Revolutionizing Addiction Recovery with Secure Emotional Attachment and Compassion

Join us for an enlightening discussion with Doug Smith, a pioneer in the field of behavioral health services, as we uncover the revolutionary world of Emotional Attachment Behavioral Therapy (EABT). Doug's personal journey from a household marred by addiction to becoming a beacon of hope in addiction medicine adds a unique and powerful perspective to our conversation. We explore how early intervention and understanding attachment styles can be pivotal in preventing substance use disorders, offering a groundbreaking approach to tackle the addiction crisis with compassion and innovation.

Witness the transformative power of gratitude and community in the recovery journey. Doug and I share heartfelt experiences that highlight the camaraderie among those in recovery, akin to survivors who’ve weathered the storm and emerged with a new zest for life. We discuss the profound impact of being part of the "no matter what club," underscoring the unwavering commitment to sobriety. By drawing parallels between overcoming addiction and surviving life-threatening challenges, we illuminate how recovery fosters resilience, hope, and a deep appreciation for life’s simple joys.

Our exploration continues into the realm of attachment styles and their influence on emotional intelligence and personal growth. Discover how different attachment styles—secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful—shape our behaviors and relationships. Doug shares insights into therapies like EABT and EMDR, which can help cultivate empathy and healthier coping mechanisms. As we shed light on overcoming perfectionism and nurturing self-care, you’ll find practical strategies to foster self-compassion and balance. Engage with us on this insightful journey, as we aim to inspire personal growth and emotional healing for a healthier, more connected future.

Show Notes

Emotional Attachment Behavioral Therapy

https://www.learneabt.com/

Emotional Attachment Quiz

https://www.learneabt.com/eabt-quiz

Contact Doug Smith

https://www.learneabt.com/contact-us

Music by Green Day, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

https://youtu.be/NU9JoFKlaZ0?si=LYqOK9jNYkRUcJ7J

Chapters

• 0:00 Attachment and Addiction Treatment Innovations
• 5:06 Gratitude and Recovery Journey
• 13:17 Healing Attachment Styles for Success
• 18:59 Understanding Attachment Styles and Healing
• 31:01 Journey of Healing and Growth
• 42:44 Overcoming Perfectionism and Self-Care

Transcript

Doug Smith: 0:00

that I'm really excited about is not only can this help people in early recovery and by this I don't just mean EABT, I just mean attachment work in general Not only can it help people with treatment who've developed things like substance use disorder or other mental health conditions.

Doug Smith: 0:17

you know, it's been shown to be effective in a lot of different areas. It also can be a big prevention tool. I'm a big believer when I hear people say, when it comes to the addiction crisis, that we're not going to treat our way out of this crisis. It's going to take a combination of treatment and prevention both to get to where we need to go, and there's a lot of prevention work that you can do around attachment styles that might be able to stop some of these issues before they occur. So you know, I see more people focused in those directions, looking in those directions, trying to work in those directions, and I'm hopeful that we can start to reach people at earlier and earlier ages.

Jami Carlacio: 1:06

Welcome to the podcast Emotional Intelligence your greatest asset and key to success. I'm your host, Dr Jami Carlacio, coming to you from the Greater New Haven, connecticut area, as an emotional intelligence or EQ coach. I'm committed to helping people develop both emotional intelligence and mental fitness. That is, you'll come to regard problems as situations that help you learn and grow. Eq is a way of being and doing in the world that enables you to develop and sustain a positive relationship with yourself and others, at home, at work and everywhere in between. Please subscribe to this podcast and tap the like button so more people can enjoy the benefits of EQ. And now here's the show. Hello and welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us Today. I have a wonderful guest. His name is Doug Smith and we're going to talk about attachment, among other things. So hello, doug, how are you?

Doug Smith: 2:09

Good Jamie, how about you?

Jami Carlacio: 2:11

I'm well. Thank you very much. I'm cold because it's very, very cold in the Northeast right now and you are in Oregon, right.

Doug Smith: 2:19

I am, yeah, it was 24 degrees yesterday and it felt freezing to me, so I can't even imagine what you guys are going through.

Jami Carlacio: 2:27

Yeah, actually this morning it was in the single digits, but I think it got up to the double digits.

Doug Smith: 2:33

Nice.

Jami Carlacio: 2:34

Yes. So for our guests who are not familiar with you, I want to say a few words about Doug. Doug has 21 years of experience in behavioral health services, including serving as a direct clinician, clinical director and director of clinical development. He has a BS in psychology from Eastern Oregon University and is a certified alcohol and drug counselor level two. Doug has innovated many modern approaches to treatment services one of the reasons why we are talking today including developing a new patient-centered treatment model and he developed the Emotional Attachment Behavioral Therapy, or EABT model. Doug is a national speaker and he is the recipient of the Oregon Association of Addiction Professionals 2023 Innovator of the Year Award Congratulations.

