Where change started...

There was a noise.

Usually, there wasn’t much that could overcome the deadening effect of the drugs on my sleep, but on this particular morning, a constant buzzing was breaking through. I wasn’t fully awake but the noise had pulled me back to consciousness. I didn’t want to be awake.

Then, there was pain.

Since the accident, it sometimes seemed as if physical pain was the primary motivating factor in my life. It got me drugs, after all. This latest cycle had started with the Vicodin prescribed by my doctor. A thousand whole milligrams every four hours. That left me feeling deeply groggy and numb. Life took on a hazy, foggy sort of quality. I wanted something to counter that sensation. I didn’t like being so out of it. Plus, the Vicodin didn’t really mask the slow, intense throbbing of my broken, useless leg. 

Now there was light, too.

It was pouring through the blinds, directly onto my still-closed eyes. My large bedroom window, which took up more than half of the wall next to my bed, faced east. Not great for someone who wants to sleep in and avoid reality. The noise was still there, growing ever louder, maybe closer? Without even opening my eyes I knew that something was wrong. I knew I should recognize this noise. I couldn’t place it, but I’d definitely heard it before. I tried to open my eyes but the light flooded my vision and, for a moment, I couldn’t make anything out. The only thing I could see were shadows, hazy shapes floating around me. I needed to focus but even such a simple task proved much more difficult than I’d expected. The sound was starting to clarify and come into focus. I suddenly realized that the “noise” was actually a series of loud voices. There were people. They seemed to be repeating a phrase, over and over.

They were screaming at me.

Now I knew that something was seriously wrong. I felt my heart beating furiously in my chest, and I struggled to sit upright. I had to get up. The words were coming together now, and I felt a wave of panic wash over me. I finally knew what they were saying.

They were screaming my name.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of glass shatter and I could make out people running into the room, swarming around me. This was no dream. It wasn’t even a nightmare. I was awake.

As I sat up in my bed, all I could focus on was the loaded shotgun pointed directly at my face.

A Reality Check

We’re all hooked on something.

It’s true.

Even when we don’t want to admit it.

Despite its prevalence, wide repercussions, and countless forms, we tend to think of addiction as something that happens to other people. But in reality, we’re all either addicted to something or close to someone who is – nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, video games, work, social media, porn, television, cocaine, gambling, cannabis, pills, shopping, or methamphetamine – you can likely find yourself and many people you know, somewhere on the list.

Today, after decades of effort and admonition, addiction is still destroying the fabric of society. With alcohol and tobacco included, there are oover 100 million people in the U.S. who struggle with substance problems – 28 million for alcohol, 57 million with nicotine, 24 million with drugs, including prescription pills (National Center for Drug Use Statistics, 2023; SAMHSA, 2021). Add to those the growing number (21 million and climbing) estimated to be compulsively using technology, porn, and online gaming (CITATION[AJ1] ). We’re more hooked as a nation than ever before. With as many as 165 million Americans reported to be struggling with an addiction to something (CITATIONS[AJ2] ), and approximately 200,000 Americans dying every year from drug- and alcohol-related deaths (National Center for Drug Use Statistics, 2023), the damage is devastating. The impact on family members and loved ones can be enormous, with broken marriages, destroyed businesses, and a massive effect on health and our entire criminal justice system having become the reality we’ve all become so used to living within. It is estimated that 85% of those incarcerated either struggle with current addiction problems or are serving time for drug-related offenses. And the cost to the U.S. economy related to tobacco, alcohol, and drug use is estimated to be between $820 billion and over $3 trillion (citation[AJ3] )

So, while many people think the addiction problem looks like this:

It actually looks much more like this:

So, why haven’t we been able to solve the problem of addiction?

Scores of organizations and thousands of experts have tried fixing the addiction issue for decades. From brain research to severe criminal penalties and interdiction efforts, no expenses have been spared. And yet, we’ve hardly made a dent in the problem: more and more people are dying every year, societal costs are higher than ever, and rates of addiction have barely budged.

What are we missing?

The problem is in our fundamentally flawed approach to defining and understanding addiction. Our mistaken assumptions regarding what addiction is keeps preventing us from addressing it appropriately and successfully transforming its effect on us. We’re focused on the wrong pieces of the puzzle, so no one has managed to get a clear picture.

