Cali’s specialty is speaking the truth to high-profile or wealthy people trying to get sober, especially when they’re being enabled by family, hangers-on or the people they make money for. Topics are : codependency, low self-esteem & boundaries

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Episode Transcript:



How To Deal With Addicts – Dr Cali Estes

Transcribed by Kajsa Lancaster

PG: I’m here with Dr Cali Estes, and you are an addiction specialist.

CE: I am.

PG: I didn’t catch you off guard with letting you know you are one.

CE: (Laughs) Hopefully not! After 25 years, I hope not.

PG: Oh my god, I am! I never thought about that. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is, a lot of your clients are high profile people, powerful people, CEOs, celebrities – mostly male, you would say?

CE: Yes, yep.

PG: Give me some stories that you think exemplify the state of recovery as an industry and ways where exploitation is happening.

CE: Okay, I’m going to give you an example. I have a client in Hollywood Hills – obviously not going to give you any names or anything. She’s got two people living with her, she pays all the bills. She’s trying to get sober from alcohol, and they’re throwing party after party after party. Because of who she is, it’s an A-list party; in and out, in and out.

PG: And who’s ‘they’ – the people living with her?

CE: Correct. They’re living on her dime, living in her house, convincing her that she needs them as a personal assistant and a PR person and such-and-such, and that without them, she would not be who she is.

PG: Does she believe that herself, or do they tell her that?

CE: They tell her that. And because she’s drinking, and because she feels low self-esteem and low self-worth because she’s been in the tabloids, they convince her they’re going to fix this. And she buys into it. And they bring more alcohol in, and they keep her stuck. When they keep her stuck, they can use her credit card, they can live in the house, they can have people in and out, they can take pictures with them, they can post it on Instagram, and they feel important. Which is what you see in the celebrity culture: people want to ride the coattails of those that have already made it – especially if there’s money and fame involved. And they do it at the famous person’s expense, because they keen them stuck. They keep them sick to allow the behavior to continue. If she was sober and her head was in the right space, she would never allow that to happen.

PG: She would see that these people are users, and then she’d have to deal with her co-dependency issues!

CE: Correct! Yes, absolutely. But to stay drunk, it seems normal.

PG: And whether it’s conscious or not on the part of the friends, I would imagine that they want her not only so they can have people coming in and out and post pictures on Instagram, but I would imagine they want that feeling that they are more powerful than her; that she’s in a state of distress so that then they are needed.

CE: Correct. One even poses as her sober companion. He takes her to certain events; however, he keeps her liquored up enough that he brings her home and he stays at the event. This is his meal ticket into an event, a meal ticket into something, to stardom. Because he can’t be her, he can’t attain that level, but if he can stay close to her, maybe someone in Hollywood will pick him up as an actor, or maybe someone will see his worth. So I deal with that – sometimes I get called in for those situations by agents that say, ‘Hey, this person isn’t showing up for work and they’re going to lose their show,’ or whatever it is. Sometimes it’s family members. I had a family call me that was on the East Coast, in West Palm Beach, and her daughter was out here, and she couldn’t reach her daughter. She said, ‘I think she’s getting taken advantage of. Her personal assistant is blowing through her bank account, the trust fund is just dwindling, and she hasn’t performed in two years because she’s drinking and doing drugs.’ And I come out, and I get there, and I’m like, ‘Wow.’ The personal assistant has taken full advantage, the financial advisor has taken advantage, and I sit there thinking to myself, ‘This is crazy: what you’re doing to somebody, keeping them sick, keeping them stuck, so you can spend their money and you can live vicariously through them.’ And I’m known as the disruptor. I come in, I disrupt the situation, kick out the assistant, kick out the people, and I work one on one with the client. I get them in the right headspace and I get them sober, and I get them to see: this is what’s going on, we’ve got to make these decisions, we’ve got to fix these problems that are happening or you’re going to be completely broke and a has-been when you wake up four years from now from your addiction.

PG: And how difficult is it kicking the people out?

CE: Can be very. It can be very difficult.

PG: Is the client fighting you on it?

CE: Sometimes, because they’re so convinced that what they think is their friend is there to help them. Sometimes it’s a mother – you know, it was a child star and the mother is riding the coattails of their daughter, at every event and sleeping with everybody. And when the daughter starts drinking or doing drugs, they want the daughter fixed, but not too fixed. Because if the daughter is totally fixed, she won’t want Mom around with her bad behavior. So it’s a delicate situation, but it’s also a sad situation, because the money and the power taints everything.

PG: Talk about the inner life of somebody who is famous, and the public sees them and thinks, ‘Man, they’ve got it made.’ What don’t they know about many of these people?

CE: Okay, so let me start here: most of the women find themselves unattractive. You look at them on TV and go, ‘Oh my god, she’s perfect! She has the perfect face and the perfect body and all this money and the most beautiful husband. She’s amazing.’ And when you see her, her hair is in a bunch, she has no makeup, and she thinks she’s the ugliest person on the planet, and she’s starving herself because she thinks she’s fat. I see that. I hold people’s hair when they’re throwing up in the toilet in between acting, and they’re so drunk on stage or so high on stage that they can’t perform. You don’t see those things. You don’t see, everybody is sleeping with everybody. You don’t see that. You don’t see how so-and-so cheated on so-and-so and it destroyed them. They just say, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’ and they move on, because that’s what the public wants to hear – they’re resilient, they’re amazing, they’re so tough! And they’re not. They’re in pieces on the floor in the fetal position when I get there. It’s heartbreaking, because they have to have the public life, the public persona, and then their private persona is who they really are. And they can’t be that in the limelight because it would destroy who you think they are.

PG: It’s funny because in my opinion, it would make people love them even more because they would appear human.

CE: They would, but the fear of the tabloids taking that little piece they give and running with it, destroying them, keeps them from saying what they want to say.

PG: But what if they owned the story, and they put it out there. Then they have ownership of it.

CE: You’re starting to see that. Celebrities coming out and saying, ‘I’m in AA, I’m sober, this is how I got there.’ And people go, ‘Oh my god, he’s sober? I thought he was using,’ or ‘I had no idea he had a problem.’ They come out saying, ‘This is me,’ or ‘I have a mental health issue and this is what I’m doing’ – they’re not afraid to talk about it anymore. Which helps the rest of the population, who are scared to talk about their problem. They say, ‘Oh, if so-and-so can say that they have this problem, I can do that too,’ which is excellent.

PG: What are the personality traits that you see among people who are extremely successful, be it in business or entertainment or whatever – give me some of the patterns, common traits… Especially things that the rest of us don’t see.

CE: Most of the men are narcissistic, self-absorbed assholes. They just are. They are all about money, all about power, all about which girl they’re with or how many, what they own, what their suit looks like. It’s a constant competition. It’s a ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick’ competition, constantly. They do that because they don’t ever want to deal with the scared little boy inside. I work in that arena a lot – I bring the scared little boy out.

PG: How do you do that?

CE: Depends on the person. I use sarcasm. I use a lot of analogy, I try to be funny and warm, but I also want them to know that no one buys their shtick. You can act all you want – that’s what you do as a job – but when you step off stage, if you’re still an asshole, we need to talk about that. Because that’s keeping you stuck, and that’s why you’re drinking, and that’s why you’re doing drugs, and that’s why you’re hiring hookers and all this other nonsense that ends in the tabloids, which then causes you a problem. If we don’t deal with that behavior, you’re going to keep spinning in the same cycle. I address them with the hard questions: Where are you? Where do you want to be? And how do you want to get there? And then, let’s do it – let’s process that and get there.

PG: Give me an example.

CE: I’ve got a client who’s a famous actor, who has been fired consistently because he comes to the set drunk and high and has a habit of trying to grope the women – the actresses, producers, it doesn’t matter. He’s been consistently fired for inappropriate behavior, but he’s a very, very good actor and he’s very well paid. I was hired to be the buffer – ‘Could you teach him to behave on set?’ That’s what they hired me to do. And I said, ‘Well, let’s clarify what that means.’ They said, ‘We just want him to behave when he’s filming; we don’t care what he does the rest of the time, but have him behave.’ So I started working –

PG: That’s pretty gross that they don’t care who he’s hurting once the camera stops filming. That’s really fucking gross.