Doug Smith: 3:30

Thank you.

Jami Carlacio: 3:31

And he is also the 2018 Addiction Professional of the Year Award winner for the Addiction Professional of the Year Community Service Award, so congratulations on that as well. Thanks, doug. You're in addiction medicine, as am I, and I'm wondering how you got into addiction medicine, because that may lead us into a conversation about attachment and how you ended up developing EABT.

Doug Smith: 4:00

I grew up in a household where substance use was going on in the home, so I grew up around addiction issues and then, as I got older, I developed my own addiction issues.

Doug Smith: 4:11

I've been sober at this point for 24 years and when I first got sober after a few years, I was trying to figure out what direction I wanted to go with my life. And I remember having a conversation with my father and he said you should look at what your qualities and strengths are and what your experiences in life have been leading you towards. Up till now, a lot of my strengths were people oriented, you know, being able to communicate with people and stuff like that. Almost all of my experiences were in regards to addiction, so it kind of felt like a natural direction for me to go and some God shots for lack of a better word lined up for me. And the next thing, you know, I got into an internship to learn to be a drug and alcohol counselor. That was 21 years ago, something along those lines. The rest is history. It's been an amazing career. I've loved working with this population and it's just been really rewarding.

Jami Carlacio: 5:12

Oh, I love that I have a similar background and I am also grateful to be in recovery like you. Like you, I guess I also had God shots, because it was a natural progression for me, after I left the teaching profession, to come into this as a professional, so not just a person in recovery, but as a person helping other people who want to be in recovery and who want to sustain that recovery.

Doug Smith: 5:40

Absolutely One of my favorite things to do is go to alumni picnics where I get to see clients with their families around them. You can see that you're not just to have a better chance, you know moving forward in terms of being able to not fall into addiction and stuff like that. It's really rewarding. Breaking the cycle has been a big focus of my career throughout my career and the attachment model that I created. There's a lot of breaking the cycle that's connected with that as well.

Jami Carlacio: 6:30

Yeah, breaking the cycle. I love that. I was actually just having a conversation with somebody today who has a five-year-old and he was really regretting that he has been absent for part of this child's life. He's doing everything he can to reintegrate into his child's life because he wants to be the present father, not the absent father. And you're right that it is a cycle. Oftentimes people say that addiction is a family illness or a disorder that affects the entire family. It affects the work, it affects friends. It affects a lot of things, right, it affects friends.

Doug Smith: 7:05

It affects a lot of things, right, yeah, and I know for me, one of the things I'm the most grateful for is my two kids have never seen me under the influence. I've worked with a lot of clients over the years that have a lot of guilt and shame in regards to stuff that they did during their addiction. And I'm no different. During my addiction there's a lot of stuff that I had to work through that I felt a lot of shame around, but I'm so grateful. You know, I've seen people work through the guilt and shame of how they affected their kids and I'm grateful that my kids have never seen me under the influence. And, yeah, I go back in my family history and there's a degree of breaking the cycle going on which makes me feel really, really hopeful.

Jami Carlacio: 7:45

Right and there is hope. When you're in the throes of addiction, nothing feels hopeful. But, as I tell people, willingness is huge. If you are willing to do this, put in the work, have the difficult emotions, sit through the urges, make the phone calls, go to the rehab or go to meetings or do all the things that people do who are able to stay sober or dry or clean, or however people like to describe it. It can be done.

Doug Smith: 8:21

Yeah, absolutely. And when I'm talking to people in early recovery, not only do I think there's hope you gotten your life back on track, but that fresh memory of where life was before makes you grateful every day that you wake up and makes you grateful for every opportunity that comes your way, every moment you have with people you care about and stuff like that. So you know quite often you'll hear from people that have had you know, like cancer survivors or people who've overcome deadly diseases, that there was a spiritual shift that happened for them through that process which makes them look at life differently. And I think addiction provides one of those gifts for us as well.

Doug Smith: 9:16

When I was in early recovery and I'd go to support group meetings like 12-step meetings and I'd hear people refer to themselves as grateful, recovering, alcoholic or great you know, part of me was like what do they even mean? But now it's like I get what they mean, because I've gone from being ashamed of my disease and being ashamed of what I did during my disease to being proud of my disease and proud of what I've overcome. And if somebody could tell me right now that I could go back in time and have never dealt with addiction, I wouldn't make that trade, because I feel like it's made me the person that I am today and it allows me to appreciate what's around me every day, which is cool.

