Demi Lovato Documentary #1 - (Addiction) - Therapist Reacts

hey deserving listeners a lot of you have been asking me to watch the new demi lovato documentary on youtube and react to it so let's get to it my name is dr kirk honda i'm a therapist and a professor and i'm going to watch this and see what comes out of my face let's watch any time that you suppress a part of yourself it's gonna like overflow at some point and that's ultimately like what happened to me in a lot of areas of my life and it was what led to my overdose for sure okay so we're learning that she had an overdose i'm glad from the start i'm hoping that it continues with this to discuss drug addiction substance abuse and how a lot of people suffer from it regardless of how famous and how successful you are we are all susceptible potentially particularly if we've been traumatized to substance abuse a commander for raising awareness about it let's continue watching we had an estranged relationship so we weren't close and growing up my whole life i longed for that relationship with him and then i resented him because he was an addict and an alcoholic and was abusive to my mom and so i cut him out because i felt like you know it was causing more harm than good okay so we learned a little bit of detail about her childhood that her father suffered from substance abuse himself and also that he according to her was abusive with the mother with her mother so as children when we witness violence it can cause a whole number of traumas for us one we don't like to see our parents being abused two we don't like to see our other parents abusing anyone i mean if you just see your parent being violent it actually can be traumatic for you also it makes you wonder am i going to be next it also makes you wonder is our family going to split up and then i'm going to be without protection and security am i going to lose contact there's also the words that are said during these altercations usually that can lead to a lot of pain for a child there are a number of experiences that can be highly traumatic not only in idea like the way i'm framing it but also physiologically our bodies are highly attuned to what's going on around us if a tiger is coming after us our body and we see it there's a whole series of bodily reactions that kick in to keep us safe and when you have chronic trauma and fear and terror and worry and shocks to the system then you can develop ongoing conditions such as ptsd complex ptsd personality disorders depression anxiety a whole slew of things really half of the dsm if not more have trauma as a possible factor in its development also when one of your parents is suffering from substance abuse oftentimes it'll affect their parenting not all the time but it's not unusual for it to happen for a parent to be erratic in their moods they might a very frequent complaint of children who have parents who suffer from substance abuse is that the parents will break a lot of promises the parents will usually be in some kind of shame cycle where they will binge and then they'll be terribly ashamed and they feel terrible about themselves they make all these vows that they're they're going to change and they're not going to do it and then slowly i'll just let a little bit of the substance in and then you know by a week later they're binging again or whatever whatever the timeline on the cycle is and somewhere in that cycle as a parent you will believe that you're you've turned a new leaf and you're going to be a new person and you might feel terrible about the way you've been neglecting or even treating your kids and you will go to them or your spouses or friends or family members work and you'll start making promises partially because you're ashamed and you want to make up for it genuinely but another part of it because you are in denial of the cycle and one of the effects of being in denial is to say well i i can fix it i can just white-knuckle it as people will say in a and i'll be able to get through this which of course is ridiculous to anyone from the outside especially if you know the cycle of addiction you know that there's no chance that you can willpower your way out of addiction you need to surrender you need to say i have a problem and i am powerless and i need to get treatment and i need help and i need to come out of the closet i need to tell everyone i need to deal with my trauma i need to go to therapy for five years to recover from trauma all that sort of thing so we also know that the susceptibility to drug addiction can run in families genetically so maybe demi lovato has some factors that are working against her in that way but the trauma alone can cause someone to have that physiological fear and then when you grow up you're having these spikes and the stress because you're frequently being triggered and you are looking for solutions as a 14 year old as an 18 year old maybe even as a 10 year old and you find that substances will smooth you out will take off that edge will dampen the distress and heroin and opiates are very effective in doing that there are many people who will have long term opiate addictions and they will say that they never felt safe they never felt calm they never felt normal they never felt like they could have a normal conversation or some combination of those things that i just said until i had my first opiate sometimes it's a pill from the dentist sometimes it's recreational at a party and all of a sudden the person says for the first time i feel like i can relax i got a good night's sleep that i could talk with people and not be constantly in my head and worry i could not be triggered by just interacting with people for the first time i felt okay well of course that is a very seductive substance at that point a substance that i can finally feel normal and none of the other things i've tried have helped now of course what they haven't tried is effective long-term care for trauma which is very particular and it's very specialized and there's not a lot of therapists that know about it so it's not unusual that people don't know to seek that but that can actually reduce symptoms such that you don't need substances anyway i'm rambling but let's get back do you have him in my life his death was very complicated because we don't actually know the exact day that he died all we know