a big part of our life you know so when she said these things it wasn’t like your [ _ ] mom is crazy that’s usually how it comes out yeah that’s usually how it comes out but it wasn’t that it was can serious conversations of you know with my mom’s health and some things that she dealt with as she got older because it would baffle me like the things as my mom got older the way she was dealing with like her deteriorating health and i would see her mental struggles and it was like i didn’t understand this was a woman that i thought was this like strong hard angry person and as an adult looking at her i could recognize that harshness was like a defense mechanism it was like a wall she was trying to put up when really she was like fragile and weak you know when it wasn’t my mom and i was a little kid now that i was an adult this person has not a really good grasp on reality right right you know we’re not far from from having earbuds that instantaneously in real time translate other languages when people speak them and i think the next step from there is we need to make earbuds that instantaneously translate what people are really saying so when somebody’s like your mother’s [ _ ] crazy what it really says in your ear is like i’m really worried your mother has some mental health issues and we should probably help her in some way she is not dealing rationally with her emotions yeah wouldn’t it be so cool to have that i need that i need everybody that i talk to to have that is what i really need mine immediately goes to the judgment criticism sarcasm like a sarcasm filter that’s what we need yeah well i’ll be sitting there saying some judgy [ _ ] about somebody and what everybody actually hears is like i’m insecure and don’t feel well about myself today so i’m pointing out other people’s flaws yeah number ten did a household member go to prison can i count me yeah i don’t know that’s what i was thinking too i was the only one in my household so i would say no i mean my father got locked up one day but yeah my dad got arrested twice but he didn’t go to prison but i did so i’m a household member i didn’t go to prison i just went to county jail so [ _ ] if you count that then there was a household member who lives in my house getting high me now we’re going to say not you we don’t count you don’t count me no you’re sure is this immediate family just in the household does it say household it says household okay so no so let’s see let’s tally up here besides the prison of marriage you got me beat so now i can feel better about myself there you go you have an eight and i have a four you only have a four yeah i led you to addiction i may i could i mean there are some potential fives possibly five but i’ll say i’m i’m a i’m a hard four and this is how serious this relates i mean i i can joke about you know i i’m twice as bad as you and all that great stuff but i mean really if you think about this if a four on that scale of ten if only forty percent of this stuff led you to needing drugs to cope with life or addiction or whatever we’d like to say it that’s scary because it’s very easy that four of these could take place in any home in america or anywhere oh so that’s that’s [ _ ] frightening if that’s all it takes right i’m thinking oh you gotta get like 70 or higher to pass this test right now i mean how low can it go we should give this to every addict we know and find out who’s got like a two and be like [ _ ] man then now the whole world’s screwed like you only need two of these they’re i mean they’ve done besides the initial study they’ve done like 70 more studies into this stuff some states have done their own studies and the statistics are i’m going to say shocking oh good because i didn’t want to do all that work so yeah so it’s a yeah you just there’s someone doing all that work already jason we don’t have to bother i regretted it right after i signed up for it i was like why did i say that so about 64 of people have at least one ace only score 64 yeah but that’s more than half the country have at least one i mean they were pretty basic parts of childhood i know that’s a twisted view they seem like basic parts of childhood i’m shocked honestly that only 64 percent of people have one and i truly i want to go meet these [ _ ] liars families that say they don’t well i am sure again this the initial studies took place in white middle class neighborhoods i’m sure if you went into certain neighborhoods you would find it way higher you know obviously four percent of people have one of these and the other 36 percenters are liars yeah so you could say all right well what does that really mean especially for addiction well people with an ace score of one or more are two to four times more likely to use alcohol or drugs hold on now so if 64 of people had one does that mean the other 36 had more than one no they have zero i’m trying to find a way for this to make sense god damn it okay so two to four times more likely just having one just having one is this exponential is this like you had 32 times as much because you had four or so the risk factors go up yes on different types of things so the more that you have the more likely you are so so what’s it for four do you have that one twelve percent of the population has an ace score of four or higher having four or higher doubles the risk of heart disease and cancer increases the likelihood of becoming an alcoholic by 700 holy [ _ ] so four or more you’re 700 times more likely to become an alcoholic wow and i i’m going to lump addict into that as well you know back in the 80s we liked alcoholic better yeah we thought there were different things that’s all we could talk about and then people with an ace score of five or more are seven to ten times more likely to use illegal drugs to inject drugs and to self-report as addicts wow oh and there was another so people with a score