Valiant Living Podcast
Welcome to the Valiant Living Podcast where we educate, encourage, and empower you towards a life of peace and freedom. Valiant Living offers hope and transformational change to men and their families struggling with addiction and mental health challenges. On this podcast you’ll hear from the Valiant team as well as stories of alumni who are living in recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling to overcome addiction or trauma, please call us at (720)-756-7941 or email admissions@valiantliving.com We’d love to have a conversation with you!
Valiant Living Podcast
Overcoming Privileged Pressures and Addiction (w/ Bob Ferguson of Jaywalker Lodge)
Have you ever felt trapped by societal expectations and struggled to find your true self? Join us as we sit down with Bob "Bobby" Ferguson, a remarkable entrepreneur and dear friend of the Valiant Living Podcast. Bobby opens up about his privileged Manhattan upbringing and the relentless pressure to fit in that led him down a dark path of substance abuse. His raw and honest reflections on his early encounters with drugs shed light on the complexities of addiction and the vital need for open dialogue and support.
In this heartfelt episode, Bobby recounts his chaotic journey through addiction, the grueling cycles of rehab, and the pivotal moment at Hazelden in Minnesota that changed everything. A counselor's tough love and the power of peer feedback became the turning point in my path to recovery. Bobby discusses the transformative role of community and the supportive environments that enabled him to rebuild his lives far from the toxic influences of his past.
We dive deep into the evolution of addiction treatment, emphasizing the importance of real-life recovery experiences and long-term care. From the creation of Jaywalker Lodge to the implementation of the Open Community Model of Care, we highlight the value of honesty, transparency, and peer support in achieving sustainable recovery. Tune in for an inspiring conversation filled with resilience, hope, and the enduring power of community to overcome addiction. Join the Valiant Living community as we strive to educate, encourage, and empower individuals on their journey towards peace and freedom.
Well, hey, everyone. Welcome to the Valiant Living podcast, where we educate, encourage and empower you towards a life of peace and freedom. I'm your host, drew Powell, and I'm a grateful alumni of the Valiant Living program. Valiant Living offers hope and transformational change to men and their families struggling with addiction and mental health challenges. So on this podcast you'll hear from the Valiant team, as well as stories of alumni who are living in recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling to overcome addiction or trauma, please call us at 720-756-7941. Or you can email admissions at valiantlivingcom. We'd love to have a conversation with you, but for now let's dive into today's episode. We love to have a conversation with you, but for now let's dive into today's episode.
Speaker 2:So do you go by Bob or Bobby?
Speaker 3:Either one. When I hear Robert, it's either my mother and I'm in trouble, or the judge and I'm going to jail.
Speaker 2:So just as long as it's not Robert, then we're okay. Well, what an honor to have Bob Ferguson. Bobby Ferguson on the podcast today. I would probably have to take me the whole podcast to list all the things you're doing and which, as a as a fellow starter and entrepreneur, I'm really interested in. In that, but a great friend of Michael Dineen and A Valiant Living, just want to say thank you.
Speaker 3:What an honor to have you and to host you on our podcast today. Well, I feel the same and Michael was good enough to come on our podcast when we were getting ramped up and launched on that about a year and a half ago at Colorado Springs. We met in my hotel room in the Broadmoor and our alumni guy is kind of an audiophile, so he had all these boom mics set up on the you know crossing across the beds and Mike awkwardly seated in a little chair stuck between the beds, beds and Mike awkwardly seated in a little chair stuck between the beds and it was just such. It was like a bunch of little kids experimenting in a you know an audio tree house or something. It was weird and Mike just let it rip and it was such a great, great conversation. So I feel like we're just continuing the conversation and I'm, I'm grateful to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, let's, let's. I love for our audiences to get to know you a little bit and I definitely want to talk to Jay Walker and some of the other things you're doing as well. Um, but I'd love to hear about your personal journey and your story with addiction and recovery and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:Sure, drew, thank you for asking. You know I am Bobby, I'm an alcoholic. I know we've got, you know, a movement of foot in our field to try to destigmatize addiction. So we're supposed to now say you know, I'm a person in long-term recovery, but I, I love addicts and alcoholics so much that, um, I like to, I like to say it about myself, I just like, um, I'm, I'm Bobby and I'm an alcoholic. And, um, and and for me, what happened was, uh, I, I grew up in Manhattan and, um, I came from, uh, a loving family.
Speaker 3:I had a little sister two years younger than us, than me, and so just the four of us. And honestly, I feel like I was given the things you need in life, all the advantages. You know, I had a mom and dad who, uh, I thought, expected more from me. But when I became a dad myself, I would later learn that parents don't want, they don't expect better things from you. They, they want better things for you, and so they tried to do those things and I had.
Speaker 3:I went to a little parochial Catholic school for boys in in Manhattan until I was, you know, in ninth grade, all the, you know, all the, all the, with 24 kids in our graduating class and everybody went off to a little New England prep school. And I did that. I went off to a little New England prep school and um, and, and then from there I went to um, a small liberal arts college in Virginia. But as I progressed, um, through those um rites of passage, uh, you know from this privileged upbringing, and you know private schools, um, you know from this privileged upbringing, you know private schools, tuition paid, obstacles removed. I did so a little bit with what you hear a lot about from people in recovery is just a sense of disease, a little bit of anxiety, a lot of self-consciousness and so, and a wicked need, growing up as I did to, for some reason, I think it's just a New York thing as much as anything else. But you want to have, you know, life is like the lightning round. You want to, you want to look good, be right and have the answer first, and, and and. I don't think any of that really served me as my addiction started to take root because you, you know, in high school I was, you know, from the ages of 14 to 17,. It was imagine going to high school with no parents around. So, you know we didn't have automobiles, so I guess in that sense it was a little safer. But, man, life got off the rails for me pretty quickly, trying to fit in with the cool kids. Yeah, uh, I I remember the first time, um, you know I I smoked pot and and got high and we're doing bong hits in some good kids room and I wandered the halls trying to get back to my room with the.
