Talking Addiction, Community, Recovery, And Finding Our Tribe: An Interview with Dr Adi Jaffe
Dr. Adi Jaffe holds a PhD in Neuroscience, from UCLA, and is an expert in addiction and mental health. His own journey through life has been far from straightforward, a former meth addict and drug dealer, he spent a year in prison. This was the catalyst for his own recovery. His decision to study extensively to gain a PhD, and his experience in modern addiction recovery techniques has helped thousands worldwide. In this interview, we discuss the topic of community, why it’s important to mental wellbeing, and how it has got him where he is today.
I have been working with Dr. Jaffe for the better part of a year now, and the difference it has made in my life has been incredible. His IGNTD Heroes program is revolutionary in that it is purely online, but still has the support of Dr. Jaffe himself (and his neuroscience PhD!) within the group setting.
When I sat down with Adi, I knew that I was in for a whirlwind of an interview, but I didn’t expect it to contain even half as much wisdom, fire and inspiration as it did! I’m sharing here the highlights of that interview, but for the full thing, be sure to tune in to my Wilde About Wellbeing podcast episode.
I know your own issues with drugs and alcohol came about relatively early in your life. Was that what led you into developing your own knowledge of addiction?
I got to having expertise through my own struggles with addiction and mental health. Earlier on in life that included alcohol, marijuana, pretty much a myriad drugs at different points in time, but methamphetamine was one of the big ones that took me down on the mental health front.
I’ve been struggling with anxiety and depression for the better part of my life, certainly from early teen years into young adulthood and into adulthood, to some extent. I was born in Israel and had, for all intents and purposes, a very normal childhood. I was socially anxious the whole time, but when I was fourteen, my family decided to move to the States. I was actually really excited about it at the time and my parents actually asked my sister and I if we’d like to make the move. I don’t think we really understood what that meant.
I was really excited. I spoke English, not great English: broken English and with an accent, but I moved right into high school and that can’t be the only reason High School is one of my least favorite periods in my life, but it certainly is one of them. I was the weird kid who was foreign. I felt isolated and out of place. I hung out with the other outcasts.
Given we’re talking about community, can you elaborate on that — did you feel then a sense of belonging with the kind of other people who were treated similarly to you by the ‘mainstream’ kids at school?
I think the best thing that I can say is I got closest to feeling like I belonged in that group. I always questioned my belonging. To some extent, I probably still question it now, just much less. I questioned it all the time back then, being a teenager. At fourteen, I left everybody I knew behind, having grown up with the same kids since I was five in Israel. Even if I felt awkward anxious back home, I had a role. I had a place, and that’s what belonging is, right?
Do you think your use of alcohol, and later drugs were about trying to find that sense of community which you lacked?
Yeah. I didn’t know it at the time, but what led me to accepting the first drink that somebody gave me was not wanting to stick out more. So I already felt pretty out of place. We went to Sleepaway Camp and somebody grabbed the handle of vodka from their bag, that they’d snuck into the camp and they passed it around. When you don’t really feel like you belong already, it’s difficult to make a conscious decision to stick out even more by not drinking.
I got to experience the effect of the alcohol which did make me care less about whether people liked me or not, and made me feel more free. And so because I felt more free I could be a little bit more myself, which I think made people accept me a little bit more and so it became the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of “alcohol helps me fit in.”
When we went back home, I found out a bunch of my friends on this Sleepaway Camp had been drinking for a while. I just didn’t know because I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to the parties where they drank, but now I was, so now I go hang out with them.
We often see there as being ‘good’ and ‘bad’ communities, but I think it runs deeper than being straightforwardly black or white?
When the drug use was relatively rampant, I was again grasping for a sense of belonging. I picked the best community that would let me in. It was like I was like, “Okay, whose group is the closest to where I want to be that I could be part of?”
When I started dealing drugs, there’s not a better way to make drug users like you, than to have a lot of drugs on you, and all of a sudden people I barely talked wanted to be my friends. They connected me to other friends. I had like dozens and then 50 and then hundreds of customers.
Eventually, I went to one of the guys holding parties I dealt at and said, “Let’s make a deal. I’m going to give you 20 pills. I only need 20 dollars from you. You sell them and keep the profit.”
Three or four of those people became like workers for me: they just became my people, they became my crew we hung out all the time and I for a while we were inseparable. If we weren’t out working, we were together getting high. Within the confines of what is normal in that environment, what we were doing was completely rational. We were all also running away from our families, so we had left our original communities behind.
I always say I think people want three primary things: connection; joy; and impact. I was so ashamed of the way I was living, I couldn’t really connect to my family, so having these guys around gave me a sense of connection. Though it was set on this one activity the rest of the world looked at as terrible or inappropriate. The group gave me one place where I could be honest, where there could be a sense of camaraderie. Though it fell apart: a community built on a striving for drugs and money doesn’t hold long because of jealousy, resentments, aggression, things like that.
That leads me on to addiction and people finding a recovery group that welcomes them, which you have now founded with the IGNTD Heroes recovery program.
I know what keeps people out of getting help, and as somebody who’s always felt like I can’t find my own community, creating a place where people can come together and feel, at least, less judged than they do elsewhere is really big for me.
I feel, despite the fact we’re in the helping profession in the addiction and mental health space, we do a lot of things that hurt, upset, scare and shame other people. I wanted to do my best to minimize that to whatever extent I could.
The three principles we use in and out of recovery, which are honest exploration, radical acceptance and individualized transformation. They’re the things that I try to live by, because a lot of times you don’t know why you do the things you do. I guess more than anything. I’m hoping to provide people with an environment a space where they can freely explore what’s going on for them.
And you’re building on the IGNTD podcast, the IGNTD group, and other work you are doing with the IGNTD Glow live event?
We’ve wanted, for years now, to have something in place and it always felt like an afterthought, so we just kept pushing it off. But this year in October 2019, we’re having our first IGNTD Glow here in LA and it’s going to be three days of inspiration, growth and self-improvement. I think there’s always room for that. I learn from people every day and I’m really looking forward to some of the people we’re going to have on here.
Every day we’re going to have mindfulness, movement, inspiration and education and the goal is to have it being as collaborative as possible. I want to I want to create an in-person version of the IGNTD community that we have online.