of four or more are also 1200 times more likely to commit suicide 1200 times more likely to commit suicide so what i mean what that says is that most people that commit suicide have suffered some of these early childhood traumas i’m speechless that’s i mean obviously you read this list and you say yeah if people go through things they’re gonna you know turn out not great but those numbers are astounding so the more they’re studying and digging into some of this the way i kind of think about it it’s like it’s like baking a cake like you need certain ingredients to bake a cake and if you take one of those ingredients away you don’t have a cake anymore you have something else so that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not going to be able to fix all of these things certainly we can’t just oh you’re at risk of parents being mean to you so we’re going to take you out of your household and put you in with nice parents then you suffer the results of being taken away from your parents which is its own trauma in its own right so what we can do is take some of this information and look for like say maybe possibly early warning signs or early interventions or things that can be used to address some of these traumas if we know that most kids and by most i mean when you say 64 of the population that’s more than half so that would be most kids are suffering some sorts of trauma isn’t it something we should be teaching more about like in schools isn’t it something that people should be more aware of you know in now we’re dealing with parenting algebra yeah geometry no that’s all we need dude i ain’t gonna lie my kids are doing that work right now and they’re like when are we ever gonna use this and i’m like i have never ever [ _ ] used any of this i don’t know how to do it anymore i haven’t done it since high school right like you’re not gonna use that why don’t we teach you about adverse childhood experiences why don’t we teach you how to cope feel better about yourself and self-care and things that are actually useful on a daily basis i i don’t know i’m i’m still going back you said talking about making a cake i’m like man i was supposed to be a carrot cake but the ingredients i got i ended up a fruitcake
right i added up some other kind of cake i’m like bread dry bread that’s why drugs liven me up yeah gave me what i was missing am i missing ingredients so one of the doctors that’s been involved in some of these studies and that does treatment of addiction today he says instead of addiction we should call it ritualized compulsive comfort seeking and that as we talked about with the bleeding person like people’s choices to use are a reaction to their trauma their upbringing and these things it’s not like how would we expect them to interact any differently no i mean that makes sense we talk about in our program one of the lines i identify with in our literature more than anything else at least at this stage in my recovery is that we seek to return to a time of ease and comfort and like that always stood out to me because a lot of days you know we talked about relapse and how it doesn’t really necessarily need the drug we have like a relapse mode or whatever a lot of days me not working my program isn’t about am i gonna pick up heroin and cocaine this evening it’s just about the behaviors that make me not feel good about myself and those behaviors are generally avoiding responsibilities and work the things that will make me feel good about accomplishing it later right and it’s all about feeling ease and comfort and a voice for me that looks like an avoidance of responsibility right can i sit in this [ _ ] chair all day and not move and not do anything like i look for these days in my life i’m like oh saturday’s coming there’s no kids sports i don’t have to take anybody anywhere i’m not [ _ ] moving right and that’s that’s that comfort and so i still in a way seek that and i guess the drugs like i’m just picturing like if you have a hole in your gas tank and you have to constantly be putting gas in it to keep it going right like i have a hole in my comfort tank or something and i can’t feel it and i just need to constantly put these things in my body that give me that and nobody showed me any nobody came to the top of the stairs when that that physical stuff in my house was going on and i was crying and scared and said this is how you find a way to make peace with that right maybe you talk to a higher power maybe you make a hot tea maybe you snuggle up in warm blankets maybe allow yourself to cry peacefully and it’s okay because there’s nothing wrong with crying or maybe you call a friend and talk about it like nobody showed me any of that they just said ignore that this [ _ ] happened and don’t talk about it or they’ll take you out of this house yeah and that becomes part of the problem so for me personally when i was you know reading through some of this and what i’ve learned about it through my personal research or whatever is that there are some key components that are really important when we look at addiction or some of the other mental health issues that we’re dealing with so rampantly in our communities one of those is the neurobiological component and i’m going to kind of generalize here but if you go on to the there’s a website called aces2hi.com that’s where you can go take the ace test that’s what’s your ace score you can go there and take the test it gives you way more of the research and the data and the studies it gives you lots of charts and graphs about stuff that you’re talking about what your likelihood of i think it’s like people that are like five or more aces are like 90 percent likely to get on antidepressant medications things like that it’s astounding some of the statistics that are on there i didn’t want to bog everyone down without talking about me again i know but you can go