is that by the time he was found he his body was too decomposed to have an open casket he had been laying there i think for about a week and a half before anybody found him okay so that's another trauma that is likely a factor in her life to one have your father die at any age but particularly when you're young and i don't know if she was told the circumstances of the death but if she were told that that's a traumatic image in your head to imagine your father yeah i won't go into the details you heard her description just having that image in your head of your father would complicate one's grief around that a lot of us are walking around with unresolved grief with complicated grief and our society doesn't help with this there's a minimal amount of attention that will be given to people around grief particularly kids a lot of people society families will treat kids like well they're so resilient and you know she's not talking about it she's okay yeah she might be okay right now but believe me it she needs to be talking about there's a process there the key is is you have to tune in to the child's needs because the child might for six months not want to talk about it but the next six months that's all they want to talk about and so you have to or they might want to talk about it non-stop for three years and then you know or they might want to talk about it one day and not talk about it next day and so you have to be attuned to a child's needs along those lines and one of the things that a lot of children will pick up on is oh people don't really like it when i talk about it it makes people uncomfortable so i'm just going to stuff it and then you can have problems like distress and substance addiction later in life because of the ongoing pain that you're experiencing psychologically anyway i'm rambling i barely watched any of this let's get back that was the fear that i always had for him was that he would end up alone and he did he died alone mental health is something that we all need to talk about and we need to take the stigma away from it six years ago i was drinking vodka out of a sprite bottle at nine in the morning throwing up in the car and i just remember thinking this is no longer cute this is no longer fun okay again commend her for talking openly to fans in the middle of a concert it's pretty brave of her a lot of people wouldn't want to bum out a crowd like that and she's like no well let's talk about it let's talk about mental health let's talk let's self-disclose my own process i'm not just talking about other people i'm talking about me i was really suffering and so she's talking about how she was drinking alcohol out of a sprite bottle i'm guessing what she's referring to is because of an ongoing daily need for alcohol consumption and dependency not only because you become physically addicted meaning that when you are without it you have terrible withdrawal symptoms and so you need alcohol to subdue the withdrawal symptoms but also because of the ongoing trauma i'm guessing she hasn't gone into it that she is suppressing with the alcohol in some ways in in the way i rank things i would say it is a second to opiates heroin percocet these kinds of opiate substances are very effective at getting rid of trauma effects in the short term of course opiates have terrible side effects and terrible on including death there's a thousands upon thousands of people who die from accidentally overdosing on it and i've treated a lot of people who suffer from opiate addiction it's actually kind of prevalent seattle she's talking about alcohol alcohol is also pretty effective so anyway she's talking about how she was drinking alcohol out of a sprite bottle or can and i think she's referring to a very common practice which people will feel very ashamed of themselves and will hide it because they don't want to alarm people around them or they're or they're tired of being hassled by other people and so they will resort to sneaking their alcohol throughout the day i'm guessing that but you know i commend her for talking about this i and i'm just like my dad [Music] i definitely think that she had some things that were underlying that she was trying to self-medicate just like i was trying to do when i was taking xanax i was trying to self-medicate okay so right that's the term that a lot of people use is self-medicate and the mom i think that's the mother biological mother saying that she according to her self-medicated with xanax which is another substance that a lot of people will self-medicate around and abuse xanax similar to alcohol similar to heroin and opiates will subdue your nervous system such that you don't feel the pain you don't feel the psychological pain you can get through the day you're more relaxed it's it's easier to cope with things you feel less anxious about things and it becomes a cycle so the mom sounds like she might have addiction that runs in her family compulsive use that runs in her family so demi lovato is getting it both from dad and mom maybe even the biological parents would use together back in the day i don't know another factor that's really quite common is that when we have a loved one who dies of a substance problem or that's how we perceive it then if we have complicated grief around the loss and we haven't resolved we haven't given we haven't been given enough chance to process our feelings and the pace that we want to then sometimes a coping mechanism available to us is to as a as in a hope to connect with that person because we long for that person that person is is lost to us we can't access that person anymore they're gone and we want contact with them and one of the ways that we will do this subconsciously is to act like them or the narrative that we have of them and if we saw them as an out of control person who used substances then we might do that as a way of trying to connect with them psychologically and emotionally and attachment-wise so i don't know if demi lovato did that as well but i've seen clients do that before let's get back to the show you know she was around for some of the abuse um from my first husband and sometimes i feel like that stayed with her for many years when i didn't know that she probably needed to work with a professional to work through some of that just like i didn't know they were causing issues in