CE: It’s – yeah – and it’s all about money sometimes. If they’re not producing and making us money, we don’t want them. But if it’s this actor that’s so well-liked by the public, we want them, but we don’t want it here because we don’t want to get sued. What he does at five o’clock is up to him. So I have to come in with that moral dilemma of, ‘Can I make this happen?’ Then I sit down with them and I say, ‘This is inappropriate at work, this is inappropriate in personal. This has to change totally. I don’t want to see it just change at work – you’ve got to change this is personal or you’re going to get sued. The whole Me Too movement is out there – you’re going to be part of that and you’re going to have a problem.’ And I have to have those conversations.

PG: Yeah, and it sounds like it’s beyond inappropriate even, it’s criminal.

CE: It could be, yeah. I’ve been on a few of those, where there are clients that have been arrested and that are facing some sort of problem, going, ‘Can you fix this?’ And I always say, ‘I can’t fix bad behavior. I cannot control human behavior. I can give you the toolbox, I can give you the tools, but if you sit down and prop your feet up on the toolbox, the house isn’t going to get built. You have to build the house.’ So I do my best with that.

PG: I love that analogy. So, going back to this person – break it down.

CE: First day on set, we’re in the trailer, and he comes in completely wasted. It’s six o’clock in the morning, hasn’t slept, was at the strip club all night, hasn’t showered. The first thing I did was go and say, ‘He’s not going to work today.’ And they say, ‘Well, he has to.’ I said, ‘He’s not going to. He’s drunk, he stinks, he is a complete shit show. It’s absolutely not going to happen.’

PG: And if you don’t want him to grope people, best probably not to have him drunk.

CE: Correct. I said, ‘What we need to do is take the day off, he needs to sleep it off, and as soon as he’s sober I’m going to work with him.’ It was about six, seven hours later, he’s sober. Hasn’t showered, he’s a complete mess. I said, ‘We’re going to start doing some work,’ and he says, ‘I need a drink.’ I said, ‘You need detox. No drink; you need detox. We’re going to detox you.’ ‘Well, I’m not going to detox.’ ‘Yes you are. It’s not an option.’ He goes, ‘Well, you’re fired.’ I said, ‘You can’t fire me. You didn’t hire me – you’re stuck with me. Unless you want to lose your job, you’re stuck with me.’ So, we went through that conversation. He called me all kinds of names, the B word, the C word, the F word. None of it fazed me. I said, ‘Okay, let me know when you’re done.’ He says, ‘Fine.’ I said, ‘Now we’re going to detox.’ I told him he needs three days off, possibly five; we’re going to detox. And I forced him into detox. The show was angry: ‘We have to hold up now for this?’ I said, ‘Well, your other option is, he’s going to continue down the same path.’ Because some of these people don’t understand addiction. You can’t just waltz me in and I’ll have a little conversation and all of a sudden, the bad behavior stops. We have to get him sober first.

PG: Yes. You’re essentially dealing with a frightened child in an adult body, and you’re trying to take their toy away.

CE: Exactly. And they get angry – I’ve had a laptop thrown at my head; I’ve had spices. I had one person picking at their spice rack, throwing every spice, and finally they ran out of spices and I said, ‘Are you done now?’ She stopped and went, ‘I think so,’ and I said, ‘Sit down and let’s go!’ She didn’t know what to do with that, and I said, ‘That’s why I do. I disrupt the bad behavior.’ I love working with the client, because I know what I’m going to get. It’s hard working with the agents and the personal assistants because they don’t understand addiction. They don’t understand the process, that this is going to take a while. This is not a 24 hour fix, this is not a Band-Aid; this is a lifestyle change.

PG: And it’s not about reasoning with people. I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions, especially among co-dependents: they think, ‘If I can just get them to see…’

CE: Yes.

PG: So, what is it that cracks open that shell of defiance in the addict, the denial?

CE: Everybody’s different. For some, it’s the ‘I’m losing everything. I’ve just gotten fired. If I get fired, I can’t pay the rent, I can’t pay the mortgage. If I can’t pay the mortgage, I’m going to lose my trophy wife. If that happens, I’m really screwed.’ So when I’m dealing with a doctor or CEO, I sit them down and say, ‘As a doctor, you’re going to lose your medical license.’ And I say, ‘I need you to repeat after me,’ and they always say, ‘What?’ and I say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ And they say, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘Because that’s the job you’re going to get when you get fired for malpractice and you kill somebody. You’re going to go to prison. That’s what’s going to happen to you.’ And they don’t get that. So, it’s that conversation of, ‘This is real.’ And with the CEO, ‘You’re going to lose your company! That’s your baby; you built that. What are you going to do? There are very few jobs for high-powered CEOs out there. It’s a long time to get that kind of an income. What are you going to do in the meantime?’ Or: ‘You’re going to lose your wife. You’re going to lose your house.’ I sit down and I talk about –

PG: Or, ‘You’re going to die.’

CE: Yeah. I talk about all these things that are going to happen if you continue doing what you’re doing. Or, you could try sobriety. And I always say this: ‘I’m not going to ask you to get sober for a lifetime; I’m going to ask you to get sober for thirty days.’ And if you don’t like, go right back to doing what you’re doing. Because the drugs will always be there, the alcohol will always be there, the women, the men, whatever, will always be there. But give it a thirty day shot and see if something changes. Then, within thirty days, things change and they go, ‘Oh, wow.’ Number one: ‘I’m not hungover!’ Number two: ‘I’m not spending all day trying to find the dope man.’ This blows their mind, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, heroin is a full-time job’ – it is! It’s the getting up and trying to find the money and trying to get it, all day long, just nonsense! And they say, ‘I don’t have to do that today! I have free time. It’s amazing.’ Or, ‘I had a conversation with my kids, and I can remember what I said!’ And they’re shocked, like, ‘Wow, isn’t that amazing.’ I let them have those little wins, and then I say, ‘Okay, you did thirty days. Let’s see if we can do forty-five, how does that sound?’ ‘Okay, I can do forty-five.’ And then we have the next marker: ‘How about sixty?’ Next thing you know, they’ve got ninety days sober and they’re going, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been sober for ninety days?!’ They have no idea it’s been ninety days. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s try a hundred.’ And then they go, ‘Okay, I’m going to stay sober forever!’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, hang on! Let’s keep little tiny milestones, because as soon as you go forever, ‘I can never have that again,’ your brain goes, ‘Uh-oh, that’s a problem!’ I don’t like that. Let’s just keep going until it’s been a year, and then it’s two, and then you go, ‘I’m never going back. Why?’ And everything has changed. That’s how I do it.

PG: What happens internally in these people? Where is the change? One of the reasons I’m a big fan of 12 Steps is because a lot of internal changes happen; a lot of tools are developed to deal with the anxiety and the fear and the anger and the selfishness.

CE: That’s exactly what we do. As a coaching perspective, we talk about, ‘Where are you stuck? What is your action plan?’ We do different exercises like Circle of Influence – ‘Who are your toxic people? Who’s around you that’s keeping you stuck? Who needs to go?’ We talk about your vision board – ‘What do you want to create? What’s your purpose in life? What’s your passion in life?’ So many people are stuck in roles they don’t belong in: ‘Well, I’m an accountant because my Dad said I should be an accountant, and I get high because I don’t like doing taxes.’ ‘Well, why are you an accountant? What else could you do?’ It’s getting them to think outside the box, and then processing if they have a trauma. If they have mental health, we get that evaluated. They may need a mental health medication – if they’re bipolar and they’re trying to get sober, and as soon as they get depressed they get high – let’s address the bipolar. Let’s get you stable, because you won’t reach for drugs if you’re stable. It’s amazing, you know?

PG: In my experience, the best recovery is where the anxiety, the fear, the selfishness etc., is replaced by peace. Because in my experience, when I’m in a peaceful state I don’t want to get high, I don’t want to get drunk. So, finding tools to keep peace in my life, especially when there’s turmoil or disappointment or pain, is the thing that I try to keep my eye on. What can I do to not stay in this state that I’m in; to not be ruminating about something. Give me an example of a client you had that, as they stopped using their alcohol or their drugs to soothe their feelings, give me an example of where an issue came up and they had to develop a new tool to deal with.