Jami Carlacio: 9:58

You said so many things that I want to touch on. First thing is this idea of gratitude that I want to touch on. First thing is this idea of gratitude, and I certainly do actually introduce myself that way. When I go to an AA meeting I say I'm a grateful recovering alcoholic and, like you, I couldn't believe it when I heard that in early sobriety I'm like how can you possibly be grateful for this? But after this many years I have found that I am eternally grateful.

Jami Carlacio: 10:26

I think of people who have suffered from addiction and are in recovery, as people who've survived a shipwreck, and we are all so happy to be alive that there's a special kind of camaraderie and a special kind of gratitude and a special kind of appreciation, because we know we've been through the fire and there are lots of different kinds of fires that people walk through throughout their lives. This is just one kind of fire but there is a special kind of gratitude for that and it's being in the gratitude and then being willing to do what it takes. I heard from somebody in a meeting last week that she's a member of the no Matter what Club and I thought that was so perfect that, no matter what, I won't take a drink or consume a drug today because my life in sobriety is so much better than anything I could have imagined.

Doug Smith: 11:25

Yeah, that's really cool and you know, something that I'll mention is the people I've met in recovery and the friends I've made through the last 24 years of my life. I trust those people in ways that I don't trust a lot of other people. It's really interesting how you can go from being surrounded by people who aren't trustworthy including yourself in addiction, to being surrounded by people that are going to have your back when it really counts and be there to check on you and make sure you're doing okay. I just know when times are tough. There's no question that the people I reach out to are people I've met through recovery and they are such a great support system. I'm really grateful for the people I've met through recovery, for sure.

Jami Carlacio: 12:13

I would say 90 to 95% of my friends are people I've met in recovery and you're right, I would trust my life with any one of them, absolutely, absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about some of the emotional language around what it's like to kind of deal with life on life's terms and, as we know, a lot of times people who grow up in households that are dysfunctional have difficulty regulating their emotions. They have difficulty attaching. There's oftentimes an over-attachment or an overdeveloped need to please, or there's a hypervigilant or there's an avoidant kind of style of I don't want to get close, this is too dangerous for me or, you know, too clingy. So there's so many different things. How did you get involved in attachment and maybe say a little more about that Cause I think that's going to be something people want to learn about.

Doug Smith: 13:17

Yes, as a counselor who's worked in the field for a lot of years, one thing that was clear to me early on was the better connection I formed with the clients I was working with, the higher their success rate was going to be. And I also learned that when I was doing group therapies, the more connections I could form between the client and their peers in the group, the higher their success rates were going to be. So it was apparent pretty early that, even though we work on all these different areas in drug and alcohol treatment, a lot of it kept coming back to how good the connections were between the individual and the people around them in terms of success rates for their treatment, and research has definitely backed that up. To be true, it got me interested in attachment theory and a lot of times with counselors, most counselors I've met are very interested and focused on attachment theory in general. But one of the things I'd noticed throughout my career is that, even though there's a lot of focus on attachment theory, there's not really any accessible type of work that can be done by clients around it.

Doug Smith: 14:25

You know, as a person in treatment you can do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy work or dialectical behavioral therapy work. There's all these models that are readily available that you can get workbooks to work out of and do exercises. When it comes to attachment, there really isn't anything like that, and so that was a lot of my motivation, where I wanted to create something that focused on attachment styles and how to build healthier attachment styles for yourself. And it's probably not an accident that, a year or so after the pandemic hit, you know that this came out because in 2020, when the world completely changed on all of us, it really brought that home how important those connections were. I was working at a treatment center at that point.

Doug Smith: 15:20

Suddenly, all the patients are wearing masks and they're six feet apart from each other, and you're just watching these connections get separated and how it's impacting their treatment level, and it just really brought home how important that aspect is.

Jami Carlacio: 15:35

Yeah, and I want to capitalize on that for a moment, because the connection part is absolutely essential and what I see happening in people who have addiction or even in other areas of life.

Jami Carlacio: 15:51

Addiction can be to a substance, a process like gambling or sex or shopping or, who knows, internet, but what it is is it's the connection and, as I have heard it referred to as a God-shaped hole, and whether or not you believe in God is not the relevant part here, but there's some kind of source or higher being connection that we all have. I call it a spiritual umbilical cord, and what happens is people are looking for that connection and they're seeking it in the wrong places. They're looking for it in the bottle versus the person, and so I think of spirits plural that are in a bottle versus spirit with a capital S. That resides, say, deep within us. As you know, the lines at the package stores they call it in the East Coast the liquor store were longer than they were at the grocery store when the pandemic shut everything down. It's certainly something telling People like that, touching or shaking hands or fist bumping, or the eye contact and the mouth and the smile and the I see you, I see you, I hear you.

