The Real Risk Factor for Addiction [Podcast]

During a retreat, people in recovery from addiction find out how their childhood trauma played a role in the addictions they struggled with. This retreat and the histories of these individuals were the subject of the documentary Uprooting Addiction. In this episode, Dr. Nzinga Harrison talks with the creators of the film about how childhood trauma is often overlooked as a trigger for addiction and how those who have experienced this trauma can overcome it.

Episode Transcript

Speakers: Tory Jadow, Dr. Nzinga Harrison, Hope Payson, Claire Jones

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  00:03

Thank you for joining us this week, you’re listening to RECOVERY. I’m your host, Dr. Nzinga Harrison. This week, Claire’s laughing because I’m being like so radio about it Super excited to be joined this week by Hope Payson and Tory Jadow. Talking about how childhood trauma can lead to addiction later in life, even if we don’t know consciously that the two are connected.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

So just at a high level, Hope is a licensed clinical social worker, alcohol and drug counselor who specializes in the treatment of addiction and trauma. And Tory works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor, I had the joy of meeting both of these two amazing souls when we did a fundraiser about their film of rooting addiction. So hunker down, and let’s jump in.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

So Hope and Tory, welcome. Tell us about Uprooting Addiction, the film, what it’s about and what impact you want it to make?

Hope Payson  

Well, it’s about some personal stories, real people who have struggled with a history of trauma and addiction and their recovery. And it’s about tracing back the things that personally made them vulnerable to developing an addictive disorder, and the different ways that they all recovered. So that’s the story. The use of the film is to have people in the community understand on a deeper level, maybe on a more personal level, with their friends and neighbors and family members are going through when they struggled with an addiction, and also the multiple pathways to recovery.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

We could probably pretty easily make the jump although Hope I’m going to ask you to give us a little bit more detail about what led you to make a film like this, your personal journey that took you there, Tory as a filmmaker, was there something connecting you to this content to this movement that made you want to make a movie about the root causes of addiction and the tree imagery is on purpose? Right? The root causes of addiction and the infinite leafy green pathways to recovery?

Hope Payson  02:30

I mean, I can start with what got me involved, it’s like a blend, like everything of personal and professional, you know, coming from a family that struggles with trauma and addiction, having the struggle myself personally, losing my brother to the struggle. But I had also been in the field professionally working in addiction and recovery for quite a while. And it was everything together. It was seeing people struggle and thinking that maybe we weren’t going at the treatment quite right. Maybe there’s some things were missing, the focus being so much on the power of the chemical that people are addicted to versus what why they might want it to begin with.

Hope Payson 

So that is always interested me. And then I was educating people around it, learning a lot from my clients and my own personal recovery. And as part of education, I was doing presentations, and the presentations were PowerPoints and they felt somewhat wooden and not real. And I wanted people to see and when I went to conferences, what I saw on my office is incredible human beings, how much they were struggling and what happens when they get better. Yep. And that’s where Tori and I need is that I start looking like I can’t just keep shooting these awful little handmade videos by myself.

Hope Payson  

Like I need something more. And I reached out to Tory Well, I reached out randomly in an email and then was linked to Tory and reached out to her personally to ask her Would you be able to help me bring some real stories to my presentation. So it wasn’t initially the idea for a film. It was that’s what led me to Tory and got us talking together.

Tory Jadow  04:15

I like to say that Hope within inside hope was a story waiting for a film and inside me was a film waiting for a story. And you know, when we met it just clicked and we were both we both kind of needed. You know, we just kind of complete sounds funny but completed each other in a professional sense.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

Yeah. And that’s exactly like as I was watching the film to your comment, Tory that hope was a story looking for a film and you were film looking for a story. As I was watching Uprooting Addiction. It didn’t feel like I was watching a film. It felt like a getting to know people and getting to understand how their journeys had taken them to where they currently are in life, like it felt very intimate, and empowering and hopeful, which is not always the case when you’re quote watching a film about addiction.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

And so I’m wondering, if you had that same experience as you were making the documentary, like every person in the documentary story was just like, climb inside of your heart and make you feel the power and the circumstances that lead into addiction and lead out of addiction. I’m wondering if each of you can just tell us like one of the stories of those people in the film?

