I am worthless, no good, broken, a liar, a thief, depressed, an addict. This is the internal language of millions of Americans that may be suffering from addiction, anxiety, mental distress, chronic illness, trauma and relationship issues. I Am Recovery works through helping clients heal wounds and see their value again, changing their inner dialogue to hope, love, and self-worth. Jared Casey joins us from I Am Recovery.
The Illuminate Recovery Podcast is about Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Addiction Recovery. Shining light on ways to cope, manage, and inspire. Beyond the self care we discuss, you may need the help of a licensed professional. Curt Neider and Shelley Mangum are a part of Illuminate Billing Advocates (www.illuminatebilling.com). They are committed to helping better the industry and adding value to the lives of listeners by sharing tools, insights, and success stories of those who are working on their mental health.
Transcript (no grammar): welcome to the illuminate recovery podcast we shed light on mental health issues mental illness and addiction recovery ways to cope manage and inspire beyond the self-care we will discuss you may need the help of a licensed professional my name is kurt neider i'm a husband father entrepreneur a handyman and a student of life i avoid conflict i deflect with humor and i'm fascinated by the human experience and i'm shelley mangum i am a clinical mental health counselor and my favorite role of all times is grandma i am a seeker of truth and i feel like life should be approached with tremendous curiosity i ask the dumb questions i fill in the gaps the illuminate recovery podcast is brought to you by illuminate billing advocates make billing and collection simple with leader in substance abuse and mental health billing services verification and analysis of benefits pre-authorizations utilization management accurate claim submission and management denial and appeal management and leading reporting improve your practices cash flow and your ability to help your clients with eliminate billing advocates i am worthless no good broken a liar a thief depressed an addict this is the internal language of millions of americans that may be suffering from addiction anxiety mental distress chronic chronic illness trauma and relationship issues i am recovery works through helping clients heal wounds and see their value again changing their inner dialogue to hope love and self-worth today we are talking with the owner and clinical director of i am recovery jared casey is a marriage and family therapist passionate about addiction recovery he believes in a holistic approach to healing and with an emphasis on spirituality jared values genuine relationships connection and working through hard things he loves to empower people and being witness to rejuvenated families and individuals jared you got quite a legacy but thanks for being here today thank you shelly and appreciate your uh reminder of some of our values and some of the reasons that we're here that's it's always good to knock and look at those things um yeah for sure and i have to remind myself on a regular basis too i think that's just human nature isn't it totally um jared you didn't always start out in recovery or even as in the therapy world can you give us a little idea of where you came from yeah i'll give you the short version i was in cells for a lot of years and traveling all around the country and even into canada a lot and during that time i wasn't spending a lot of time with my family and i started feeling like this isn't really what i want to do with my life i'm not capturing the meaning of what is important so i made a pivot in my career and finished my schooling and decided to go into social work initially then when i learned about social work you realized that was really really hard stuff that's where the real warriors are in the ers and helping people right off of really fresh stuff it was more than i felt like i could chew at the time so i pivoted learned about marriage and family therapy from a couple professors and started interviewing for learning about that i wouldn't got a masters in marriage and family therapy and started off bouncing around from different populations working with children working with adults working with near homeless working with near disabled families couples i was just kind of doing internships in a couple different places and trying to get a feel for what was good for me or what i could be good at what felt right what didn't feel right and i landed in an inpatient program uh doing an internship there and i loved it just loved it for whatever reason the addiction population the mental health with depression anxiety ptsd population it really resonated with me for some of my own personal reasons as well but it just felt more attuned to my mission in life and i started finding passion and helping people in this demographic and all the while helping myself the old adage is you learn more from your clients and they learn from you over time and that's kind of been a piece that just stuck with me and while i was working in patient i started finding um a lot of frustration with my clients when they leave they come for 30 60 days they leave and they a lot of them relapse and i take it almost personal what did i do wrong how come they're not doing better like why are these people not making it longer than a couple months after they leave here so i started looking around and asking around and started finding that statistically even people did transitional living they had higher success rates sustained staying in their sobriety or staying in their growth mental health-wise um but there wasn't a lot of traditional transitional living in yupo county at the time so i started looking at i started speaking to the people i worked with hey why don't we do silver livings why don't we do outpatient and the ownership where i was at they were not interested in that that