Be Recovered: Breaking free from the Disease of Addiction | Dean Taraborelli | TEDxSedona

[Music] [Music] beautiful introduction and the one part that wasn't on there is I have this 30 year history with addiction and during that time I learned that addiction was a lifelong incurable disease I heard a thousands of times and I believed it and I'm here to tell you that maybe that's not true just like science and takes a while to catch up maybe that's not true maybe addiction is a call for something else and since we're talking about addiction you know we often think of the person that's hit rock bottom and you know the homeless people ten percent of the u.s. population is addicted and I can tell you it's way more pervasive than that because it's shame-based we hide it so at the end of the day an addiction is when I'm doing something that I don't want to do and I can't stop doing it regardless of the consequences and I think we can all resonate with that so here's how I got so interested in all of this when I was 12 years old you know I'm a guy I'm riding my bike the next thing I know I have a joint my hand and a fast forward 30 years and at the height of my addiction I had a $200,000 a year drug habit that went on for I don't know six seven years and I can tell you I could fill a book the size of world war in peace with all the drama trauma you know injuries accidents herds near-death experiences hospitalizations overdoses you know I'll spare all that but my dark night of the soul you know I the last six or seven years of this process I'm in my dark night which means I don't know what to do and I'm all alone and nobody knows I'm working everyday and I'm doing my stuff and I'm in this inner hell and I don't know whether to kill myself or whether I'm gonna overdose or whether I'm gonna smash my head through a windshield again but something's going to happen and those are a lot of sleepless nights and as I was getting very close to the end of my life and you know when it's coming the thing that bothered me the most was that I was not gonna fulfill my purpose and I didn't even know what it was but that hurt me enough to get to my last treatment experience and at the same time when this wasn't working I was going to treatment so I spent 20 years in treatment and I've been to every kind of treatment there is for months on end I've been to doctors and on all kinds of medication and experimental protocols and I've been to inpatient outpatient outpatient outpatient you know you name it I did it and when that wasn't working I scoured the globe I've been to 50 60 countries on planet Earth talking to shamans mystics and clerics and teachers and doctors and anybody that I thought could help and here's what I came up with treatment isn't working the model of treatment and I don't mean just inpatient treatment the way we handle this situation is not working because I wanted to get well and I paid very close attention in treatment when I went to my first treatment experience I said tell me what to do and I'll do it and I did it right up at the time I got high again and I was watching everybody and I thought I noticed that I wasn't the only one not getting it nobody was getting it barely anybody was making I had been to treatment with thousands of people nobody was getting so I did a little googles because I wanted to just check it out and make sure it wasn't in my head and I googled the success rate and treatment which is terrible at the time when I was doing that I came up with something called spontaneous remission and I thought wait a second what's that so that's where people just decide to stop using and they do and I thought I want to do that I want to be recovered recovery is not working for me I want to be recovered so and while I was Google and I came up also upon a word iatrogenic and I answer Genesis means death by medicine and medicine it's the third leading cause of death in the United States and that means I go in I have problem a and I die of complication B so staph infection you know I'd go out to the hospital to take my appendix out I get staff and die that's an iatrogenic response so medicine wait a second I can't just go to my doctor and go to the treatment center and say here tell me what to do and do it there third leading cause of death holy smokes so let's go back to treatment for a second why isn't it working well one thing I noticed is that treatment and the medical model is pathologizing normal life processes so the pain the loss the grief of life which we need to grow and process and those are things of the soul we now have turned them into diagnoseable mental illness followed by a pill and somebody was sharing with me yesterday they're watching a commercial of you know a family's packing up to move to a new city and their little son's in the back of the car and he's waving to his best friend and oh my god he's crying and of course he needs a pill not wow how's it going to navigate life how will he deal with that loss and change and friends so I keep in touch all the all the questions of life you know lets medicate him and medication here to tell you you don't have no qualms with medication but unfortunately medication has become a lifestyle it's no longer an intervention it's now a lifestyle how many times have we heard people say you know you'll be on this the rest of your life and the problem with that is side effects and every medication has a side effect and some of those side effects are worse than the actual condition that I'm taking the medication for and we hear them on TV these are fairly drastic side effects you know death heart disease your heads going to blow off you're going to kill your parents that stuff and people say you know what I'm hurting I'll take it anyway that won't happen to me that's not that much different than a heroin addict that knows he's gonna get in trouble too but the one side effect that we don't hear about is the side effect of numbness so I have something in my external world some condition that's making me unhappy so I take a pill so I can live with it and not have to manage it unfortunately then I'm numb to other things love and life and my intuition I'm disconnected from that so I take more pills for the numbness because numbness is painful so I realized in treatment that we were not getting to the core issue that we were managing symptoms it's all about symptom management so I'll let you know that anxiety and depression and Bill Wilson that founder of a band said alcoholism is a symptom it's not the problem it is a symptom so we're not getting to the root root cause and I didn't even think I had a root cause you know I grew up I my family was kind to me I was fed I thank you I was cared for you know all that I didn't have the trauma that I heard all these other guys in treatment had so I thought I don't have a core issue but everybody that's doing something that's dis drug has a core issue and what we do is we hide our wounds we protect them so if I were standing here and I twisted my ankle my body would reorganize itself to take weight off of that ankle so it could heal something hurts me deeply I will hide it so no people don't inflame it I'm gonna protect it and eventually it gets relegated to the unconscious mind where I forget about it now but it does not forget about me so I thought root cause we got to get to the root cause so I'm sitting in treatment I think to myself wait a second I know what to do I'm gonna leave treatment and I because I have been scoured worldwide I know more about treatment than anybody that I've ever met including most of the counselors that I've sat with plus all these healers and all these different things I've got this gigantic body of wisdom I am going to go recover and I am going to develop a program to