Hello, and welcome to the True Hope Cast podcast

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many physiological and psychological aspects.

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Today I welcome Dr. Callie Estes to the podcast. Now, Dr.

Callie, the addictions coach, is a highly sought

after addiction, professional life coach, recovery coach,

performance coach, and wellness guru who blends talk therapy

with positive change

to assist her clients in unlocking their true potential.

She has been featured in books, magazines, radio,

and television for her work in the drug addiction

and transformational coaching fields.

She is a five times bestselling author, founder

of the largest addiction

and mental health education school online founder

of Sober on Demand,

and host of the wildly popular Unpause Your Life podcast.

Today on the show, we're gonna be talking about how

to tackle addiction and mental health in 2024.

Enjoy the show. Hello, Dr. Callie. How are you?

Welcome to True Hope Cast. It's wonderful to have you here.

What's new and what's good?

Thank you for inviting me.

I know it's early for you, so I appreciate that

and I'm happy to be here.

Wonderful, wonderful.

Well, we're gonna be discussing, um, how to tackle addiction

and mental health in 2024.

We're coming to the end of it, but

before we jump into that,

would you mind just giving us a brief introduction about,

um, who you are and what it is that you do?

Sure. So I'm Dr. Kelly Estes.

I run and I founded a signature program called Sober on

Demand, where we bring the entire

treatment team to the client.

So the doctor, the nurse, the sober companions,

the therapist, the entire team goes

to the client wherever they are, home office, tour,

bus on set, and we helped get them sober.

And then after doing this for, oh God, 30 some years,

I got asked, how do you get involved?

How do you do this type of work?

And I created the Addictions Academy.

So we actually have a whole school to train people in how

to do sober companion, sober coach, recovery coach,

trauma coach, counselor, all of these things.

So that's what I do.

Very cool. So just an addiction companion. So like mm-Hmm.

Can you explain to me like what's the most common individual

that will come and like, take your course?

Anybody who wants to help,

maybe they don't wanna be a therapist

and go get their bachelor's and their master's

and then go through the accreditation process

and have to be stuck in an office, for example.

Maybe they wanna work in the field, they want to go

to the client's home, the office, go to the park, go

to the beach, go to the gym and help them get sober.

So it's a fun job that doesn't have all the rules

and regulations of, say, a therapist that they would,

plus you don't need the bachelor's and the master's.

So those are the people that come to us, uh,

most are in recovery.

They've got some clean time, usually five plus years,

and they're looking to give back and help.

Amazing. So is there other lots of people who come in

to say, if my partner's struggling with some kind

of addiction, they come in

and like learn how to become, you know, not just a,

a supportive partner, but somebody

with actually a very specific skillset to,

to help through that time?

Exactly, yeah. So if you're a partner of an addict

or maybe you're a parent of an addict, a lot

of people will come in and say, help me

through this period of time.

What do I do? What are the resources I need

to help my person to help my loved one?

So we help find them resources, we help get them coaches

and therapists and such.

And then a lot of those people come back

and say, well, I wanna learn how to do this.

I wanna help other people, because there's a

lack of resources.

A lot of people turn to Google and they say, okay, uh,

my child's using drugs, what do I do?

And you have all these paid sponsored ads

that pop up that'll say, come to this treatment center,

or come here or go there.

And you're navigating a world you don't know.

And you don't know if these places are any good.

You don't know if the therapy is any good.

You don't know how much it costs.

And sometimes parents are, they just grab the first one

and go, okay, I'm gonna send Becky here.

And that first grouping of people says,

well send us $20,000 on a wire

and we'll, you know, put Becky in this treatment program.

Well, we don't know how good it's, so we hope you navigate

that entire world that's new to you

to find the correct resources

that you need for your loved one.

I might do or for yourself. Mm-Hmm.

Yeah. Um, and how, sorry, how so,

how long have you been working with addiction

and how long has this, uh,

this program, this course been available?

So I've been in addiction 33 years.

I'm in recovery myself.

I have my PhD in clinical psychology,

and I created the addictions academy in 2014

because there was not a good standard of resources

or wraparound services, if you will.

So you could send somebody to treatment.

But what happens when they come out 30 days later,

the parents don't know what to do, the spouse doesn't know

what to do, and everybody expects this person is

cured and they're not.

And they end up relapsing.

And a lot of people say, well, I don't know what happened,

what went wrong, because there's no wraparound services.

So the addictions Academy became those wraparound services.

We have a family coach, we have recovery coaches,

we have sober companions, we have addiction coaches,

trauma coaches, mental health coaches, sex addiction,

shopping, addiction, you name it, we have it.

And we work with somebody in real time to help them conquer

what their stopping blocks are, to combat the addiction

and to break through and figure out who they are

and where they wanna go in life.

Amazing. What have you,

what have you learned about addiction from your personal

life and now as an educator?

Like how, what have you taken from your, from

that personal experience into now

how you support coach and teach?

So for me, when I was, I don't wanna say diagnosed

with an addiction, but when I figured it out like, Hey,

there's something wrong here.

I realized there was a lack of help other than NA and AA

and I and, and oa.

So I was given these pamphlets to go to meetings,

and that didn't fit with me.

It didn't work because my addictions were sugar,

caffeine, and diet pills.

And when you go to na, they have sugar,

caffeine, and cigarettes.

And I'm like, this is, these are my addictions.

So it didn't work. Interesting. Yeah.

And I ended up getting sober on a yoga mat.