CE: Okay, so, I had a client where we were working on anxiety. His thing was, every time he had an obligation he got severely anxious and would medicate to get through the obligation. So I said, ‘Let’s address the anxiety. Where is the anxiety coming from?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ So we started the therapy process where we went backwards in time: ‘When you were five, were you anxious?’ ‘No.’ ‘When you were eight, were you anxious?’ ‘No.’ And all of a sudden, when he hit ten, he said ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Tell me where you were.’ He said, ‘My mother would’ – his mother had Borderline Personality Disorder, so she would change through different things. Whenever the dishes piled up, she’d have this meltdown and start screaming. So he started to associate anything overwhelming with screaming and yelling. So, to avoid the screaming and yelling at all costs, he would drink a glass of wine, at ten years old, from the cabinet.

PG: Wow.

CE: To avoid her screaming. And he noticed when that would happen, everything was dulled. Her screaming and yelling was dulled. It was nice. He wasn’t anxious. And then she could scream and yell and it didn’t bother him. He carried that into adulthood. And I said, ‘Well, let’s address that anxiety. Let’s address that.’ And as we went back and processed that, and I said, ‘You’re not ten. Now you’re thirty-five. There’s no reason to be anxious over dishes. That’s ten-year-old you. This is not thirty-five-year-old you.

PG: You’re not trapped in that house anymore.

CE: Exactly. You’re not in that situation; you’re safe. Now that you’re safe, how can you handle the situation? What can we do? It was all about pre-planning so the anxiety wouldn’t go up. ‘Well, if you do the dish every time you eat, you won’t have a bunch of dishes, and you won’t be anxious.’ ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Or if you put it in the dishwasher.’ And he started doing little things like that, and the anxiety never came up because it never got that far. He never let it get so overwhelming that he got to that point where he had to drink a glass of wine. And then we disassociated the anxiety from the mother. So, it’s also teaching him, ‘The reason you were anxious was your Mom, and she’s not here, so the anxiety is not real; it’s perceived. There’s perceived anxiety and real anxiety – when you were ten, it was real. When you’re thirty-five, it’s perceived. You have internalized your mother and you hear your mother’s voice in your head, that’s not there!’ So, it’s disassociating that and getting him to realize he’s safe, and take a deep breath. I taught him meditation, we went to yoga class, and he learned how to balance himself every time he felt anxious, instead of reaching for wine. And eventually he said, ‘I don’t need the wine. The wine doesn’t center me – I center me. And when I center me, the dishes don’t matter! They’re just dishes.’ And he realized, that wasn’t his problem. His problem was, he was making all this stuff in his head crazy, so he would drink. Once he stopped doing that, the drinking stopped. So, that’s what I do.

PG: It’s mind-blowing when you realize as an addict, it’s not the drinking, it’s the thinking.

CE: Yeah, yeah. The drinking is your solving your problem; it’s your solution to your problem. That’s where a lot of treatment centers go wrong – they address your drinking. They don’t address your problem. They say, ‘You need to stop drinking and doing drugs, that’s your problem.’ No, it’s not! That’s your coping skill to deal with your problem. What’s your problem?

PG: Something I see happen a lot in Southern California are these rehabs that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and there’s a personal chef and there’s this and that, and I always think to myself, that seems counter to what you want the person trying to get sober to experience. If you’re trying to get this person to experience humility and simplicity… What are your thoughts on that?

CE: This is a double-edged sword. What’s happened is, we got away from traditional treatment, which was twelve-step based: you come in, you prepare your own food, you do your own laundry, go to group – you’re accountable. And we’re now more into, ‘Let me do that for you,’ and you work on you.’ But we don’t give them enough you-time. You’re not getting enough therapy, you’re not getting enough coaching, you’re not getting enough of those things, and we’re pampering you in the process. Some of them are designed to fail, and they’re designed to fail so the person goes out, relapses, comes back in, and we do it again.

PG: Yes, and they don’t get kicked out when they relapse in there, which, to me – somebody had wanted to advertise on this podcast, it was a rehab, and I asked them, when somebody uses in your rehab, what do you do? And they said, ‘Well, we believe in second chances,’ and I said I can’t advertise, because if an addict isn’t given consequences, it’s not going to take – that’s my personal belief. I’m sure other people disagree with it.

CE: Well, to your point, it’s worse than just that. There are certain things – and I was a Director of a rehab in Florida that since sold, and the original owner – who I worked for – his policy was, keep them happy at all costs.

PG: Oh my god!

CE: Yeah, and I said, ‘Well, we’re not teaching them accountability,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but we’re losing revenue. This is a business, young lady.’

PG: How the fuck does that person live with themselves?

CE: Well, he sold it for 13.5 million dollars. I said to him, ‘We’re not teaching them; we’re doing them a disservice.’ And one day I counted out of the 45 people how many had come through – our relapse rate was 55%, because we gave them what they wanted, and they didn’t learn anything. They left, they used, they had a good insurance policy so we brought them back in and did it all again. And the rule was, well, since you didn’t get it the first time, you obviously aren’t ready. And I said, ‘What?! So you’re telling me it’s their fault? No, it’s our fault! What are we doing wrong that we’re not teaching them something?’ After that, we had a difference and a parting of ways that pretty much ended with me telling him to go fuck himself. I said I can’t work here; this is not what I do. I teach accountability. I teach behavior modification. If I’m telling someone, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to cook your lunch, I’ll do it for you’ – what are they learning? Nothing! If we allow them to curse at us, what are they learning? Nothing! And we allow Mom to come in with fresh underwear and baked banana bread every Friday – what are we doing? Nothing! So that’s happening, in addition to the relapse rate – let’s pacify the addict, let’s pacify the person so they don’t leave. We don’t want bad customer service. Yeah, we do! If they’re uncomfortable and hate me, I’m doing my job.

PG: (Laughs) Because you’re getting to the feelings underneath it.

CE: Exactly.

PG: I had somebody from a wealthy family who’s a mother, who said, ‘My child isn’t staying sober. What’s the most expensive rehab you know?’ And it just blew me away. I said, ‘It has nothing to do with the money; in fact, it’s often counter to it. Beware of the expensive rehabs, because they have a reason to want to keep you.’

CE: Yeah. I just signed a client – I got this phone call from a colleague who said, ‘I’ve got a 29-year-old entitled twat.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got the program.’ I sent him to a program that was $16,000, cash pay, nothing frills: you cook your own meals, you have to get up, you have to work on the farm, they have food that you have to grow. Day 2, the kid calls me screaming: ‘This is not for me!’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ That is for you. He called his parents, and I said, ‘Do not answer the call – you route everything through me.’ These parents had tons and tons of money, and they said, ‘What is he learning?’ I said, ‘He’s learning responsibility, he’s learning accountability, and we’re fixing the bad parenting. Because he’s learning, you cannot do that in this facility.’ He said he was leaving, and it happens to be in the middle of the forest in Florida. So it’s like three miles of bare walking, so he gets into the woods, freaks out, comes back running in and tries to call an Uber. The cellphone service doesn’t work. So, it was absolutely incredible. The family called me and they were like, ‘He called today and said thank you. It’s the first time we heard this kid say thank you.’ I said, ‘There you go.’

PG: So he had a moment of clarity?

CE: He had a moment of, ‘Oh shit, I’m in the middle of nowhere, what am I going to do? I better change my behavior to get myself out of this situation.’ He had a few slip-ups – you know, bad behavior. And we said, ‘Every time you have bad behavior, we’re going to extend your stay by ten days.’ And that was like, ‘You’re what?’ ‘Well, yeah, we’re going to keep extending you until you learn that this is not acceptable; this is not how we behave as an adult.’ And sometimes that’s the kind of program somebody’s who’s entitled and affluent needs, because they’ve never had accountability. Mom buys them out of this problem and Dad buys them out of jail, and they crash the car, we buy a new one, they drop out of school, we put him in a new school… We fix these problems, but they never learn, they need to fix their own problems. And then Mom and Dad call me as a private coach and go, ‘I don’t know what to do with my 25-year-old who’s living in my house, who doesn’t have a job, who doesn’t have a girlfriend… What do I do?!’ And I go, ‘Okay, I’ll be there.’ I’ve got to parent. And I do – I’ve got to come in and parent. I’ve got to say ‘No.’

PG: What are some of the dynamics that you see among the affluent clients that you have? You talked about narcissism, them being materialistic.