wasn't their business model their business model was inpatient only so when they didn't let me uh explore that i even offered i'm like i'll run it for you like let's just do this this is needed i can't see any of my clients relapsing like this this is too hard um they weren't open to it so i took a chance and found a business partner and went out and just went for it not knowing how expensive and difficult and hard that actually would be and had a lot of resistance from the community as well especially opening sober livings in residential neighborhoods people tend to think that's going to be a bad thing i don't know why right so the stigmas are there and they're very real and there's a lot of education and a lot of pressure my first house i tried to open we had about six months where the city was just pushing back and delaying and delaying i was running out of money my investor was running out of money too and we're like should we just sell this the real estate is still good uh i got a job offer that was paying would pay really well and um my partner at the time was like you know what i'm in this i don't care what happens and she kind of motivated me to just go for it no matter what so we just went all in and we're able to get the license from the city and start doing business and a little slow climb and a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of stress along the way but incredibly fulfilling and really fun to watch grow and be part of people's growth as they do grow that's awesome yeah an incredible journey um i'm wondering i mean i can hear the difficulty and the challenges and i i think i even saw part of those happening as you were putting i am recovery together what kept you what kept you going forward i mean obviously i heard you say that your investor um was gung-ho and said we're gonna do this you know do or die or whatever was there other things that you did just to keep on top to be able to keep your head in the game you know yeah i mean honestly there are so many times where the weight was just really heavy and i had to keep reminding myself why am i doing this like start with why is one of those pieces you look at if you're gonna do something crazy why are you doing this and i always came back to i felt really fulfilled and i felt really good about it and as i tell my clients you need to trust your higher power you need to trust something greater than yourself i had to practice what i was preaching and many times along the road i just had to turn it over to my god and be like all right you're the ceo what do you want this do you want this to succeed because it doesn't feel like it um you want it to fail because that's what you want i can do that too and time after time money would show up or a really ins like really hard working client would show up and just help the program get better or a new employee become like really integral to helping the program succeed just little mini miracles after each other just kept testifying to me that we're on the right track and that we're doing something of value and worth and many times it's just whoa i don't know i don't know how we're still in business other than um we're meant to be in business at this point and i feel if we continue to be on the right course of helping people and keeping those mission statement pieces like you talked about in the beginning they're on track and remembering who the ceo ceo is of this business we'll be okay and we'll continue to help a lot of people well i love that i love that you that you practice and engage in the same kind of work you're asking your clients to do right because healing is universal i think it's a human necessity and although maybe some of us escape addiction and maybe even you know heavy mental mental illness um i think that um that we all have to practice right we all have to as a therapist you know we need to do therapy and we need to be doing what we're talking telling other people to do and i can hear the spirituality that that is an emphasis in your life i'm curious do you see your clients um grab on to the concept of spirituality i know that comes up a lot when we talk about recovery with other people as well what do you see that that in this industry often times when someone's ready to change they've hit a point in their life where they'll do anything because what they're living isn't it's not working anymore and there's a saying i think it comes from aaa that the pain the pain it takes to stay the same is actually greater than the pain it takes to change and that that tipping point generally makes someone a little more humble and more vulnerable and more open and they start to see the miracles in their life and they start to see i should be dead by now i shouldn't be alive why am i alive is there some greater purpose for my life that's kept me here and it tends to be when someone's at that point they're far more open to spirituality and connecting with that higher power that some for some reason has spared their lives or kept them going this far and they just tend to lean into it now there is a breaking point though where someone will lean into it a little bit and they're like oh i'm good now i'm okay then they want to retract and go back for what we call go get some more pain and go get some more humility and unfortunately industry wise that can take several trips to inpatient care it can take several trips to outpatient care to several trips to jail or prison before someone has made that reconciliation that they really need a higher power or something greater themselves to help them stay the course and work a spiritual program and work a recovery program and live in a way that sustains their growth do you see people in recovery be super successful without the spiritual concept i do not um personally i see white knucklers um some people will sustain weeks months and occasionally a year or two where they're holding tight to [Music] coping skills and and things that maybe help