Speaker 3:I could hear the fluorescent lights buzzing. I could feel like, you know, pimples breaking out on my forehead. It was the most angst, angst ridden anxiety experience ever and my heart was beating about 170 beats. And I get back to my room and I'm like I, I think I'm having sort of a you know a THC induced mini panic attack and I remember sitting there going I got to get better at this, like I need to. I need to, I need to practice Like those guys. Those guys were laughing and having fun and I can't even complete a sentence. I can't get to the comma.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't I need to stop doing this. It was I got to get better at this.
Speaker 3:Right, right, like they say, you know like an alcoholic, whatever you know like, runs into his neighbor's mailbox and says that's it, I got to quit driving.
Speaker 1:So that's you know but, but, but.
Speaker 3:But. So I smoked pot every day for like the next eight years, never enjoying it, but that that only calls into sharp relief just how much it meant to me to be a part of, to to be seen a certain way. Um, you know and know, and my need to kind of fit in, but I ended up graduating from college, I like to say, with a diploma, but without an education. I cut corners and, you know, college was awesome. We had an amazing friend group there and everybody was ripping it up. You know, we were doing everything we could get our hands on all the time, and that wasn't necessarily true for the entire student body, but the entire universe of my social sphere, that was true.
Speaker 3:And yet, you know, after college I'm sort of stayed in that mode, while others around me you know, there I guess there are about a dozen of us who who relocated from, from Lexington, virginia, to, you know, the upper west side in Manhattan, and six of us live together in a two story brownstone. That was pretty fun and chaotic, but guys were getting promotions, they were keeping girlfriends, they were starting to sort of transition into life on life's terms and, you know, maybe Friday nights would be crazy, but they had normal Tuesdays and for me it was Friday became Tuesday and I became kind of that problem friend, that guy people were a little bit worried about, relationships were chaotic. Um, I, I began this uh career as a journalist in New York City and and that sort of dovetailed nicely with the work hard, play hard. You know, once you had filled 37 column inches and turned your copy in for the week, nobody cared about your lifestyle, or if you were, when you showed up and when you didn't. You just sort of had to meet your deadlines and stuff.
Speaker 2:So you could just crank that out and be done and get on with the party and get on with the rest of the life, yeah right.
Speaker 3:Hunter S Thompson was my hero. I wanted to be. I just sort of adopted this identity of this sort of manic, let's go guy, sort of manic, let's go guy. But still, beneath that, I had this need to look good and be right. I couldn't completely embrace my addict identity, so I would go off on these dark hearted binges. In Spanish Harlem, I got into snorting coke, became smoking crack and, and. But I started to compartmentalize that in my life. And so what? I? What was?
Speaker 3:By the time I finally got fired for not being able to do my work and show up and, and headed off to rehab. I started a cycle of of living in on the edge, creating a crisis, getting fired, going to rehab, cleaning up, turning over a new page, getting a new job. And that happened three times in my uh, from 26 to to 29. And, um, I finally had landed a job. I was the Caribbean editor for Tour and Travel News, which was a, you know, a sort of a travel that landed me this incredible job. After and now I've been to rehab twice and I, and I remember thinking to myself, drew, you know, bobby, there's only one thing that could take this off the rails you just just and sure enough, I mean, within four months, they sent us off on this charter to an island in the Caribbean called Montserrat, and Montserrat had experienced Hurricane Hugo in 1988.
Speaker 3:And this was in early 92. And what had happened was they had rebuilt their infrastructure, the Minister of Tourism had invited you know, this junket of media, including, you know, photos and the New York times, and so I was, I was, I had arrived, you know, this is, and we're, all you know, flown first class and put out at there and, and, and, of course, they were drinking, and I and I, and my real problem, I decided, decided was was cocaine and crack cocaine, and, and, and I did the whole thing, I was like, oh, okay, I can drink on this trip and then, um, you know, return to my recovery when I right international timeline or some bullshit.
Speaker 3:It went so bad, so fast.
Speaker 3:It was just I wouldn't say leaving Las Vegas level, but I woke up. You know, there was a tiki bar on the beach and I woke up the morning after covered with bites all over my body because I'd slept in the sand and it was bad. And so I go from there straight. You know, I filed my story and went straight to Spanish Harlem and ended up on this 13 day binge and that was it. That was it. So I, it was right out of the central casting.
Speaker 3:You know, there I am, at a pay phone on the corner of 107th and Amsterdam, calling my parents again and they said listen, just come home, we've got a place in Minnesota and you'll get a. We've got you a one-way plane ticket. We're no longer I had. Finally, my parents, through my experience, were no longer interested in my ideas about my after. Like they, they didn't know bob's grand designs and plans about his recovery. They just said do what they tell you to do. And uh, good luck. And um, that place was minnesota, it was hazelden in minnesota. And um I, I went to their 30-day men's primary care unit. They transferred me to a unit called GELNIC, which was an extended care, four-month on-campus program for chronic relapsers. And I will tell you I really immediately loved that place.
Speaker 3:There were 29 of us, men and women, believe it or not, and every one of those knuckleheads, including me, had earned their seat in that circle. Like these were chronic relapsing men and women with a history of doing well in treatment and badly afterwards, and um, and so for me that was, uh, I can, I, I wouldn't say I was hopeful, I mean I, I arrived feeling like um, you know, my parents were scared to death. I didn't think this would work. Um, I had tried it before Um, but I sure, like these other people, they were my people. I, I really immediately felt like um, I was in a room full of hunter s thompson's like this. This was it and um, I think the important moment for me came about two and a half months in.
