Dr. Keith Humphreys

love and attention and you're not getting it.

And that's a very common experience to grow up with an addicted parent.

And that can generate lifelong negative feelings about it to people.

And again, I say understandably, you know, even if you do eventually come to the view that, yeah, you know, dad had a disease or mom had a disease, you still didn't get what you wanted at the time.

And so it'll be, you know, grief and sadness about that.

Seems strange, doesn't it?

Yeah, so all people to some extent

you know discount future rewards to some you know like so we buy the five dollar latte instead of putting in our retirement even though if we did that every day we would have a million dollars you know when we were 65 right and in addiction they do it even more so people when in in addition if you ask people about what you know what about something would you would you take you know uh

$5 today or $20 tomorrow.

They're more like to say $5 right now.

It's almost as if tomorrow doesn't exist.

So this really is a problem and you can't really say to people, you know, if you get in recovery after like five years, you're probably going to – I bet you'll meet a nice person and you'll get married and settle down and then you'll go back to school and get – it's like that's all like, you know –

fantasy camp kinds of stuff, right?

So, it's okay to have those long-term goals, sometimes those are very motivating, but you want to focus on things that are immediate, because that's the world they're living in, a world of immediacy.

For example, you will have more money every day.

If you're using an illegal drug, your risk of arrest will drop to zero immediately, once you stop engaging in these transactions.

You will feel physically better, you know, very, very quickly than you feel right now.

And, you know, social reinforcement really matters too.

This is one of the geniuses of the people who developed the 12-step fellowships, the fact that you get...

literal status by how many days or years you have not used the substance and you get respect and we care about those things for very good reasons, they've been central to the survival of the species.