them sustain it for a while but they're rarely comfortable in their own skin there's a lot of them will say like i'd rather be using than miserable in recovery because they will feel it as misery it's a form of misery it's that pain level where they they know they're at the max amount of pain they can handle so they want to change but they don't want to change all the way so like c.s lewis describes it like an old cottage right aren't you aware of that term where he invites you invite you might got into your cottage and make some repairs and we say all right you can you can fix the kitchen sink but don't touch the walls don't touch the carpet you need to leave now and you know god says no i came here for the whole thing i'm going to tear it down and build it up and make it something totally different so it's that process of giving in and continuing to give in letting go of vice after vice after vice until you're remade and everything about you has changed is typically where the success happens i'm uh i'm curious as you talk about that that concept of of you know giving up or surrendering your power does that fall into the first step of a a i mean would you say the powerless piece is that here we are trying to control our lives and if we can let go of that and recognize it that's really not what we should be trying to do do those go together they really do go together really well i find they can be confused sometimes as some people don't want to accept that they have an addiction or a really severe mental health problem but it's not really about that it's accepting you need help it's accepting you need something greater than yourself to give you a better way because what you've been doing isn't working anymore or isn't serving your life anymore so that's they can't go really well together but sometimes people think it almost a step one is a stigma in itself oh i guess i'm an addict it's an excuse now but it's not it's like i need help you know that's the area of my life i'm really struggling with well and i think that's one of the it seems to me that there's a there's this huge lie and i think this is human beings that experience this lie is that i can do this on my own and i really can't trust anybody else because people have let me down what's your take on that um it's it's it's it's a truth for some people i mean it's a subjective truth when you've lived in a way that every time you touch the stove it's hot you stop trying to touch the stove when it's turned off so essentially your past experience dictates your presence and your future so it's building trust in something different than what you've been doing all these years or things that have happened to you uh it's a tough space to be in it's it's a difficult acceptance piece you can look at it from a dbt perspective or a dialectical behavioral therapy of i just gotta really radically accept that things can be different that it doesn't always mean the still is going to be hot the outcomes can change and my life could be better and i can feel like crap at the same time that's a huff that's a tough dynamic to be in it that dualistic idea that both can exist in the same space but they have to i mean they have to otherwise you're gonna get exactly as you are living so i'll treat you train like i think i can you're right think i can't you're right and you have good reasons to be right you've had lots of justifications lots of things that have happened but doesn't mean it has to stay that way it can change you have to believe in change or else there's not much there's not much of a point like if you can't believe in some change you're not going to go very far right how hard is it for clients to grab onto those concepts because i mean they've lived some of them lived in in cultures in family dynamics where that just didn't exist right these have been generational patterns that they've been in for a long long time for that kind of a client who just really doesn't have never had a good model what what does it take for them to get to that place where they can sit in that dualistic place oh it's it's really really difficult but living as an addict or living with severe mental trauma is also really really difficult so people in the state they're used to doing hard things it's hard to get up and go chase a drug all day every day and be homeless it's hard to have nightmares all night or not be sleepy so it goes back to that analogy of pain and change so yes these things are hard but they're actually not as hard as the life they've already been living so when they start to see that usually it takes a shift into gratitude i'm grateful for where i'm at today i'm grateful for what i can do and then it takes a shift into perspective on how change actually happens a lot of people in their addiction they they fall into an all or nothing trap then they expect things to come right away fast and hard when reality uh change is more gradual people don't get sick overnight they don't get better overnight so as we help them reframe what does success look like you being in that chair is success honestly you being a chair increases your odds over 25 just because you sat down today that's huge can we sit in that and just appreciate that growth that you're here instead of somewhere else that you know doesn't help you and then what would one percent better today look like opposed to yesterday what's one percent you can do to change and improve and let's own that and take joy and feel everything where a lot of them haven't been feeling for years so reframing helping them get there and stop getting stuck in old thinking patterns that's really a big part of it right well and then they're gonna they're gonna fall into those old patterns over and over again and it's that process of having it happen less and less of the time recognizing it's happening and and being able to go back to what they've learned right the new skills because those neural pathways are alive and well we really