Speaker 3:They, everybody did these exhaustive peer reviews, um, and they were. They could get intense and uh, it's called full group and what would happen is three peers would get um attention from the group over a period of two or two and a half hours and you would do three peers in one eight hour session. So everybody knew full group was coming up and and um, I was mortified to find out that I was one of the people that the peers were had concerns about, like I was like oh, because I had a long list of how I was going to help you with your issues and you to come forward with some of your stuff and you were the guy in the hot seat.
Speaker 3:I was the guy and I didn't like the experience at all because I kept trying to kind of rebut the witness and my counselor is like, just be quiet, like, and so we went around the room and there was 25 people in the room and when I finally got a chance to talk, I literally dressed down the entire room. I was like you guys have the collective intestinal fortitude of a lame sheep, like. I was walking on the serenity path with you, joe, last week. You didn't tell me these things, but no, you're grandstanding in group, you know, and I, I just I just eviscerated the entire room with my indignity and my rage and and there was this horrible long silence when I was done, there was just nobody was saying anything. And finally my counselor, who's named Don, turned to me and he said you know, bobby, the fact that you're in a room full of people that don't feel comfortable giving you feedback or talking honestly to you about how they experience being with you, that may not be your fault, but it's damn sure your problem and you're going to live with that the rest of your life. And it's weird because you know, for a pipe hitting entitled white boy from the wrong, you know from the right side of town in the wrong side of town, all of this, um, there was. There was, in that moment, no drugs, no alcohol. I'd been sober for almost three and a half months and yet I was alone in a room full of people where all I really wanted to do was be everyone's friend and be connected to them, and that's walls came down. That's when I suddenly felt horrified and terrified that this had never really been about drugs and alcohol at all. It had been about, you know, a design for living and a system of beliefs and a way of showing up and a need to look good and be right all the time, and and, and and. Put my hand on that buzzer in the lightning round that just puts people off. Nobody wanted, nobody wanted to hang with this guy. The bob show was very bad ratings and I felt miserable and so I sort of broke down.
Speaker 3:And you know, and and, um, and, about a day later this, this bass player from Toledo, ohio, this huge 300 pound guy, comes to my room. He goes. You know, it's true that we don't like you, bobby, but we do love you. Now let's go, stop feeling sorry for yourself. You're gonna have to come to lunch, like stop it.
Speaker 3:And he just pulled me out of my room and I got very interested in other people's ideas about their life, about my life. I started to listen. I, I, I didn't care what your resume looked like, what you'd done in life, what girl you were dating, if you were comfortable sitting at lunch talking to other people. You had something I didn't have. I wanted whatever you had, because this wasn't working at all.
Speaker 3:And that's a strange moment of clarity for somebody that had been, you know, uh, with with the dramatic story. I wanted my moment of clarity to come with a trembling, you know, putting a, putting a dime in the pay phone. You know, that's it, it was over, but it wasn't. It happened in therapy, it happened in group therapy, it happened with my peers and it happened when I realized that that my grand plans and designs and my outlook and my attitude and the way I showed up was going to leave me alone in a room full of people the rest of my life, and I had a desperate, desperate feeling of, of powerlessness and surrender. And, and I think today, even at Jay Walker, I find myself talking to families and talking to guys and I'm like, look, it's not about you know, it's not about your drug of choice, it's not about um quitting alcohol or or or giving up heroin.
Speaker 3:You've done that a hundred times. The hardest thing you're going to do here is learn how to listen and learn how to get interested in other people's suggestions about your life. We're not wired for that, we're not set up for it, but if you can learn that, if you can become interested in other people's ideas about your situation, you can do anything Like. That is the keys to the kingdom, and it's probably more likely to happen with one of your peers or with an alum than it's going to happen with a highly rated master's level, phd, psychiatrist, therapist Right? It's not going to come from the place you think it's going to come. It's going to come from. It's going to happen at recess and lunch, not not in your ap class, right? So put a book away and start paying attention to how it is you're getting along with the people around you. So that's that's sort of it for me was those people that had the courage to tell me what I needed to know, even when it wasn't what I wanted to hear.
Speaker 2:How many years ago was that? 32 years ago Wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 1992. And there were a series of episodes that happened. I ended up going to sober living. Let's say, I rearranged the furniture spontaneous in the living room. One day I was confronted on a few things. It wasn't exactly all smooth sailing, but I always, every time I I felt that crisis of identity come up in the context of other people, I started to gain reference points of just transparency, trust, patience and that feeling of okay, this is where you're. I would continue to create episodes, drew, where I'd run out of altitude, airspeed and new ideas and get myself just fucked in a corner and I'd be like all right, it's others, it's, this is the Bob show. Get another opinion, get a second opinion, talk to somebody, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's, that's really man. I'm personally just soaking this in because I you know I'm not going to go into it's, I don't want to make it about me, but there there was an episode last week where I felt very lonely in a very large place and it was a weird feeling for me because in my former life I would go into large rooms and be the guy and that everyone wanted to sit with and hang with and it was. I was just projecting. I mean, nobody knew me and I didn't know them and I was, you know. But it was a really weird feeling to be in this very large place and be like I don't, no one wants to sit with me, I don't have anybody here that cares that I'm here, I'm all alone, you know. It's like you know and I really had to do.
Speaker 2:I got home and I told my wife I was really lonely tonight, but in a good way, like it made me wrestle with why do I need to walk in the room and have affirmation? So I'm curious and I didn't see the podcast going this way, but I'm so moved by your story. What was that journey like for you, going from that where it seemed like you know what I heard you say you kind of lived your life and the approval of others and being able to kind of perform and to kind of carrying what people think in or and then moving into just being okay with yourself, being okay, like, how has that process been? Because, because I know that's not just an overnight thing, but I'm super curious about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know. Thank you for sharing that. I totally. I don't think there's anything necessarily unique about how I felt that day. I think we've all been there, kind of like oh fuck, you know. But um, or being alone in a room full of people, or that feeling of sort of self-imposed alienation, like that separation that we all feel. Um, I doubled down on um unapologetic and relentless pursuit of intimate friendship with other guys. I just I realized that I'd used alcohol and cocaine and pot, like I shared earlier in my story, so that I could feel connected, so that I could have a place at the lunch table, so that I could just be a part of that was your pathway in to those.