CE: M-hm.

PG: When you begin to make progress with one of them, you crack the shell, they start to get a little bit of clarity. What do you often find underneath that, not only in terms of their self-beliefs but maybe trauma or something from their past?

CE: There’s a lot of high expectations they never meet, from Mom and Dad or family lineage – it’s expected they go to Harvard, it’s expected that they’re a doctor but they’re not smart enough to cut it… So they end up being a drifter, and they pass it off as an artist. They never hit the bar, and the problem in the affluent community is that the Moms and Dads are trying to keep up with each other by using their children as the pawn. One of my specialties is failure to launch. I get the kids from 18 to 28, Mom and Dad set the bar so high, Junior couldn’t hit it, so he just checked out and started using drugs and alcohol. And I sit down with Mom and Dad and I say, ‘You have this unrealistic expectation of what he or she should be doing. That’s the problem.’ You gave them so much pressure, all they know how to do is check out. It’s too much. I have to have that conversation.

PG: How is that received?

CE: It’s usually not received well, because I’m coming and saying, ‘Junior is never going to be the doctor you insist him on being. He’s going to be a drug addict if you keep pushing this. He wants to be, for example, I had one that wanted to be a surfer. He wants to be a surfer! He’s really good at surfing. That’s about all he’s good at. He’s not at accounting. You’re pushing him to be an accountant; the kid can’t balance a checkbook! I mean, he’s never going to do it! I have to explain to them, you’re the reason he’s in this position. You’ve got to back off. You’ve got to be supportive. That’s tough, especially when you have a Dad who’s self-made. ‘Well, I made all my money and I did all of these things, and his last name is something-something Smith, Junior – he’s the Junior and he needs to be like me!’ Well, you don’t own him. Yeah, you created him, but you don’t own him. They use their children as property.

PG: Does that sink in?

CE: Sometimes. Sometimes on the flip side, they don’t want the person in the tabloids. So, I might get the matriarch, I might get Grandma who hires me and says, ‘Well, I have a 35-year-old grandson who crashed his car and now I’m in the news because he’s a drunk. Fix it.’ Oh, that’s tough, because they don’t care about the drinking; they care about the getting arrested part. They can make the arrest go away but it’s already been – there are mug shots. For example, I had a famous celebrity who got stopped, and during the stop had an altercation with the police officer, put her hands on the police officer and got arrested, because she committed Battery on a LEO.

PG: What’s a Leo?

CE: Law Enforcement Officer.

PG: Oh, okay. I was wondering, why does the zodiac sign matter? (Laughs)

CE: Right. (Laughs) So she hired me to make it go away, and I said, ‘You can’t make it go away. We have to address how you got there. How did this happen?’ And she’s like, she kept saying, ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am?!’ as they were arresting her. And they caught that on YouTube, and it’s all over. I said, ‘We’ve got to fix this.’ Because ‘Do you know who I am?’ – nobody cares who you are! Especially if you’re in LA. Everybody’s famous in LA; nobody cares. But the bad behavior got you here. So how do we fix that? How do we address these issues? And they’re uncomfortable issues, you know? You have to look at your behavior. And you have PR teams that sweep it under the rug and you have legal teams that make it go away, and they expunge your record, but at the end of the day, you’re still sitting there on the sofa with yourself, and that’s why I’m here – so that all of that stuff can be addressed.

PG: So, what did you do with that person?

CE: We talked about low self-esteem. We talked about ageing in the industry – that’s a huge fear in the celebrity world, is ‘Oh my god, I’m getting old.’ I have a 21-year-old who talks about getting old, and she’s getting Botox, and I’m like, ‘You’re 21! You’re not ready for Botox.’

PG: You mean you have a child or a client?

CE: I have a 21-year-old client, who’s in the industry, the celebrity industry, she’s an actress.

PG: That’s a little old.

CE: Yeah. (Laughs)

PG: Kidding, of course.

CE: All this Botox… I keep trying to tell her, ‘You keep doing this, you’re going to be so misshapen that you won’t get a job.’ And in her mind, she’s ugly. So it’s reason she checks out with the opiates and the Benzos is, ‘I feel ugly.’ Let’s address why you feel ugly. You’re in an industry that tells you that 25 is old, and you need a face lift and you need a this and you need a that. We have to address that. And, maybe you need a backup career. Maybe this isn’t the right career. If this is the pressure that’s going to lead you down this path, what else can we do?

PG: What other dynamics do you find at work besides the industry valuing youth etc. – is there stuff from their past, from their childhood…? One of the dynamics I see a lot in the surveys that people fill out, is the mother passing on her body and food issues to her child.

CE: Welcome to my mother. That’s where I got mine.

PG: Yeah?

CE: My Mom was a foodie, and she – I’ll give you my story, I’ll interject. I lived with my Mom, my Grandma and my sister. And my grandmother, the way that they handled issues – because there was no alcohol in the house; it was a dry house – they would have all the women over and she would bake. She would bake enough for the entire neighborhood, and they would come over and have coffee and discuss whatever issue needed to be discussed. Then my grandmother would go to bed, everyone would go home, and my Mom would bring me down to the kitchen and we would eat all the cake. All of it. Whether it was one or twelve, we’d eat all the cake, and we’d sit there. That was how she released stress. So that became normal. If you’re happy, you eat. You’re sad, you eat. You’re mad, you eat. There’s a problem, you eat. I learned that’s what you do. And then, when I was in college sitting on the floor, and I’ll give you the visual – I had a cake on the floor, I had cake on my face, cake on me, cake on the dog, cake on the wall, cake everywhere, and I was crying at two o’clock in the morning because I went out with all my friends and no guys ever liked me. All my friends had guys. And my roommate came in and she goes, ‘Dude! What the fuck?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and I’m like, ‘Nothing, this is normal!’ and she goes, ‘That is not normal!’ That’s how I learned the first time, I have a problem. Because to me that was normal. Mom raised me, this is what you do. My mother just learned in the past ten years she’s a food addict. She didn’t realize it. She said, ‘I don’t have a problem! There’s no issue. This is what I do.’ Well, that happens a lot, because a person doesn’t deal with their own demons so they have a child, and because they haven’t handled their business, they pass it on. Socially, could be genetically depending, and that child picks it up and says, ‘This is normal. This is the behavior I exhibit.’ You can also see it with sex abuse, and it doesn’t have to be mother-son, mother-daughter – it can be father-daughter, it can be uncle… If there’s a sexual trauma, that really changes the game for the addict. Because now they internalize, ‘Something is dirty about me, and I’m the reason they did that; I’m the bad person. And because I’m bad, I don’t deserve to be happy, successful, or pretty, or nice – I don’t deserve those things. And because I don’t deserve those things, I’m going to get high, because why not? I deserve nothing.’ I see that in the celebrity industry a lot. Their self-esteem is so shot, and it can even be in the industry. They were a childhood star, they got molested in the industry as they were coming up, and they were told, ‘You keep this quiet, because you will lose your job. No one is going to want to hire you if you out so-and-so.’ And they do, and they do so much drugs and alcohol, some of them passed away – we’ve seen that – or they numb out so much that they become a dramatic train wreck. And then it’s bad press after bad press after bad press, and they just disappear and fade out, and you see them 20-30 years later, strung-out and completely broke. And you’re like, ‘That’s so sad.’ But no one ever helped them.

PG: Give me an example of a trauma you were able to process with a client that was a revelation to the client, and it helped give them the clarity to straighten their life out and develop coping mechanisms or boundaries or whatever it was.