are and i i tell my clients it's a one-to-one ratio if you have one day that was bad it's gonna probably take one day that's good now the only difference that i see is those who instill higher power it's more like a three to one ratio so those who give and contribute and connect with their spirituality every time they're giving every time they're connecting spirituality every time they're thinking about others every time they're living in a more fulfilling way their higher power rewards them three to one at least and they they're the ones who have big gains fast for some reason i don't control the ratio giving but higher power does and it's god's generous and gives back to those who are trying hmm that's powerful well and they don't have to like they can't create that right it just shows up when they do their part which is which is powerful yeah and just helping them be aware of that like can you recognize your higher power in this can you recognize these little miracles and then let's just be really grateful let's learn to talk about gratitude and stop talking about all the bad and all the things that don't go for you and all those moments that are just sour and let's start attracting more of the good in your life more of the things that are working i mean the law of attraction is real and it's it's really powerful in this industry as well it helps people start to reframe and change their mindset to one that's outward and full of gratitude you connect both of those dots you you're really finding spirituality in a nutshell and that spirituality is big time gains that's huge i want to ask you a question about something i heard you say is is your why the why that you did recovery the why that you opened up i am recovery the why and what i heard you say is because you felt good about it and to as i heard you say that i'm like wait wait doesn't know why have to be bigger than that doesn't know why i have to have this really great definition and you just are so anchored to it and you said no i just felt good about it yeah i mean the very essence of of life like what what gets me out the morning why do i do anything i want to feel good be feeling good feels good to quote my coach shea aslet and when you focus on feeling good and doing good for what some reason good comes your way and it's full of purpose and it feels good so my why at times has been challenged especially during the really hard times and starting to learn to even appreciate those i had one moment early on in iron recovery where um one of my counselors cameron which is a phenomenal man we were really struggling and we were trying to figure out how to like structure things and make things work and he looked at me he's like are we just so grateful for the the actual affliction we're going through right now it's like you're nuts man why should we be grateful for that but as i sat in it and as we kind of talked through it all that affliction made it really really appreciate the growth and the gains we were making so that kind of flipped the script and continued to build upon our why we're here to feel good but part of feeling good is learning how to feel bad and work through that affliction without the need to wallow in it or to be upset at it or mad at it instead just respect it and lean into it it's interesting that with all the people that we talk to you know when we talk to them and say okay you probably wouldn't ask for this you know again you might not want to do over but having learned the lessons that you've learned would you give it back you know and it's always it's never it's never a yes right it's always there's always appreciation for kind of where they are and it i think it's the same in in addiction as it is you know and you're you're talking specifically about you know starting and running a business and that it adds not just the value that you're adding to the to the client but like for you as a as a person who's helping other people and running this business it makes it so much more meaningful right like if if you just open your doors and it was all easy it's easy to take for granted but having been through that like okay how am i going to make payroll how am i going to pay rent like where am i how am i going to afford this type thing it just makes it so much more valuable to you right like don't you appreciate it more oh yeah i've got like a level five attachment to my business now like on a stage if someone you know attacks my business it's like murdering me like don't do that it's not nice i probably wouldn't be nearly that attached to that involved if it was if it came easy um yeah looking back too it's kind of like a taking a flashlight through a dark train tunnel and if i knew how long the tunnel was and how scary some of the corners were and how close the train would hit me sometimes i don't know if i would do it if i had the whole lights turned on so but does that like does that give you does that give you gratitude for your naivete yes i'm i'm very naive and um stupidly ambitious sometimes and i fall and fall into lots of hard learning traps all the time um big big learning curve for this guy right here which is a negative way to talk about it right but but i asked that question in a sense that like you mentioned you wouldn't have done it right like if you knew all of the factors it'd be easy to back off and you've been talking about you know attitude positivity spirituality right so spirituality i think is a different level of positive thinking right there's a different level of hope that comes from believing that you have someone else impacting your life on a higher level beyond just positive thinking but you've talked about the power of positive thinking in recovery and and working through you know some of these things this is not necessarily inside your wheelhouse but it's more of a curiosity because of what you've been talking about have have you ever seen any statistics as far as you know i would assume that