Uh, a friend of mine drug me to her yoga class

and she said, just do this.

And I was like, whatever. Sure. And I did.

And when it started to work,

and I learned to manage my emotions

and I started to heal, that's

what got me into this industry.

And I said, if I struggled with this, there's a lot

of people struggling with this too.

What else is available?

So I've been doing this type of work

for 30, 33 years roughly.

And then I wanted to create that alternative reality of

what else can we do to help the people

that are need that, that need it.

What was it about yoga that helped you?

Learning how to manage my emotions,

doing the sun salutations.

When you're doing the deep breathing

and you're doing the most, the movement,

so the first thing the instructor had me do was do one sun's

salutation, which takes maybe a minute-ish.

And I did it and I was grumbling the whole time.

I couldn't touch my toes. This is stupid.

And he goes, okay, good. Do a second one.

And I'm like, I'm out of breath, right? Do a second one.

I did a second one. I'm still grumbling. This is stupid.

Do a third one. By the third one, I couldn't breathe,

so now I'm not complaining.

I'm focusing on that dying, which was a different focus.

And then he said, every time you wanna get high,

or every time you want to eat, do a sun salutation.

And I thought, that's stupid. But I did it.

And it gave me just enough window to go,

oh, I don't want that thing.

And then he taught me about dopamine

and he said, you know, homeostasis is here.

When you eat sugar

or take a diet pill, your body goes up here,

your dopamine goes up.

What also goes up in exercise.

So if you're exercising,

suddenly all those happy chemicals flood the brain,

you don't want that substance.

And I went, oh.

So now I started using that trick.

So if I'm in target and I'm frustrated, I just do 10 squats.

I'm the crazy lady in target doing 10 squats. Love that.

What does that do? It boosts your dopamine.

You can't be happy and anxious at the same time.

You can't be happy and depressed at the same time.

So if you get that dopamine up, you won't want

that drug or alcohol.

And that's what started to happen naturally.

And as that happened, I learned new coping skills

and ways of dealing with all the feelings

that come up when you want to grab

that drug or that alcohol.

And over time, I didn't want it.

And I went, if this works for me,

this works for a lot of other people.

So we started looking at dopamine

and ways to boost that natural happy chemical as opposed

to grabbing the donut or the cocaine or the alcohol.

When I started doing yoga in my very early thirties.

And, um, it was one of the first times

that I was really connecting my body

and my mind in a, in a very practical way.

Like I would do very slow,

very deliberate yin yoga to begin with.

And it brings up a lot for you psychologically

when you are working with your body

and you are making quite conscious, deliberate movements.

And I wonder like, as you, you mentioned that

yoga allowed you to become probably more aware

of your emotions and then like

learning how to deal with them.

Was that a similar kind of experience

for you when you kind of got down there on the mat?

Exactly. And for me, the hat to yoga

or the yin, the yin yoga

that you were looking at, I couldn't do.

'cause I have a DD mm-Hmm.

So I would sit for 30 seconds with my legs crossed,

and I'm looking out the window and I'm working around

and I'm like, okay, I can't do this.

So my instructor said, you need to be in Ashtanga yoga,

which is power yoga, where you're constantly in motion.

And that started to work because now I'm in motion

and now I'm focusing on my breath work.

And then he would add in, you know, if you're angry, get rid

of your anger, breathe out your anger, breathe in zen.

So he would add that in as a moving meditation.

So I learned quickly on that.

I've gotta be in moving meditation.

I can't sit still to meditate. Mm-Hmm.

So a lot of my clients are very similar.

So we do a moving meditation

or we do, um, different types of walking

or what do they, they call it forest bathing,

but basically going out in nature

and reconnecting where you're in motion.

Mm-Hmm. And you're using that same breath work.

Beautiful. Yeah. I think that yoga

and yeah, forest bathing

or just being in nature is such obviously a,

it's a very powerful thing to do,

but it's, it's often very difficult to get somebody

to do something that's so simple, so profound,

and something that they probably know

that they might need in their life.

But yeah, the excuses have come up for a lot of people

to like not actually go out and do something like that.

I'm sure you've, you've, you've heard it all.

Yeah. And,

and I tell my clients, if you don't have time in between

what you're doing, stand up and do 20 squats.

Mm-Hmm. That's all you have to do.

And if you're sitting at your desk, I have like,

I have two desks that rise up, so if I'm teaching

or I'm doing email throughout the day, I'll rise my desk up

and I'll just be standing as opposed to seated.

And now I'm sort of in that moving meditation as opposed to,

you know, sitting here getting frustrated.

Sure.

Yeah. I think that, yeah, with the,

with the movement piece or the exercise piece,

putting your awareness and your focus, um, on, on something

very different to the habitual addictive nature,

you're engaging different parts of your brain

and you're, you're, you're, you're engaging that, um,

those areas that yeah, like as you said, with the, with the,

with the dopamine, dopamine release,

like you are engaging similar pathways,

but obviously there is only amazing benefits

to moving your body and doing squats or going for a run

or like going for a walking nature.

Like it's, it's, it's, it's incredible

that we have these very free available tools to us.

But as you say, like a lot of people just go onto Google

and they're looking for that kind of, that thing,

that place, that drug that's just gonna take care

of their problems rather than like sitting back recognizing

we have these very simple fundamental things available

to us kind of all of the time

and we don't necessarily reach, reach to them.

So I wanna ask you about your, so 33 years, it's a,

it's a long time in the addiction mental health space.

And I wonder, have you seen any particular patterns?