Tory Jadow  

Yeah, I can start with one of our we call them but we actually ended up calling them participants, it was tough to figure out the right word. But one of them was Chuck, a guy named Chuck. And Chuck was, I don’t know, in his late 50s, maybe, but he had been a wrestling coach and a mailman. And was struggling with substance use disorder. You know, I sort of feel like maybe Hope should tell this because I think he’s, you’re closer to him than I am.

Hope Payson  06:21

Well, check was my mailman. Yeah, it’s a small town, social work here. But yeah, Chuck was my mailman, who showed up at my door one day, and said to me, I can tell from your mail that you have something to do with recovery. And I wondered if you might help me. And then when I met him in my office, we started to work together. And like, just like Tory said at me, this wonderful guy, everybody in town knows them. Everybody loves him. He has quite a history of sexual abuse, which he talks about in the film, which is really common for both men and women with addiction issues.

Hope Payson  

And he’s very open and talks about it. That was the secret, you know, and that was one of the drivers that made it very hard for him to grasp recovery. And it was very hard for him to get help, because of the barrier of even talking about that as a man, you know, and as a trauma survivor, and how people with trauma stay safe by not talking about it. And so yeah, I met him. And we did some work on his trauma. And in that work, he was able to change his life and get into recovery. But because the pain was going away, you know, he could access the skills he already had.

Hope Payson  

It was hard Tory and I you know, I reached out and net Tory via email, I reached out to all these different people that I either knew, or some I didn’t know via email. So what you see in the film is quite a miracle of people who said, I’ll disclose anything in front of the camera. And I don’t even know you. We don’t know, like some of the other characters. So, you know, Darrell, I had never met before Ryan, I had never met. And we all met and spent a lot of time together making the film. So it was very, it felt very personal to me. It was pretty emotional. I don’t know, Tori, if you felt that way with the team.

Tory Jadow  08:20

Yeah, I mean, definitely, we got really close with them. You know, when they’re sitting there baring their souls, you know, that’s a real bonding experience. I do feel like there was more of a personal element than I’m used to on, on projects. And I don’t really know why that is. I mean, I think we got Lucky with some incredible people. And I think that was part of it, that we just the people that stepped up and really follow through with us were quite extraordinary, ordinary people.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

Yeah. And I think part of it is that connecting is healing and healing is connecting, that goes both directions. So Tory, you actually started talking about Chuck who turned out to be Hope’s mailman. Was there another person’s story that stuck with you?

Tory Jadow  

Well, yeah, I mean, they all they all stick with me. Caitlin. She also suffered some abuse as a child. And her brother, her older brother, what did he have Hope? He was bipolar.

Hope Payson  

He had bipolar disorder, and then died of an overdose.

Tory Jadow  

Yeah. And he was, you know, really challenging to live with. She had a real complicated relationship with him where she loved him to pieces, but he could also be very violent and very unpredictable and very disruptive. And then when he got, you know, into his teenage years, and then drugs. You know, they were all so worried about him. And, you know, we spoke to Caitlin and her mother, we follow Caitlin. But we do one interview with her and her mother. And so, you know, we get to hear from her mother’s point of view. A lot of you know, really moving a really moving story about losing a son, and then having a daughter that is also now struggling.

Tory Jadow  10:24

And you know, that’s got to be terrifying for Caitlin’s mom. And Caitlin, it’s a lot of pressure on Caitlin, because she knows what her brother put her parents through. And she doesn’t want to do that to them. But by the same token, she’s got a lot of trauma history and she’s struggling, and I believe she’s doing really well, last I heard, and she’s done some great work. She’s also one of the ways we talked about it in the film, she is one of the angels in a program called Chatham Cares For You in Chatham in New York. She comes down. And you know, how do you describe that program, Hope?