as somebody's going through recovery as somebody's trying to work through mental illness or health issues i would assume that positively positivity has to help that process right whether it's speed it up or make it more likely to be successful and maybe you've seen this shelly have there ever been any studies done on like addiction rates just in people who start from a positive attitude versus have a negative attitude you know what i mean are are negative thinking people right fear-based thinking people more likely to be addicts so i'll do my best to answer that and shall you chime in too um the science of positive psychology is still pretty young it's 20 years old maybe a little more studies done on it are probably even fewer to be found there are some really interesting documentaries out there that have some of the stats built into them the documentary happiness is a really good reference for anyone who wants to learn more about that essentially people who focus on positivity live longer they have more fulfilling lives they have better marriages have better relations with their children they have reduced anxiety and stress and the numbers quoted in those documentaries are relatively high personal experience with clients those who flip to a positive mindset it's they can be really really powerful but can also be dangerous to a degree because sometimes they try to only feel positive instead of allowing themselves to feel crappy and feel through it where there is a seeking behavior in addiction where someone's always trying to feel good or feel nothing and we have to reframe that and teach them to feel and allow your body and your mind your soul or whatever to come around to accepting all feelings as good and letting time pass through those feelings to teach yourself that you can feel bad and good so for me it's more of a focus on what is working and not working and what's an outward mindset versus an inward mindset instead of positive versus negative that's super interesting almost like the attitude of like contentment is more healthy like super positive and super negative are both polar kind of dangerous areas to be in and you've got to be comfortable feeling those highs and lows not constantly just trying to turn everything into a high that's interesting that response well i also think that the interesting piece is is is that if you look at it as a behavior you're trying to model or a behavior you're trying to implement it it doesn't work so well i mean you fake it till you make it but there's developmental pieces in that i mean even at the very youngest age of you know birth to one you're trying to develop this idea of trust versus mistrust right can you trust the caretakers around you and if you grew up in an environment at the early age of one where you couldn't really depend on that person the very person that you needed to go to for love and affection and when you fell down and scratched your knee you know you went to that person and that's the same person that yelled at you or smacked you or or whatever that behavior was and there's a lot of other scenarios that can cause that if you look at eric erickson's developmental theory he even goes as far to say if you're not successful or if you're less successful than some at developing that trust versus mistrust dynamic that you lose the capacity on some level to even have hope and so sometimes we're looking at developmental pieces and you can teach them the skill but they really have to start to like jared said feel it inside themselves and experience those feelings of like you use the word contentment or you know being able to be in that space of i am really uncomfortable but i'm really grateful for it and that's a that's a developmental thing as well i think what would you say jared oh i just love when you talk shelley you're so on point um i feel like the industry is moving more towards self-compassion with less focus on feeling positive and it's you know doing those things that contribute to self-compassion is really the indication that you can be contented inside and that you can love yourself exactly as you are and heal early childhood attachment wounds to inner child work just through learning compassion and there's a lot of ways that people can practice that on their own through being compassion towards others as well as themselves so that's a really a focus of growth right now in the whole world for anyone from any type of mental health to anything from relationships to couples and children and practicing real real compassion um i i agree and i even read some recently some studies around positive psychology pos you know that framework and even suggested that just positive psychology in and of itself is not sufficient it's not successful unless you can surround somebody with all of the other skills that are required and that self-compassion i mean you can be as positive if you want but if the words inside of your head are negative and hurtful and spiteful it just isn't going to do anything for you well it's like you said like fake it till you make it's an outside inside approach we're looking at inside outside if you work on the internal you can be interdependent with people you can grow you can build positive you can take negative you don't have anything so personally um one foundational piece that we use a lot at i am recovery with this not to go into much of a tangent is we we require everyone to read the four agreements book and essentially that book is a building block for self-compassion and understanding of self yeah well in the integrity piece right being authentic and showing up with with full integrity is huge um in recovery and be able to to feel like you have birth and value because you show up with worth and value exactly i love that book and you you said four agreements is required you guys make everybody read that yeah it's it's you can't phase up unless you read it and then present on it that's fantastic it was funny