on there and find all this stuff but one of the things that they talk about in there is the actual damage that happens to your brain like you suffer as a kid in your development in your like neurocognitive development you know you are actively impaired and it gets into why there’s some plaques that get formed on certain receptors and you you’re left traumatized mentally traumatized from these experiences and so as addicts what we get into in our 12-step journey is sort of dealing with the results of that we don’t look at the why so much we just look at the all right i am now a person that just really compulsively comfort seeks i always we use different language we say i always want to do what’s easier softer what feels good yeah um feels good i want more you know if it’s like i don’t want to do the hard stuff it’s like yeah that’s that’s been wired into my brain at this point because of these traumas that i suffered as a kid at least for me what that kind of stuff means is i can’t just stop using drugs and expect everything’s going to be better my brain is [ _ ] up now right i want all the results without any of the work i feel entitled or owed and maybe i feel owed because i feel like my life has been so shitty like maybe it’s so i’m like man i need a break like something should come easy for me since this has been so hard i mean i don’t i don’t know maybe i’m just justifying my entitlement issues right well and then there’s a part of that that nowadays we’re starting to learn all about the epigenetics of things and how these things are passed down you know genetically in our dna we’re predisposed to certain behaviors certain things and that these things do get passed on not just behaviorally generationally but actually in our dna [ _ ] dna this is why i should have came from space just had my own dna now look see we argue against growing people in test tubes but had i grown in a test tube i wouldn’t have my past generations [ _ ] ups to [ _ ] me up to like i just had my own [ _ ] ups to put on my own clean slate right well and i think that’s what we think a lot of times nowadays that’s the way we look at it like when people come into the world they’re a clean slate and none of their prior traumas none of their prior things matter whatever their upbringing was doesn’t matter like when you’re an adult we’re all at zero and you’re just supposed to move forward being good and doing the right things and making good decisions and if you don’t you’re morally bad you need to be locked up you need to be put in a cage you need to be set [ _ ] straight because your parents obviously didn’t do it so now as an adult in society we’re going to do it for you and really we’re coming into the world like a busted up ass hoopty right that you know needs all kind of work the [ _ ] oil is leaking the gas tank has sugar in it like [ _ ] just does not work at all and then they’re like yeah why aren’t you going why don’t you drive what the and we’re in a race with people that are in mercedes that are brand new that got every opportunity in every the 36 percenters right the 36 percent that got everything there’s bastards those liars you know and and they’re you know in a brand new mercedes and we’re supposed to race to the finish line if this doesn’t tell you the state of the world i don’t know what does i truly don’t believe them i don’t believe that their family was that great i’m like that’s impossible i don’t know any families like that that’s not real but that’s and i’m not okay so let’s take a rational look maybe it is real but the fact that i don’t believe it’s real says something about everybody i know and and the state of society most of them are probably the one percent that we don’t get to hang out with that might be it the overachieving one even if their parents can’t be there to provide the support somebody’s hired to yeah so as a result of a lot of this science as a result of these studies and all these different things what they’re figuring out is there are things we can do about it the words that they use to describe treatment for some of this are trauma informed care and resilience based practices basically we teach people for one to identify like yeah your trauma is real like that shit’s not normal and you shouldn’t just accept it as normal and almost like you say like well everybody goes through this well no everybody doesn’t it’s right this [ _ ] is not the way you were supposed to be brought up it’s not healthy and that’s okay we start there and then what can we do to give you some tools to give you some skills to kind of be able to deal with life better obviously we’re still going to have this compulsive comfort seeking behavior because it’s hardwired into us but there are some healthier things that we can do that make our comfort seeking not so damaging to ourselves or everyone else around us yeah this is exactly what i was trained to do in my internship and what i’ll be doing in a few months you know people come in normalize validate and then assist them with some kind of new outlook and new skills and tools to be able to use kind of like what we do in recovery to some extent right we get we talk about our recovery toolbox like this is like a life tool box like what kind of things can we do now that we accept that you don’t have to feel stupid for the way you feel about your life because there’s some real [ _ ] there doesn’t make you weak right this is valid stuff that you went through it’s not fake we acknowledge that we acknowledge that there’s there’s a lot of people that feel that way and you don’t have to feel weird about feeling that way now what can we do to help you with some of that because now that you know it’s a problem we need to start putting into place some new behaviors and looking at your strengths right like what kind of strengths do you have well let’s build from there and build some