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The Truth About Addiction
Dr. Samantha Harte is a speaker, best selling author, coach and sober mom of two. She is here to tell the truth about her life, which requires telling the truth about her addiction: how it presents, how it manifests, and how it shows up again and again in her recovery. This podcast is one giant deep dive into the truth about ALL TYPES OF addiction (and living sober) to dispel the myths, expose the truths, and create a community experience of worthiness, understanding and compassion.
If you are a mompreneur and are looking for a community of like-minded women who are breaking all cycles of dysfunction and thriving in business, family, body image and spiritual well-being, join the waitlist below!
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The Truth About Addiction
From Addiction to Authenticity: Billy Jensen's Journey of Sobriety and Resilience
Renowned investigative journalist and bestselling author Billy Jensen opens up about his transformative journey from addiction to sobriety, sharing how these experiences have profoundly shaped both his personal and professional life. Through candid discussions, he reveals the challenges of adapting communication in today's digital age and the powerful impact of authenticity. Billy talks about evolving from a storyteller who crafted elaborate narratives to one who values clarity and directness, comparing the succinctness required in modern communication to the art of poetry.
Growing up in a household marked by addiction, Billy reflects on the complex family dynamics that influenced his understanding of normalcy, faith, and anxiety. He shares how his pursuit of religious studies was an attempt to find order amidst chaos, and how these early experiences fueled his journey of recovery. The episode highlights the significance of confronting "rock bottom" moments and the vital role support systems play in overcoming addiction, sharing personal anecdotes that emphasize the power of resilience and growth.
Listeners will gain insight into the transformative power of choosing sobriety and the courage it takes to challenge societal norms that glorify alcohol. From venturing into the fashion industry to write about personal recovery experiences, we explore the healing potential of embracing new challenges and sharing stories. This engaging episode is a testament to resilience, creativity, and the relentless pursuit of authenticity in overcoming life's adversities.
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Welcome back everybody to today's episode of the truth about addiction. The gentleman I have on in today's interview is someone that I found on Instagram yet again, and I find his story really compelling, his career really intriguing and his insight into sobriety just refreshing, and I think you guys are going to get a lot out of this. More about Billy Jensen. He is an investigative journalist. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Chase Darkness With Me how One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders and has solved or helped solve 10 homicides with law enforcement. He was an executive producer and co-host of the multi-part series Unraveled on Discovery Plus and the creator of Jensen and Holes, the Murder Squad. He was friends with writer Michael McNamara and, after her sudden passing, helped finish her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark. His new book, killers Amidst Killers, hunting Serial Killers Operating Under the Cloak of the Opioid Epidemic, came out in December 2023. He is sober and recovers out loud.
Speaker 2:Amen, let's get this conversation started, leaving me for dead. But perfection's just a game of make-believe. Hey, gotta break the pattern, find a new reprieve.
Speaker 1:Breaking the Welcome back everybody to the Truth About Addiction. I have a man here that I have really wanted to interview and we don't know each other. We decided to make this podcast interview the very first time we really spoke, so, for the listeners, you are tuning in for the very first time, as we are to one another. Billy Jensen is a New York Times bestselling author which, as most of you know, I have a book out in the world. It's a bestselling book, but to become a New York times bestseller is a whole other feat. So immediately when his profile was going across my feed, I thought I need to know more about that, and then I saw that he was what we call a friend of Bill W's, which is another elusive way to say he's sober, and those two things alone were enough for me to want to make contacts and have a conversation. So, billy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I think one of the appealing things about you was the way you cut straight through. I could say noise, but I'm going to say bullshit. There's something very guttural and visceral about the way you speak, and I relate to that. I relate to that and I, especially at 15 years sober, having lost a lot of people to addiction and having never really had a a taste for bullshit and small talk, now more than ever feel like we are in a connection crisis. Now more than ever feel like we are in a connection crisis. We are starving for real, authentic communication and belonging, and so I am inherently attracted to people who are speaking at a level of truth that a lot of people are afraid of but we're actually in desperate need of. So how does that make you feel when I say that?
Speaker 3:It's interesting. The thing that I think about is that I was taking classes at Georgetown and got into the just on a whim whim because I happened to move to DC, because I could live anywhere and I was like I'm really interested in counterterrorism, because I think that counterterrorism is. You know, we had this kind of lull in terrorism, at least in America, but we know that it's starting to come back. It's going to come back even worse so, with not only ISIS, but far right and a lot of other things that are going on and mass shooters and and all of that. So I started taking classes and one person, one of my, my cohorts, said yeah, our teacher said you know what I love when, when, when Bill talks, because he just gets right to the point. And you know, and I'm taking classes with people that are like 25 years old they're literally half my age, you know and I never really thought of that.
Speaker 3:I always thought of myself as because, as a writer, when I was a newspaper writer, as a magazine writer, I always overwrote in the sense where I had a word count and I would always go above that. And I think, having to transform yourself into this how to communicate with people now, especially online and in social media. You can't do that anymore. I mean, I can do that in my book and my other books that I write and things, but you can't do that.
Speaker 3:You have to get right to the point If you want to reach people, now more than ever. You know, I can write something that's 500 words, but nobody is going to read it. And I can, I can yell at a cloud about that like an old man, or I can, you know, adapt and overcome and, quite frankly, listen it becomes. I'm not going to say that what you know, the things that I say are poetry, but that's how we have to communicate in this day and age is we have to look to poetry, because poetry are things that usually are very small sentences, like a haiku or something, and they got their point across through that and that's the way we're going to have to communicate if we want to use words in the future.