CE: Okay. I was doing a private intensive with a client. I had them for thirteen days, 24/7, where I was doing every day for about eight hours. We were doing therapy and coaching, and on the fourth day he realized – his mother was an alcoholic, but he knew that – but he didn’t realize how controlling she was, and how everything he did was to please Mom. If she said no, he didn’t do it, whatever it was. And as he started to realize that, he also realized she was physically abusive. She would hit him if he didn’t do exactly what she wanted. She was bipolar, unmedicated bipolar. As he’s realizing this, he’s reliving some of those moments and he’s talking about these things and he’s crying and he’s there, and I said, ‘Let’s just stop for a second. Look around. Is she here?’ He said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘You’re safe.’ It’s teaching people in trauma to be safe. You’re safe, you’re okay. And letting go of all that stuff you keep carrying – you’re carrying that all around. So, the exercise I did with him was, I had him get a backpack and fill it full of books and put it on. As we were talking, I was walking with him around the room. Not thirty minutes later, he’s like, ‘Oh, this backpack is really heavy, when can I take it off?’ I said, ‘You can’t.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘You’re carrying all your mother’s trauma in that backpack, everywhere you go. And that is what you’re doing. You’re so weighed down with your mother’s crap that you have not gotten rid off, and that is what’s keeping you stuck.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’m going to take the backpack off.’ I said, ‘Are you sure? Because once you take that backpack off, you’ve got to process that trauma. We’re going to process it, and it’s one book at a time.’ So we did. We started to process each layer of all the things she did, one by one, and I let him take a book out of the backpack each time. Eventually we got to the bottom and the backpack was empty, and I said, ‘Now, you fill the backpack with your experiences and your happy things, not the traumatic experiences you had. You’re safe.’ That’s how I got him through dealing with his mother. She died unexpectedly, she had a brain aneurysm, so he never got to say anything to her – ‘I hate you’ or ‘What did you do to me?’ He never got to have that conversation, which, to him, was horrendous. Because it was like, ‘I finally realized, you did this to me and I want to tell you how much I hate you, and you’re gone, and now I’m stuck. You left me like this.’ He was always stuck in ‘Look what you did to me, but I can’t get out of my own way to let you go.’ And then, once he let her go, he realized, he was like, ‘Oh my god, this weight is lifted off of me and I don’t have to be the person she wanted me to be, and I don’t have to be stuck. I don’t have to drink to drown her out because she’s not here.’ And then, he was able to be sober.

PG: So would it be fair to say part of that process is identifying the voices in your head that are your mother or your father or whoever –

CE: Yeah!

PG: And learning to identify them and telling them to shut the fuck up, so that you can be the authentic person you are.

CE: Yeah! Yes. I’ve done psychodrama with a client where you put the teddy bear in the chair and you have a conversation with Mommy, and you tell Mommy everything you want to tell them, and you should see the – I mean, it’s real! People are there. They’re there talking to Mom. And it can be ‘I hate you,’ and I’ve had one curled up on the floor in a ball, crying. And it was a teddy bear. It was so real to him that that was Mom. And I said, you know, it’s a teddy bear, it’s okay, it’s okay, and it’s getting through that – realizing that ‘Oh my god, this is me now. First, it was Mom holding me back and doing this. Now it’s me keeping me in this prison. Why am I holding myself back? And why can’t I be free?’

PG: Talk about the difference between identifying a perpetrator from the past so that we can give weight to our trauma and begin to process it, and not moving past being a victim.

CE: Okay, so, when you’re dealing with sexual trauma specifically, or you’re dealing with violent trauma, what happens is that person, the perpetrator, convinces the victim of certain things that aren’t true: ‘You’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re fat – you’re the reason I do this.’ These are the things they say. So, for example, my father always told me I was fat, stupid and ugly. ‘You’ll never get a husband, you’ll never go to college, no one will want to be with you.’ By the time I was fourteen or fifteen and sixteen, I still hadn’t had a –

PG: Your father said that to you?

CE: Oh yeah. My father was a motherfucker. He’s still alive. And I believed it. So my first boyfriend, I was seventeen. I was a senior in high school dating a freshman, because in my mind, what senior would want to date me? I have to date a freshman, because that’s the only person that will ever want me; I’m fat, ugly, stupid. I went through this consistently. I had no boyfriends in college, four years of college – five, because it took me a little longer – and then I finally got a boyfriend who was crashing on my sofa. Because why would I get a guy with a job? I couldn’t. I’m not smart enough, I’m not beautiful enough, I’m not intelligent enough. No one wants to be with me so I’m going to get the, you know, sofa-crasher. And then it’s reiterated when the perpetrator says, ‘Well, look, the best you can do is a junkie laying on a sofa. Look how stupid you are. You can’t even get a guy with a real job.’ And you become the self-fulfilling prophecy. You give them what they tell you you are. And then, when you realize you’re feeding into that, my aha moment, I was twenty-four. I was in my room, and I called my father. I had had enough, and I said, ‘I want to know why you abused me as a child.’ I’m studying psychology so I’m learning all this stuff. And he goes, ‘I never abused you,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did!’ I had an ashtray – I was a smoker at the time – and I threw the ashtray against the wall… And I went, ‘I’m as violent as my father.’ I stopped, and I went, ‘Oh my god, I’m becoming the perpetrator.’ My father goes, ‘You want to know why I did what I did?!’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Because I hate your fucking mother!’ And I went, ‘What?!’ I said, ‘Explain!’ And then he told me, ‘I hated your mother, and my way to get to your mother was through you.’ As soon as he said that, I was like, ‘I don’t need you, and I don’t need your bullshit.’ I hung up the phone and didn’t speak to him for ten years. I spent the next ten years fixing me. He would call, I’d ignore him. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I’m not ready.’ When I was ready, I called him. I said, ‘Now I’m ready to talk to you, because now your crap is not my crap; it’s your crap, and you’re going to own it.’ He didn’t like that. He said, ‘You don’t speak to me like that.’ I said, ‘Okay, then don’t call me.’ And I hung up. Another five years of no talking. So I learned that I didn’t need him, and I didn’t need to hear the negativity. And I’d teach my clients that – what they tell you, what your perpetrator tells you, is not real. It’s perceived. It’s their opinion of you.

PG: And oftentimes it’s them projecting their own shame and thoughts about themselves onto you.

CE: Exactly. My tagline is, your opinion of me doesn’t matter. Because I don’t care about what you think about me. Whatever you have to say about me negatively is how you feel about you. And once I learned that it wasn’t me, it was him, I was like, ‘Wow, he felt so bad about himself that he couldn’t deal with it, that I was his punching bag.’ Now for me it gets worse, because he really likes my sister. He helped pay for her wedding, he helped pay for her house, he takes really good care of her, and gave me nothing. So I also had that: ‘Why am I on the lonely totem pole?’ Then I went, ‘It really has nothing to do with me.’ When I realized that, I was free. I was like, ‘This isn’t about me! This is about his crap.’ Once I got that, I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ That was years of therapy and years of coaching, and that experience helped me be a better counsellor. Because now I can look at a client and go, ‘Hold the – that’s not you! That’s them. And you’re allowing them to affect you – why? Why are you allowing them to rent space in your head and not pay? They’re renting space for free! Why?’ And then people go, ‘You’re right. Wow.’ When they start to look at things from an observer role and not in it, they start to realize how fucked up it is. And then say, ‘How do I fix that now?’ And that’s what we start doing – we start talking and getting that stuff out, and as it starts to come out – my therapist had me write a letter to my father. She said, ‘Sit down and write.’ My first letter was twenty-six pages. I wasn’t allowed to send it. She goes, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘Eh.’ She goes, ‘Do it again.’ My next letter was fifty pages. ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Eh.’ ‘Do it again.’ My third letter was three hundred pages. She says, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘Vindicated.’ She goes, ‘Burn it.’ And I burned it. When I burned it, it was like letting him go, and I’m like, ‘Whoa…! This is heavy.’ So I do that with my clients. I’m like, ‘We’re going to get all that shit out and you’re going to let it go, and it’s going to go. Once it’s gone, you don’t need it. You’re free! Why do you need that?’ So that’s what I do.

PG: Thank you for sharing all of that personal stuff.

CE: Sure!

PG: One of the things that I realized when I did the talking to the person as if they’re in the room, or journaling, is, you think you know how you feel about something, but when you have to form a sentence, it is a doorway. It opens up stuff that is almost unconscious sometimes, things that we’ve compartmentalized, and it can be so, so powerful. Talk to the person who can identify that they have a parent who is abusive, but they are either – or, not even abusive; there is a dread involved when interacting with them, when their number comes up on the phone their stomach drops or they just want to go take a nap. Talk to that person who can’t bring themselves to address or set boundaries with this person, or doesn’t know what to say to that parent, to advocate for themselves.