Speaker 3:I drank, broaden my universe, lubricate my social situation, give me some courage, make me feel comfortable in my own skin, reduce my anxiety and reduce my anxiety. And, in the end of the day, all it did was ramp up my anxiety and leave me totally alone, literally like in a box of my own making, like I was, you know, by the on, in the sober living. We were there for four months and and then I after was interesting I did a, I did a fourth and a fifth step and you know, and I went through the 12 steps with my sponsor in St Paul, minnesota, when I was living in the sober living, and there was this pattern of, no matter where I was or who I was with in my fourth step, this guy, bobby, would show up with this need to look good and be right and step on the toes of others and they'd retaliate Like it's. It's almost like you could change the zip code, you could change the backstory. It wouldn't matter whether it was, you know, aunt Gertie or my soccer coach.
Speaker 3:I was the same and what I thought was going to be this very dramatic. You know, netflix mini series of intensity. Why is this complicated person, you know, sabotaging him? It wasn't that at all. It's just this boring, predictable, monotonous guy showing up the same way in every different relationship, and so what? What ended up? And so so that sort sort of. There's more and more information coming back from this process that we're in all of us, you know struggling to get a foothold in sobriety together, in, in, in saint paul. And then, when I was done my, my peer group said okay, you've been in minnesota now for nine months, you haven't shit on the zip code, you don't know where the dealers are. You've got a job.
Speaker 3:You've got a bunch of friends. Maybe you don't go back to New York now, Because literally up until that point I had looked at this as sort of a compartmentalized sort of chapter in my life.
Speaker 2:That would conclude and I would resume okay, you would go back to before, but a new man.
Speaker 3:Right, right, and and show everyone. Yeah, I could need to look good and be right. You know, like, like I, I I'd show them this new, improved version and and for whatever. And, and it was funny I, they improved version and and for whatever. And and it was funny I. Uh, they're like, don't go back to new york, there's nothing there for you. You've got friends here, we've got a great life together. Um, why don't you stick around?
Speaker 3:And and I think you know, for the first time ever, I assigned meaning to other people's suggestions about my life and and. But again, it came from my friends, it came from my peers. I really assigned and attached a lot to what they said and I was grateful they wanted me, you know, and I understand. I understand in Minnesota for seven years, so, which means the people were warm cause the weather wasn't. So I was there for good reasons, with good people doing good things, slowly, but, um, yeah, I think that's what. What happened to me in transition was that, like, I kept getting good information about old behavior and I could see it in a different light. But I wasn't alone. Other people were alongside and I started to take action and suggestions that other people recommended for me, which is a massive departure from my coping system and my worldview before that which is a massive departure from my coping system and my worldview before that.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, Living in consultation is something I learned at Valiant and that I can relate to what you're saying, Cause that wasn't something I mean. If I ever asked for someone's suggestion, it was just for affirmation of what I already knew I was going to do.
Speaker 3:Right, right Right.
Speaker 2:I can relate to that. So help help me bridge the gap here. So that was a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that part of your journey and I know a lot of people listening and watching are going to find a lot of hope and a lot of help in that. So help me bridge the gap between that's. That's who you are. You're in Minnesota for seven years to. I mean, a lot of life was lived between that, and was it 2005 when, when Jay Walker was born? I think that's right. So help me bridge that. That those years a little bit. What was what was Bobby like in between the recovery and and getting sober and then starting your own lodge here for for recovery?
Speaker 3:Um, hopefully and thankfully, I think that origin story about my recovery ties in a lot to the origin story at Jay Walker and almost like one of those old get off my lawn guys like I don't know much, but here's what I know.
Speaker 3:I mean we're talking about an enormously complex universe of human variables, but my little slice of it, and the part that I keep returning to, is you know, like-minded peers, friends, you know, passengers rescued the moment after shipwreck, this, this whole idea of um, you know this happy lot of castaways, the broken toys coming out from under their bed to live their best life together. This was the, the narrative that was unfolding for me. You know, in Minnesota, and I, I, I, I worked at a warehouse. You know I got, I, I did what everybody else did, I was. We were told to get a job in the sober living and it had to be a 48 hour a week job. And of course I go out and I get and everybody's working, these recovery kind of get well jobs. You may be working on a construction site, there was a warehouse that serviced a nonprofit that a lot of people went to work for, there were call centers but of course I go out and I get offered a 25 hour a week unpaid internship at minnesota public radio.
Speaker 3:So I'm grasping for that differentiator, that elite, um, different like that, that, that identity that separates me, like I'm gonna get a career job in a, in a halfway house, like this and and again. My peers are like no, get on the bus, go work at the warehouse with us, we'll do it together. And for some reason it's funny because I took it to my counselor and he said and his name was Tom Savage. And Tom said well, it sounds great to me. I'm sure that it's okay. We can find 15 hours a week to fill in the gaps, doing service work or something. But why don't we take it to your peers and see what they say? We're like you're not doing that.
Speaker 2:This is your story, this is what you always do right, right they can see it in you better than you can see it in yourself at that point.
Speaker 3:Yeah and and tom was like well, sounds like the, the jury has spoken, you know, and and I remember I woke up the next morning. I'm like, fucking, I'm gonna work at the warehouse. And so there were these just episodes of me acting, um, this new behavior like interested in doing what other people suggested, and of course it was the greatest life Like you get up early, go to the warehouse, be done at like two in the afternoon, go play nine holes of golf at the Muni, go to an AA meeting, eat dinner with everybody, and it just had this rhythm and routine. And I ended up meeting a girl in Alcoholics Anonymous. We had, I like to say, we had a cup of coffee and a couple of kids, and we're still. She had gone through Fellowship Club, the sober living before me, so we didn't go there together, but we met at the Macalester College Big Book Study Group and so this life starts to come together out there.