Doug Smith: 17:10

Absolutely, and you were talking about that God-sized hole inside of people. One of the things with the attachment model that I developed we look at attachment wounds from people's past and then we look at what unmet needs are correlated to those attachment wounds, right? So let's say I grew up with a father that was really strict and because of that at times I didn't feel safe or I didn't feel secure. Those were unmet needs that correlated to that wound from earlier on in my life. What we do with our clients is we have them look at those wounds and what unmet needs are connected to it.

Doug Smith: 17:46

And they identify what their top unmet needs are that stem from those areas of their life. And then we will ask them look at that list of unmet needs and think about the first time you used your drug of choice. How many of those needs were being met in that moment for you. And what you see with these guys is a light bulb, go on. For the first time they really realize how their addiction is connected to a lot of these attachment-based issues that took place earlier in their life.

Jami Carlacio: 18:16

Wow, I love that. That makes complete sense. Attachment issues are huge, so can you say a little bit about the kinds of attachment styles that people typically have and then maybe how to work to heal some of those?

Doug Smith: 18:34

Yeah, so there's four attachment styles. The first one is secure attachment, which is the only one that's under the secure category of attachment styles. With secure attachment, that usually means you're able to connect with people pretty easily, you're able to open up to people, trust people. You're good when you're alone. You're good at setting goals and working towards achieving them all of those sorts of things. There's then anxious attachment style, which is one I'm very prone towards.

Doug Smith: 19:03

When you were talking earlier, jamie, about being overly connected to things and emotionally dependent almost on things, that's a lot of the anxious attachment style. With anxious attachment, it's almost like you don't know who you are if you're not around other people. So you're really good at identifying other people's emotions. You need constant reassurance and validation to feel okay about yourself. You don't do very good when you're alone. It's almost like if you don't know how to chameleon yourself to the people around you. You get really uncomfortable in those situations and there's a lot of correlations in the research I've done between anxious attachment and what we talk about with codependency in the SUD field. It's a lot of putting other people's needs before your own, struggling with self-esteem and your sense of self and some of that sort of stuff.

Doug Smith: 19:58

Then there's avoidant attachment and, like you had mentioned earlier, that's the one where you put a wall up and you don't connect with anything or anybody. So you don't trust anybody. You don't want to open up to people. You might let people have surface conversations, but if they try to get any deeper than that you're going to back away. Quite often people with avoidant attachment style can be really successful in their careers and come off as very confident, be good at public speaking and stuff like that, but if people try to get close to them, that's when the wall comes up for them.

Doug Smith: 20:33

And then the last of the four attachment styles is called fearful attachment style, and that one is that hypervigilant one you were talking about earlier. You can go from one extreme to the other, so you can be really clingy at some points and then put up a wall. At some points you can be really hypervigilant. You can have a really tough time regulating your emotions, and a lot of that with fearful attachment style stems from growing up in traumatic environments or environments that felt really unsafe. So you have kids that just learn to walk on eggshells constantly and they're just trying to do whatever they can to protect themselves in those situations.

Doug Smith: 21:15

In regards to what you can do to work on these attachment styles, there's a lot of different things you can do. Therapists have been working on this stuff for a while and one-on-one therapy. There's great work that therapists do around attachment styles. I've seen EMDR therapy work really well with attachment-based issues. What I wanted to do with EABT is make it more accessible to everyday people. With EABT, what people do is they identify their attachment styles. There's a quiz that they take to learn what their attachment styles are.

Jami Carlacio: 21:48

And we will include that quiz in the show notes so other people can take the quiz and find out like, oh, that's why I'm that way.

Doug Smith: 21:56

And then, after they identify what their attachment styles are, they start to look at their insecure attachment styles, their insecure characteristics that most impact them in their life. It's about gaining awareness. Part of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, and so much of EABT is building up self-awareness. We want people to understand better why they react to things in their world the way that they do. Right? So when I'm alone and my anxiety goes through the roof and I never know why that is, we want people to start to be able to understand why that happens. They can connect the dots and learn.

Doug Smith: 22:33

This is why I respond these ways in these situations. So it's gaining a lot of self-awareness around that. And then it's starting to learn coping skills so that you can respond to these things differently. Because for people like me, when those uncomfortable situations come up and I get triggered for lack of a better word my go-to would be those unhealthy addictions that you're talking about, whether it be substances or shopping or whatever it might be. And so what we want people to learn with the ABT is how to utilize more healthy coping skills so that they can respond to it in different ways.