And I used to be in that camp myself.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve learned a lot – through my own experiences, through my classroom education, and through my research, my teaching and then directly through helping thousands of suffering people. So, I have developed an incredibly intimate understanding of this problem. That moment in my bedroom, waking up to a SWAT team on a Saturday morning, was not the end of the road for my addiction. It was the consequence of years of destructive, compulsive- addictive- behavior. But it was also a critical part of my journey to understanding and recovering from addiction. There were many other crucial junctures along the way, some of which you’ll hear about in this book. I am going to break down what I learned for you, step by step, so that anyone who wants to get unhooked can do so. I am passionate about this work for many different reasons, but the first is certainly my own unexceptional, and yet startling story. It started well before I had that shotgun pointed at my head.

I was 14 years old when my family moved to the United States. In many ways, the move was an adventure. I mean, who wouldn’t want to “go to America” for a few years and see all those streets paved with gold, full of movie stars, and free of the conflict and war that regularly ravaged my country? It sounded great!

Too bad my parents moved us to Skokie, Illinois. The town was made famous by a neo-Nazi march in the 90s and a single line about a barbershop quartet in the movie The Usual Suspects. We didn’t have gold streets and there were no movie stars to gawk at. It was colder in the winter than anything I’d ever experienced and we lived right off Elm Street, which I was pretty sure meant I was going to be killed by Freddie Kruger in my sleep. (I hadn’t yet realized that every neighborhood in the U.S. had its own Elm Street).

What I also hadn’t realized was the impact that leaving the intimacy of my neighborhood, and the comfort of the only home I’d ever known would have on me. All my friends, all that was familiar to me, disappeared in a moment. My language, the air I was used to breathing… it was all gone. I wasn’t prepared for that. And I was walking, shaky and angst-ridden, into the first year of high school.

While many of you probably didn’t experience this, there’s usually a table in the cafeteria reserved for the foreign kids -- and it’s not the cool kids table. We were all transplants, knew no one, and either we sounded or looked different (and someties both). It was made very clear that we didn’t really fit in. And for a kid like me, trying to fit in became incredibly important. Still, no matter what I did, I felt like I was on the outside looking in. I joined sports teams, and that helped a bit. I got to know some of the other students through football, then soccer, then tennis and swimming. I was good enough to fit in there, but it didn’t seem to translate to our times outside practice. I tried to make friends with the other Israeli kids but I always felt like they were in on some joke that I didn’t get. While this feeling of angst had definitely started with my friends back home, I became engulfed by anxiety and fear in Chicago.

Until that fateful trip to the Israeli sleepaway camp.

I’ll never forget it. The trip was organized by an Israeli youth group I was part of; eight other transplants who’d recently ended up in Chicago. As we boarded the plane for New Jersey, I was filled with excitement and possibility. When we got there, we met up with at least 100 other kids – from San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Miami. It was like an Israeli transplant conference located in a cold and snowy New Jersey log cabin camp. I was feezing, but also felt more at home than I had in months. Leaving the awkwardness of my Chicago high school behind was an incredible relief. We spent our first day getting to know each other, playing games, making fools of ourselves, and having fun like kids should. When the first night came, my life changed.

About thirty or forty of us ended up in one of the bigger cabins. We weren’t really supposed to all join together – boys and girls were to be separated – but try to tell that to a bunch of kids in high school. At some point in the night, while I was heavily engaged in a conversation with some new friends, a boy tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a massive glass bottle. I was a jug of vodka.

I’d seen vodka before, but I’d never really tried it. My mom would drink some occasionally, though my dad didn’t really drink at all. I’d had a few sips of wine at one Jewish holiday event or another but nothing more. Still, packed into this room of boys and girls I liked hanging out with, it was clear what I was expected to do.

“Yalla, take a drink and pass it on,” the boy told me.

I froze for a split second, trying to figure out my next move.

A moment later, I grabbed the jug from his hand.

There was exactly a 0% probability that, on this night, finally feeling good and comfortable amongst these kids after months of feeling like an alien outsider, I would say no to that drink.

I wasn’t about to feel like an outsider again. So I took a big mouthful and swallowed. Then I took another.

I can still remember the burn of that vodka on the way down. It tasted horrible and made me almost throw up. But I knew I had to hold it in. So, I steadied myself, put a smile on, raised the jug, and passed it on to someone else. I had passed the test.

It was approximately 15 minutes after that moment when the best feeling I had never known existed took over my body. It was  like a warm blanket on a cold night. All my anxiety, my fears of not fitting in, and my constant worry about what others thought of me simply vanished.

I felt GOOD!

For the rest of that night I talked, danced, and sang with my new friends. By the end of the night I had even fooled around with one of the girls which, for a 14-year-old boy, felt momentous. By any way I could measure it, that night was one of the best nights of my life. And we still had another night there.