Speaker 1:And that's the way we're going to have to communicate if we want to use words in the future. That's so interesting Quality over quantity.
Speaker 3:And yet, when you were writing more robustly when, when word count wasn't such an issue, were you still writing in a way that cut through the noise, or did that? Yeah, no, I would always. Yeah, I mean, I like to write flowery and this and that, but yeah, you know, I mean you got. I started writing. As far as professionally goes, my first story was about um, this, the guy that basically the jack ruby of the lincoln assassination, the guy that killed john williams booth, and uh, you know, then, as I I started becoming a paid journalist and would take my philosophy, was never turned down. An assignment as a freelancer would offer me something. I would say yes, even if I thought I didn't have time, just because if you say no, once you know and this was the very sort of beginning of the end of when they were, you know, newspapers and journalism, unfortunately but yeah, no, I always had to stick to a word count.
Speaker 3:And then you started to learn that, all right, if you have a 2000 word count, you, you better say what you want to say in those 2000. If you have a 2,000 word count, you better say what you want to say in those 2,000, because if you go to 3,000, they might just cut it, and as an editor, I know that as well. If I don't have a lot of time and I don't want to send it back to the writer and I'm on deadline, I'm just going to cut stuff, you know. So yeah, I was always pretty good at getting to the point, but I would always. I think I often would go down rabbit holes. You know, I think every writer really does need an editor at some point, so I would go down rabbit holes, especially when you're dealing with crime. You might start focusing on something that you think is important, but the average reader might not.
Speaker 1:Is writing something you always knew you wanted to do.
Speaker 3:No, it's always. It's the only thing I was ever told I was good at. You know, um, that's the thing that you know. I was not a good athlete. I eventually became a hockey player and got decent at that. I was never good, I was okay, it was passive, um. But uh, you know, not a good athlete, not certainly not good at math or any of the other science or anything like that. But writing for, you know, writing essays or writing for, like you know, poetry in high school and things that was the only thing that I actually got some sort of accolades from. But even in college I didn't really, you know, I didn't embrace that. It was only towards later that I embraced it.
Speaker 1:Who was praising you for your ability?
Speaker 3:Um, just, you know, getting published in the school paper or getting published in like a literary, the school literary magazine, that kind of thing, you know, and just having people come up to you and say, hey, I read that, that was really good, that kind of thing which you know that wasn't. You know for the most part that was really good. That kind of thing which you know that wasn't. You know for the most part. You know, as a, as a boy and as a Generation X boy, you know in the 1980s you're praised for sports. That was really the main thing you're praised with. You know so, or, unless you like, built a robot or something. So you know to be praised for that. Looking back it's. You know that was the thing, that the path I should have probably taken a little bit more seriously. But you know I went off the beard and did a bunch of other stuff and then came back to it.
Speaker 1:What was your home life?
Speaker 3:like Home life was good, didn't realize later until really until I I got sober and was in recovery that that parents don't drink that much, regular parents don't. Um, you know, my dad was a recovering um heroin addict. He had kicked that but he always drank beer. Never drank hard liquor, but drank beer and took pills he had. He would get these really bad migraines.
Speaker 3:So he would took darvon, which is kind of like vicodin, and he would drink beer and like we would go to ball games and, uh, you know, he would drink three beers in the car on the way there and then we would sneak usually three beers in and then, um, just because the prices were high, that I mean, if he saw the prices now he would go insane. But uh and uh, you know, I just thought everybody's parents were like this. This is just how everybody was, you know. So it wasn't until later on that I realized, oh, you don't know, there was some certain things there and my mother um was not a real heavy drinker until a bit later, like when I turned 20 or 21. And then she became really a full blown alcoholic and then she got in the program.
Speaker 3:So she was in the program for about 10 years before she passed last year. So she was, you know, they both were, were addicts and you know my dad when he got, you know, eventually it killed him because he died of hepatitis C, uh, before they had that cure for it. So he, um, you know, because of those needles from 25 years earlier, that's what killed him.
Speaker 1:What were the lessons, if any, that you learned about faith growing up?
Speaker 3:if any, that you learned about faith growing up, my father, my parents, didn't put me in any kind of religion. She was Catholic, my father was Lutheran. They just didn't, they just decided not to. So it kind of stopped there with me, the one thing about faith. So faith was kind of absent in the house.
Speaker 3:The one thing that I was raised on my dad had this poem on the wall called the Desiderata, which is a poem that was written in the 1900s and it's just sort of like this nice kind of philosophy type thing and I think if I was raised on anything it would have been that. And you know, growing up without faith, it definitely affected me. I wish I did have it. I definitely do believe in some sort of higher power, but it's nothing that is really written down. And you know, it's the reason why I ended up majoring in religious studies in college, you know. So I got four years of religious studies and then I went and got a master's degree in religious studies and that really was because of that. You know, my religion was Star Wars, you know.
Speaker 3:The closest to faith was the force, even though I wasn't that big a fan of the jedis. But it really was like star wars was. You know, I was into batman and then, when you know, the old batman reruns, and when star wars came out I was five years old in the summer of 77 and that was just that, just took over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you said something really interesting that you in hindsight wish you would have had some faith. And and I'm wondering can you take me to a moment, growing up where it wasn't there, but now sitting where you are today? If it had been, if you had had access to more faith, perhaps the outcome would be different.