Like we're in 2024 right now.

I don't think anxiety and depression

and mental health issues have ever been like this bad, um,

especially with younger individuals.

Have you seen any particular patterns

emerge in those 33 years looking at, at it today?

Well, ever since Covid it has been

probably triple what it's always been.

So a lot of people when Covid shut down,

they maybe weren't alcoholics

or they didn't use pills to cope,

but now they're sitting at home, they're bored,

they really can't go out, they can't socialize,

they're not going out with friends, they're not going

to the gym, they're not doing their normal routine.

So they started drinking or taking

marijuana or taking some drugs.

So we've actually seen addiction go up since Covid.

And a lot of people, when the, the doors basically reopened

and said, okay, go back out there, they kind

of went, uhoh, I got a problem.

Right. So we've gotten a lot of that.

In terms of the younger generation, they don't communicate.

So they use their phone for everything.

So instead of a phone call, they would rather send a text

or they're FaceTiming each other.

Um, the new trend that they're doing is

that they're FaceTiming while they're sleeping.

So their phone is always on next to their head

and their three or four

or five of them are all sleeping kind of together.

So if one wakes up and talks,

kind of wakes up the other one.

So they're not getting any rem sleep

That, sorry, hold on. The

that's a thing.

That's a thing That's gotta have a name

that's gotta have a weird teenage name to it.

There's probably some pop name they came up with.

'cause they come up with a name for everything.

Even the stuff that we used to do, like the,

they're calling, um, sitting on an airplane,

like not drinking, not watching tv is

called dry dogging now.

And I'm like, that's right. We've sat on an airplane

for years not doing this stuff.

Like this is not even a,

you know, they're just making up names.

Yeah. Um, but yeah, that's a thing.

And then there throughout the day,

they can't stay awake in school.

So their, their grades are dropping

and a lot of kids are dropping outta school

because they can't keep the grades up

because they can't stay awake.

So I'm seeing a lot of that, uh, we see a lot of failure

to launch in the younger kids where they don't wanna work

because you see these influencers making a hundred,

$200,000, you know, a year posting videos

or re you know, reviewing a product.

And they're thinking, I don't wanna go

to McDonald's and make $18.

That's, you know, that's beneath me.

So they just don't wanna go to work. Yeah.

They don't wanna go to school. They don't wanna go to work.

Work. Yeah. It's very, very tricky, difficult landscape.

And yeah, of course. Um, like the pandemic with, you know,

shutting people who own homes

and, you know, um, arresting people who,

who are on the beach on their own, looking to go surfing

or something like that, you know?

Mm-Hmm. It was a very, very unfamiliar wild time

and obviously a very scary, scary time for a lot of people.

And I think that a lot

of people are still suffering the anxiety of, of

that whole ordeal.

Yeah. And for young people,

let's just say 18 and under, who have,

who don't have a fully developed neurological system yet

to actually have that as like two, three years of their

existence, of their development.

I just wonder like how underdeveloped

these young people are.

And I see the patterns with the problems we have

in the mental health space with, with, with,

with kids and with adults.

Now with, with that shutting down from other people,

that lack of community and seeing Mm-Hmm.

Seeing, not even, not necessarily just seeing friends

or golf buddies or pickleball buddies or whatever,

but like actually just seeing

other human beings walking around.

Like we've, we've been doing, we've been engaging

with human beings, obviously forever.

And I think that if you were to just take that away

and we've just got the walls of our house

and we've got these screens

and we've got these destructive substances, we get

so far away from how we've been built

to be in the world

that our biology just doesn't know how to deal with it.

And it's still, still struggling.

That, that's correct. 'cause the opposite

of addiction is connection.

So when you, when you become an addict, you isolate,

you take drugs, you take alcohol, you get away from people.

But if you're taking drugs

and alcohol around sober people,

they're gonna pull you out of that.

Yeah. They're gonna say, this is not okay,

this is what you need.

So when everything shut down, you didn't have that.

Everyone was, oh, fend for myself and take care of my family

and, you know, close it down and,

and just, just be, well,

that really did some damage to a lot of people.

And then of course, the young people,

all they did was stay on their phone.

That's how they stayed connected.

So they're comfortable now in this digital reality

that isn't real when they go out in the real world.

They don't know how to behave.

They don't know how to act, they don't know how

to have a conversation.

They don't, these things have changed.

So the anxiety is up, the depression is down,

and then the solution is, well, here, take a pill.

Mm-Hmm. Pick a pill for that.

So if you have anxiety, we're gonna put you on Xanax.

Well, then you get addicted to Xanax, which is benzo.

It's bad for you. Well, if you're on Xanax

and you go out with friends, you have a glass of wine,

that's a big no-no, then you get a DUI,

then you're told, oh, well you're an addict.

Well, how am I an addict? I have anxiety.

The doctor gave me Xanax.

So we're seeing that pattern happen. Mm-Hmm.

And the same thing with, I can't focus, there's, you know,

I go to school, I can't sit still

because I'm used to being on my phone

and you know, this text message and that text message

and Snapchat, and I'm doing all these things

and now you want me to sit and focus on one teacher

and one board, and they can't do it.

So now we give them Adderall.

Now you have Adderall, now you're focused.

But Adderall is basically legal methamphetamine.

So now what happens if they're on Adderall,

say from eight to 18?

Because here when they turn 18,

most doctors are cutting 'em off

their brain formed with the Adderall.

Mm-Hmm. So now your brain, which doesn't stop forming

to your 25, has all this chemical in it.