CE: Okay, so, the first thing is, there’s a fear. There’s a fear if I talk out of turn I’m going to get scolded, or I’m going to be in trouble. The unique thing is, that parent needs you to set the boundary. They need you to put your foot down. Because they will continue to push, push, push until you push back and it shifts everything. I have a female client who’s the oldest of two, alcoholic, also a sex addict, and her Mom tells her every day, ‘I hate you, you should not be on this planet.’ She’s in her mid-thirties. And she talks to her like she’s trash. At Christmas she’s not invited but the younger sister is. They take these vacations and don’t invite her. She has a son, and they treat the son like their son. What I told her was, ‘I want you to tell your mother that’s not appropriate. That’s all I want you to say. That’s not appropriate, I won’t allow it.’ She looked at me, and she goes, ‘My mother is going to flip.’ I said, ‘You let her flip. You tell her, ‘That’s not appropriate, I won’t allow it.’ And you say it just like that.’ So they went on this vacation, and she called me from the bathroom. I said, ‘What happened?’ And she goes, ‘I told my mother that’s not appropriate, I won’t allow it.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ She goes, ‘My mother went, ‘It’s about time you grew some balls.’’ Her Mom took a step back and started treating her with respect. And she goes, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘Your mother has been asking for you to set that boundary. Your mother has been asking for it by pushing, pushing, pushing and you have done nothing. By setting that boundary you got your Mom to back up and say, ‘Okay, finally my job is done in that case, and I’m not going to treat you like a five-year-old anymore. I’m going to treat you like the thirty-five-year-old you are.’ That’s part of what your parents need.’ Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Oh! I can’t believe you said that to me. How dare you talk to me like that?!’

PG: That seems to be more the norm.

CE: Yeah, so when that happens you say, ‘Well, unfortunately you’re being inappropriate with me and I’m going to set a boundary. This is our boundary. I love you, and I can’t talk right now.’ And you get off the phone. You set the boundary, get off the phone. Let them process. Because it’s new. If you set the boundary and stay on the phone, they’re going to keep talking you out of the boundary, and you want to just say, ‘I love you, that’s all I have to say, I’ll call you later.’

PG: Boundaries are not negotiable.

CE: Yep, yep.

PG: Consequences are the best gift you can give somebody who is inappropriate, because many of them don’t even realize it.

CE: Yep. And you always say, ‘I love you, but that is it.’ And you hang up the phone. You set the boundary, you say ‘I love you,’ and you hang up the phone, you let them go. And you continue to do that.

PG: What if you don’t love them.

CE: Then you don’t have to say that. You say, ‘You don’t have to speak to me like that, and when you can speak to me better, we’ll talk. Right now, that’s it. Goodbye.’ Hang up the phone. And you keep setting that boundary. ‘That’s inappropriate. I’m going to hang up the phone.’ Eventually they will learn that if they want a relationship with you, it’s going to be on your terms, not theirs. When they learn that, that’s when the respect kicks in. But you have to teach them, and it’s so uncomfortable for the victim to say, ‘I’ve gotta teach this person boundaries.’ The minute I taught my Dad boundaries – ‘I’m not going to answer your call when you’re having a meltdown.’ My Dad is severely bipolar. He would call me and say, ‘I don’t know why I’m alive.’ Call your therapist! Don’t call me. ‘When you’re a therapist, you should fix me.’ Not my job!

PG: Wow.

CE: Not all the money in the world could pay me to do that. So it’s, not only am I going to be nasty, I’m also going to expect you to answer the phone. And I said, ‘I’m not your therapist. Get a therapist. Pay for a therapist. I’m not going to do that.’ Eventually, he stopped calling me with those issues, because he knew I wasn’t going to deal with it. ‘I’m going to hang up the phone now. You’ll figure it out.’

PG: Talk to the person who has somebody in their life that they feel, if they don’t give them what they want, that person is going to take their life – take their own life. The boyfriend or girlfriend who is like, ‘If you were to ever break up with me, I’d jump off a bridge, or a parent who says, ‘You’re the only reason I’m alive.’

CE: Okay. Two separate things. The boyfriend or girlfriend is very tricky, because that is a very sick situation. My suggestion, my best advice for that, is that you get yourself a therapist immediately, and possibly one for that other person, and you say to them, I want to go to couple’s counselling. I want to address this issue. Because two things: When they start telling you that, it could be a double homicide – they’re going to kill you first and kill themselves. That’s the direction, the fine finality of that, and it’s real. If you break up with them and they say they don’t want you to see anyone else, they’re going to kill you and kill themselves. Now, does it always happen that way? No. There are people that say ‘I’m going to kill myself just because I don’t know what to do with you and that’s what I say to keep you,’ but if you’re in that situation, you’re co-dependent with that person. You need to address your co-dependency on them, why you are there and why you feel you need to be there. You also need a support team, because you may need a restraining order, you may need a whole bunch of things besides yourself. Do not do that alone. Get help. Now, the mother who says to the child, ‘I don’t know why I’m here, you’re the only reason I’m here. If something were to happen to you I don’t know what I would do.’ There’s a dramatic piece to that, of ‘I need attention,’ and there’s a piece of ‘I don’t know who I am, because my only role and function in life is mom, and that’s all I identify with.’ That kind of thing is, ‘Oh, Mom, you really need a hobby.’

PG: I was going to say the same thing.

CE: You need to go get a massage, you need to find a day spa, you need to go to Vegas with the girlfriends. You need something else besides Junior. If Junior is your only function in life, you have no life.

PG: And it’s abusive to put that much pressure on your child.

CE: Oh yeah.

PG: You’ll see that with the affluent community a lot. They become the Mom who has the butler and the chef and the maid, isn’t cooking and cleaning for the family, and she’s the stay-at-home housewife/mom, so her only function is mom, and the kids turn eighteen and fly the nest and she completely has a meltdown. ‘What do I do now?’ And then she’s chasing them all over the country and calling them every day: ‘Did you go to the bathroom? Did you wash your laundry?’ And they end up using drugs to block her out. And she goes, ‘Oh, I have a function! My child is an addict! Yay! I feel important!’ So it’s important if you’re having that, you set that boundary with Mom and Dad. And, of course, offer to get them a coach or a therapist.

PG: Talk to the person who has experienced that, where the person threatened to kill themselves and that person did.

CE: Ooh, that’s tough. First of all, you’re never responsible for anyone else’s behavior. Anybody who has killed themselves and said it’s your fault – it’s not your fault. That’s a choice they made based upon their life. Now, you absolutely need a therapist to process that. That’s grief and loss, and it’s also guilt and shame. Because you go, ‘What could I have done differently? What did I do wrong?’ If it’s history of trauma, it becomes, ‘Was I a bad boy?’ And you go back through your entire life and go, ‘I did all these things wrong and I could have saved my mother.’ Well, no, you couldn’t have. Your mother was going to do this regardless. She just happened to pin it on your as a last hurrah on her way out to destroy you. But you need a grief and loss therapist for that, and maybe even EMDR, which is the eye movement where you’re not talking consistently about that; you’re actually getting to some of it.

PG: Talk about the difference between ‘You’re not responsible for other people’s behavior’ and the addict who is triggered into using because of the parent or is stuck in the cycle because of the parent. Because on the surface you would say, well, that’s an example of somebody’s behavior, somebody being responsible or what looks like being responsible for somebody else’s behavior.

CE: I’ll give you an example of a client and I’ll tell you what we did. I had a twenty-six-year-old male living with his family. His Dad was a very famous musician. The problem was, his father was very successful. The son was not successful. Everything he put his hands on failed miserably. I felt so bad for the kid. He’s doing heroin, he’s doing Xanax like crazy. He has no friends, and Dad is constantly, ‘You’re a this and you’re a that, you disappoint me.’ So he just keeps getting high to drown out that. The very first thing we did –

PG: But he’s getting high successfully.

CE: Correct, so he did something!

PG: He did one thing. Let’s give the kid credit.

CE: You know what, you’re right. He put his mind to something, he did a good job.