Speaker 3:I mean just possibly just dealing with. I think one of the reasons why we have so much, so much anxiety is because we don't have faith. Now, you know, I really don't. I think, as much as religion is the cause of many wars and bad things, it also is the cause of many good things, and there's a reason why religion started. It started because people were trying to figure out the world. When you look at the indigenous cultures and the mythology, yeah, there's a big crack in the sky and it really freaked everybody out and they created the Thunder, god. You know, it's just like they created Sangha. It was just like they were trying to create things that were explaining the world, because the world can be a ridiculous place and we like to create order out of chaos, and that's what. That's what faith does and that's what religion does. So I can't really put my finger on it on one particular moment, but it really would have been something along the lines of you know, less anxiety, less you know, sort of what's going to happen, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So then, how did your anxiety show up as a kid? Cause I have you know sort of what's going to happen, that kind of thing. So then, how did your anxiety show up as a kid? Because I have you know, I have some really visceral memories of and again, only in retrospect can I understand it this clearly having such extreme anxiety. So I would want to be the best at everything, total, hardwired perfectionist and going into whatever the performance was going to be up to it, I would just say, over and over, obsessively I can't wait till this is over. I can't wait till this is over.
Speaker 1:I'll be so happy when when that was met because my parents hadn't done their own work and they didn't grow up in an era where any of this stuff was even talked about, let alone recognized, was to say things like why can't you just be happy now? Right, Didn't get that. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of it not being perfect because my identity was wrapped around that that I couldn't tolerate that up to moment and the not knowing of how it would turn out. Right. So that's how my anxiety presented. What was yours like?
Speaker 3:You know, I think when you just mentioned that it brought up a memory of I have a thing with my legs where my my knees go out, so I run really funny, I'm really slow and that for a boy was kind of devastating. I got made fun of it all the time and I remember crying about it. My dad said you know there are people who don't have legs. You shouldn't cry Like that kind of thing. You know it's just like. And looking back on that I was just like, yeah, that's not the way he did. You know he should have handled that.
Speaker 3:But, he again. This is the guy that went through, you know. You know he was a regular kind of very, you know, blue collar type dude and never went to therapy or anything like that, at least probably towards towards the end, maybe a couple of therapy. But that was it. And yeah it's. I think there was the anxiety there was always. I was always looking ahead, I was always looking towards. When I was in high school, I just wanted to get to college. When I was in college, I just wanted to get to grad school. When I was in grad school, I just wanted to get a job. It was. I very rarely did appreciate the moment, you know, and I went very fast. You know, I didn't take any breaks, I didn't go travel, I didn't do anything, I was just kind of had my head down and just went. You know, and you know, looking back on that, yeah, it made me who I am, but it's also not great, you know, in terms of I could have experienced a lot more.
Speaker 1:Is, in your opinion, your anxiety part of what fueled your own substance abuse?
Speaker 3:Well, I also have. I got um at 22,. I got diagnosed with depression, so depression and OCD and I used to get I used to have really bad OCD about going to the bathroom and it turns out like a lot of that was from like. I had this medical procedure when I was like five years. It was like four years old or something a medical procedure when I was like five years.
Speaker 3:It was like four years old or something, and a lot of that came from that. And then, um, so there was a lot of anxiety with that and then like just other things that were OCD, more in my head. I wasn't a clean, you know I don't want to use the word freak, but I wasn't one of those people and, uh, I used to always say, oh, it's just, I'm more obsessions than compulsions, but when you're like that, you have a compulsion as well, because you're trying to fix it in your head. That's actually a compulsion as well. So, so I had OCD and then I would go on.
Speaker 3:I eventually went on Prozac and was on that for a really long time when I so I think that was really where a lot of the manifestation came from when I got sober, it really felt like the Prozac wasn't working anymore and I got off the Prozac and then had to try a bunch of different things, which was hellish, to be honest with you, just because you know I lost the medicine, which was the alcohol, and then I lost really the other thing that I had, which was the Prozac, and then I also lost, you know, things that I was like my work, that I was doing so I that was the darkest time was when I was trying to get on the right meds. You know, and I'm on Zoloft right now it's actually been really good, thank God so, but there was a lot of that. You know. As far as anxiety goes, and you realize when I was off the Prozac how bad the anxiety was, and then just trying different things and, you know, really made me appreciate.
Speaker 3:You know, one of the things in recovery that went through the roof is my empathy for people. I always thought I had good empathy and I, you know, work a lot with victims, families and things, but so much empathy right now and empathy for even the you know, the criminals that I, that I have helped put away, and that kind of thing, it's just, it's the empathy has been one of the biggest things that have come out of it.
Speaker 1:Was there a rock bottom moment that made you say'm going to a meeting?
Speaker 3:oh yeah, yeah, I was at a. You know, I should have looking back. I should have had I had so many moments that should have been rock bottom moments. Um, in 2020, I had uh, gone to a, got to universal studios by myself and just drank a lot at moe most tavern which is funny because it's it's from the simpsons, you know and then I won a bunch. They have these carnival games right outside of it and I lived walking distance from universal and I played these carnival games. I won a bunch of stuff and then I was going to walk home. So I was walking home on blankish boulevard in burbank studio city and I I stumbled and then I fell into the road and I was, I was on my hands and knees on the road and then a car came within a foot of my face and slammed on the brakes and then I just looked up at him and the guy just like shook his head Like dude, what are you doing? That should have been my rock bottom.