Speaker 3:After a couple of years working at Rivertown Trading, which is this mail order catalog company, I worked in customer service in the warehouse for a while and then went to work at Hazelden and I was hired as an alumni coordinator great entry-level job at any treatment center, but at Hazelden they had about 55,000 alumni, this far-flung network across the country. They'd been in business for almost 50 years and I loved that work. This was the greatest, greatest job ever, and why I bring it up is because that really was, in many ways, um, you know, the archway or the bridge between um, everything I came to know about my own recovery and then about treatment. I learned in those six years that I worked at Hazelden and working specifically with alumni, and Jay Walker today has a tremendous alumni community and we focus on alumni. But it was never strategic. It was that it was founded by a guy who grew up in alumni relations. And so I don't know clinical, I don't know business development, I don't know operations and administration. What I know is a like-minded community of people with a common call to purpose and sobriety that are growing and changing and evolving after treatment, after treatment.
Speaker 3:Everything I learned about treatment was in after treatment, sure, and what does that community look like? What does it look like to manage that gratitude? What does it look like to leverage those resources? What does it look like? You know to show up and and and how do we show up in that space. So alumni relations at Hazelden was positioned on the org chart in a strange place. It was underneath executive vice president Mike Schicks, who ran all of recovery services. So Mike Schicks was in charge of all recovery related activities at Hazelden Hazelden New York, hazelden Chicago, hazelden Florida, hazelden Minnesota.
Speaker 3:And I say that because many programs, if they even have alumni resources, put them under ultimately. Hazelden, for instance, moved it under development, which is fundraising. It could live under business development, it could live under publishing, because you want to sell more books to alumni, but it touched all those areas. But what it said to me was here was an organization that was going to show up with resources in support of the growth and ongoing recovery of its clients that were no longer paid clients. And so I guess what I'm saying is that as much as anything informed my worldview of treatment, where I felt treatment could be most effective, where I was most comfortable, you know, with these sort of like-minded recovery champions that wanted to stay together after the fact, um and and and that was and is critical in my um, when, when I opened Jay Walker in 2005, I had worked for Hazelden in alumni, as I said, and then I I worked in business development for a program in California called Promises, also for one in Antigua in the Caribbean, started by Eric Clapton called Crossroads, and in those business development jobs I would be living in Colorado, um, in 2000, from Minnesota to Snowmass village, colorado, on the Western slope, uh, about three hours West of Denver, and, um, our kids were three in one.
Speaker 3:And I was doing these business development jobs, based in Colorado, but kind of a traveling salesman for, uh, for Clapton's program down in the Caribbean, um, for for Promises, which was in West LA and in Malibu, and I got to visit a lot of other programs so that and I mean I would say several dozen over the over that period of five years, maybe over a hundred. And so when I opened Jay Walker in we, we incorporated in 04 and we and we opened in 05, I have to confess that I did it really with more of a list of pet peeves and personal preferences about all these other programs that I'd seen.
Speaker 2:Here's what I'm not going to do. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:And and I was always a kind of terrible employee you really don't want me working in your system because I'm that guy. You know how come they always do this or make any sense to me. You know, like if I were, if I were, if I were in a pizza restaurant, I'd want to change the sauce. You know, it's just that bad employee.
Speaker 2:Oh, man yeah so.
Speaker 3:I had these grandiose ideas about like this is bullshit, man a, you know, pro forma, strategically informed, you know, um, focus group tested, uh, operating plan as like, uh, here's what I don't like and here's what I do like and here's what we're gonna do, and um, and a lot of that was drawn from. I didn't. I I felt that alumni need to be part of a treatment experience from. They have more credibility than staff. They have more credibility than parents. They have more credibility than even current and former, I mean, and your peer group like, like alumni had such an impact on me at hazelden. They would come in every night. They'd tell their story from 7 to 7 30.
Speaker 3:I couldn't get an angle on why they were there. They weren't paid and um, so I wanted to move alumni jay walker from the periphery to the center like they. They needed to be in the middle of the bullseye from day one. That that was one of my pet peeves. Another one was that I felt like this entire industry was pussyfooting around the 12 steps. Like the Minnesota model at the time was universal, like it was pretty much going to be, regardless of whether it said it on the website or in the brochure you were going to find yourself, you know, with those 12 steps on the wall when you showed up at that treatment center and they were going to be talking about, you know, god and things that people just didn't want to hear about. So they, I felt like we're not so right on the website vital spiritual experience, like we need to start telling people what they need to know from the beginning.
Speaker 3:We put our prices on the website, we put our length of stay, you know, and so sort of this sophomoric attempt at like we're going to be brutally honest about this is a time consuming and difficult and expensive process and and so we started out with a four month length of stay. You had to pass a physical fitness test, you had to interview to get into Jay Walker All the things that were on Bob's pet peeve list. Like you know, we're going to be. This is the hardest thing you're ever going to do. We're going to tell you that up front. If you don't like it, we'll send you somewhere else. But many are called, you're chosen.
Speaker 3:You might be a jaywalker, and it was built around this spirit of I can't, we can, let's do it together. Like, yeah, this, we value the peer-to-peer relationship above all else. And, um, I hired, uh, two unit supervisors from hazelden that ran units there. They were husband and wife team. They came out and we got this business stood up around these basic fundamental peer directed operating principles that I'd learned back in that sober living and you know, in Minnesota and back in with those peer groups. So that's the way those two things bridge and connect is. I felt like David Brooks is a, is a is a columnist and an author, commentator, and, and he wrote a book called social animal and he talked about in this book about education and he has this whole chapter on and basically it comes down to the idea of you know, if you send your fifth grader off to middle school, fifth or sixth grader, the most important two subjects of the day are recess and lunch, like pay attention. Yeah, pay attention and lunch. And that's where power moves around the room, that's where people find themselves of of service, that's where into you know, identity and interdependence come into play, and I used to talk to my kids about that all the time.