And all of a sudden we take it away

and we expect you to just exist.

They're imploding, they're having breakdowns

and mental health breakdowns and depression.

And our violence rate is up.

We're seeing these young kids, 14, 15, 16,

going into schools, doing shootings

and killing their parents.

And people are going, what's wrong? Yeah.

And I say the same thing every time.

What big pharma medication were they on?

What were they prescribed?

And nine times outta 10, it comes back

with a little nice little list

of three or four things they were on.

And those side effects are suicide, ideology, homicide,

ideology, all of those side effects kick in.

And then we see this behavior and then we all stop back

and go, well, what happened?

And here we are.

Yeah. It's during that kind of whole story

of an individual and going through all of that

and coming at the other end, you know,

in some cases in prison

or dead, there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of people

who lose significantly in that whole story.

That individual parents, friends, schools, educ,

society in general.

But there are some winners in this story. Mm-Hmm.

The pharma, these pharmaceutical companies that, you know,

have a responsibility to their shareholders

to make money and to get as many of their products

into individuals as they can.

They're the huge, they,

they are the big winners in all of this.

Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

They, with, uh, the heroin epidemic,

they really did a number down here in Florida.

They pushed the Oxy

and Roxy, so I don't know if your listeners know this,

but down here in the States, in about 2013, there was a lady

who sued the medical board and she said, I'm in pain

and my doctor would not give me pain management medication.

Meaning opiates. Yep.

So the medical board told all the doctors that

a patient's level of pain is what they say it is.

Your job is to prescribe pain medication. That's your job.

Do your job. If you don't, will pull your license.

So all of a sudden you could go to the doctor

and say, I hurt my elbow.

And he would give you 90 oxycodone.

'cause that's what he was told to do.

So they flooded the market.

And of course, if you're an addict, you go, aha,

I can go in, I can get these pills, I can do these pills,

I can sell these pills, I can do all these things.

So all these little pill mills started popping up in

Florida, and they called themselves pain management clinics.

And you could go in and say, I have anxiety,

I have headaches, I have a migraine.

And you would be given these prescriptions.

So we started to realize it was outta hand.

Now you've got all these people doing all these drugs.

And the medical board said, enough, this is not good.

And then pulled the Oxy and Roxy.

So on the black market,

you could get it at $3 a pill overnight,

it became $30 a pill.

When that happened, all these addicted

people turned to heroin.

And that's why you saw this uptake in overdoses.

Now you have the street drug dealers going, this is awesome.

Now we're selling heroin. How do we make it more potent?

We can't get oxy, we can't get Roxy.

Oh look, there's fentanyl.

Now they throw fentanyl in it,

and you have an addict going, I want that good high.

Well, fentanyl's a good high. So they started using it.

But you've got drug dealers that aren't chemists,

backyard mixing stuff.

So now you have overdosing. Yeah.

And then you have these drug dealers saying, well,

how can we get more people?

Or This is a business, how do we get more people?

Well, let's put that fentanyl in something else.

Cocaine, let's put it in a Percocet.

In a Vicodin, because now you're physically addicted,

you're starting to detox, so you want more of the drugs

so you don't have the detox symptoms.

So that's sort of what happened down here.

And then big pharma went,

uhoh, we're losing our market share.

Right. We can't sell the the Roxy. We can't sell the Oxy.

Let's throw some Suboxone out there.

Now they're selling Suboxone to the same people.

They sold the Oxy oxygen Roxy, to,

to your point, that's how it went.

Full circle. Mm-Hmm. So here we are.

Yeah. It's a wild story.

There's some amazing documentaries

and some really, uh, really intense, um, dramatizations

of those whole events.

'cause it really was like one

of the most wildest things we've ever seen in

world medical history.

Yeah. It's absolutely, Mm-Hmm.

I think it's absolutely super, super fascinating.

And as I say, there are losers and winners in these stories.

And, um, it's unfortunately the, you know,

those losers are the, the tragic families of these people

who, you know, lose their loved ones. And

Yeah.

It's, it's unbelievably sad.

But I, I want to, um, I wanna ask you in regards to

the conventional treatments for addictions that most people

have available to us,

or, you know, for example, somebody goes to their doctor

and, you know, they're having an addiction problem.

Like, what's the typical route for somebody like that?

So most times you're told to go to therapy

or you're told to go to addiction rehab.

The problem is addiction rehab is a 95% failure rate.

And traditional therapy is years long.

And most people don't stick that out.

So that's what we're seeing.

And the reason that it has such a high fail rate is you're

plucked from your environment

and you're thrown into a sterile environment.

You can't get drugs. You can't get alcohol. What do you do?

You go from group to group to group to group,

and you sit in sessions and you listen to people's stories.

When you come out,

you're dumped right back into your environment.

Mm-Hmm. Now you don't have the therapist

that you had if you were having a bad feeling

to run into the office too.

You're sitting at home going, what do I do?

What do I know to do? I get high. So it doesn't work.

So what we recommend for people is sober companions,

they come, they stay with you.

Or an in-depth person,

maybe a recovery coach a couple hours a day

during those periods of struggle

where you need that extra help.

So you're in your environment

and you have that extra support

and that help when those feelings come up.

Mm-Hmm. And that stressor comes up

and the person says,

this is how we're gonna work through it.

This is what we're gonna do. And you learn over 30 days.

'cause it takes 30 days to make a change in a

neuro pathway in your brain.

You learn new coping mechanisms, you learn new skills.