help other people recover and so of course I called my parents right and I told them a great idea they were a little skeptical so I leave treatment for the last time and I come to Sedona and I actually go through this process which was the fountain the foundation of what we're doing now and I got well I recovered and when I say that what do I mean by that well thirty years I would tell you that 90% of my life force my time my energy my thoughts my money went to using and I got to tell you I don't even think about it anymore it doesn't cross my mind I'm in the business of recovery and it still doesn't cross my mind to go do that so here's the model and the model has to do with integration we are integrated beings and we have become disintegrative so we have a body a mind a soul and a spirit and these things work together in a very synergistic way and unless we work on them in a synergistic way we're missing we're missing the power so you know holistic or integration it's all the buzz now it's a great marketing thing and when I began this process we're the only holistic center out there you Google it was like us that's it and now there's it's coming on which is great people are catching on and you know throw a little green juice and some yoga in the mix and some mindfulness and but unless these practices are integrated so the body the mind and the soul and the spirit are sharing information they're like a database that shares information so we have to work on them all if I want to clear any of it so we talk about the body so the body is this colony of trail cells and every time I have a thought it tells the body how to feel so if I think about something a lot I'm instructing my body how to feel and especially if I have something traumatic than I'm thinking about bit so he sometimes think about that over and over and over and over and over again I'm instructing my body so then when I forget about it my body reminds me you know I'm on the beach and I'm having a great time and my body goes oh yeah you're depressed remember oh yeah okay so we have to clear that we gotta clear the cellular memory in the body we got to detoxify the body so we've heard earlier today food a lot of the food that we're eating is toxic which means it's laden with chemicals and hormones and antibiotics that my body can't recognize and it creates inflammation and inflammation is affecting all of my organs and they're sending signals to the brain that I am NOT okay and I can't perceive those signals but they are creating this underlying feeling that I'm not alright so there is a ton of now peer-reviewed science about the condition of the gut and conditions like depression and anxiety ad D I was reading the other day that bipolar disorder has a link to mitochondrial dysfunction Wow my cells affected how I feel at the end of the day our brain needs nutrients and minerals to metabolize and to function well if I'm not getting them then my brain is gonna begin to falter so I gotta work on the body and I have to change my relationship with food and the things I put in there so then we have the mind body mind and most of time we think about the mind that's what I'm using to deliver this talk actually that's about 5% of my mind the other 95% is back here it's unconscious and my unconscious mind is programmed like a computer so all the programs are running in the background and they make me react so I watch my parents when I'm growing and I say you know I will never grow up to be like my dad anybody ever hear somebody say that and of course what happens they grow up exactly like their dad because they're programmed when I have a situation on my hands a trauma something I develop a reaction I devise a strategy to deviate to deal with it then that files in my brain so I know later the brain is efficient so it stores things it says oh that I thought happened then I know what to do I'm gonna react so most of our lives are actually unconscious reactions so we got to get to the unconscious part cognitive behavioral therapy is great but it's only dealing with the 5% I gotta get down here and now the soul and this is where the juice is so I've sat with hundreds of people over the years I say what's this soul and they say you know it's the my essential self it's my authentic truest self and I ask people well give me some words to describe that invariably they'll say love and passion and community and contribution these are all things that sound like luxuries as we're on death's doorstep or I'm stressed out in the day but these are basic life necessities these are important to who we are an example as young people that will join gangs so they join a gang and all of a sudden they have structure and meaning and purpose and they have rules and regulations and structure all the things they don't have at home and they'll take massive chances to get in these things and break the law and could go to jail forever but they do it anyway it's that important another example is people in tragedy crisis 911 and hurricanes people come together and there's no more race or socio-economic differences we are at our best I'm at my highest in crisis why do we have to wait till crisis so the soul and when we are disconnected from our authentic nature we get something called soul sickness and soul sickness as I was getting ready to die that was my big issue that I wasn't going to do what I came here do body mind soul spirit so we live in the sea of energy if you want to talk about the Earth's magnetic field or even the whole quantum field and the field affects everything that's in the field so I have an energy field that's generated by my nervous system and this field interacts with the 'greater field but it doesn't consciously I can't sense this field with my five senses I have to do it with my intuition my awareness through my energy system and when my energy system is compromised then I'm not taking in that prana that information that informs all of life to make you know to sperm and a permanent egg come together a moment of conception and a baby comes out you know all the birds fly south at the same time the the song of life that's my antenna so body mind soul spirit these are not new concepts but we have to work on them in a synergistic way and when we do we can get out of recovery and actually be recovered so people ask me a lot at these kind of conferences okay so if I'm recovered can I go use again and these are counselors that ask me this mostly right so I'm like look if there's something wrong with the present moment and you want to go in just a solvent to change it you might need a little bit more recovery because for me being recovered means that I am aligned with my highest purpose that I am no longer defined by the past and I can let go of the past and people keep talking about the past because they haven't resolved the past so I've resolved the past now I can be defined by Who I am becoming and what is possible for me that's my new definition and being recovered means that I go from chaos to peace that I go from scarcity to abundance that I am on my hero's journey and the journey of the hero is where we take our deepest darkest problems then we turn them into medicine and that's the journey that we all must go through as part of life so addiction might just be the wake-up call to step into your hero's journey and become more than you ever thought that you could be and when we do that then we are recovered and we're gonna tell you that you only have one journey and you get to decide live with passion be recovered thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 374,670

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Personal education, Personal growth, Recovery

Id: 5eJEzg0Tfc4

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018