Speaker 3:But really, jay Walker was the program that was going to focus on an unapologetic embrace of intimacy among men. I would direct guys when they arrived look, don't worry about root causes, family of origin, trauma resolution. We have master's level therapists that'll figure that out. Your job is to make two or three friends for life, somebody that's got your back and you've got theirs, right or wrong, right. Someone that you can be absolutely transparently, because nobody's ever taught us how to be friends before, nobody's ever taught us about relationships, nobody's ever focused on the single most important thing that can change your life and that is, um, making friends and having fun, and that's serious business here. So that was the pep talk like let's go, the other stuff will take care of itself, right, but you can see in retrospect that's very derivative of my own full group experience. Sure, and that might be good for me, that is not a universal solution.
Speaker 3:We had to figure out pretty quickly like well, this is, this is effective perhaps for a specific client profile, but we certainly couldn't be all things to all people with that kind of an approach. Yeah, and, and our counselors were, thank God, much more open-minded, resourced and sophisticated and versatile than than the owner. But that's pretty much the culture and that's pretty much when Bobby's need to connect with others in a meaningful and transparent way was manifest in the DNA of Jay Walker when we opened, and it takes its roots back to those aha moments where I found myself finally connected with the people that I love the most.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so something that you do there at Jay Walker and I think it probably goes hand in hand with what you're talking about you implemented there and also Alpha Behavior Health. We haven't talked about that yet, but that's in Austin, right? Is that Austin Texas?
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so something that I was reading about that you do. It's called the Open community model of care, and do you do that in both places?
Speaker 3:It is. It's it's just a fancy way of saying, yeah, well, it's about assigning structure, autonomy, accountability and basically documenting, professionalizing and chronicling the messy part that comes after containment. Traditionally, the value promise of 30-day treatment is that you're going to be placed in a safe, secluded timeout from your life for a period of three or four weeks. You'll be subject to a content delivery system on the disease model Maybe examine some family of origin, origin stuff, some root cause stuff. You'll get an aftercare plan and you're good.
Speaker 3:Then you'll be recovered and and it's ironic because part of my journey brought me into these various service roles with, like the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, I've become involved with them, with the Foundation on Recovery, science and Education, which does outcomes research. It's a massive nonprofit looking at de-identified patient data across 100 treatment centers in an aggregated data set to try to figure out outcomes in an objective way. Aggregated data set to try to figure out outcomes in an objective way. So I've gotten myself involved in various leadership roles in the treatment field. And yet if I had a t-shirt on underneath my button down, it would probably say nobody gets sober in rehab. On the front and on the back it would say we get sober in community, right yeah?
Speaker 3:like we can arrest active addiction in a safe, secluded time out from your life. But until or unless we look at that messy part in the middle and move our attention, our payer policies, our provider practices, our client expectations move life change. Change is difficult, it requires patience, it requires transparency. It would be great if we could contain it, but we can't. But there's a much higher risk, higher reward proposition that happens when you give people kind of the keys to their own recovery. You put recovery on the table, you put relapse on the table during the day and you've got real recovery at night. But you've got to risk and let go and trust and engage people in real life recovery in real terms, but not just cut them loose into aftercare and that's where the alumni come in and so forth. So the open community model refers to everything that a provider does to translate a treatment episode into a recovery experience. Right, it doesn't happen by accident and it doesn't happen in containment, it happens in community and it's a little riskier.
Speaker 3:It's a little messy, there's going to be relapse, there's going to be things that you've got to manage and contend with, but ultimately that's where agency and autonomy and ownership and equity and traction and recovery really take place when you let go. And that's what happened for me. Again back at Hazelden, I was on that campus for five months and one month in primary and four months in Jelnik. But when they cut me loose in St Paul, any one of us could have drank any day but for some reason we didn't. And Tainer at that point was the interdependence and the attachment I had to these other knuckleheads, these broken toys. We all called out from under the bed together and we were going to go make the world our very own. We were going to put it together and that's sacred and it's beautiful. But I think providers don't like that. But I think providers don't like that. You know your director of operations doesn't like the idea of putting 12 guys on a sprinter bus and taking them to a Native American reservation for 12 days. Like shit could go wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Habitat for humanity. They're going to be using power tools, tools like there's too many negative, you know nabobs or nattering nabobs of negativity in our space that put a mouth guard and a helmet on every client and tuck them in every night. And I just feel like until or unless we're willing to let go the way we ask our clients to let go right, Trust the process. We need to trust these guys. They're powerful, they're they're good. We're no good on our own, but we're good together. We cut them loose and we got to trust them and we've got to give them responsibilities and we've got to let them have their head and and and and let them have a little more leash. Yeah, I think it's the field, or we're going to continue to get what we've always got, which is the bypass containment as you let them out right.
Speaker 2:Well, I love everything you're saying. I'm so I'm super passionate about this because and I I'm I'm so grateful that someone in your leadership position is saying these things because I do think a common problem is a lot of guys go into treatment thinking I'm going to do 30, 60, 90 days, whatever, and I'm going to come out fixed. And that wasn't my story. It hasn't been the story of anybody I've known that's gone in. I think you said it brilliantly about just getting some space from your addiction or escape of choice is great for that. It's great to get you out of you know, get you away from that.
Speaker 2:But I always say, like, valiant for me and it sounds like this is out of Jay Walker and a lot of other programs it was just getting me to the starting line. It was just getting me to like all right, now I have a little bit, my brain is starting to heal a little bit. I'm, you know, I've got some friends in recovery space, I've got some language around, what's going on and some understanding. But now, about the time where I felt like I was finally coming, my brain was coming back online. It was now go back to nashville and live this. You know, it's like, well, man, wait, I just I feel like I just got here.