But that takes a 30 day window of,

of repeating the same thing every day to get that new skill.

Yeah. And what we see, what you see,

what you see in movies, and what you see in TV is like,

you know, these individuals, they go into these settings

and it's all awful and difficult.

And then they have this transformational change.

And then yeah. They come out of those 30 days, it's all,

you know, sunshine and roses

and everything's absolutely fine.

Right. I can, I, I can't imagine That's the reality.

When you are, um, your environment

and your every day, your every single habit is

completely vastly changing.

You go into this like, as you call, sterile environment,

and then you just thrown back out again into the wild.

And if you don't have, you know, a treatment team,

you don't have these people who are trained, who are close

to you, who actually care about you, who are, you know,

have those responsibilities, then it's inevitable

that most people, like 99 out of a hundred are going

to end up falling back into those similar patterns.

Because I bet you they've created actual communities

surrounding that like, bad pattern of

where they go to get their hit.

And Yeah.

It's that, that conventional method just,

just from not having a whole lot of experience of addiction,

it sounds, it sounds horrific. It doesn't sound helpful.

Well, most people that don't understand addiction,

this is the analogy I give.

I always say, have you been on a diet?

And most people,

at least one time in their life went on a diet.

Right? And I say, what did you do?

You woke up on a Monday morning

and you said, I'm going on a diet.

How long is the diet? It's 30 days, isn't it? Right?

So Monday morning you said, I'm not going to eat sugar,

processed foods, anything.

I'm gonna have yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch.

I'm gonna have, you know, chicken and vegetables for dinner.

And day one you do it. Day two, you do it right.

With day three, you go to work

and they have pizza for lunch.

What happens on day three?

You're sitting there going, God, I would love pizza.

It smells good, looks good. I miss pizza. Right.

So by dinnertime you're frustrated.

'cause that pizza's still in your head,

just keeps popping up and there's your chicken

and your vegetables and your husband

or wife says, I'm tired of eating that I'm gonna have,

I'm gonna order Chinese food.

Mm-Hmm. And you're sitting there going, oh, Chinese food.

I miss Chinese food. God, that smells so good. Right?

By Thursday or Friday, you've fallen off the wagon.

Now you have had a donut.

You've had, uh, probably a Starbucks,

you know, a Frappuccino.

And then you get a case of Theit, which is, I screwed up,

I'm going to eat whatever I want.

Right. So by Friday you're eating whatever you want.

Then you go in your head, you go,

I'm gonna start my diet on Monday.

I'm gonna start again on Monday.

And you have this pattern, right?

Then when you're driving in the car, you see a billboard

and you go, oh, taco Bell, I miss Taco Bell,

dairy Queen, I want ice cream.

Mm-Hmm. You start to see this

and what happens, you go right back into your old pattern

and then you say to yourself, I gotta go back on a diet.

So this becomes your pattern. And people go, yeah, yeah.

That's me. That's me.

That's the same thing with drugs or alcohol.

You may have that 30 days clean

'cause you went somewhere like a vacation.

Maybe you went to a retreat.

But you're back in that environment

and all those billboards are coming at you.

Everybody's got something you want.

They're talking about it, they have it.

And then your brain starts to obsess. Why can't I have that?

Mm-Hmm. Why can't I do that? I'll just have one.

I'll just have one. And then you have one,

and then you're off the rails.

So people that don't understand addiction, I say,

you never have one potato chip, do you?

And you don't get a pint of ice cream

and have one teaspoon Mm-Hmm.

And put it back. Do you? No. So it's the same exact thing.

It's just a different substance.

Yeah. I think a lot of people can actually,

if they sit back, they can certainly relate to the, um,

the habitual nature of addiction.

Be that with sugar or alcohol

or many of these drugs that are, you know, deemed

to be absolutely okay in fine loss society,

but are causing absolute havoc, especially sugar, obviously

with obesity and preventable diseases.

And oh, it's just, yeah, it's absolutely insane

that the damage that sugar does

and it's absolutely in everything.

And yeah, you're talking about those, those signs

of the Dairy Queen and Taco Bell that are very uniquely

and specifically placed.

They use very unique specific colors and music Mm-Hmm.

And all these things to grab your attention,

to lead you there.

And I think, I,

I think what's interesting about the whole diet thing is

like when you, when people go away on vacation to, you know,

to Hawaii or to the beach, and they don't eat

or drink necessarily perfectly,

and they don't come back huge

and heavy in feeling awful,

they often come back feeling amazing

and great and refreshed.

I feel that is a good point in regards like

where your nervous system is most of the time doing your,

like, normal, normal life, quite stressed out, work, work,

work, kids, all these things going on.

And then you throw in sugar and caffeine

and alcohol into that environment

and your body is significantly going

to struggle to deal with that.

And then you put yourself in Hawaii on the beach, you know,

drinking coconut, drinking coconut water,

and maybe not eating brilliantly,

but you come back feeling differently.

Your body is in a completely different state in regards

to your nervous system's ability to, you know,

break down those foods and actually heal and repair you.

And I like to, I like to use that story to use that idea as,

as you can, you can bring Hawaii to your, to

to yourself Mm-Hmm.

Through practices and through being in nature

and through meditation and yoga, et cetera, you can

reengage your nervous system into be into a more restful,

um, and digestible, um, state.

Is that something you've kind of experienced in regards

to the, like the the forward

treatment for supporting people?

Exactly. And a lot of people ask me what I do,

how do I keep myself centered in balance?