Jami Carlacio: 23:08

Right, wow, you said a lot there, so I'm going to just slow us down a second and maybe break some of that apart. And since this is a podcast on emotional intelligence and I talk a lot about a positive intelligence and emotional intelligence in positive intelligence, shirzad shamim has developed a system for really understanding how to be in the world, and part of how to be in the world and part of how to be in the world is to recognize what are the things sabotaging our success, and we all have a judge, the inner critic. And the inner critic, or the judge, has nine accomplices, and one of them is hypervigilance. One of them is control. One of them is people pleasing. One of them is conflict avoidance. One of them is hyper rational, especially like oh, emotions are not safe, let's just keep the emotions out of it, let's. It's all logical. It has to be this, this and this.

Jami Carlacio: 24:06

There are 10 total saboteurs when you're talking about how do we heal from this stuff. First of all and I say this almost every time because it's so important those saboteurs were developed as coping mechanisms and as survival strategies, so they're not bad. It's that they helped when you are in trauma or when you are in crisis. Maybe you needed to be hypervigilant, maybe you really did need to learn how to walk and kind of dance around the minefields in your house, but maybe there aren't any minefields anymore, but you're still dancing around like there are minefields. You were talking about self-awareness, and that is huge. But, as you said, it's not just self-awareness, just the first piece, right, it's now what do I do with this information? How do I develop different strategies?

Jami Carlacio: 25:00

We talk about in positive intelligence, these sage powers. So the first one is empathy, like, hey, I'm not a bad person, or, yeah, I did screw up and that's okay. It's easy to make that kind of a mistake and I can do better next time. And, of course, if you can empathize with yourself, you can empathize with others. But the other ones are also important, and one of them is explore, and so this goes to your point about looking at. Here are my attachment styles, here are my character defaults. Let me explore. Why did I react that way? Why did I try to push that person away, or why won't I accept a compliment, or why do I shut down every time I get into an intimate relationship? And it gets a little bit too cozy for me, right?

Doug Smith: 25:53

Yeah no absolutely. You know you were talking about exploring also and being able to explore. So much of that is rooted in attachment. You know, if I'm a one-year-old little Doug in my crib and I'm crying and my mom comes in immediately. Not only do.

Jami Carlacio: 26:10

I feel safe connected with her.

Doug Smith: 26:12

but if I cry and she comes immediately, I feel safer knowing that when I get in trouble, the parental figure is going to be there for me. And so you fast forward a few years and I'm on the playground. I'm going to feel more comfortable testing the boundaries and doing new things because I'm going to know if I get into trouble, somebody is going to be there quickly to help and give me support. So I've got that safety net right, and kids that don't have that or don't grow up with that, they feel really uncomfortable as they become adults, exploring or taking new risks right. So it all kind of plays forward into our adulthood and it can impact us as we move forward into adulthood.

Doug Smith: 26:56

The other thing I want to mention that you touched on was empathy, and one of the things that we focus on in EABT is not only having empathy for yourself with these attachment styles, but understanding that attachment styles are intergenerational. These styles are passed from generation to generation to generation. So a lot of the work that we're doing around attachment is around how to break these cycles that have been passed down from generation to another and so, like you said, empathy for yourself leads to empathy for others. Understanding your own attachment styles and having empathy for developing those also allows you to have empathy for your caregivers and the fact that somebody passed it down to them this goes back lots of generations.

Doug Smith: 27:39

We really focus on learning how your parents' attachment styles played into the development of your attachment styles and so on and so forth, so you can see the whole cycle, also your parents' attachment styles, how that plays into your choice and partners. There's a lot of overlap there you can create this whole genogram, almost type of family tree of attachment, and really see all these correlations that play into it.

Jami Carlacio: 28:06

Yeah, wow, okay. So for those of you who've never heard of a genogram, a genogram, you can probably better explain it than I've. I've done a few of them myself. But it's looking at your family tree and looking at, say, let's say, you did a genogram on addiction in your family or trauma, you can pinpoint oh, that uncle was an alcoholic, he was an untreated alcoholic and he had three marriages. They all ended in divorce and his kids won't talk to him. And then I've got my aunt, so-and-so, and she married an alcoholic, you know. And then all my grandparents and their parents, and so you can start to see all of these connections. It's like a board and the lights light up and you're like, oh, that's where that comes from, that's why I do that thing, or that's why I pick those people in my life, or that's why I have no boundaries.

Doug Smith: 29:04

Yeah, and not only can you look at the different people on the genogram, you also can look at relationship dynamics between those people.

