Recently, Koorosh appeared on Sirius XM’s Jenny McCarthy Show to discuss Evo’s approach to addiction treatment. Together they discussed coping strategies, misconceptions about addiction, and even how Jenny and her partner, Donnie Wahlberg, address conflict. It’s a great interview and really gets at some of the core principles of Evo’s treatment model.
Listen to the full interview:
Here’s an excerpt:
Jenny: Let’s get to this part. The subtitle says, “A Rehab That Lets You Drink.” So if people come in with any kind of addiction, they can still drink?
Koorosh: So, it’s not about if they can or can’t drink. We recognize that the drinking or the substance use or anything else—the gambling, the sex, the food—these are ways that people are attending to what they need, and then they become their own habits. They become a way of being, and the nervous system wakes up and screams for “more, more, more.” And so this idea that we would immediately stop to be able to get help for the very thing that they are struggling with doesn’t make a lot of sense, and is the number one reason that people actually reach out and do the hardest thing, which is ask for help, put their life on pause, whether it’s completely on pause or partially on pause. And then they do the very thing that they are coming to get help for and they get either shamed for it, or worse, they get kicked out for it. So what we do is meet people where they are—this is the respect piece—to say ok, well, this is what’s happening. What are your goals? What is this doing for you? And what can we work on together? And when that problem presents itself, we see it as an opportunity and a challenge to meet those folks where they are, to really get a sense of what’s happening for this person in their life.
Jenny: I love that.
Koorosh: And to actually bring community in and sit with that person to say, oh, let us all hold this space for you, let us all work on this together, as we now work toward your goals.
Jenny: I bet you’d have so many more people willing to get help. Because to me, the scariest part for most people is immediately going dry without learning any, learning how to deal with your issues. So meeting you where you are at that moment in your life, I think is a really powerful way to do this.
Koorosh: Absolutely. And I think that, unfortunately, for so many people, and we don’t really have statistics for this because there’s a silence for the majority of people who know that this isn’t going the way I want it to go, I’m having a tough time and I’m drinking too much or I’m using too much and I know that. This isn’t fun anymore. But I can’t get help because as soon as I do that, there’s this whole booby prize over here that says, well, adopt the title of “addict” or “alcoholic” to start with—
Jenny: Right!
Koorosh: —And now, begin to learn to live the rest of your life attending to this chronic disease that forces people into an isolated place, and if you think about this place of belonging I mentioned before, what it does is it actually makes you feel worse. And then in the treatment, what we’ve done is we put the responsibility on the individual on top of that and then we make up things like, oh, well they’re just not quite ready yet. Without taking the responsibility to say, wait a minute, we’re the ones who are forcing people to not be ready because what we’re forcing on to them is unacceptable to them. So absolutely. There are people that suffer and don’t ask for help because of these false ideas of what it means to have trouble in this world.
Evo Health and Wellness is an outpatient addiction treatment program in Venice, California that respects where you are and where you want to go. Learn more about Evo’s program.