What's my self-care? So,

and I teach my clients this,

the first thing I do when I get up, you know, I make coffee

and I come into my office is I light a candle

and I choose what scent I want for that day.

Do I want sticky bun or do I want winter green

or what, what do I want in my office?

And then I sit down to do my work and I'll take breaks.

I'll go for a walk in nature.

I go to the gym every day and that's my downtime. Mm-Hmm.

And then every night before bed, I take a magnesium bath

with essential oils.

And again, I pick my flavor. Do I want orange?

Do I want menthol? What am I doing?

But I have downtime

and I have certain recuperating things for me

that I schedule in my planner.

'cause I hear a lot of people say, well, I don't have time

for that, but they have time to get their nails done

and they have time to run their kid to soccer practice.

Yeah. And they have time to watch Netflix for three hours,

so you're not scheduling you time.

And I tell them, you block that off.

And when someone says, can you meet for a coffee?

Or can we do this? Nope, from seven to eight, I am booked.

I'm going to the gym, or I'm having my bath,

or I'm whatever it is you're doing.

But you book that time in

and you treat it as if it really is

with someone else or a work event.

And once you start doing that, you get in the habit

of taking care of yourself,

your anxiety and stress goes down.

Mm-Hmm. When that's down your work product productivity goes

up and your want for substances goes down.

Your cortisol has to stay down.

The cortisol going up will cause you to want to get high

and drink because you're not dropping it naturally.

So if you're reaching for a substance to do that,

you've gotta learn how to drop it

naturally, if that makes sense.

Oh, that makes absolutely perfect sense.

And I think all those things that you're explaining, like

what you do in your day, what you recommend to people, all

of those things are investment in your future self.

Like you are preparing yourself, um,

correctly rather than kind of like

impo these impulses we have

during the day and then feeding on those.

So you're making a very deliberate intention when you choose

to, you know, surround yourself

with a specific essential oil you're taking that make easy

and bath to calm your future self down and how,

and facilitate good quality sleep.

You know, you're making, you're put putting steps in your

present to take care of your future.

And that's without question a really important part of

what people can do in their busy stressful days, is

to take those moments.

And it doesn't need to be an hour.

It can be five minutes, it could be a few minutes, you know,

to, um, take a second

and to prepare yourself for, for that day.

And yeah. Just investing in you.

And I think that comes kind of round to what I want

to talk about next in regards to that, that

that personal ownership, that responsibility

that we have individually,

because nobody else is going to do this for us.

You know, I think it's a little, you know,

we're talking about most people who are struggling

with their very busy days

and they don't find the time to, you know,

take these small steps

to take ownership of their own health.

And, um, yeah, I would love it if you could just touch a

little bit more about like, how do you feel people can start

to take their own personal responsibility?

So the first step is realizing that you are responsible

for everything in your environment.

You, you cannot change how you feel about something.

So I call it the secret triangle,

and I'll just let your listeners know what it is.

So you have a circumstance,

let's say you lose your job, right.

That you cannot control that circumstance,

but you have a feeling the tip of your triangle.

Your feeling is you're frustrated,

you're angry, you're upset.

Right? That's a valid feeling based upon your circumstance.

Mm-Hmm. So a lot of people say, well, change your feeling.

Well, no feeling's valid at the bottom part

of your triangle is your thought.

You can change your thought.

You can say, well, I can't believe I got fired.

I wanna get high, or I can't believe I got fired.

I wanna look for a new job.

Those are two very different thoughts. Yeah.

Based upon the thought.

You have your action, here's your accountability.

So under action, I can, I can go with either thought,

if I wanna get high, my action is to get high.

Sorry. If I want to find a new job,

my action is gonna be looking for a new job.

So those are my two options.

My accountability lies in where my thought goes. Mm-Hmm.

So my outcome changes based upon my

action. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. So accountability right there

changes everything

Beautiful with those individuals.

Um, let's say somebody's struggling

with something a little bit more serious than let's

say a Netflix addiction.

Not to say that's not serious for that individual,

but like talking, talking about, you know,

an alcohol addiction and drug

addiction, somebody suffering from that.

And those, um, those courses that you teach, those people

that you train, what are some of the key skills, I wanna say

as a, as a partner, somebody who's like

in the house with that individual.

What are some of the like really key skills

to help support somebody, let's say

after they've had their like 30 days

or their initial kind of treatment or therapy?

So what happens is, and,

and I was the partner of an addict as well,

my husband passed away about a year ago, uh,

from complications of long-term drug addiction.

Okay. So as a spouse

or a partner, your first inclination is to be angry

and say, well, you are not doing things fast enough.

You're not going back to work fast enough.

You're not helping me with the kids.

You're not cleaning, you're not cooking.

So the spouse gets frustrated

because that partner's been gone for 30 days.

Right. Or only has 30 days clean.

Their brain isn't totally there yet. That's the first issue.

So they're not thinking clearly, they're still little foggy,

but we also have this unrealistic expectation

that they're just gonna jump in

and everything is gonna be fine.

Right. And that's not real.

They're gonna still have these issues coming up.

So we need to be supportive.

We need to say, I love you, here's what I need.

And the, and the dichotomy comes in when our needs

as a spouse aren't getting met, and then there's frustration

and anger, and then we tend

to lash out at the addicted person who then can't handle

that stress, who then goes and uses.

Right. And then as the partner, we go,

see, here we are again.

You know, and we're creating that.

So a lot of partners don't know about that.