myself yeah good the mom is saying i didn't know maybe she should have been working with a professional what i would have recommended i think if i knew the details is a family therapist to help them as a i'm a family therapist and i find that it can be very helpful to have the ability for the therapist to know the kids and the parents to have meetings together to have meetings separate and it's it there's a lot more opportunity we tend to look at psychological health as an individual thing where you take the child and you put them in therapy and that can help but i find as a family therapist you can get so much more done so much more quicker if you have a competent family therapist with a family that actually wants to work mental illness to think that that's that's all there is to it i also felt a lot of guilt over the years because i've been such an advocate for mental health yeah here was my father who had bipolar and schizophrenia and then on top of that the disease of addiction all right so a little bit more detail she is saying that her father suffered from bipolar and schizophrenia these are two conditions that often go hand in hand some researchers consider it to be on a spectrum where you have bipolar on one side and schizophrenia and the other schizoaffective is in there as well anyway without going into the weeds on that what that probably means especially if the father was diagnosed with schizophrenia is that there were times when he had breaks from reality or delusions or psychosis or hallucinations or voices or manic episodes where he would become extremely unhinged and very different and harmful to himself or all the above that is a very significant mental condition for someone to go through so i feel really bad for her father and then of course as a daughter as you're watching your father go through that that would also be very worrisome and kids don't know it's like they can't differentiate between the parent when they're acting as the true self and when their psychosis or their mental illness is manifesting and so that i don't know but it just brings up a lot of other possibilities as to what demi lovato went through as a child or the way that i had been preaching about and that really ate up at me but ultimately like i know that he was kind of too far gone at that point he needed to realize that he needed help himself sobriety has to be your choice and no one else's if it is someone else's choice for you then it won't last and so i tried to get him to get help and i wasn't able to make that happen he just he wasn't ready yeah that's completely true and it's a hard thing to accept for a lot of family members but it is true that sobriety begins from the person who is suffering from the addiction if you've ever had a family member who suffered from addiction you know this that you can't force them even if you met like i would work with families where the parents had control over the child and they would force the child into rehab and they would do everything right they would you know have the kid in therapy they would have the kid in substance abuse treatment they would go to family therapy they would work on their parenting they would work with physicians they would try to bond with the kid they would do all the right things and at the end of the day it was up to the kid if the kid said well i'll be sober for a while because you i mean this is all in their head the kid's saying okay fine i'll be sober for a while because you're making it incredibly inconvenient for me to use at this point but as soon as i have a chance i'm going back to using and then if you have a spouse or an ex-spouse who is suffering from an addiction then that's going to be even harder to get someone to change you've probably had years and years and years of developing a problem developing a dependency on it meaning the withdrawal symptoms are now extremely problematic as you've been using daily for five years but also the emotional dependency without it the person doesn't know how to how to cope emotionally they don't know how to cope professionally they don't know how to cope socially but it did depend on the person it depended on them to make a choice and that is an elusive thing that begins from within the person sometimes people say you gotta hit bottom sometimes you have a moment of clarity it's really an elusive thing and people have been trying to study this this moment where because you'll you'll ask people with 10-year sobriety like what was it about that moment and we study those things because if we could know what it was about that moment that began the road to recovery then we could replicate that with all the other people but it's we just can't everyone's particular everyone has their own process there seems to be a model that helps uh and it helps to encourage people you have meetings 12-step you have therapy of trauma recovery you have there's a whole series of coping techniques like getting rid of the substance not hanging out with friends that use not getting bored there's a whole system that's involved but it still needs to come from within as the mother is saying if you look at my family history my mom has dealt with substances and an eating disorder so i didn't know any different then i was put in beauty pageants where it's extremely competitive and it's all about your looks and your talent my self-esteem was just completely damaged from those beauty pageants i remember actually making a pact with myself saying if i don't win this pageant i will never eat again yeah these beauty pageants have to be looked at i know that they have been by society for a while now after certain reality tv shows revealed things documentaries about these child beauty pageants but i think we need to look at it more i don't know what the percentage is you know let's say that 90 of the kids are not harmed by these beauty pageants or even their life is better because of the beauty pageant so let's say 90 do we still want to sacrifice the 10 of kids that are being harmed by it do is does that justify it especially the the way that the sort of pressure to look perfect to be perfect to look like a little adult often people are sexualized children are sexualized in these pageants which probably isn't helpful and completely unnecessary why do we want to do that so she's talking about yet another