Shahroo Izadi

There's various reasons, confidentiality reasons, all sorts of reasons.

So I thought, right, these people need a system.

And I started to draw from smart recovery, intuitive recovery.

These are all things used in hospitals and bought in as recovery programs.

But I believe all abstinence based.

Right.

So the idea is that you help people who are in trouble with abstinence.

alcohol and other drugs to stop altogether from the 12 steps, from the training that I was getting at work, needle exchange, all of it.

And I put it all together and I started becoming really good at quickly identifying the combination of evidence-based interventions that people needed in a conversational, chilled, nonjudgmental way that connected with them.

It was all the same stuff to me.

Really?

Yeah, it was all the same stuff.

It's just we all come at it in different ways.

So, for example, urge surfing.

What's that?

Urge surfing is when you feel like you want to use and you give it 20 minutes and you imagine there are different exercises used in rehab.

Like one of the grounding exercises that they would give you, much like a body scan meditation or something, is to visualize things calming down, to visualize something calm.

And one of them that we used to say is imagine that there is a leaf on the water.

And it's going through the water.

And a person who's skilled can kind of describe it for you in a way that will calm down your nervous system the way that you do in meditation.