They don't know what those things are.

So we have to teach them those things.

And then we have family coaching.

So we actually teach the partner how to handle the addict.

What do you say? What do you not say?

What is your reasonable amount of time

before you have this expectation of all these things

and expecting them to come home from a, you know,

a 30 day rehab and go right back to work and help and cook

and clean and do all this stuff.

It's gonna overwhelm them.

They're not ready for that yet. Mm-Hmm.

Well that sounds like a win-win, um, for the,

the caregiver as well as the individual with addiction.

Because having those reasonable expectations of of

that person is gonna allow you

to set yourself in a particular manner

and tone that's gonna be able to support that individual

to have certain expectations of somebody who is

coming back from, you know,

a very significant time in their life.

Yeah. And support is key.

We, we tend to wanna lash out

and say, you know, you've been gone, I've been stressed,

I've been doing all this on my own,

plus working and paying all the bills.

Mm-Hmm. Here's the stuff I

need you to do now that you're back.

Yeah. And that's a natural reaction.

'cause your partner's been busy. Yeah.

You, or, or if it's your child, you want them to go

to school or you want them to go to work, you want them

to clean your room, take a shower, do your laundry,

all the things that a normal teenager should be doing.

Yeah. They're not ready for that. Nice.

So as a partner, we have to learn, uh,

space and we have to learn.

Some of the needs we have aren't gonna be met in the

immediate, but in the long term,

you're gonna get your person back.

But we have to know how to handle that and how to get there.

Have you seen, um, faith come into

this piece for a lot of people on their road to recovery?

Yes. So a lot of people have tried everything.

They've tried therapy, coaching, rehab,

and they're just like, none of this is working.

All I have is faith.

All I have is the ability to ask something outside of myself

to help me because I can't get this to work.

Mm-Hmm. And a lot of people reach for that

and it's different and it's, you know,

all they really have and it works.

And they come back and they're like, you know,

I got baptized and I went to church,

and boom, I'm, you know, I'm cured.

And I'm like, wait a minute, you are not cured.

You know, you just have a new coping skill.

Um, the thing that I, I warn people

of is don't trade one addiction for another.

Sure. Don't start going to a meeting

or to church every single time you have a feeling,

because that becomes your addiction.

Mm-Hmm. You have to learn how to sit with your feelings

and your emotions and use those other things.

Use church, use your faith

as an addition to what you're doing.

So bring it in as an extra, not in exchange for

what you're addicted to.

Yeah. I can only imagine like going into, you know,

a communal situation like, like church

where you've got a lot of like wonderful individuals

who would be open to supporting you and praying for you

and being with you like that could only, you know, support

that individual through what they're going through.

I feel that that could be a, a very positive thing.

Yeah. Absolutely. And too, to your point too,

you also have connection.

You have fellowship, you have people there to talk to.

Mm-Hmm. There's meetings, there's groups, all

of those things are important.

And that's what we're missing in addiction

is the connection.

Yeah. We're not connecting to other human beings.

We're alone on this island going, no one understands me,

but when you meet like, like, like minded individuals

and they say, I understand you

because I've had that problem.

Yeah. Now you have a commonality.

Yeah. I think for a lot of people,

there's a big challenge in being in environments

where people will actually listen to you with, you know,

with, with genuine care

and grace rather than, um, with an agenda

or waiting for their turn to speak.

I think that's a significantly rare scenario

that we unfortunately have in our world today.

And when I, when I first began practicing as a nutritionist,

my initial consultation was like nearly two hours long.

And for a lot of people, that was the longest

that anybody really sat and listened to them

and asked quite detailed,

open-ended questions about their personal

like circumstances.

And for a lot of people, like it was, you know,

it's a nutritional consultation,

but it ends up being this significantly impactful therapy

session where they're able to offload a lot of things

and talk through a lot of things

and just be actively listened to rather than being part

of just like, I dunno, I wanna say normal dialogue

where it's like I talk, you talk, I talk, you talk.

And sometimes there's not a whole lot of

space and substance there.

A lot of times we talk to answer or solve the problem.

Mm-Hmm. We don't talk to listen.

So when I'm training a new coach,

the first thing I have them do is listen for five minutes

where they can't speak a word

and the other person complains for five minutes.

Yeah. And the coaches get frustrated.

They're like, but yeah, yeah. Nope, you can't say a word.

You gotta sit there and listen.

And the person talking is like, wow, I talked

for five minutes and I wasn't interrupted

for the first time in my life.

Mm-Hmm. Plus they're hearing themselves

and they're solving some of their problems just

by hearing it without being interrupted.

So I teach that as an active listening skill.

And then we teach the six open-ended questions.

The what, where, when, why, who,

and how Every question you ask should be open-ended.

It should never be did you or do you? Mm-Hmm.

It should always be why did you do that? Yeah.

How did you feel when you did that? What's your outcome?

What's your plan? And when you reframe things like that,

it gets people to think, they start thinking,

well, why am I doing this?

Yeah. What am I really getting out of this? Is it worth it?

Yeah. We spoke at the beginning of the show about, um,

that lack of communication skills that a lot of people have

and a lot of teens are not developing.

And being able to actively listen

and ask good quality questions is, is is a skill.

It's something that you absolutely learn. And yeah.

If we're not doing that, then how,

how much quality is really wrapped around the,

the friend circles that we do have?

I think that's really interesting.

I don't think it was very, uh, I'm very fortunate,

early in my marriage, I realized that when my wife wants

to sit down and have like, get something off her chest,

she does not want me to fix her problems.