trauma that she went through and she is raising awareness about that so really really bad for what she went through families and their next break i've realized that i've spent more time trying to please other people the past several years of my life than i have really trying to make it what i want it wasn't until the last so that's very insightful of her to say that she was trying to please everyone else and she wasn't thinking about what she wanted and you could imagine that being fostered in a child who is on stage a lot when you're on stage when we watch people on stage it seems like the world is their oyster but if you've ever been on stage particularly in a scenario like that you know that there's a lot of people telling you what to do and as that the other person said there's a lot of people that depend on you their jobs literally depend on you being on stage and doing well to perform well it's a lot of pressure to put on anyone let alone a child but anyway so one of the things that can happen to kids when they go through traumas and there's violence and substance abuse in the family is the child will not be given a chance to develop a connection with their self if you listen to my podcast you hear me talk about that a lot you can listen to other past episodes a sense of self you can search for that in the episodes where i go into more detail but the point is is that in order for children to develop a connection with themselves there needs to be a safe place where they can explore a lot of mirroring and attunement to the child's needs a lot of communication to the child about what they're feeling such that the child learns oh that's what i'm feeling that's what i want it's okay to want things it's okay to say no it's okay to ask for things within reason of course and then you develop this connection with the self you you dev you develop a connection with your emotional center with your needs with your power with your assertiveness with your entitlement we're not all 100 titled but we are entitled to some things we're entitled to say hey i have needs here and i'm a part of the equation i'm not here just to please everyone else around me so she's talking about that as well that she had a hard time with that but she has learned to you know have a connection with the self and to stand up for herself which is good trying to keep her well and it had just eaten away at her there were times where i had to spend the night because she like ate a cookie i felt like i was always walking on eggshells no matter what what i was eating around who what we had in our dressing room what kind of food it was very intense everyone around her had to be drug tested you know she wasn't allowed to hang out with anybody that wasn't sober completely there were times where i was just like and by the way if you have an eating disorder you think you might or you might think you might know someone else that does if you have trauma or you think you might suffer from some sort of trauma condition if you have a substance abuse problem if you have a suicide issue make sure make sure that you talk to a therapist or a professional that specializes in that as i always say never use youtube as a replacement for therapy you deserve a therapist get one you really really do deserve a therapist everyone does so you really really do please get one i put on like a little weight so like i don't want to go on stage every night and clothes that are like showy a part of the problem is too is like the sketches that they draw everything looks good on a sketch because it's a 10 foot 90 pound model with a 5 inch waist there's just so much pressure as a female in the industry to look a certain way and to like dress a certain way yeah a hundred percent and it's only getting worse it is only getting worse and by the way these discussions if you are susceptible to this can be triggering to you and again you probably want to not watch this video if you are being triggered the documentary included by the way they had a little bit of a trigger warning at the beginning of the video but i think that it needs to be repeated through a video just because some people might think oh i'm not going to be triggered by this and then they're in the midst of being triggered and they need to so just check in with your body you can always pause it and come back later or not watch it all and again talk with your professional the legendary iconic debbie this is a special day six years [Applause] the other thing i'll say is that relapse is normal it is very frequent in fact when you go through recovery you make plans for the likelihood that you're going to relapse maybe even relapse for a while that happens and the reason why we want to prepare people for that is when people relapse they will often go overboard because they're so ashamed that they're relapsing and so we want to put a bunch of ideas into their head like it's okay we you know we don't want you to relapse and we're gonna do everything we can to prevent it but if you do it's okay you just keep coming back you know that's what a a and n a meetings just say just just keep coming back don't be ashamed relapse is normal just just keep coming if you keep coming you'll eventually get down the road so i'm guessing she had a massive relapse and that is very very common especially when you're under under a tremendous amount of pressure so yeah i don't know what it was involved now the part of the problem with relapsing especially when you're talking about opiates is that opiates can kill you if you take too much think about if you're say a cigarette smoker and you quit for six years and then one night you have a few drinks you're like screw it i'm gonna smoke a cigarette and that whole that that night you smoke an entire pack of cigarettes well that's not probably going to kill you but with heroin when you use after any opiate when you use after a while one it can slow down your heart such that you will die other complications basically can lead to death from opiates but the other thing is is that you will use the the amount you use is based on what you think you're supposed to use so when you were using all the time every day your tolerance went up so you needed more and more and more to get high and more and more and more to just feel anything and then you quit for six years and