more strengths and give you some new skills and ways to look at things and ways to interact with the world and ways to cope with stuff that’s comforting that will get you better outcomes and help you feel better yeah and when i started looking into what they describe as some of these trauma-informed care type things it’s really i hate to say it this way but it’s almost like basic [ _ ] human respect and dignity it’s what it boils down to and it’s sad that we have to look at that as like we need to teach people these skills as an approach to life i wish people would do these things all the time you know it should be a way that we live not a something that we aspire to be it’s incredible how many people that i saw while i was you know doing that that just come across and and i don’t know their whole life story but they come across as if nobody has ever paid attention to them for a [ _ ] hour before and it’s like jesus christ like that’s sad yeah wow think about that concept right so it’s so refreshing that’s why so many people find it refreshing just to walk into therapy they’re like [ _ ] you you listen you remember next week at my next appointment what i said this week that that’s amazing right and it blows their minds because they’ve never had that experience and the problem is when we go through these aces we get stuck into like an attachment style and in a way that we think is normal which is what we’ve talked about here we say oh yeah everybody grows up in [ _ ] up households it’s normal and so that’s what we seek out subconsciously in our life so we’ve set ourselves up in relationship after relationship that play out the exact same way and make us feel the exact same or we become the perpetrator and make other people feel that way but either way we’ve still never had these healthy relationships because we don’t even know what they look like and when they come along we say ah that person’s boring unattractive there’s nothing interesting there’s no spark all right and so we’ve just perpetuated this our whole life and it’s not our fault i mean it’s just what we’ve done and so yeah we walk into a therapy room we’re like holy [ _ ] somebody cares yeah so a couple of the things that they talk about like say to me these seem like basic things but what we want to develop or the goal to try to develop in people i guess because usually by the time they find treatment or start looking for treatment they’re adults and the trauma’s already been suffered obviously the earlier we can get involved the better which is to me why we should start this [ _ ] in school age high school even younger middle school pre-k but some of it’s pretty basic stuff teaching people to be able to ask for help teaching them it’s okay to ask for help helping them build trusting relationships maybe you can’t trust your parents but as you mentioned earlier you might have a mentor at school or coach or someone in the neighborhood maybe a neighborhood parent you know as someone that’s there to support you and help you looking for those kind of people in your life forming positive attitudes getting people out of self-hate [ _ ] off of social media especially kids the devastation of that weirdness like we looked at this aces test as something that’s going on in our household but how much of what’s going on in our immediate environment that’s not our household i spent almost as much time at school as i did at home so how much of that also gets lumped into this aces right yeah and i think that’s some of the current more current studies that are going on are some of those types of things and i would say i personally think some of the social media stuff should start factoring in there like what is the influence of the internet and social media on kids nowadays and the trauma of like online bullying or that stuff i mean that’s gotta be pretty traumatic for kids i mean christ it’s traumatic for me i’ve decided that i don’t get on facebook anymore because it was [ _ ] traumatic it was you know my anxiety was up i was [ _ ] angry hating people one of the last things they talk about is listening and talking about feelings that like how important that is that i start to recognize some of that about myself hey you’re getting on [ _ ] facebook and spending hours of time arguing with people and and trying to be right and when you leave those situations most of the time i didn’t feel better even when i felt like i was right and won the [ _ ] argument i still felt gross like and so learning like hey i don’t have to continue that behavior my feelings are telling me that this isn’t a good thing for me to do maybe i just need to get away from it yeah i mean i so i do we have listeners that aren’t really exposed to the therapy world i i don’t know i don’t know if people who aren’t in tune with therapeutic ideas and concepts would enjoy listening to us maybe i have no idea right but i’m just thinking for me none of this aces the test itself right none of those responses that i had to those answers were mind-blowing like i’ve explored most of this through some therapy at some point in time or another i guess for somebody who’s never been to therapy that aces test could be a revelation of like oh that that’s not normal that doesn’t go on in every household what do you mean right like that could really open their eyes to see that there’s something big going on here and so i guess in those instances this test becomes helpful to open people’s eyes and bring awareness to maybe you want to treat some of these things even if you’re not an addict maybe you just have areas you struggle in your life or maybe you just want more life satisfaction like that’s a great goal maybe you could do something about it and then i think for me ultimately my goal looking at this now as a parent is like let me read through this list again and see how many of these are present in my household