She just wants me to be there and listen

and hold her hands that, that that's what she wants.

That's what she needs in, in those moments.

And if it was a buddy of mine back in the UK

and he was talking to me about a problem, he would be like,

okay, let's sort this out.

Let's fix it. Mm-Hmm.

But that's, that, that's skills that you have to like, learn

and be, you know, be open to developing even, you know,

even at like 30 years old

or 40 years old, you know, these things,

you never really stop learning these things.

And yeah, I'm just, um, it's amazing that we have, um,

individuals like you who have schools like yours

who are teaching people, but I just honestly wish

that we had like more evolved, um,

educational systems, uh, that would teach these kids

to be able to do this in an early age.

Because from, for a lot of, a lot of people's problems, kids

or adults, communication and talking

and being with people is very often like

at the, the solution.

And if you're able to do that kind of early on in the,

let's say stages of it becoming an addiction

or a big problem for somebody,

then it can really like massively impact

years of somebody's life.

Mm-Hmm. Absolutely.

Yes. Wild stuff. Wild stuff.

I wanted to ask you, what's the, uh,

what's your experience in the role of

nutrition when it comes to addiction?

We see, so here at Trope Canada, we're a mind

and body based supplement company.

And we work with a lot of people

who have been on psychotropic medications

for sometimes decades.

And they've never really resolved their root concerns.

But when they start taking good quality supplementation,

nutrition, especially our flagship product is a, is a, um,

broad spectrum mineral supplement.

And our minerals are chelated for four days

and the industry standard is four hours.

So our minerals actually pass through the brain blood,

sorry, the blood brain barrier

and actually impact people's psychology very, very quickly.

And we see that people's ability to pick a different path

happens very fast when they've actually got adequate amounts

of like, nutrition coming into their body

that their body's been craving for a long periods of time.

We talked about sugar addiction

and alcohol addiction, what that does,

so like gut integrity, the ability to absorb nutrients, um,

and people become chronically nutrient deficient for years,

decades sometimes.

And then when we see that's replaced

with good quality nutrition,

we see impactful changes happen very fast for people's, um,

physiological and psychological, um, bodies.

Absolutely. So, um, a couple things while you're talking,

I'm thinking about I need to use your supplements

for my Canadian friends

because we have supplements here

that we can't cross customs with.

Right. So we'll talk later about that. Absolutely.

Nutrition is key and so is supplementation.

The first thing we do is a urine

and a saliva test to see everything.

Where's your cortisol? Um, what are your biomarkers?

What is going on in your body that's not getting addressed?

Because in traditional

addiction medicine, it's talk therapy.

Mm-Hmm. But if you're chemically not correct,

you're not gonna feel well enough to do talk therapy

and you're gonna be reaching for something to feel better.

So when we get your gut right,

and with us, you stop eating sugar,

I know a lot of clients are like, what?

We take you off sugar, we try to get you off caffeine,

anything that you're on processed food,

we want you on good quality nutrition.

And then we wanna figure out

what you're missing in your body, which, what's missing?

Get this supplementation correct.

Now the talk therapy and the coaching so much easier

'cause we're not fighting upstream.

Wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah, it's, um, it's a huge piece.

I think there's as many pieces to the pie when it comes

to somebody's mental health, but as we said

before, like the, the foundations are there

and the foundations to help people get out

of a tricky spot are often free and available

and, um, accessible to most people.

So yeah, it's, it's wonderful that we're able

to have this conversation today to to,

to shed some light on those addictive

struggles that people have.

And I feel like we've also discussed how I think a lot of,

a lot of people can relate to somebody who's got like,

a serious, serious addiction.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Um, before we finish off,

can you just tell us a little bit about your

podcast Unpause Your Life?

So I have a podcast called Unpause Your Life.

And it's for people that have done something extraordinary

or overcome something in their life to go on to be better

or bigger or, you know,

conquering the world, whatever they did.

Mm-Hmm. So there's authors on there, there's, uh, people

that are famous, uh, jackasses on there.

What's the guy from, um, Brandon Novak's on there. Dr.

V from her show is on there.

Billy Lee, like the first trans

transgender woman is on there.

So it, it's sort of like, if you've done something unique,

I'd like to have you on and, and hear about

how you overcame adversity to get there. Very

Cool. Very cool.

Well, I'll make sure that

that's linked up in the show notes so people can find that.

But what's the best place for people to connect

with you and learn more about your work?

So I'm at sober on demand.com

or the addictions academy.com.

Or they can just Google Dr.

Call Estes and I'll pop up all over the place

and they can reach out

and, uh, give us a call, um,

the phone number's +1 800-706-0318 and they'll reach me

or my assistant and we can help 'em however we can.

Amazing. Wonderful.

Well, I'll, as, as again,

I'll make sure all those links are in the show.

Next. People can learn more about you

and connect with you if they want to, if they need to.

But, um, other than that, thank you so much

for coming onto the show today.

I feel like we've got many other things

that we could be talking about.

So if you're, if you're into it, we'd,

we'd love to get you back on the show.

I would love to. Thank you so much.

Beautiful. Well, that is it for this episode

of True Hope Cast, the official podcast of True Hope Canada.

Again, you wanna check out the show

notes to connect with Dr.

Callie. You can do that. All the links to her social media

and website will be on there.

You can leave us a, leave us a review on iTunes if you want,

and a rating on Spotify.

But that is it for this week. We'll see you soon.