Speaker 3:But my rock bottom was, you know as that, that that was right before the pandemic and, uh, you know I was a daily drinker. Then I was probably having three or four drinks a night, but then pandemic hit, definitely had a lot more um and uh. 2021 I moved into a house up on the hill, drank even more and really had a reclusive lifestyle. That wasn't good. And then, like one of the very first, I was at a party for like my network, for my podcast, and I was blackout drunk as often as I was often, and then I people complained that I I hugged them inappropriately and I grabbed somebody's butt and I don't remember any of it, but that was, that was the rock bottom right there. And then that was the sort of you know losing, losing something that I had built and then also losing, you know being so, you know being so, feeling so much shame that other people, that people that I liked and respected, were so upset with me that they had to say something.
Speaker 3:And that was really, you know, that was the rock bottom right there, and then I actually slid even more and then eventually it came, when that news came out, then I sort of got basically publicly canceled.
Speaker 3:That was, I was drinking so much and I threw my rules out the window, like my rules of not drinking before five o'clock and that kind of thing thing, and I said, you know it was, either I was going to kill myself, which I had been, had really bad suicidal thoughts the year before, before all this happened or I was going to drink myself to death, or I was going to go to rehab, you know, and I chose rehab, you know. So, yeah, I went to rehab for a month and, you know know, didn't really um, you know I was, I didn't really want another drink other than to turn off the voices in my head and the thoughts in my head and, uh, it wasn't until I really got a good sponsor, which was about four months later. You know, I tried to do it on my own, like most people do try to do, but I got a good sponsor and then, really, started kicking in a high gear and like January of the next year.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was June. June 26th is when I went. That was. That's my sober date.
Speaker 1:I want to talk for a second about something you said. That's really important and it's part of my story too. I think it's part of a lot of addict stories which is that should have been my rock bottom. It wasn't. And I have unpacked that part of my story a lot. I mean so much so that the way I see it now is in many ways the driving force behind why I wrote the book that I did, and what I mean by that is I overdosed and for some reason came to right that absolutely should have been the bottom.
Speaker 1:I mean I was this close to death and it wasn't.
Speaker 1:And in fact it went on for my drinking and using and cutting and pasting and breaking all those rules that we set for ourselves.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to do this only after seven, only on weekends, only downers, no more uppers. You know I spent a year and a half cutting and pasting. Then I got caught by the guy I was dating and the look in his eye was just so full of shame that's the shame I felt inside that I that I went to a meeting I'd only been to one about a year and a half earlier after the overdose and then never went back. And then he caught me with this prescription pill bottle my dad was supplying me and that look in his eye and the fear that he might leave me because he was the only semblance left that I was worth anything at all got me back into a meeting. But that wasn't bottom either. Pill bottom was five years into recovery in a marital crisis. In a marital crisis. The reason why I know that was bottom is because it was a level of spiritual bankruptcy where every single tried and true pattern that had worked for me, my whole life, stopped working.
Speaker 1:So, when I think about going in right. I yes, yes, I almost died from cocaine and clearly I need to stop doing that. I had so much evidence outside of that that controlling and managing and manipulating my whole world, my body, my grades, my job that was working so well. That stack of evidence was so much greater than I have a problem. I have a problem sitting over here, but I don't need to reroute all of my deeply ingrained beliefs about how to function in the world right, sober, like they had nothing to do with each other.
Speaker 1:In fact, the language of the steps until I was able to reimagine them with the right sponsor came up against everything I was taught as a girl that kept me safe, which was there's no such thing as God, and if you believe in God, you're an absolute idiot. The only person you can count on is yourself. And now I'm being told yeah, you have a problem over here, and if you're actually going to live a sober life and be happy and not that thing, you need to get down with God. And so, until I was face down in a pit of despair in a marital crisis, having for two years, tried everything to the point of insanity to change my husband's mind about how he felt about me, I wasn't ready to do this. I couldn't hear the steps as a solution to the problem. They felt like a problem in and of itself.
Speaker 3:Right. So, so you were in. Sorry to cut you off, but you were in recovery for five years, so you hadn't touched a drug or drink. And but had you not been in the program too, or were you in?
Speaker 1:the program without a higher power.
Speaker 3:I was did you work the steps? I did without, without a higher power, you work the steps very yeah, I was very much white knuckling it.
Speaker 1:You know, there were some things I did well and there were a lot of things I didn't do well and, to be honest, I I think I am not a person who believes everything happens for a reason, because I've lost too many people I love and I refuse to say that these people died so that my life. However, I think everything happens, and then we have a choice about the reason we assigned to it.
Speaker 1:Right we assign to it Right? So the man who sponsored me ultimately, who I called after the cocaine overdose and then didn't see for a year, who I called again after my boyfriend found the pills, was the only person I trusted and believed that was living a sober life, that seemed really happy, and I was like I don't believe any of this shit. I hate the steps, I hate the language, I hate the God thing. I just know you seem really happy and I trust this shit. I hate the steps, I hate the language, I hate the God thing. I just know you seem really happy and I trust you, so I'm going to follow you around and try to do what you say, right. So we bum rushed our way through the steps, even though I never cultivated my own sense of faith, and at the end of my first year he ended up relapsing. He had 22 years sober from heroin addiction, completely turned his life around, was like the guy in aa that knows everyone right and he realized and killed himself jesus between one year and my rock bottom.
Speaker 1:I really think. I don't think bobby died so I could live, but I think as a result of Bobby dying, I assigned a reason that if I touch that shit I'm dead.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I didn't want to die at that point. I just didn't know how to live any other way than pleasing and perfecting and performing. So I'm curious, you know, when you hear me say all that right. So I'm curious, you know, when you hear me say all that right, Is there something that happened that final time for you, where all the tried and true things you had?