Speaker 2:It's been 90 days, you know, and and um, so what is practically? What does that look like for you? I hear hear alumni which you know. That's a big part of it. I love to, just for those that are listening or watching that are like, yeah, I'm either looking at coming into treatment or I've left treatment. I think what you're saying is so profound. How do you help people that come through your program kind of sustain that ongoing relationship with the guys or stay connected to the alumni and all that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, what tends to happen is it's a minimum 90-day length of stay and I have to be really careful when I get on my little high horse and my righteous. We should do this and we need to speak truth to this, you know, and we can't just do containment. Well, all I've done out here in Jaywalker and I think this team is, you know, we've reverse engineered a model of care backwards from the best possible outcome. So we're in this beautiful mountain valley, you know, 7,000 people in Carbondale, this sort of green, leafy mountain town at the foot of Mount Sopras. It's expensive and it's time consuming and if you add those two things together it's like a Land Rover to come here. So I'm helping the 1%. So you know, if you want to be really candid about it, what I've done is create in very much in in in the image of what I needed.
Speaker 3:You know, page 37, more about alcoholism, right out of the big book. You know this, this Jay Walker character, this guy who who did well in treatment and badly afterwards. You know this, this Jay Walker character, this guy who did well in treatment and badly afterwards. You know, there I was in my late twenties and that's who we serve guys in their late twenties with three to five previous treatments. They've done well in treatment. They do badly afterwards and they get this massive mulligan out here in the Valley. So they come for 90 days and what we, what we'll tell them is look, if you don't choose to stay in our community afterwards, we failed you. Like you do what you need to do and we'll make it what you want to do. Like that you're willing to take that risk.
Speaker 3:Well, I suppose what I'm saying is that when I talk about t-shirts that say nobody got sober, everything's necessary and nothing's sufficient, that the principles of long-term engagement in recovery for a community, some of them are kind of priceless and some of them are low cost, like, instead of going to a health club, we go to the rec center. It's cheaper and it's more community-based. Instead of hiring and outsourcing, say, a high-cost mountain-based expedition experience, we can go down to Habitat for Humanity, set up in the infrastructure of everyone's local community. That all it takes is administrators willing to entrust the community, entrust the systems that are set up. We pick up litter and adopt a highway. There's animal rescue sites that are thrilled to have your patients come volunteer. There's a lot of opportunities. Low-hanging fruit, low cost. So what I'm really calling for isn't everyone to charge $1,000 a day and make your treatment stays forever. Containment, get in our way or get in our patients way in terms of how can we bridge the gap to, to get people engaged sooner in community, and and and moving around. So I just need to check myself a little bit there, like that's and and and and.
Speaker 3:Another thing that I think is important and I think would help us is that it gets back to that idea that the value proposition of a treatment episode, a treatment episode without a recovery experience, needs to be examined. We need to be talking about this. What is it that each of us as providers can do? Initiating a hectic and structured reentry into life is an entirely different value proposition than a contained, safe, secluded time out from your life that arrests addictive behavior. Stopping active addiction does require primary care, requires medical assistance, but does the disease model really serve us when we're talking about something at the next stage? That's much more of an educational experience, much more of a social experience than it is. I know we've got a disease.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure recovery is an inherently medical experience. I think it's a much more social, psychosocial and educational experience and people look at college and education with tremendous resources. We're going to give you four years to get that done. We got four years to execute our value proposition when we're turning an entire person's life around, but to give them a refinement and a chance for a better job. Families are gladly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years on that, but we've tried to shrink it down to changing somebody's life into a four-week span and we're disappointed when it doesn't work. And that's my, that's my little soapbox. Like we need to re-examine the whole paradigm around and and and. The reason the medical versus educational thing's important is because we're trying to get our health insurance to pay for it all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the tricky part.
Speaker 3:It's tuition assistance, it's it's it's education's education. It's it's learning how to live life effectively. It's a design for living in a practical program for relationships in your life.
Speaker 3:That I'm not saying it should take four years, but we, we can't do it in four weeks right and and we can't attend to people in a meaningful way by giving them a prescription and an aftercare plan and an app on their iPhone and saying and there's no other people around? Like, where's the people? Like that's the great thing about a four-year education in college is it's all these relationships, it's all these people you know fellow students, professors, people in the community.
Speaker 3:You know, even at the local bars you're just in, you're living in a they end up being the people you know, even at the local bars you're just in, you're you're living in a they end up being the people you network with the rest of your life and you learn how to network, you learn how how to operate in in and there's and you've got a roommate for four years, you've got, you've got shared food in the fridge, you've got to manage, navigate romantic relationships and there's, there's so many things that happen, you know, in in when we, when we afford a human being the opportunity to make lifelong, radical transformation in the, in, in the college paradigm, and and it's and we need it done yesterday in addiction and it just makes no sense.
Speaker 2:Well, I love just the mental shift, paradigm shift really, of the like. I had never thought of it through the tuition lens before, an education lens, and that's really. That's really brilliant and that's rings true in my experience. Um, cause, so much of what I learned and so much of what shaped what I'm doing today with my life has been a lot around. Where has this information been? This was an educational experience. That's only one part of it, because the transformation happens after I apply that education back to my life and that's a lifelong process.
Speaker 2:But I was having aha moments right and left at 40 years old of like growing up in the church and even learning things. I'm just like I did not know any of this, and so that's why I've become so passionate about getting some of this education out, in hopes that people have these aha moments and then they'll be like, hey, I might need to look into this further. There's some things here that I haven't examined, so super interesting. I love this conversation and I'm I love it because I haven't even got to my notes. I don't even know where we're at, and this is what, what I love about these conversations. But let me ask you this is kind of one final question, the the, your vision for the future, as you're kind of looking ahead into what's next, really, not just for jay walker, for alpha behavior, health, but just in general in this space. What are you, what are you envisioning, what's the evolution look like of treatment in the coming years?