Tory Jadow  

Yeah, she was a peer, you know, that helped other people in recovery in those pivotal moments when people are seeking help, and they need somebody with some life experience. She was there. She’s doing very well, she seems really happy right now everybody is, which is..

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

That’s so good to hear

Hope Payson  

Really good.

Claire Jones  

We’re gonna take a quick break, and we will be right back.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

I wonder if that’s probably not a coincidence that people are doing well, after having taken this journey. Like you said, hope of I will say anything to these strangers, even about trauma that I experienced, that we don’t get to talk about. And so to kind of get to this idea, because each of those people’s stories that you just told us had the common thread of trauma, which is the common thread of Uprooting Addiction. And what I really loved that I thought you all did so brilliantly, was taking what can be a nebulous idea of childhood trauma.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  12:28

And put it into something like very understandable through ACES, adverse childhood experiences, and hearing the participants say, making that change from what’s wrong with you, to what happened to you. And being able to look at what happened and how that was affecting them today, even though it may have been 40 years ago, and never told anybody. So can you pick up this thread for me hope talk to our audience about ACES and trauma, and how actually talking about it can lead to healing that I think makes it not a coincidence that the people who were in this film are doing well.

Hope Payson  

Well, when people volunteered to tell their story for the film, they knew they would be filmed during a retreat, talking about their trauma. And Ryan, who had an A score of 9. So he experienced a lot of traumatic events, as a child said in the interview, well, I’d like to be in the film, but I don’t really have a history of trauma. So would you still include me? And I said, well, the fact that you told me that you had a long-term heroin addiction tells me you do have trauma. Just that is dramatic. But I think you know; I think we can talk about it as a group and you maybe you’ll see it differently. So part of the retreat, and part of what we filmed is people taking their A score, and counting up the amount of things they experienced growing up, and then looking at that score.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

I know that an A score of nine is dramatic. But help our audience understand what are ACES. What is the score you’re talking about.

Hope Payson  14:05

Yeah, so they are 10 questions and it looks at physical, emotional, sexual abuse, the impact of poverty, the impact of having a family member incarcerated, or have a family member with an addiction or a mental health issue. And the ACE study originally was developed to look at the impact of that on our health, which is significant. And then also realize there was a connection between your ACE score and your vulnerability to addiction. So if you have an ACE score of five, you are seven to 10 times more likely to have an addictive disorder.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

I’m sorry, Hope. Can you just say that again? Because that is a colossal statistic.

Hope Payson  

If you have an A score of 5 and most Americans at least have a score of 1, and actually the leading A in the United States, a developed country is Poverty. So that’s the one that scored the most. And divorce is the second. But if you have an A score of 5 or more, you’re 7 to 10 times more likely to be vulnerable to an addictive disorder. Now, that’s not the only thing that you’re vulnerable to, you’re vulnerable to diabetes, you’re vulnerable to asthma, you’re vulnerable. There’s that allostatic load that chronic stress puts on the body that makes you vulnerable to pain, which makes you vulnerable to opiate addiction. Yes, yeah. So the higher the score, the more vulnerable.

Tory Jadow  

Yeah, and also more vulnerable to risky behavior.

Hope Payson  

So we brought the group together, they did that together. And they did their A scores together as a group, which is pretty intense experience.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

And so did you see the lights coming on? And did those lights coming on kind of help people?

Hope Payson  

Yeah, yeah, the lights came on. I mean, everybody, the people who had an A score before, when it came in, they said, everybody, the average in the group, everybody, including mine, A score went up one, because we realized during the retreat, like, oh, wait a minute, yeah, I did have exposure to that. Or Ryan says, at some point, this thing happened. I don’t want to talk about what it is. But now that I read this, it counts on  the A score. So yeah, the light went on, in that we realize more deeply the trauma that we had experience. But also I think that compassion increased, because it’s like, okay, now it makes sense. That’s when we brought the tree and we develop this group project together.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  16:35

Tory, you are behind the camera for this, right?