By the time we took the bus back to the Newark airport for the flight home, I was plugged in. I had friends, I was dancing in the aisles (sober) and singing at the top of my lungs. I had arrived. Who knew a few sips of a clear liquid from a jug could make that happen?  It was clear to me that I had found the answer to all my problems…

Needless to say, alcohol (and then drugs) became a very regular part of my life.  I started being invited to weekend parties with  all those kids I hadn’t quite belonged with . For many of us who realize we’re “hooked” there is an origin story like this. But that was just the beginning of my journey. But here’s the thing: most people who read (or even tell) stories like this one believe, mistakenly, that we’ve gotten “hooked” on alcohol, or pills, or porn, or gambling or food. That’s even how we identify the problem in the first place – “alcoholism,” “cocaine/food/porn addiction”. But these things are not what hooked me at all, nor what hooked any of the people I have worked with. And while everyone who tried to help me 20 years ago wanted to convince me that there was something inherently wrong with me - that I had some mysterious disease causing such disastrous results- they were all wrong as well. No, in reality, that sip of alcohol was the first medicine I took to relieve the pain inflicted by invisible emotional “hooks” that had a hold on me. Those hooks were the real issue, not the presenting problem: self-medication using alcohol and drugs. Unfortunately, when you focus on the  wrong aspect of a problem, the solutions you come up with are unlikely to help in any real way. The tools you use and the methods you employ are aimed at the wrong target, resulting in more damage in some instances and simply not  creating  change in others. And that’s why the mainstream treatment of addictive habits and compulsions is, and has been, so unsuccessful. Because it doesn’t address the core issue… it doesn’t unhook the hooks.

As Seymour Chwast once said - “If you’re digging a hole in the wrong place, making it deeper doesn’t help anything.”

I FEEL LIKE WE COULD USE A DRAWING HERE OF A PERSON HOOKED BY PAST PAIN?[ly4] [AJ5] 

I’ve [AJ6] [ly7] had the good fortune of studying addiction for the past thirty-two years, starting as an active participant. I used alcohol, cannabis and every other drug imaginable in what I now refer to as my “embedded lived experience” phase. I traded my cushy upper-middle-class life for an seven-year tour through the gutters of LA and took on the role of the classic “drug addict” (a term we’ll tear down and do away with in this book), using anything at any time to lose myself. I seemed to care for no one and nothing, myself included, and I suffered the consequences: four different arrests, including that full NCIS-style SWAT team arrest you read about earlier, courtesy of the Beverly Hills Police Department. By the time I was picked up from my bed by four officers and hauled off to LA County Jail--leg shattered from a motorcycle accident, gun at my side, meth pipe on the table, and a suitcase full of money and drugs in my closet--I had left a trail of wreckage too long and devastating to overcome by almost anyone’s reckoning.

It was at this point, weighing just 124 pounds, alienated from everyone important in my life, and headed straight into the abyss that I decided I was done with my “lived experiences” phase.

Phase 2--Clawing My Way Back

Unfortunately, addiction wasn’t quite done with me. I was caught with drugs in rehab after three months and promptly kicked out. As he escorted me out, my counselor told me that I would be allowed back in if I could maintain 30 days of sobriety. This he said with a straight face. I had been using and selling drugs for so long that I had forgotten how to live a “normal” life or play by the rules. Or maybe I’d never really know how to do it in the first place. Fortunately, by the time I checked into my second rehab, the pieces started coming together. Facing 15 years in prison, I managed to stay sober and complete the program.

The time of my sentencing, about a year later, was an incredibly tense moment for my family. Even with my newly discovered sobriety and clean-cut image, we had no idea how things would go. I had to plead guilty to nine different felonies. The judge could have sentenced me to over 20 years in prison and no one (except my father in the courtroom) would have batted an eyelash. My life hung in the balance, and I wouldn’t have thought it unjust if it went the wrong way. As it turned out, I got lucky and was given a single year in jail with a seven-year suspended sentence--meaning that after jail, if I screwed up again, I’d spend a very long time behind bars.

Like the sword of Damocles, that suspended sentence hung over my head, an ever-present reminder that my freedom could be taken away in an instant.

I got the message.

Still, I knew nothing of how to live a normal life. I hadn’t done it since the age of fourteen. After nearly a year of unsuccessfully searching for work (turns out no one will hire a nine-time convicted felon), I decide to go down the only path that seemed available to me--school. I had barely finished my bachelor’s degree at UCLA and graduated on a technicality. But I was out of options. So, I decided graduate school was the answer. My father, who had wanted nothing more than for me to follow in his footsteps as a doctor, no longer had much faith in my abilities. And we wondered if I’d even be allowed to practice medicine if I made it through medical school—after all, I couldn’t even get a job delivering pizza, and it was unlikely that a medical board would let me through. So, we decided on a graduate degree in psychology.