i like how you said um the fake it till you make it thing so that's because that's kind of a false concept right of like you're you're faking it and so that's not sincere and so your your point is that you really have to have the attitude of just start right you're better to fail through it but start and be authentic than to fake period yeah you're shelling off all these layers people wear a lot of masks and the faster you burn through those masks and get to the genuine into the authentic it it tends to give you more gains that are sustainable and reason and like actual growth it's hard for some people and some do need to wear their mask a little bit longer until they feel safe and until they feel comfortable with getting vulnerable and that that becomes a challenge too is promoting safety and vulnerability so that people can stop faking it and take off those masks and just get real yeah i am i have a question i'm going to divert a little bit and ask you this question because i heard you say that you started in kind of a residential treatment facility that was impatient these people were there 24 7 and getting substance abuse treatment probably mental health as well and you went to the transitional living piece the the you know outpatient type of services the life after that inpatient treatment do you have a do you have um opinions as to whether one is the right or the wrong way how do you see those two well yeah i definitely have opinions um being in being in both of those i i feel there's a need for both uh i do feel the line blurs sometimes and people spend too much energy in inpatient and not enough energy and outpatient and what i mean by that is someone who's early early in their recovery say they're quitting drugs and alcohol or they're really working on some deep mental health stuff they go to a very protected environment in patients very protected a lot of them 24-hour watch no phone no internet uh no outside opportunities to go find drugs or to be around negative influences and there's a need for that like there's definitely a time and place for that however um a lot of a lot of patient programs i've seen that don't focus on the transitional piece they fall into a magic pill thinking that this is the solution and what i found in the reality is the solution is is not something that's done in 30 days it's a day for a day maybe three to one with rich well well someone spent a few years in their addiction or in their bad mental health mental health they're not going to recover in 30 60 days they will make gains they will get a grip on things ideally they'll get some tools to help them sustain it but they're likely to be white knuckling it for a year or two or three to get back really in a healthy healthy head space but they're also gonna be expected to be functional rational adults or teenagers and that's really difficult to do when you've had so many years of programming of i'm not good enough and all this other stuff so for me you definitely need transitional whether that's outpatients really solid sponsors really solid coaching community you know connecting with a whole resource of friends healthy family members activities that engage you in positive ways call it social interaction with whatever that looks like could be church it could be uh sober softball it could be community fellowshipping and giving back and service but you just really need to plan on two to three years of really solid working a program that gives you fulfillment and gives you purpose and after that two or three years you're probably gonna develop routines and last a lifetime and those routines will continue to feed your spiritual growth and your purpose in life the rest of the way the fallacy is 60 days 30 days and it's it's a sales pitch it sounds good you give us a bunch of money uh you sell your boat you know you're gonna miss where the boat was and you take out a second on your house and you put jimmy joe or whatever in inpatient for 60 days 60 000 later and bam he relapsed a week later and now he's struggling and maybe it's even worse because he was clean for so long so absolutely respect inpatient but in patients that don't have a focus on transitional care peer support sponsorship coaching they're setting you up to fail i think that's it's valuable information to understand that someone is not going to be like you said they're not going to be in recovery for 60 90 days right that that's not enough time to sufficiently change those neural pathways that they've developed while they're using in and to know how to handle the triggers that come when they smell that smell or go past that place that they were at they they need a whole lot longer and i heard you say two or three years worth of recovery is is probably much healthier than you know 60 90 even even six months yeah i mean you can look at post-secure withdrawals and philosophy aren't familiar drugs get in the body and neural pathways they stick in a person's body for two to three years you could be doing a yoga stretch one day and pop a pop a little bit of a bone joint and release a little bit of old meth in your body and instantly get it high and feel triggered so that can happen for a couple years not to mention using dreams and thoughts of it and old patterns that are family members are still using friends they're still using it takes time to develop a new life and like we talked about the analogy with the train tunnel if i tell the client right up front you have to change every single thing about you most of them are going to tell me to go take a hike but if i say you're gonna change this one percent today and do one percent better every day for the next three years that's digestible that's the flashlight five feet ahead and they can do that if i say 90 days 60 days you're going to see the whole tunnel it's going to be a flood and it's it doesn't work i mean success rates from inpatient without traditional care are around 8 percent over the first year of