PG: Yes. (Laughs)

CE: So the first thing we did was pull him out of the house and put him in – he went to detox, he went to treatment, and then we did sober living. And the reason for that was, Dad wasn’t there barking in his ear. That was the first change. From there, it was empowering him, and telling Dad ‘I need you to spend the next few months not talking to him, I need you to use me.’ I was the buffer. His Dad would call me screaming, ‘Oh, he’s only got ten days clean!’ Well, that’s ten days. He has ten days! I told Dad, ‘We’re going to flip that and say wow, he has ten days clean! Instead of what you just said.’ I had to coach Dad on his behavior. What I do is I take the client out of the situation and I work with Dad. I put Dad in his place, and basically this is what I tell them: ‘You’re the reason he’s getting high. You have twenty-five years of bad parenting. You’re screaming at your child. And when he does something well, like ten days sober, you discredit that. Ten days sober, you should have said, ‘That’s amazing! You got ten days! Kid’s never had ten days, so why are we not celebrating that?’ And he says, ‘Well, it should be ten years!’ I looked at him and said, ‘My god! I completely understand why this kid gets high.’ He just looked at me, and I said, ‘You’ve got to own your behavior.’ So then I work with the parent, and I say, ‘You have these behaviors that are causing a chain reaction. You have this unrealistic expectation that your son should be this amazing musician like you, and he doesn’t want to play an instrument. He wants to be an artist, he wants to paint. And every time he paints’ – he was a real good artist, by the way – ‘you would tell him how stupid it was.’ In fact, his Dad took a gallon of paint and ruined all his paintings, just threw it all over.

PG: Jesus!

CE: Because he said, ‘You need to be a musician.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘That’s what my Dad did for me!’ I said, ‘Look how you turned out.’

PG: Haha! How did that work?

CE: That worked great, because he sat there and he goes, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I said, ‘That means you’re angry, you’re narcissistic, you’re abusive, and your son went the opposite direction. Your Dad was probably just like you.’ He said, ‘He was.’ I said, ‘Did you like your father?’ He goes, ‘I hated him.’ I said, ‘Why do you think your son is using drugs?’ And he goes, ‘He hates me?’ I said, ‘Probably! You treat him like garbage and expect him to be successful.’ In these situations, it’s the family member that needs the counselling and the coaching, and I got Dad to change his behavior. And when Dad’s behavior changed, the son was a totally different person. I said to Dad, ‘Have this kid put his art in a gallery, his stuff is amazing!’ It was incredible. His Dad actually eventually went to an art gallery and his son had a show and got to see his work, and he’s like, ‘Should I be proud?’ He would call me and go, ‘What should I be doing?’ I’m like, ‘You should be proud,’ and he goes, ‘What if I’m not?’ I said, ‘Then you fake it. You tell your kids you’re proud, even if you’re not proud. That’s what you do. That’s Parenting 101.

PG: Yeah. And then throw the paint on it.

CE: Nope, no paint. (Laughs) You are banned from that.

PG: At what point, though, is the addict responsible for their addiction even though their parent is triggering them? You know, yes, the parent may have instilled this trauma in the kid that is making it difficult, but let’s say that that kid is twenty-one now, they’re an adult, they’re autonomous – theoretically – what responsibility do they have, because we can’t blame their all on the parent. I believe we can look at it as a trigger, but isn’t it up to that addict to not tolerate that behavior?

CE: Absolutely. I give you new coping skills. Now you become accountable for your addiction. Up to the point where you don’t know what else to do, I’m going to say you’re not responsible? The disease of addiction is taking over. But once I give you coping tools and mechanisms, it’s just like sitting there with your feet on the toolbox. That house isn’t going to get built if you’re sitting there with your feet on the toolbox propped up. I need you to open the toolbox and pull out the hammer and pull out the nails and build the house, and try something else before you get high. That’s when I see accountability. Now you have a trigger and instead of reaching for drugs and alcohol you go to a meeting – that’s excellent! Now you’ve done some of the work. If you have a trigger and instead of going to a meeting you get high, I’m going to say to you, ‘Well, we talked about this, and your new coping mechanism was to go to a meeting.’ ‘Oh, well, I didn’t look, I don’t know where they are, they’re too far away.’ Now we’ve got to talk about accountability. You have all these excuses and zero action.

PG: Yes, this is no longer your parents’ fault.

CE: Correct. Because now you have the coping skills and the tools and you’re choosing not to the use them and playing the victim – I’m not going to permit that.

PG: And I also believe that there are many addicts who came from wonderful childhoods and I just believe they were genetically born addicts or alcoholics.

CE: That’s my husband.

PG: Yeah?

CE: You’re going to love this story. I didn’t get married until I was thirty-four because obviously I’m fat, ugly, stupid according to my father. And my husband, his father was a Dean of School, so he ran all these schools. Mother was a school teacher. Oldest son works for NASA, builds spaceships. Youngest son is a Doctor in Psychology for the school system. Tim, my husband, graduated high school, had a baseball scholarship, left it. Left Florida, came to LA to be a musician, spent the next fifteen-twenty years doing drugs, travelling around, tattooed, pierced, and his father said to me, ‘I don’t get it. We had dinner every night at five o’clock, we took family vacations, we never argued, he had the best education on the planet… How did he end up arrested?’ He has twenty-four felonies and fourteen misdemeanors from his addiction. ‘How did that happen? What did I do wrong?’ I said, ‘Let me ask you a question. Tell me about your parents and your wife’s parents.’ His parents, fine. When I was talking to Tim’s Mom she says, ‘Well, my father reminds me of Tim.’ I said, ‘Tell me how.’ She said, ‘He could drink. He was ninety, driving around with women all over, he could drink anything.’ I said, ‘Do you think he was an alcoholic?’ She says, ‘I think so.’ I said, ‘There’s your genetic. Your son has the gene.’ And she goes, ‘Because we did everything right!’ I said, ‘Yeah, you could do everything right and you could have that.’ Tim has ADD. I said, ‘Was your father into all kinds of stuff?’ She says, ‘Oh my god, he’d start a project here, forget it, start a car here, start over here, he was all over the place!’ I said, ‘That’s your son! Your son is just like your father. That is strict genes.’ She goes, ‘I didn’t know that was possible!’ and I said, ‘It is! Absolutely.’ I said, ‘How did I not turn out worse? With my upbringing I should have been a complete, you know, at sixteen with ten kids with different fathers and no education. How did that happen?’ She goes, ‘Boy, I don’t know!’ I said, ‘Genetics! I don’t come from alcoholics and addicts. A food addict, but we never had alcohol. We never had access to it, nobody did.’ So, we talked about that, and it really shocked her. I said, ‘That’s a lot of what I do.’ When I’m working with someone, I’ll say, ‘What was your upbringing like?’ ‘Oh, it was great, it was wonderful.’ ‘Okay, let’s go back. Let’s talk about the uncles and the aunts, because there’s always one – whether it’s a sex addiction no one talked about, alcoholism no one talked about…’ And they always say, ‘Oh my god, Uncle so-and-so, when he would come over, he was always drunk.’ Or, ‘So-and-so, he was always on some narcotic or some pill.’

PG: Isn’t that just Christmas? (Laughs)

CE: Yeah, just Easter. Before church or after church, right in there.

PG: Would it be fair to say that looking at the root causes of somebody’s destructive behavior isn’t as important as identifying what the triggers are today that they need to deal with and develop tools for?

CE: Exactly. If you figure out trigger – so let’s say your trigger is – I’ll give you an example. I had a client who, she couldn’t buy groceries. In Florida you can buy beer and wine in the grocery store, and she couldn’t buy groceries, because every time she’d buy groceries, she’d buy wine. I said, ‘What’s the trigger?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, shouldn’t be.’ We put it together and found out that, you know how you go the grocery store and they have the bakery? She’d go in the morning and she could smell the cookies. Well, the cookies and the alcohol went together because her and Mom would bake and drink. So she’d smell the cookies and go, ‘I need a drink.’ So, we switched up her grocery time which stopped the trigger. The problem was, we never dealt with the trauma with Mom. Sometimes she’d be at a restaurant and the trauma would trigger – a woman would walk by that looked like Mom or spoke like Mom and she had to have wine. So, even though we got the trigger with the cookies down, we didn’t get the trauma. Once we got the trauma down, now she can go out anywhere in the world and there was no trigger. Because the trauma – the root cause – was taken care of.

PG: How often do you have a client where there is no co-occurring mental illness or any trauma in their past?

CE: A lot. Because I do behavior modification. So, I’ll get people who learned behavior.

PG: No, I mean where there isn’t any mental illness or trauma in their past.

CE: A lot.

PG: A lot, oh, that’s surprising.