Speaker 3:lived by and learned as a kid about not feeling your feelings, shoving things down, whatever it was that you were like. Oh, I see now why that was the moment in which I was done and I was ready to try something new. I mean, I think that for me, it was choosing life. That was what it was. For me, it was literally making that choice of do I want to do, I want to not be here anymore, of do I want to do, I want to not be here? Anymore or do.
Speaker 3:I want to be here anymore, and if I do want to be here anymore, I have to. I have to do something, you know. So it was as fundamental a choice, which is really one of the most fundamental choices you can make. It's also such an unnatural choice because life is really the the biggest sort of instinct uh, instinct the preservation of life that we have uh but it really was that it was do and then and then it was it's.
Speaker 3:This is what I'm doing. Without this. Other stuff is not working. I've gotta there's this book here and it tells you how to do it.
Speaker 3:Let me, let me try to do it right and it was a matter of going to every, going to a bunch of meetings that I didn't know anybody, you know just like um and then eventually finding somebody and I and I I heard somebody speak and it was really good and I'm the kind of guy I'm still sort of a i'm'm a guy that like I needed somebody. That was that looked like they could kick my ass. I really like that was in my head and I got a guy who's shorter than me. I could probably take him now.
Speaker 3:He's a big dude, he's a big dude and you know, bald head, beard tats, and I was just like, and he was a really good speaker and I was like that, you know. And then we had a conversation and I said, listen, I'm, I'm, I don't have a higher power, I'm kind of an atheist, you know, or at least an agnostic. And he said, all right, that's going to be, that's a challenge for me. I like that, you know. And he said, just, I'll do this, but you have to, um, you have to, you have to do everything. I say I said, okay, you know, and then we, we took it, we took it from there and it worked. And you know, one of the, you know, after you get through that, the great thing, you know. They say that you know the only way to hold on to sobriety is to give it away.
Speaker 3:And you know it was such a great feeling when sobriety is to give it away and you know, it was such a great feeling when you know, at the end of the meeting, when they ask you know, and I go to a very it's a stag meeting, that is a lot of it's. Obviously it's all dudes, but it's big, it's like 120 people and at the end of the meeting there's a lot of newcomers in there in the meeting when they say you know who you know, if you want, if you're looking for a sponsor, all these dudes are raising their hands. And then there was at one point when he looked at me and said all right, it's time for you to raise your hand.
Speaker 3:And that was an amazing feeling for me, um, to be able to raise my hand and say, um, I've gotten to this point where I'm able to help somebody and um, that was good. And now, you know, I really I don't have anybody in the books right now, uh, but I, um you know I have people, because I do recover out loud, and I was just speaking with a woman who had messaged me like eight months ago, who had been a reader of mine and a listener of mine who said I got sober because of you and I was like that's amazing, you know.
Speaker 3:I just checked in with her and, uh, she's still doing well. She said, still, you know, hard, but I haven't touched anything. And I said that's amazing, you know. And uh, and I said you know, that's the reason why I'm recovering out loud is because I know that there's other people that that, um, anywhere that you could potentially can get it, you know, and you don't want to be a proselytizer, you don't, you know, I see, I see we're so inundated with messages to drink and uh, particularly, you know, I just went through, I went to the euros over overseas, um, so there was so much drinking there and I went to a lot of, uh, baseball games during the baseball playoffs and you, just looking at how much drinking there is and how much you know, it's like it's OK to have somebody saying, hey, you know what, it's all right to not drink and be that sober guy, be the sober guy amongst all your friends.
Speaker 3:You're not going to lose that much, much. And um, I think that's one of the things that, um, I think that's one of the things that, um, in this day and age. You know, a lot of times if I post something, people like you're not being anonymous. The whole thing of you're supposed to not be. Not talk about um aa. That was from a book that was written in 1939. You know, that's not the way the world works now and I don't think if those guys had seen, and one of the reasons why they eventually had said you're not supposed to talk about it is because they didn't want people to see the failures, which that's like. The one thing that I don't agree with, you know, in this whole thing is that they didn't want to see people saying, oh, that person was saying that they were in this club called Alcoholics Anonymous and then look at them now, the guys at the bar drinking. That's always going to happen.
Speaker 3:You know, we know that. We know that the the rate is. You know, it's not a, it's not a. You know people that go to AA. You know the majority of them don't really stick around at the end of the day. You know, we know that.
Speaker 3:But the people that do and there are hundreds of thousands of people that do it actually did work and it goes back to the thing that we were talking about before that you had mentioned before about connection, and we are in a crisis of connection right now that we've never seen before. So anything that gets people in front of another person to talk about things that's obviously not hurting other people, or a cockfight or something, that is something that is uh, that is positive, you know, and um, it's, you know, when I was reading it and reading the big book, and I was just like you know what this is a great book that I, that I should have read, even if I wasn't uh, you know, didn't have a problem, you know, just because it's it's a very good book about, about destroying your ego and and um, and and trying to put that aside and the whole actor's dilemma and all of that. You know it very much. That spoke to me and would speak to a lot of other people too.
Speaker 1:You're sort of accidentally putting plugs in for why people should buy my book. It's so poetic, honestly, and everything you just said makes me want to pull up, and I'm going to do it. I'm going to pull up today an Instagram post that I made and I'm going to read it to you, and then I want to know what you think about it, because it's right on topic with what we were just saying.
Speaker 3:Sounds good.