Jami Carlacio: 29:13

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug Smith: 29:14

To see that you respond certain ways in relationship situations and other people in your family tree who responded similar ways. So a lot of this gets passed down. You know we talk a ton in the clinical world about intergenerational trauma and much of that correlates to this conversation with attachment stuff, because a lot of it is just passed down from one generation to the next.

Jami Carlacio: 29:39

Right and I am going to share a personal anecdote because it seems apropos right now. I have a lot of intergenerational trauma and I grew up with all kinds of screwed up attachment styles, which I've now learned about and can work to heal. But one thing that I had trouble doing was forgiving my parents and I finally forgave them and it was the most freeing thing on the planet when I was able to say you know what? I don't know what happened when you were a kid, but something clearly did and it caused you to do this and that or whatever, behaved this way or that way and I forgive you and I'm sorry that that happened to you. I had to do it.

Jami Carlacio: 30:27

They both passed on, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter what happened was. I healed tremendously in that process and as soon as I was able to look beyond my own pain and my own hurt and my own whatever and say, wow, I wonder what happened, I wonder why you chose to do this and not that, or why you weren't here or whatever, it just all of the resentment and the anger just went away and I healed tremendously. So I highly recommend doing this kind of work Because and do it with a therapist, do it with a counselor. This isn't stuff you just go into by yourself. You can, you know, read the book. This is something that you work with people in. Would you say that?

Doug Smith: 31:19

Yeah, absolutely. There's a degree of work that you can, that self-help that you can do on your own. But a lot of what we're talking about I've worked individually with therapists throughout my recovery. I've worked in different group models and with different counselors and stuff. So I definitely am a big believer that there's layers that we work on and certain layers you want to have professional guidance with you. But once you go through some of those layers, there's a degree of self-help work you can maintain on your own. And just to add to something you said, Jamie, one of my favorite sayings in recovery is the greatest gift we can give ourselves is forgiveness for another. That's always really applied to my recovery journey as well, so I appreciate you sharing that.

Jami Carlacio: 32:02

Yeah, I don't share it too often, but I think I might share it a little more often, and I have started talking about forgiveness with people that I work with because they are so hard on themselves. The forgiveness piece is so important because if we can't forgive ourselves, we're going to be in the shame that you mentioned earlier and we're going to be in the resentment, and you know recipe for continuing to do things that sabotage our success.

Doug Smith: 32:34

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I'm really proud of we work with a youth here in the state of Oregon using EABT and when I talk to the parents of the students that are using it, the parents will say that and I hear this pretty regularly that they're seeing an increase in empathy coming from their kid, where the students are gaining empathy towards other people and they're more understanding about people making mistakes, and they also see an increase in their kids' ability to regulate emotions and have coping skills and stuff like that. So when I hear stuff like that, it really warms my heart because that's exactly the sort of stuff we're going for, right.

Jami Carlacio: 33:15

Yeah.

Doug Smith: 33:17

In a nutshell what we really want to see with EABT, no matter which population is using it. We want to see insecure attachment style scores coming down and secure attachment style scores going up, and that's a lot of the results that we've seen so far working with different populations, which is really exciting.

Jami Carlacio: 33:41

Yeah, boy, that is exciting, it's so hopeful. And the other thing I would say is this isn't a sprint, right that it would be lovely to say okay, I've done the workbook, worked with Doug, we're good, we're good to go, you know. But this is stuff that can take years and maybe we need to have some patience with ourselves and with the whole process, because it wasn't built in a day and you can't dismantle it in a day.

Doug Smith: 34:05

Yeah, no, absolutely. I completely agree with that. I look at it like layers. A lot of times, you know, I think there's times like in early recovery we're getting certain things off of our chest quickly can be really helpful. And then there's other work that's going to take longer and it's going to take years, and so knowing when to push yourself and when to pace yourself is really important. So, yeah, it's a difficult balance, for sure.

Jami Carlacio: 34:29

Right, I think you know the impetus is I want to get better, I want to feel better, I want to just get better, I want to put it all behind me. But it isn't as simple as that, because humans are complex.

Doug Smith: 34:40

Absolutely.

Jami Carlacio: 34:41

And emotions are so complex, I mean we're still, we're all still trying to figure stuff out. Right? You know the philosophers from 5,000 years ago? I mean, look, read the Bible. Like some of the Hebrew scriptures over 5,000 years old, they were still trying to figure stuff out. They didn't have EABT then they might have needed it.

Doug Smith: 35:02

Absolutely. The other thing I'll mention really quick that I'm really excited about is not only can this help people in early recovery and by this I don't just mean EABT, I just mean attachment work in general Not only can it help people with treatment who've developed things like substance use disorder or other mental health conditions.