That proved to be a wise choice, and the third phase of my transformation began.

Phase 3--Redemption

My path through school looked very different this time. After everything I’d been through, I was so committed and driven that I became the student who organized the study groups instead of ignoring them; I stayed after class to talk to the professors and made it to all the office hours instead of never showing up to class; and I started working on assignments and papers weeks in advance, instead of forgetting all about them until after they were due. And there were a lot of papers. Somehow, the lazy, rebellious, smart but incompetent version of me was replaced by that annoying “apple for the teacher” student I’d made fun of my whole life. It was my first true indication that real change is possible when the right conditions align. This new version of me became a star student, 4.0 GPA and all. It also got me through two master’s degrees and a PhD from UCLA, the top psychology graduate programs in the country. It was wild.

I was more motivated than ever before and had greater follow-through than anyone could have predicted. No one – not my parents, not my sister, not my professors from a past life or my friends – would have believed I’d find this version of myself hidden under all the pain and waste that my life had become. My drive was centered on two matters: making sure I stayed the hell out of prison and figuring out how I’d become a meth user and dealer after such a promising and privileged start. Still, even with this determination and direction, I rose slowly. The pit I had dug for myself was deep and it was going to take time to get out. Along the way, a deep desire to help others going down similar dead-end roads called out to me. I knew, for the first time ever, that I had a true purpose. I put everything I had into this purpose – studying late, learning how to write and to communicate the research I was learning, experimenting on myself and then testing theory after theory[ly8]  with those who eventually came to seek help in my treatment center, online programs and lectures.

This book is the result of those thirty years of research; from addiction to academia and now, to helping others find their own way out. Here, we’ll journey from the miniscule (neurochemistry) to the monumental (societal and existential factors) to map the real reasons we get addicted in the first place. Then we’ll use that foundation to address addiction in a new way-- that finally works. But first, let’s look at why, as a society, we have made so little progress to date.

The current sad state of affairs

As I’ve explained, the story we tell about addiction is simply wrong. And we’ve become satisfied with very simple answers to explain a very complex condition.

One of those simple answers comes down to the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical “reward signal” that makes us feel great. When the brain releases a dopamine surge, it interprets whatever is happening at that moment as highly rewarding. And so, we seek that dopamine brain-buzz, whether we get it from a piece of chocolate, an eagerly anticipated text, a raise at work, a goal scored, or a line of cocaine. Dopamine release has an impact on brain areas related to motivation, movement, learning, and more. We seek out those dopamine hits, often without being aware of it, by recreating the behaviors that prompted its release. [ly9] 

Throughout evolution, our brains have used the release of dopamine to indicate what’s good and novel (by releasing more dopamine) and what is not good, or no longer novel (by releasing less or no dopamine). In that way, these dopamine bursts teach our brain how we should behave to get the desired result of the dopamine hit. [ly10] The more of this learning that occurs, the less conscious effort must be put into generating the requisite behavior. And once a behavior has been repeated enough to become habitual, dopamine release slows down and eventually stops all together. Unaware of this, we increasingly repeat the behavior, trying to get a dopamine reward. To no avail.

Because habits don’t require more dopamine to be repeated--they drive themselves on near autopilot. That’s because habits are all about brain efficiency. Our brains want to engage in habits and rituals--automatic practices that require little attention. This is what the brain is built to do. It’s economical and saves energy and resources. That said, addiction is no simple matter of cause and effect or stimulus/reward; it’s the continuation of habitual behavior that no longer serves us, creating repercussions. Yet even though the process of addiction is more layered and complex, requiring the examination of our emotional hooks, we’ve been mostly satisfied to look for answers in this basic dopamine-learning story.

This causal, reward-based system aligns with the definition of addiction as a biological, progressive “brain-disease.” But there are some major problems with that simplistic disease model of addiction:

1) It leads us to seek a solution in the world of biology, where physical diseases are treated or cured: if addiction is caused by the dopamine release we get from drugs, then all we need to do is stop taking drugs and we’ll break the cycle forever, right? Wrong--because in truth, addiction isn’t purely biological. It lives in everything that makes us who we are: the biological machine we inhabit (citations[AJ11] ), the psychological experiences we’ve been through (citations[AJ12] ), the people, cultures, and places that surround us (citation[AJ13] ), and the connection (or lack thereof) to something bigger [AJ14] than ourselves (citation[AJ15] ). All these factors and circumstances play a role in the complex system that creates that dopamine release[AJ16] [ly17]  as well as other important biological systems.