that tolerance goes away and now you only need a tiny little bit to get high or to have the effect but you don't necessarily know that or you're not remembering that and you take a similar amount that you used to take or even just you know maybe a quarter of the amount but that is enough to kill someone that doesn't have the tolerance so that's why a lot of people end up dying i don't know if that's what happened to her with the overdose i'm guessing they'll get into it i had a photo shoot and i remember being at the photo shoot and just thinking to myself like i don't even know why i'm sober anymore like i am so miserable um i'm not happy i have all this stuff that i'm dealing with i picked up a bottle of red wine that night and it wasn't even 30 minutes before i called someone that i knew had drugs on them i'm surprised i didn't owe you that night right so that'll happen if you used to use a lot and then the idea i'm guessing for her this is speculative but a lot of times though so the way she told the story was i was just sitting there in a photo shoot and i thought why am i even sober i'm guessing that that was a thought that had been building up for a while that's usually what happens it's usually a slippery slope where you just have this tiny little thought and then you don't deal with it you don't talk about it you don't say oh it's coming back i need to increase my measures to make sure that i stay sober or what's going on in my life that is causing me so much stress that i that i'm thinking about substance use what you know it's a barometer it's a indication i just had an intrusive thought about relapsing what's going on in my life what's happening what's happening in my body what's happening in my relationship what's what's happening in my life and you need to be open about it you need to start talking about it you need to reach out you'll be like something's going on here because i know that sobriety is better than using i know that using is tempting and i know that i could probably have one fun night but i know that if i open the door to substances my life will become completely unmanageable and it's going to destroy could even kill me so i'm guessing she didn't do that and which isn't uncommon it's very normal relapse is normal the thought is building up in her mind a little bit by a little bit and then one day she's just like screw it i'm just going to bit a bottle watch just a bottle of wine people drink wine i'm just saying things that people will frequently say but the addict part of the brain if you'll go with this uh this metaphor the attic part of their brain is like hahaha we'll get her to drink wine because wine is no big deal but that'll open the door to all the other substances we want and then we can really go to town the metaphor is sometimes really helpful for people who subs who suffer from substance abuse problems because they know what that is if you've ever had a substance abuse problem you might be able to relate to that there's a there's an addict part of the brain that is always scheming and trying to get you back into the lifestyle by tricking you and saying it's not literally a part of your personality but certain ideas start to form in your head and and over time if you don't deal with it if you don't talk about it if you don't get support if you don't go back to meetings if you don't go back to therapy if you don't address the stress that's going on in your life if you don't start speaking up if if you don't allow old patterns to start getting back into your life if if you don't stop self-shaming yourself which is another reason why people will will use again then those those thoughts they grow and they start to take over the entirety of your psyche before long you're buying substances at the store and then you're using all night so she's describing a very very common scenario of relapse went on a shopping spree that night i did drugs that i'd never done before i'd never done meth before i tried meth i mixed it with molly with yeah she is describing another common scenario that when you've been sober for a long time and you you've had you have relapse energy building up inside of you and then you let a little bit in i'm guessing she said to herself i'm just gonna have a glass of wine just one glass no big deal but of course that addict mind is saying hahaha i know we're gonna go to town and what will happen is that people think okay this is my one night i'm gonna i'm gonna be sober again later so i'm gonna do everything and every and all the things tonight because this is my one last and then i'll then i'll be done and then you end up using obviously way too much substance and really putting your life in danger and around 5 30 in the morning i said i was going to bed but the reality was that i had called one of my dealers over paramedic upper 65 what's the address of the emergency i we just need to get some money out yeah do you know what happened to her okay gonna be there shortly stay with the patient i'm gonna remain on the line with you all the way until the paramedics arrive okay okay we just need someone to slack them down right yeah please yeah i'll uh second that it's okay to ask for help if you or someone you know is struggling with addiction call 1-800-662-help or visit samhsa.gov for free information and support not only just with addiction but we're here to talk about eating disorders and trauma recovery and all the things so make sure you reach out to someone you can talk to them you can also contact the national suicide prevention hotline you can just google the dv hotline domestic violence hotline you can reach out to your physician or a therapist and sometimes it takes a while to find the right one to treat your issue but make sure you do that you deserve that i know a lot of you have done that already and i commend you for that maybe comment below maybe support each other below in the comments and everyone out there please take care of yourself because you deserve it you really really do

Channel: Psychology In Seattle

Views: 85,941

Rating: 4.9451218 out of 5

Keywords: Demi Lovato, documentary, addiction, therapist reacts, Dancing with the Devil, Psychology, Therapy, Counseling, Self-Help, Education, Movies, Wellness, Relationships, Culture

Id: qpf7XY3L3aY

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021