Tory Jadow  

Yes, yes. It was really interesting for me, because I’m not a therapist, and I had not sat in on these kinds of conversations. So it was really moving. You could have heard a pin drop in that room as each person was talking. And I was just as engrossed. Yeah, it was a bit of a struggle to keep all the technology in line, because you know, it was just really moving and engaging.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

Part of what we’re trying to do in Season 2 on IN RECOVERY, which I feel like I saw happened, that sit in like my verb and mountains were like not even matching that I saw happen. As I was watching the retreat in Uprooting Addiction, like you said, hope was this development of compassion and empathy. And like part of what we’re really trying to do on IN RECOVERY period, and especially on season two, is like to draw together those threads of the common experience, because a lot of times people can think, oh, addiction, I don’t have that. Oh, trauma, that didn’t happen to me.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

And then from that can be this sense of like us in them. But then also for people who have trauma or who have addiction. What is wrong with me? Like, why do I have it? And so I’m wondering if you can talk to us about kind of the whole listening audience scoring themselves on ACES. What do you do with that information? How do you use that information, kind of for your own personal journey, maybe to support compassion and connection for someone else’s?

Hope Payson  18:26

I wish that we all took the ACE test, as part of like our regular physical, like, you know, I get my blood pressure taken, I get my cholesterol looked at, it would be really helpful if my physician knew I had an ACE score 6, because then she maybe she’d be less prone to offer me things that I probably shouldn’t take. Even though I’ve told her I have a history of addiction, you know, and that’s not her fault. That’s because it’s just not widespread known. You know, I think there’s other addictions, we’re not thinking about because people say, oh, you know, I don’t have an addiction. Well, we have an addicted culture. And it doesn’t just include drugs and alcohol. It includes food, it includes sex and love. It includes work and perfectionism. You know, things that drive us. Things that drive us that are out of balance. We all qualify, you know, probably for that.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

I feel like you read the episode list for Season 1.

Hope Payson  

Well, it’s in searches some dopamine, which sometimes we need, because we’re depleted because we’re working too much. And we don’t take care of ourselves. So there’s a cultural aspect to this, of how it’s tolerated. But if it were normal, like just like, it’s normal to look at my blood, right? If it were normal to say, hey, Hope, listen, this is not your fault, but you have an A score of six. This means we need to watch your health more carefully. You know, because you’re going to be more vulnerable to things like pre diabetes, all the things that I’m working on right now. You know, and oh, When you get a pain meds are offered to be careful. What’s your alcohol use like? I’m hoping as more people learn about the ACE study, which has been around for a long time, maybe it’ll be more normal to talk about it.

Claire Jones  20:20

Almost going off of a question you asked Nzinga, once people have taken their ACES, and they find out that they have a number, maybe 5 or higher, what can they do next? They say like, okay, I’ve had a lot of trauma in my life, I know that I’m at a greater exposure to have an addiction. What are options for them? And what are some things that you all did with some of the participants in the movie for, again, for people who haven’t seen it?

Hope Payson  

Well, there, you know, for me, if somebody told me I have a high ACE score, I would suggest they seek some evidence-based treatment for their trauma, because we know that we can resolve it. We also know that not everything bad happens to us is necessarily encoded as traumatic if we intervene early, because it isn’t about the bad things sometimes, it’s about what happens after the bad thing. So human beings are super resilient, we can have a lot of bad things happen if we have solid people around us who support us. So we don’t label it as it’s my fault. Or I should have done something different.