now right let me see what i’m providing and the environment i have and honestly assess if there’s something i can do better to give my children a more protective layer against this kind of stuff right and as you described so that was my experience when i first read it and took it i was like wow this is [ _ ] mind-blowing information like i’ve been to therapy a few times most of the times when i was younger i wasn’t trying to go i was either court-ordered or made to go so i wasn’t 100 honest about things or you know at 17 or 18 what the [ _ ] do you know i mean i know you think you know a lot about life but i do it a whole lot right and so i just read this maybe two years ago a year and a half two years ago and when i read through that and and looked at like wow that’s pretty [ _ ] amazing you know that that this information like this is kind of the why behind what’s wrong with me you know why i do some of the things that i do because it’s baffling to me you know i remember as a kid my family would ask me like why do you do the things that you do like i don’t [ _ ] know that’s just what i want to do you know i don’t know why i like getting high and risking my life every day it just seems fun i’ve been asking myself why all morning right as soon as you figure it out let me know right the last thing i did want to say was i think when i look through those things when you look at asking for help building trusting relationships forming positive attitudes listening to feelings like that’s what 12-step fellowships do like it does all of those things are are cornerstones to recovery in a 12-step fellowship right you know you’re going and sitting in a group of people talking about your feelings listening to other people’s feelings you’re getting a sponsor which is someone you’re supposed to be able to trust in you’re admitting that you need help by showing up there and asking for help like all those things are sort of cornerstones to our process of recovery and i think that’s why it works but i think it’s also important for the flip side of that is we can take some of those really key elements of 12 step fellowships and try to find new or inventive ways to use them for people that have some aversion to 12-step meetings or have some aversion to n a or a a yeah and there’s only four of them that sounds less dawning than 12. well there’s definitely more i just picked out the ones that seem to be like the easiest and most in common with 12-step fellowship well let’s just lie to people and tell them there’s only four in them no and well now we’ll get on a little bit of a tangent i won’t go too long but the guy that actually does those studies on how to overcome some of these things is very clear on sometimes even if you do all of these things it doesn’t matter people are still messed up the trauma’s still there and they just don’t overcome it like the the correlation between doing these things and getting better isn’t as direct as the relationship between the trauma and the risky adverse behaviors that come with trauma right i think we should invent our own recovery program like right now and it’ll be a four step program and after they finish the first four steps we’ll be like all right that’s great now here’s here’s the four steps you got to do in your life now and then it’ll just be five through eight and then they finish that like all right now you just need these four parts of your life and it’ll be nine through 12. just four just only four not twelve and then we can sell it for easy installments of 1995. i mean and then every time you finish something you just have four things you got to focus on your life that’s it only four at a time sounds reasonable it’s not so overwhelming right people can do four yeah and then as soon as you finish those four you just hit four different ones 12 sounds like a lot it is it takes forever
and then you can be in like and you’re not you finished already you did four you’re like oh yeah you did great man that was phase one now phase two and then you but then you’re like well [ _ ] i’m in phase two i can’t quit now yeah i don’t know yeah so anyway if you’re uh interested at all in aces like say the easiest place to go is acestuhi.com check out all the information on there scientists got to get rid of these [ _ ] acronyms dude ace is too high it’s like too legit to quit that’ll be the next one yeah you could go there and find some information they they want to be catchy yeah my wife was telling me that i guess all these state organizations now are coming up with podcasts about all this information but they make it like boring and stupid and nobody wants to hear it because it’s a [ _ ] done by the state right so i told her we were going to try to do it a little different maybe ours would be a little more interesting the statement definitely doesn’t have foul language yeah that’s why we say [ _ ] the state state’s great but [ __ ] this so have you stuck with us this long thank you for listening please rate review give us positive feedback on whatever your current listening platform um it helps us to be found more easily in searches and things and helps promote the podcast uh we appreciate you as our listeners and look forward to hearing from you soon yeah and do it do the aces test and tell us what you come up with reach out to us on any of the social media platforms email all that great stuff find us on facebook twitter reddit youtube wherever oh you can watch us on youtube all that great stuff especially if you’re in the 36 of you know zero people we’d really like to hear from you i want to hear all about your lion ass all right have a great week if you enjoyed this podcast please feel free to share it with people you think might benefit from the conversation look us up on facebook twitter and instagram to join the conversation also and share your ideas with us we’d love to hear it