Speaker 3:um, that's a. I wrestle with that a lot because I'm 63 now and um, you know when, when I started, j started Jay Walker and I think you can hear it just in my tone and my whole kind of you know, I'm living in the mountains of Colorado but I'm still a New Yorker at heart, like, like there was. There's this kind of edginess to how we open Jay Walker, like we're going to out honest. You, we're going to tell you what you need to know, even if it's not what you want to hear. Um, we've got like-minded, motivated soldiers of recovery. You know, we, we have an uh, you know well, this is not a consequence for screwing up as an addict. This is, this is a hopeful and forward-looking promise of your future. And, god damn it, we're different and you guys do it your way. We're going to take the time it takes. We're going to speak truth to addicts and we're going to get them loud, proud and sober and that's what makes us different. It was all about a competitive differentiator. Different, it was all about a competitive differentiator. Now it's 20 years later and you know that's. That's not really helpful to the future of anyone or anything. There are about 34 of our alumni now who are in leadership or ownership positions around the country, and I, I love that, and Hazelden probably has 10 times that number. So taking that moving out of our space, you know, launching in around that common set, you know a biting set of peer directed principles and so forth, that's and so forth. That's a hopeful thing. What I guess I'm saying is I was not trying to lead collaboratively, I was trying to differentiate independently and competitively, and that has changed for me. You know now, today, me is there's a little less me, it's a little more we. I think.
Speaker 3:However, the field, when we opened Jay Walker, we did it as a business to business platform. I wanted to open an extended care chronic relapse program and market it to addiction counselors at primary care programs that were seeing jaywalkers show up again and again in primary and would refer to us for extended um. You literally had a list of accounts that we called on. That was, you know, two dozen at most, and we would visit those treatment centers. We would identify. You know this is our client profile, this is how we treat them, and today less than 15% of our referrals come from like-minded primary programs. In fact, more and more. You know our 90-day model is more the standard today than the exception. Back 20 years ago, everybody was 30 days and we were four months payer policies.
Speaker 3:We now have many clinical models that are reverse engineered. Against a reimbursable diagnosis determined by a utilization review professional sitting in a cubicle in the Midwest somewhere about medical necessity for a client, we're we're reverse engineering our models in terms of following the money and what we'll pay, and and and. That's necessary but it's not sufficient and and I I feel it's gotten to the point where we open, for instance now, you know, last November, an eight bed containment program. In essence, while other primary cares were getting into the extended business, we respond by getting into the primary business. Right, so you can stay. It used to be. You would stay in containment before you entered the open community model at jaywalker for seven days now, depending on your rtc benefits and how much residential is there. You know we'll extend that from 7 to 21 days.
Speaker 3:I feel that over time the pendulum always swings back, you know, and that that the value proposition of collaboration will be revisited around recovery outcomes over time. You are, at the same time, we're seeing these reverse engineered diagnosis-based treatment models emerge. You're also seeing more recovery coaching. You're seeing more peer-directed programs. You're seeing more recovery-oriented directed programs. You're seeing more recovery oriented systems of care pop up on the backend. Sober living is no longer a dirty word, it's getting. It's getting the credited. Magic happens in sober living. It needs to be um, you know high standard, and, and, um, and, and, and. So I thinkically, what I see for the future and what I hope for the future is this same shift away from competitive to collaborative that I made personally, just by maturing. And you want to get old and say we can do this together, not get off my lawn.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:But I feel that in the long term, enlightened best interests of a recovery outcome, that we will start to see that as we move our resources further down the continuum, those resources are connected to an outcome and ultimately consumers and and and reference are going to understand you can't have one without the other. So in the same way, I became less competitive and more collaborative over time. In my own mindset I'm I feel the pendulum swinging back the other way and you know it's lower cost out there on the back end of the continuum. It just you know it takes time and it takes other people and you know the importance of availability, human availability, like I feel like we've been living in an era where we're trying to eradicate the need for other people to be involved in this process.
Speaker 3:You see these online apps, you see distance learning, you see virtual treatment. You see you know outpatient aftercare recommendations that don't even involve groups. It is we need transparency which builds trust, which happens around availability, because you can pretend to care but you can't pretend to show up Having roommates. The magic that happens in a residential treatment environment after your clinical goes home. That's where he orders the hierarchy and group the next day people in this process and expect you know them to coalesce around a principle-driven, purpose-driven life in the absence of like-minded peers Like you just need to find a way to keep that chemistry happening over time, and I'm hopeful that's what's begun to happen and what will happen, and um, it'll be driven by, uh, better outcomes and and and more savvy uh, addiction consumers and reference yeah, well said well, on behalf of your, your friends over here at valiant, we're grateful for you and your leadership, your program.
Speaker 2:I'm new to this space and I don't know if it's unique or what, but I've been blown away by the level of collaboration that happens between programs and, like I told you before we started recording, you're spoken very highly of around the Valiant Living camp and so really grateful for you and thanks for sharing today not just your story but your wisdom, your expertise and this has been really great conversation, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, drew, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Well, we appreciate you listening to this episode of the Valiant Living podcast and our hope is that it helped you feel educated, encouraged and even empowered on your journey towards peace and freedom. If we can serve you or your loved one in any way, we'd love to have a conversation with you. You can call 720-756-7941 or email admissions at valiantlivingcom. At Valiant Living, we treat the whole person so you not only survive, but you thrive in the life you deserve. And finally, if this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean a lot to us if you'd subscribe and even share it with your friends and family. You can also follow along with us on Instagram and Facebook by simply searching Valiant Living. Thanks again for listening and supporting the Valiant Living podcast. We'll see you next week.