Doug Smith: 35:23

you know it's been shown to be effective in a lot of different areas.

Doug Smith: 35:27

It also can be a big prevention tool. I'm a big believer when I hear people say, when it comes to the addiction crisis, that we're not going to treat our way out of this crisis. It's going to take a combination of treatment and prevention both to get to where we need to go, and there's a lot of prevention work that you can do around attachment styles that might be able to stop some of these issues before they occur. So you know, I see more people focused in those directions, looking in those directions, trying to work in those directions, and I'm hopeful that we can start to reach people at earlier and earlier ages to work on this stuff. I even do parenting classes with parents where they work on increasing their levels of secure attachment with their kids and stuff like that. And so if we can start working with parents early on and working with kids earlier on who are developing insecure attachment styles, how much of substance use disorder can we start to prevent before it occurs, which is really exciting to me.

Jami Carlacio: 36:35

Yeah, I think the other good thing is having this conversation and being really open about it is important, because this is not stuff you can keep under the rug, bringing it to light, saying this is a thing and you don't have to have shame around it, you do have to deal with it and you have to own it. And you have to take shame around it. You do have to deal with it and you have to own it and you have to take responsibility for things that you may have done or not done, that you should have or shouldn't have done. But really it's having the conversations and then saying now we can prevent it, we can heal, we can move on, we can make different choices. And part of emotional intelligence in reframing the way we think about the world, the way that we think about ourselves and others, and then behaving differently. And that involves resilience. It involves the ability to accept your imperfections and say, okay, I screwed up.

Jami Carlacio: 37:26

And the other thing I wanted to go back really quickly. You know, with the trajectory of learning, we may do some really great work and then we may fall back a little bit, right, we may regress a little bit. That doesn't mean we've lost everything. It's like this. Growth is always like this. It's never just all one way. And so don't say oh, it's, it's like this. Growth is always like this. It's never just all one way.

Jami Carlacio: 37:51

Yeah, and so don't say oh, it doesn't work.

Doug Smith: 37:55

Yeah, it's kind of that two steps forward, one step back type of mentality. So, yeah, it definitely does not seem like it's a perfect trajectory where we're just moving the same direction, and I kind of look at it like those dips allow us to learn more parts of ourself for the next layer that we need to work on. So, you know, I think I try to look at it from from almost a Zen perspective, where it's like without this, you wouldn't have this. You know, and I think the biggest strength is being willing to look at yourself openly and honestly and see what you can continue to improve on and also find joy in that path. Find joy in it's about the process, it's not about the destination and being able to enjoy the fact that you're working on yourself.

Doug Smith: 38:40

I am not a perfect parent with my kids, but when I make mistakes I try to own it right. I try to do things a little bit differently than what I saw when I was a kid and that's not trying to be negative towards my parents. They want each generation to do better than what they did as well. I think the natural tendency is to want each generation to get a little bit better and so being willing to look at yourself and how you can improve is really really important is really, really important.

Jami Carlacio: 39:07

Yeah, and again, going back to the willingness to do the work and it isn't easy and it's not always comfortable to have to look in the mirror. In the AA Big Book, one of the first things that Bill W talks about in doing that fourth step quote unquote moral inventory is he likens it to taking an inventory at the store. When you've got a bunch of stuff on the shelf and some of it doesn't work, it's defective merchandise, get it off the shelf, it's not gonna sell, you know. And so you take the stuff off the shelf that's not working or is defective or whatever, and you see what is working. So the other thing is right.

Jami Carlacio: 39:50

And again this goes back to loving yourself, forgiving yourself, accepting yourself. That try not to make this into a, an excavation of all the things that you've ever done wrong in the world, or all of the things that are quote unquote wrong with you, because you know, ultimately, as I say, there's nothing wrong with you. We are all perfectly imperfect human beings and, as I like to say, we are beautiful, beloved children of a beloved creator. And you know we've all got cracks and places. But you know, if you have a crack, then there's a little bit of light that can get in right.

Doug Smith: 40:31

Absolutely. Yeah, it's. You know your biggest weaknesses are your greatest strengths, in disguise. I remember being told that early in recovery. It's not just a question of overcoming my weaknesses, it's a question of understanding that those are actually my biggest strengths. They're just hiding having that type of attitude towards it. And you're right, you got to take it at a certain pace and be kind to yourself as you're going through it, and all that stuff is extremely important. You know, every time I do a class or a group or whatever, I just commend people for being there and wanting to do the work, because that's a bigger step than a lot of people would be willing to do. And so having that willingness to be open and honest with yourself but also be kind to yourself at the same time, be understanding that you're not going to be perfect in any of these areas- Right, I just had a conversation with somebody about perfection and I just don't even believe it should be in any book.