Hope Payson  

Instead, it’s like, I’m a survivor, I get through it. So for me, because I’m a therapist, you know, I think first some evidence-based treatment. But also, as a human being, I know, there’s also lots of other ways to recover, you know, in connection with others, reclaiming yourself, you know, in the community, but there has to be room for us to talk about it. There has to be acceptance in the community, that I’ve been hurt, just like if I had a terrible car accident, there’d be you know, a lot of help and forgiveness, you know, or, or just like, you know, if I had a heart attack, the EMS would run here and help me no matter how many heart attacks I had, they wouldn’t say, you know, this is the fifth time we’ve come to Hope’s house and she’s overdosed. Right, maybe this time, we shouldn’t intervene so quickly. Like we wouldn’t be having that discussion, because it would be seen as something normal.

Claire Jones  22:16

There’s like attending, people tend to you if you get into a car accident, or if you have a heart attack.

Hope Payson  

Because it’s not your fault. And there’s still a belief in our culture that if you pick up an addictive substance it is. But if we look at the studies, we know that one, somebody with no way score, and somebody with five are going to have a very different experience when they pick it up.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

That’s right. That’s right. All right, Claire, I think it’s about time for a break, shall we?

Claire Jones  

We shall.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  22:54

Well, we are nearing the end of our time together, which always happens so much faster when you’re having an amazing conversation. So I guess if I was gonna ask each of you to leave our listeners with a gift, What gift would you give our listeners on your way out of this episode?

Tory Jadow  

Well, I’ll start with that one. What I learned, going through this, the process of making the film and being with all these incredible people that we’ve met along the way, is that, you know, if you’re struggling, or you have loved one, a family member, or close friend or whatever that that is struggling with, you know, with addiction, that you’re not alone. And addiction can be so isolating, and you’re not alone. And it’s okay to ask for help. And there’s so many people out there that want to help you and programs, different modalities that might work for you, or combination of different ones together could work.

Tory Jadow  24:14

Everybody’s unique. It’s like a thumbprint. But, you know, there’s help and recovery is possible. And I’ve seen it myself. So it’s a beautiful thing. And I almost feel like people in recovery. It’s like their superpower. They’re better than ever. They’re like, you know, superhumans traveling you know, wandering the earth. And, and that’s out there for everybody that’s struggling. And just to know that and to have faith and believe in that. You know, that would be my gift. Like, just believe that because it’s true.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

Yeah, yeah. Gift of hope sounds like. Speaking of hope. Do you have a gift for us?

Hope Payson  

Well I would say that nobody gets through without some brand of pain, right? We all have it. And we all experience it. So if you were to take a score and find out that maybe you have a little more pain than you first thought that it’s not your fault that it doesn’t define you. And if you slipped into ways of dealing with your pain that have not served you well, you can change that the brain is constantly changing, we can update our neuro networks we can change the way we define ourselves so my past your past does not define you and you can change it at any time. And you know, people who would the worst histories you know, I trained therapists now and I’ll say if some people with the worse histories, it feels like impossible to get better are the ones that are out there leading now helping other people. So it’s definitely possible and you’re worth it.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

I love it. It’s possible and you’re worth it. Is there a place where people can see this film we just spend the whole episode talking about?

Tory Jadow  26:03

Yes. Okay, first of all, we are on Apple TV now.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

Oh, that is awesome.

Tory Jadow  

Yeah, we’re on Apple TV. We’re on iTunes. There’s also Vimeo on demand at but if you don’t want to remember all of that, you can go to our website uprootingaddiction.com. And we have all kinds of links to view the film through the website. You can also join our mailing list if you want to stay in the loop as far as local you know, screenings and panels and events that would be coming up in the future. Festivals and whatnot. So you can join the mailing list on website uprootingaddiction.com and there’s also a lot of behind-the-scenes information on there and you know, profiles of all the people involved in the film and the participants and etc, etc.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

Awesome, uprootingaddiction.com. I love movies, I love books, I can list the books over my life that have made a lasting impact. I can list the films that have made a lasting impact and Uprooting Addiction is one of them.