Speaker 1:Okay. The conventional 12 steps of recovery have an extremely low success rate. Here's why have an extremely low success rate? Here's why, despite being rooted in wonderful spiritual principles they were written over a hundred years ago by white men Despite being non-religious, they reference a male God and use prayers from Christian literature throughout the big book. Despite trying to help the addicts stop using, they focus heavily on the ego and self-centeredness as the root of the problem. But women are also suffering, often in silence, and people have often learned in their formative years to fear a punishing God or believe there is no such thing. Worst of all, addicts come into recovery with tons of shame, and when we call them selfish, we are targeting the symptom and not the source.
Speaker 1:Substance abusers at their core feel unworthy of love. In their quest to find it, drugs and alcohol become the solution. That in turn leads to bad decisions, which in turn creates a mountain of shame. All they ever wanted was love and belonging belonging. All they ever did was find a solution to their problem. All they really need is compassion and accountability. It's time we take a modern approach to the 12 steps. It's time we make them trauma informed, so we can cast the widest net on who we can help. It's time to give addicts a way to clear the shame that is making them sick instead of reinforcing it. If you're ready to do the work, leave a comment. I bring that up because you know in that in my spiritual rock bottom, there were many revelatory moments because we were doing the steps on the marital crisis.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:Suddenly, the spin was no longer a focus on my substance abuse problem, which I knew I had no control over, but the marriage, I was sure trying to control it. How do I repurpose the steps to fit the crisis I'm actually navigating? Each one of them was sort of its own act of revolution, but none so much as the ninth step. Now I'm 30 years old and five years sober. I had made so many amends to other people over those five years. Right, for all the things I did in my active addiction. This woman said to me and remember, right, I was an untreated perfectionist. So the main voice in my head was critical, relentlessly critical. And so she said have you ever made an amends to yourself? First time in my whole life, forget about my sobriety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anyone asked me that the reason why that was the beginning of a spiritual transformation was because I had a possibility to rearrange my inner self-talk, so it became more compassionate. So if I was trying to say, wow, if I'm not actually like a terrible person because I did all those terrible things, if I just did terrible things but I'm actually a good person, then how would a good person who cares about themselves speak to themselves? It wouldn't be this voice in my head. That's like you're getting. You get this shitty marriage because you deserve it. Punishment fits the crime, like you right? And if that's not true, then what do I deserve? How do I want to feel? And all of a sudden, everything opened up right in my whole life, and the amazing thing about that was I had a vehicle now to start lifting the shame that I was carrying around, that was clouding all of my decision-making, and because of that I could hear my intuitive voice, which I hadn't heard in decades. I mean, that was a voice that, from one of my earliest memories, was shut off as soon as I started asking hard questions.
Speaker 1:My mom abused prescription pills, and so I was. I mean, I couldn't have been more than five or six and I remember saying to her why do you have to take those pills every night? Reason I asked that is because I was afraid of who she became once she took them, right? So it's highly anxious, clinically depressed and untreated. And so she was self-medicating and she was almost catatonic, you know. Her eyes glazed over, she would shovel more food down her throat than she ate in an entire day and I would just watch her like a ghost in the house and be terrified about it. So I'm asking her this. And she said do you like the things that you have?
Speaker 1:I'm five right, I'm like yes, well, if you like the things that you have, mommy needs to work and in order for me to work, I need to sleep, and these pills help me sleep. So it was do not ask that again. Right, let alone, why, let alone, why, why are you right? There's no sense of what is happening inside of me that I would even ask that question. So my intuitive voice got shut down.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, I have this way to make amends and start being kinder to myself, and I can hear this totally different sounding voice, which, which I knew was from me, but it felt like it rose from the belly up, whereas my anxious, critical voice was so cerebral right, it's always ruminating and obsessive, obsessing about figuring out the problem very top down rather than bottom up. It was always calm, it was always compassionate. It was always curious Like what if you tried that? What if you did that? Right? And I started taking real notice to the sound of her voice, trusting her, taking action in the direction she was nudging me. And then I would accumulate small wins.
Speaker 1:And so, to this very day, I consider the whisper of my intuition to be the God of my own understanding. It was in that experience of rerouting the 12 steps so that they were not a template for me to go oops, I did all those things but I was so sick and I was so sad. No, it's, you're going to take accountability and ownership. You're going to literally amend your behaviors, moving forward, you're going to change at the core how you operate, and also we are going to love you through that and we're going to change at the core how you operate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also we are going to love you through that and we are going to normalize what you've been through and tell you that you're not just a self-centered piece of shit.
Speaker 1:Your self-centeredness was, at the end of it all, trying desperately to protect you from feeling the pain that you've been carrying around for all these years. And we see that and we're actually going to help you heal that pain, clear your shame and your dreams. Right. So it's. It was just the right mix of practical, passionate with get to work, girl, because, yes, you got to clear your resentments. Yes, you have to do nightly accountability. Yes, you need to be of service. Yes, you need to try and talk to God, now that you know what God is for you. All those things are true, but we're going to come at the root of your suffering and we're going to see it and we're going to hold space for it and we're going to normalize it and we're not going to call you a piece of shit as we do it, because you're already calling yourself a piece of shit to stop or you're going to die.
Speaker 3:You know it's interesting. When you had said the thing about your mother asking you that, I thought in my head what she was going to say is you know? She asked you, do you like what you have? And you said yes. I thought she was going to say, well, I don't like what I have, so that's why I have to take these pills. That's just where my head went. I don't know, do with that what you will, but yes, but I think what she was saying was she was being way more utilitarian with it was that I got to sleep so I can go to work, so you can, so I can get you the toys that you like.