Jami Carlacio: 41:27

It shouldn't be in the dictionary, because we have this sort of ideal that we somehow think we need to achieve and none of us ever does achieve it.

Doug Smith: 41:37

So well. And let's take it a step further. If I'm honest with myself, my perfectionism is a direct correlation to my anxious attachment style. The reality I need constant reassurance from people around me that I'm good enough, because I don't feel like I'm good enough. That's been something throughout all my recovery. Is my self-esteem right and so? And that's improved over the course of my recovery. It's gotten a lot better, but it's still a work in progress, just like all the other areas, and so the reality when it comes to perfectionism is, I think I have to do stuff perfectly and better than other people to get the same level of respect that the average person might get. And you know, you think about all the ways that leads to burnout and not taking care of yourself and all those sorts of things. So it's really interesting how a lot of these things that we focus on in recovery whether it be procrastination, perfectionism, all these character areas that we try to work on they're all correlated to the attachment stuff, which is really interesting.

Jami Carlacio: 42:42

Yeah, it is. And just going back to close the loop here, because we need to wrap up the idea of perfectionism, you said it leads to burnout and I would just say it's exhausting trying to achieve some kind of ideal that we've maybe set for ourselves that is artificially high or impossible. And you're right, we're kind of running like a hamster on a wheel and we're never going to get wherever we're trying to go. And also that kind of vibe doesn't sit well with other people. They're like oh gosh, you know she's going to judge me if she has these high standards and I'm not even close to meeting those. And I'm guilty of living with that kind of perfectionist. If I'm not this, then I'm not good enough, right? If I don't get an A, then I must not be good enough at all. And that kind of rubs off on people, even if we don't think it does. I'm here to tell everybody who's listening or watching it rubs off People notice.

Doug Smith: 43:52

Absolutely. Yeah, no, you'll see it. I see it at times with my kids where their grades have to be to a certain level and when I see it it's like, oh, that's not what I want, but we can unintentionally pass this stuff down, which definitely affects the people around you. When I was supervising teams of people, my perfectionism would create a lack of self-care for me, which would role model a lack of self-care to those guys as well, and thankfully a lot of them were better about it than I was. But still it's like it does rub off on the people around you.

Doug Smith: 44:23

Something my therapist would always say to me that has really stuck with me. He would have me use and you talked about good enough. He'd have me use the word enough in my vocabulary a lot and he would say, instead of saying, have I gotten all my work done before you leave for the day, say, have I gotten enough work done for today? Instead of saying, did I get this project exactly the way I want it? Did I do good enough on this project to feel good about it? It was interesting how challenging it was for me to incorporate that word enough into my vocabulary, because I'm kind of that black and white thinker, right when it's either all or nothing, and it would kind of bring that middle ground in, which was really helpful to me and it would kind of bring that middle ground in, which was really helpful to me.

Jami Carlacio: 45:11

Yeah, I had a therapist who made me say out loud to myself on the way to wherever I was going it's okay if I make a mistake today. I had to say it out loud and it was a good exercise because as soon as I could hear myself say that I did give myself permission to relax. But I know it may sound silly, but it is important, just little things like that.

Doug Smith: 45:37

Absolutely, absolutely yeah.

Jami Carlacio: 45:40

And so earlier you and I were talking about a song that resonates with you.

Doug Smith: 45:46

I like songs that remind me of where I come from, because that makes me appreciate where I am, and so there's a song by Green Day that I like a lot, called Wake Me Up when September Ends. That song always resonates with me because it reminds me of where I've come from in my life.

Jami Carlacio: 46:03

All right, let me pull it up and play a snippet of it. Pull it up and play a snippet of it. Like my father's come to pass. 20 years has gone so fast. Wake me up when september ends. Okay, that was lovely and, um, I hope people enjoy it. And, of course, I'll have the name of the song in the show notes. And for those of you who are tuning in, don't forget that like and subscribe to this podcast, because the more people see it and share it, the more people can be helped with people like my friend here, doug, and if you want to work with me, my information is in the show notes. If you want to reach out to Doug, his information will be in the show notes, including information on the emotional attachment styles and any kind of work that you might want to do around that, doug. Any final thoughts?

Doug Smith: 47:25

No, it's been a pleasure spending some time with you, Jamie, and thanks for inviting me to take part.

Jami Carlacio: 47:32

I am so grateful for you, I'm grateful to know you, and thank you everybody, and until next time we'll see you at the Emotional Intelligence Gym. Bye.