CE: Well, the younger generation, there’s no trauma sometimes. They’re twenty-five years old and everything’s been done for them, so it’s a learned behavior. It’s ‘I’m bored because I don’t need to cook, clean or do the laundry, Mommy does it, and everything’s provided so I don’t need to work, so I’m just going to check out. I’m going to play videogames, smoke weed, pop a couple of xannies and go hang out with my friends.’ That’s a learned behavior because you’re bored. So we need to figure out your purpose and passion in life. We always start with, is there trauma, is there addiction in the family, what’s causing? And if there isn’t, and it’s that, then it’s behavior modification. Because I specialize in that Failure to Launch concept, I get a lot of that, where it’s all behavior mod. Where it’s, ‘Okay, Mom’s going to cut you off, Mom is not going to do your laundry at twenty-five…’ I had a forty-five-year-old whose mom came to him apartment, opened up the apartment, came in, gathered his laundry from around the house, took it to her house, washed it, folded it, pressed it, brought it back and put it and hung it up.

PG: Jesus! And to her, that’s love! Yeah.

CE: Oh yes! And I said, ‘He’s forty-five! Do you want him to get a wife?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘No woman in her right mind would touch her son like that. You have got to stop doing his laundry!’ She goes, ‘Oh! But who’s going to do his laundry?’

PG: He’ll figure it out!

CE: Him! He’s forty-five! So, that was behavior modification. He just figured, ‘I don’t need.’ And Mom would put money in his bank account. Mom paid for his rent. So he didn’t work! He literally was laying on the sofa when she came in to get the laundry. And she’s like, ‘He needs to… Something needs to happen!’

PG: Or not happen!

CE: Yeah, so in that case it was, ‘I need you to give your house key back to your son and I need you to change the locks. Mom does not belong in this apartment. We’re going to teach Mom some tough love.’ That’s how it started. Then I came to visit him two weeks later and he had no clean clothes, everything all over the floor, and I walk in and he says, ‘Ooh, I’m overwhelmed!’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘Really? You’re overwhelmed?’ And he says, ‘I can’t handle this. I’m going to have a meltdown.’ I said, ‘No, you’re going to pick up that laundry bucket and we’re going to do laundry together.’ And I showed him how to do laundry. He had to go use the laundromat in the condo complex, so he complained the whole time: ‘I have to carry this down two flights of stairs and I have to stand here and I have to load this…’ It was four hours of him complaining, and finally I told him to callate la boca. I said, ‘Shut your mouth.’ He says, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because you’re not making this activity fun anymore. This could be so much fun. Laundry can be fun!’ He goes, ‘How is it fun?’ I said, ‘We’re going to make it fun.’ And we made laundry fun. Sometimes it’s all accountability and it’s no trauma. In that case it was codependent Mom who needed to be cut off from her son.

PG: Some great advice and insight, I really appreciate it. Let’s plug your book.

CE: Sure. I Married a Junkie.

PG: Love it.

CE: Four years ago I got slammed on the internet by a competitor who posted my husband’s criminal record and said, ‘This person is a therapist with a PhD, how could he she help anybody? Her husband’s nothing but a junkie. She married a junkie!’ And I went ‘Aah, I married a junkie! Let’s do a book and put that out there.’ So we did. Four years in the making, it’s all about our story, his drug addiction. He was into cocaine when I met him, cleaned up, totally clean, and then switched to heroin. And what it was like to be with somebody on heroin trying to do what I’m doing, and how he got sober and how he has clean time… That’s what the whole book is about.

PG: And I imagine that you had to deal with any codependency issues you had?

CE: Oh, yeah. See, I’m not codependent. I’m very – the first time I found out he was using, I locked him in the room and I said, ‘Listen, you’re going to detox old school.’ He goes, ‘What does that mean?’ I said, ‘We’ll lock your ass in here and I’ll see you in two days. Here’s some Pedialyte, here’s some Gatorade.’ He went, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I said, ‘You want to go to detox?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘See you in two days.’ And I walked out. I called my friend and said, ‘I gotta get a coach immediately.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘My husband’s doing heroin.’ That’s exactly what I did – exactly what I tell my clients to do. This is what I need to do. And then a part of you goes, ‘Oh my god, he’s going to die!’ No, he’s not. I’d just check on him, and then I called my coach: ‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’ ‘You’re doing the right thing, keep doing this.’ So I had somebody. But I knew right away, I’ve got to make that phone call, because I’m not going to be able to handle this myself.

PG: And even if he did die, it’s not on you.

CE: Right, but I want to try everything I can to push him out there and make sure he gets the best care he can, which is what I did.

PG: And if he chose not to, then give him consequences, you move out or kick him out or whatever.

CE: We actually came to that moment, and I said, ‘This is it. You either need to go on tour with the band and clean up, you need to get arrested, or I’m filing for divorce. Because you’re not going to clean up. And he looked at me and he goes, ‘I guess I’ll go back on tour.’ And we put him on tour, and he actually cleaned up, playing drums on tour.

PG: That’s amazing.

CE: And he called me and he was like, ‘This sucks.’ I’m like, ‘You’re not coming home. I don’t want to see your ass until you’ve got ninety days sober. Goodbye. I’ll fly out and see a show and I’ll fly home.’ And the group he was with, there was no drug use, and he’s like, ‘Okay.’ And he called me and said, ‘I’ve got it. Today’s the day. I’ve got it, today.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah…’ ‘Can I come home?’ ‘No. Ninety days, see ya.’ Click.

PG: Yeah. And he’s been sober for a while now?

CE: Oh yeah. He’s got a couple of years under his belt, but for a while there it was like, wow… I came home one day, I was on a business trip for fourteen days and I came home and – he’s a drummer, so he’s got two different drumkits, he’s got the drumkit, Angel Bartolotta’s from Dope, we have that, we’ve got Nicky Sixx’s bass guitar… We have all this stuff – and it was all gone. I walked in the house and I was like, ‘Where’s the equipment?’ He just looked at me, and said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ And I’m like, ‘What happened?’ He’s like, ‘I went on a bender.’ ‘Okay, now we’re going to rumble. Now we’ve got problems.’ He had pawned it all and it was like, ‘Oh shit!’ The first thing I did was call my coach and was like, ‘Let’s go! Tell me what I need to hear, because I need to hear it.’ And she was all balls out: ‘This is what you’re going to do.’ And I did, I listened, I know what I need to do. I said to him, ‘This is not how I live, this is now how we live. So you either want my lifestyle or you want your lifestyle, but you can’t have both.’ And that realization for him was like, ‘She’s not fucking around.’ Because he’s been married twice before, both of them addicts. They would use and one would trigger the other and it was always a mess, and I’m not a user. So for me, there was no other option. You don’t get a hall pass with me. He kept saying, ‘I hate you.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’ And then one day he called me a cunt, and I’m like, ‘Really? My father used to call me that.’ And that’s when he heard my father’s story, and he’s like, ‘Your father called – I mean kid! That’s all you have? That’s the best you got? You better get sober! Because I’m Italian, and it’s not gonna fly!’ His eyes got huge and he was like, ‘Uh-oh… You’re not fooling around!” I said, ‘Nope, I’m not fooling around. No money, no bank card, no nothing. Good luck – I’ll see you in fifteen days, I’m going on a road trip. You’ll be sober.’ And he ran out of money, and he got sober. I was very tough with him, because that’s what I would have told my client’s family – this is what you’ve got to do.

PG: Consequences.

CE: Absolutely. And finally he said – and this was his aha moment, when he was on tour – he was like, ‘It dawned on me that this lifestyle that I was living, sucked. It sucked! It was a full-time job. I’m always sick, I’m always dope sick. I love to play music and it didn’t ping my brain. I had no interest. Now I’m out here playing, and I’m like wow! I’m doing music and I love it, I love music! This is what I do – I’m an entertainer! This is my role in life!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, no offense, but on heroin you can’t play drums – you suck!’

PG: (Laughs) Yeah! That’s a bad drug for a drummer!

CE: It was awful. And he’s like, ‘I thought I sounded good!’ I’m like, ‘Naah…’

PG: Yeah. Well, Cali, thank you so much for coming and talking about such important stuff, I appreciate it.

CE: Awesome! Thank you for having me over, I appreciate it.

PG: And once again, her book is I Married A Junkie, and we’ll put a link to it on the website.

CE: Awesome, thanks.