Speaker 1:that kind of thing, yeah which you know, if you really dive into the psychology of that. Of course she wasn't trying to do this, but I was almost being blamed. Oh yeah, yep right, I mean, what a burden to me.
Speaker 3:I mean either, blamed or used as an excuse. You know that, like I've got to do this because I got to get you your shit, you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know. So a couple of years ago I lost my sister to a drug overdose. So I thank you. You know I, I am the cycle breaker in a very long lineage of sickness, and not just addiction but my mom's mentally ill. I mean, you name it, I come from it.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I knew. I mean, I've always loved writing, by the way, so this is a thing you and I have in common. I ended up going to graduate school for physical therapy and had to go the pre-med route, which terrified me because I loved creativity and arts and performing arts and writing and the idea of having to be great in science was so frightening to me. Yeah, I always sort of had a love affair with words and thought one day I'm going to write a book. But then, you know, I become a PT, I switch my sides of the brain, I start opening a practice, I'm sober, I'm running this clinic and I'm treating people's pain and it's cash-based. So I'm really doing what I want to do with the body.
Speaker 1:I'm getting to the source of the problem and I'm noticing all these people who are not addicts, who are stuck in cycles of dysfunction and perfectionism, people-pleasing workaholism, and it's all getting in the way of all this money they spent with me to try to fix their knee pain and yet it wasn't in the scope of my practice, right? I'm not going to pull them into an AA meeting. I'm not going to therapize them when I'm their physical therapist, right? I'm not their psychologist. So sort of this, this tug inside of me, this internal strain where I was like, oh, like I'm not serving these people at the highest level that I want to, but I don't even know what that looks like. And then I lost my sister and I was like I don't, I don't know where I'm going or who I'm going to become on the other side of this grief. I just know it's not solely Dr Hart.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:I knew I had to write my book. Like that was the moment where it's like you're no longer going to dream about writing a book. You're going to write a book. Yeah. And so, as I'm writing, you know all these tales of my lived experience, because so many of my life stories are kind of like you know, like the way I had to learn my life lessons was so big every time.
Speaker 1:It wasn't just this losing my sister, I mean, the story of my marriage is insane. It's its own movie lifetime story. It's its own book. Right, just that and everything I can think. In chapters I was like, okay, so you're going to tell a great story and there is serious power in storytelling, but if you are really trying to save lives and help as many people as you can, what saved yours? And that's when I connected the lines and was like it was when I worked those steps a different way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's what my book has become. And it's funny because some people see what I'm doing and I'm going to talk about recovering out loud. I'm like, oh, recovering in silence was never for me. I'm not going to blast somebody else's recovery or anonymity, but my own. I'll be damned if you're going to tell me I can't shout it from the rooftops in case it saves somebody. Somebody's life is watching on the other side of the screen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And also, you know people think that I don't go to meetings anymore and I don't like the steps and it's. I have done so much work inside to deconstruct my core beliefs around God, around religion, around the patriarchy, around whatever that I can go into any meeting, no matter how old school big book thumpery it is or not, and find community, longing and solace and at the same time I'm going to keep talking about this wider lens of how we can frame them in case it can save somebody else's life. Why wouldn't I do that? And honestly, at this point in my life, having lived through so much loss, I don't know what else I'm even supposed to be doing here If it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting that you say you one of the things that I started going to physical therapy too, cause I do have a bad knee and I have I started getting tennis elbow and it's from, it's from hockey, and so I play hockey once or twice a week, and the doctor said to me, you know, I was like how can it get better that kind of thing? And obviously I'm doing the PT and everything like that, and I was just well, you know, you'd have to rest it for a little bit and then he can almost see it in my face.
Speaker 3:I'm like that's not going to happen. You know it's like I need to play because that is that is one of the things that keeps me mentally. You know that is that is, being able to play, and I used to like playing because it was the only time that I could turn off my head without drinking. You know what I mean. It was because I was just concentrating on where the fuck was and doing all that, and you know when you were saying the thing that and you know when you were saying the thing about how therapists. You know you were a therapist, but a PT you weren't. You weren't a mental therapist. You know I remember saying telling him that it was about a month and a half ago and then he could just see it. It was like, yeah, you're not going to stop playing.
Speaker 1:I'm like yeah, well, exactly why right could you imagine like, uh, having a sober pt who totally gets how it is that you know part of mental health is contingent on your ability to do physical activity right?
Speaker 1:yeah so it's part of what made me a great clinician is because I could really meet people where they were at I. I'm a dancer, so so my love language is is movement. I get that more than anything, and it's it's really. It just like. The 12 steps are a reframe of how we think and feel and cope in the world.
Speaker 1:It's just the same thing, you know. It's just about having a more flexible template of like it's. This is not a forever, this is a for now. Let me widen the window on everything you actually can do as you fit to play hockey, as opposed to playing hockey to get fit. Yes, right, yep, exactly so. There's always a way inside of the resistance to find solution. I'm wondering are you still writing now?
Speaker 3:um, I, I'm interviewing people for a new book I'm doing about, uh, ordinary heroes in in terror and mass shooting situations, so people that rush the gunman or rush the guy with the knife for the bomb or whatever.