sobriety that's a massive investment to me failing on yeah i agree i agree and it's a lifestyle it's not it's not just a short-term fix and and i think that's not it doesn't just apply to addiction recovery it applies to every aspect of our life if we want to improve and grow it's going to take time to develop that and it's really we're fooling ourselves if we think it's going to take 60 days or 90 days but there is value for that treatment absolutely value for that treatment it just can't end there no you've got to you've got to consider the rest you really do or else you're just it's a sales pitch at that point you're buying snake oil like really really plan on a lifestyle change and taking that time to develop it for the long haul we we often replace the word recovery with just life say oh you're in life okay what are you doing for your life um not you're in recovery because we're all in recovery we're all in life for something trying to trying to make this life a little more fulfilling in some way or another yeah totally agree um jared i uh i want to ask you about i read somewhere that that you started out in your career as a roofer and it makes me laugh because i spent 20 years doing custom cabinets and finish work i'm like is it maybe there's some trend that therapists come from the construction industry yeah my my dad had eight boys and one girl and i think he had us all to be cheap labor cabinets and he put us on the roof at 12 13 years old and started working so i was i was roofing from 12 13 years old all the way through my late teens early 20s and anytime i complained on the roof my dad would say well go to college then huh or you don't want to be rude for the rest of your life go get your schoolwork done it was like this one liner you had locked and loaded every time a complaint whispered out from any of us doing the roofer good i'm teaching you not to be a roofer we're going to go to school like it worked dad i got about 22 years old my brother he pulled me aside he's like dude you got to get out you're going to get trapped in this industry if you don't get out now all right peace [Laughter] but you know i've i loved roofing with my family i spent so many summers in the hot sun eating lunches under shade trees taking quick naps talking to my brothers talking to my dad learning about life the work sucked it was horrible but i loved it like it was a community of its own and i almost stayed in it just for that just to be around family and people that really care the life lessons i've learned are invaluable but i haven't been on a roof since like i won't hammer and nail i've had my own roof has got a big old chunk missing for 10 years and i won't go put it in isn't that the way it always works it looks like my house isn't getting fixed already oh that's that's fantastic um i heard you say early on you know you're trying to debate whether to do the job or do the business right i am recovery or take this really good paying job and and in hindsight where you're at now you kind of i mean you really wanted to do this because you were spending all your time working and not with your family how has that shifted for you and would you still pick the same the same path you know the funny thing is the guy who offered me the job has a very successful in-patient program and he wanted me to be an elite therapist for him and i asked him straight up i was like look i've got a sober living started i would like to keep doing that and work for you and he said no you have to either do me or that and i asked him i asked him what would you do because he's an entrepreneur himself that's been successful and he said i'd absolutely bet on myself so i was like okay that was just one more thing that was just showing me i was on the right track so i bet on myself and went for it i was also listening to a book this was for kurt this is one of those entrepreneurial books there's some book i picked up like in a discount bin for four bucks that said dare to do something stupid i was like that's a really it sounds like me right now so i i bought the book and i listened to it there's this entrepreneur talking about how stupid it is to do a business but how amazingly rewarding it is so for the last three four years it's been very stupid but it's also been very rewarding and at this point in my life i would never take it back like i'm so grateful i did that that's incredible i love hearing that and and i've watched your journey on some level from a distance and i see the people that you help and the way it changes their lives and and sometimes it's you know it's relapse after relapse after relapse and they but they keep coming back because what you offer them means something to them and i see that and it's incredible so i love that you that you haven't given up on that dream and it really kind of inspires me because i'm always asking myself what's my why why do i do what i do and for you to come in and say you know because it feels good because i like what i'm doing and it just feels good allows me a little bit more space and a little bit less hardness on myself i've got to figure out this incredible why so i appreciate that and the and the work that you do jared um thanks for being with us thank you shelly i appreciate you it's it's been a parallel journey i've appreciated you all along the way you and your team have shared insights and knowledge and support and given me a lot of cheerleading from the sidelines that we need that there's days where you just you need it you need other people in your corner and fighting for you and that's the whole point community and growth yeah i couldn't agree more i always feel like we're in this together we might as well help each other along the way because if you can't help somebody else your your success really doesn't have any value i don't think that's exactly right well thank you thank you for being with us today and we'll keep up the good work thank you thank you kurt thanks jared