2) It reinforces the false notion of “addicts” as a special, separate group of people. It ignores the fact that we all have experience getting addicted to something and that dopamine drives the same reward mechanisms in all of us. This false separation allows us to ignore the real impact, which allows the problem to spread, obscured. (citations[AJ18] [AJ19] ) Indeed, the world is getting better every day at tapping into new sources of engagement and pleasure making each of us more reliant on the subsequent dopamine hits released in our brain. Unless we intervene, the future is clear: an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with rewards that allows more and more people to be controlled and manipulated by the destructive sources of those rewards[AJ20] .

It’s happening all around us in technology, advertising, marketing media, and pharmaceuticals. Our reward systems are being aimed towards obsessions that bring about questionable, if any, benefit, and it’s only getting worse. From heroin to porn, TikTok, Candy Crush, and texting, our minds are being hijacked. And the result is emptiness, desperation, and an ever-growing dissatisfaction with our lives and ourselves. 

The idea that the world is separated into addicts and “normal people” is not only false, but causes shame, isolation, and hopelessness. Labeling people as addicts, telling them they suffer from an intractable disease and declaring them powerless in the face of their condition has not worked. Indeed, the all-or-nothing methods we employ for addiction are the reason [AJ21] [ly22] behind the obscenely high failure rates we’ve come to expect as fact in the world of addiction. As I’ve said, addiction is more than a simple cause-effect dynamic.

Addiction’s habitual character is a natural, chemical drive. And everyone has undesirable, even compulsive, habits to everyone to different degrees. Knowing this, I propose a new way forward, one that doesn’t focus on the presenting problem of the behavior. Because the alcohol use, drugs, porn, overeating, or social media compulsions are not the actual problems at all. They are simply the compulsive and habitual behaviors formed in response to the real issues – the hooks . These bad habits are what many of us, trying to cope in this modern world, have turned to in our natural inclination to find what we truly crave: connection, joy, worth, and meaning in our lives.

The new, alternative understanding of addiction overturns the old cause-effect model by first addressing the hooks themselves. Trauma, relationship problems, biological dysregulation, early exposure to drug use, work stress, family dysfunction, sexual/gender confusion, perfectionism, insomnia, anxiety, depression, financial struggles, low-self esteem, boredom and lack of purpose are all common hooks that can result in addiction to negative behaviors.

The Unhooked Method allows anyone to first uncover, and then dig deep into these core issues that hook people, enabling sufferers to understand why such destructive behavior developed in response. That leads to an understanding and acceptance of what the consequences of that behavior have been. This knowledge unhooks the present pain from past pain, discomfort and hurt. Finally, once unhooked, the presenting problem- the compulsive behavior itself—can be replaced with more advantageous behaviors that promote wellness and positive functioning. I will explain why trying to simply stop a habit, cold turkey- what the old models are based on -  is a fool’s errand. Using the Unhooked Method, you won’t be labeled or told you’re powerless (you’re not). Instead, you will be empowered.  

The Unhooked Method gives you a step-by-step recipe for deconstructing and changing any bad habits that have taken over your life - or that of a loved one- and replacing them with good ones. You’ll learn how to make sure the forces driving the addiction are minimized while those supporting growth are reinforced. And you’ll be guided in the creation of a personalized path out of addiction.

This is the same method that allowed me to go from a hopeless drug dealer, addicted to his own supply and headed straight to prison for the rest of his life, to a blissful husband and father of three who is recognized as a worldwide expert in his field. It wasn’t magic, and there’s nothing special about me – it took time, deliberate effort, and a method that does its job.

In last 32 years of my life, I have realized the mistakes of the old model of addiction and have methodically studied the true origins of the issues that I (and millions of others) have struggled with. And, in doing so, I have been able to get myself and thousands of others unhooked. It’s unlikely, and very rare, that you or your loved ones are truly unable to put these addictive habits behind you. You simply must redirect your efforts, get real about the hidden hooks that have been keeping you trapped, and go about systematically dismantling them.

To better understand this, we have to go back to… the end. Not the beginning. In the next post , you will see what I mean.

IMPORTANT - If you’re someone who is struggling with a big change in your life, or are wanting some massive change that seems just out of reach, it may be a good idea to connect. Reach out here and let’s see if I can help you!