Tory Jadow 

It’s an honor to be on your podcast. I love it so much. And thank you so much for bringing us on.

Hope Payson  

Yeah. Thanks for having us here.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

So Claire, that was such an amazing conversation with hope and Tory. What are you thinking? Where did that put your brain?

Claire Jones  

Well, of course, it put me in a thousand different tracks. But the biggest, the biggest thing I am thinking now is how trauma and mental health are at the root of addiction for a lot of people. And it just makes me think about the last year and what the implications of the last year are currently and what they will be, especially as hope mentioned, because of the way that we don’t necessarily talk about trauma, or we don’t necessarily talk about pain and how a lot of people don’t think that their pain and their trauma is warranted. So that’s sort of where my brain goes and especially because that’s something that we’re talking about so much this season. That’s sort of where I went, What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Nzinga Harrison 

I thought it was so interesting, Hope and Tory said as they were making the film, everybody’s ACE score went up a point. Yeah. And it was just talking about it and realizing what those childhood experiences has been. And so I think probably we could say over the last year, the majority of people’s the aces score probably went up a point for different reasons. And so we think about that, you know, with ourselves as adults, and maybe like, you do your ACE score, and you’re like, oh, this helps me understand why the last year was so much more difficult for me than maybe I thought it was for other people.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

But then you also think about your kids, right? Like, did our kids get an increase on their ACE score over the last year? Because if so, we’re in a position of power to practice some prevention, around the impact that has on them growing up. So I thought it was just like, a really beautiful conversation that definitely applies to the last year is like, how do we start to recover from the last year? Talk about it? How do we start to recover from the last year? recognize the impact of it? Yeah. How do we start to recover from the last year? Recognize now that I’m 44. What the 43 years of leading up to the pandemic had to do with how I navigated the pandemic.

Claire Jones  

Yeah, yeah, I like that point a lot. Yeah, because like the reason I just want to clarify this reason that all of their scores went up when they were taking the ACES is because they were all together. They were like talking about it and talking about the questions. Okay. Right. And so talking about what this last year has been like, for all of us, helps us recognize, like, oh, this was a big deal, or like, oh, this maybe has bigger implications for me than I would think about or that I have thought about sitting in my house alone for the last year or whatever.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  30:29

Like, I think part of what probably happened as they were sitting in that group talking about their aces score, she mentioned, Ryan said, I’m not going to say out loud what this experience was, but it definitely equals a point. Like when you’re talking to other people about things that have happened to you that you’ve survived, and you’re getting empathy, and compassion that fortifies you to look at those things that have been too scary to even admit happened to you.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

And then that’s like, the first step to grabbing your power back is like, I can look this in the eye and say, this happened to me not because I did whatever not because it was my fault. Like it happened to me. And now I have the power to start walking forward from it. Some things are so scary. We can’t even look at them. Without the support and connections of other people.

Claire Jones  

Yeah, totally.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  

I love that conversation. And I for real, for real. For real. For real. Love the film Uprooting Addiction. Yeah, like, this is it. Nobody paid me to say this. I saw the film. And I was like, I want to bring them on in recovery because it really did have that impact.

Claire Jones 

Yeah, I can vouch for this. This was like a year ago, she sent us this email. So she’s not lying. If nobody’s paid her. Check it out. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. And that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening. Everyone.

Dr. Nzinga Harrison  32:00

See you later.

CREDITS

IN RECOVERY is a Lemonada Media Original. This show is produced by Claire Jones and edited by Ivan Kuraev. Jackie Danziger is our supervising producer. Our theme was composed by Dan Molad with additional music by Kuraev. Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer are our executive producers. Rate us, review us, and say nice things. Follow us at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, or find me on Twitter at @naharrisonmd. If you’ve learned from us, share the show with your others. Let’s help to stigmatize addiction together.