Speaker 3:So I'm in the middle of interviewing them and I need to, uh, I need to start writing a sample chapter and I, you know, and there's a thing that definitely I see, I was a different type of writer just because I was writing nonfiction. So I wasn't like a Hemingway where I was drinking when I was writing, but I would write sober at it, drunk, as opposed to write drunk at it sober, uh, because I would write and then I, you know, first I had to get all the details right and everything, but then if I wanted it to sing, you know, if I wanted it to to not sound as stilted or whatever, I would have a drink or two and then, you know, go through it and make it sing a little bit. So you know, that's going to be definitely a challenge for me. Moving forward is not having that and seeing how I'm able to write without that.
Speaker 1:Is there something exciting about that?
Speaker 3:Not necessarily. No, I mean, that doesn't really. No, no, not really. I think there's also another reason why you know that was a fun, you know, because I could drink. So it was like that was another fun and it was like I was drinking, uh, for work, you know, and I I come from, listen being a journalist uh, particularly with the people that I worked with, starting when I started working for Village Voice Media, it was such a drinking culture, you know, I mean it was all drinking, it was all.
Speaker 3:That was all that you know, they would have job interviews in a bar, because it was always like, listen, if you can't have a, have a conversation with somebody over a drink, how are you going to be able to talk to a source? You know, because that's where you meet your sources was in bars, you know that kind of thing. So, very old school way of thinking, but that's what, what it was like. So I definitely um, I could, I could kind of point to that as when my, my drinking started getting going from being a social drinker which is what I was up until about, you know, 34 to, like, you know, starting to drink every day.
Speaker 1:I would just challenge you to consider that your writing could be even better, because the truth, the truth is, your writing is a certain way and you know that it's that way when you're editing, you don't really know yet what it will way when you're editing. You don't really know yet what it will be when you're not under the influence, and so why make the assumption that it will not be as good when you literally don't know that yet? Sure.
Speaker 1:Right, so it's like leaving just as much space, for actually my brain's going to be functioning at a higher capacity, so maybe it will be even better, a higher capacity, so maybe it will be even better.
Speaker 3:Possibly. Yeah, yep, just throwing that out there. Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1:So the last question I want to ask you is and maybe we just talked about it, maybe we didn't what is something you're working on right now? It does not have to be professional. What is something you're working on right now? It does not have to be professional. That matters to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, one of the scariest things is that I've always had. I've always been a person that had goals, that had ambition, that had projects and halfway through my sobriety probably, you know, it was right after my mother died I was trying to get my meds right. I didn't have the will to do anything that was the scariest thing, because it was like that was the whole.
Speaker 3:My reason for being was always that I able to pull out of that, and one of the things I want to do that I'm building right now is I'm building a fashion brand, uh, which is so out of my comfort zone, um, but it's a menswear brand built on sobriety and men's mental health, and I've got a great partner and uh, who is, who is in the fashion industry and is sober as well, and we're just, um, you know, want to want to create clothing that. You know. Listen, can a t-shirt save the world? No, but it's a clothing based on three things which is mending, you know, mending yourself, you know which is all about recovery, connection, connecting with others and purpose. You know, those are the three things that we need right now Narrowing those three things down for people, you know, connection being huge and purpose being huge, because a lot of people might have jobs but they don't necessarily have purpose, and that's one of the things that we've definitely lost in America is that?
Speaker 3:That's one of the things that we've definitely lost in America is that, and it's going to be. You know, if we're able to read some people with this, then that's great so so that's the. That's one of the things that I'm, and I like the fact that it's not in my comfort zone at all. I mean, there's certain things that are.
Speaker 3:You know, we're going to have a content component, we're going to have social media, so all that reaching people. But, um, you know, just, it's very tactile, you know, like looking at the different fabrics and that kind of thing. It's just it's something that's really it's neat. You know, and I've always been somebody that I've always been really good at merch. Uh, when I was a, you know, I started the university of kansas hockey team and we were awful but we sold out in our t-shirts because we had really cool t-shirts like that.
Speaker 3:And at Village Voice I made some great t-shirts. We made great t-shirts as Boston Phoenix. So always like that kind of thing I was always really into. So I think, yeah, something like that. You know you're surrounded by, especially when I go to these sports games. It's going to have kind of a big sports component and everybody's kind of, you know, wearing the same stuff. It's just like you can wear something that could still kind of support your team, but it has a different message. We're not necessarily hitting people over the head with it. So that's what I'm excited about, yeah.
Speaker 1:I love that. So for everyone listening, where can they find you and get in touch with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Best place probably is Instagram. Just go to Billy Jensen and at Billy Jensen.
Speaker 2:J E.
Speaker 3:N S E N, and you'll see what I'm doing there. I just posted a video of that. I forgot to post because it was right. It's right. Before I got sober, a French TV station network had come and done an interview with me and it's all in French and I completely forgot about it. And then somebody sent it to me. I was like, oh, I remember that, yeah, so I just posted that. So is that stuff?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to check that out. Billy was so amazing to talk.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you so much for having space for me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Cool conversation. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Bye.
Speaker 2:Bye, Thank you. Whipping my mistakes to jump over the grief. Breaking the circuit. Making it worth it. Oh, Sick and tired of the voice inside my head Never good enough. It's leaving me for dead. But perfection's just a game of make-believe. Hey, Gotta break the pattern. Find a new reprieve. Breaking the circuit.
Speaker 5:Making it worth it. Oh, I am ready to make a change. I am big. That's a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside I got left to fight.
Speaker 2:I can be brave and afraid at the same time. Practice self-compassion, start to calm my mind, taking tiny steps to loving all of me. Just the process, cause it's gonna set me free, breaking the circuit making it worth it all.
Speaker 5:I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. All I got love the life. Gotta gotta gotta break it. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I got to live the life. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I got this life.