From Homelessness To Healing Through Brain-Based Recovery

He hit bottom on the street, shaking with delirium tremors, and had a realization that changed everything: alcoholism was never just about alcohol. We talk with Dr. Robb Kelly, PhD, a recovery expert who’s spent decades studying the brain, trauma, and what actually drives compulsive behavior, from alcohol dependence to drug addiction, anxiety, and depression.

We get into the invisible part of the story: the subconscious thinking patterns that form in childhood, the “normal” experiences that later reveal themselves as trauma, and the belief systems that keep people stuck in self-sabotage. Dr. Kelly explains how neuroplasticity and brain-based methods can help rewrite those pathways, and why tools like brainspotting and Breathbox Studio aim to uncover, discover, and discard what the brain has been protecting for years.

We also focus on veterans mental health, PTSD, moral injury, and why the hardest stretch can come after service ends. When routines and identity drop away, isolation rises, and old memories surge back, people need more than advice they need a process, a community, and practical daily support.

If you or someone you love is struggling, this conversation points to clear next steps and real resources, including a free session offer for military-related PTSD and a free copy of Dr. Kelly’s book. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find help when it matters most. Learn more at https://robbkelly.com/. 

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:34

All right. Hi, everybody. This is uh welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Roberts, and today we have a great guest with us. Dr. Rob Kelly, PhD, is a sought-after recovery expert who believes in treating the causes of addiction and not the symptoms. Dr. Kelly has appeared on such shows as The Doctors, Eye Opener, Good Morning Texas, and Ken's Five Morning News. A frequent contributor to radio and print interviews include the Jim Bohanett Show, Miracles in Recovery, USA Today, and participated in McLean's Hospital, Harvard Medical School study on the stigma associated with mental illness. Dr. Kelly hosted Sober Celeb Show on KLIF Radio in Dallas and currently hosts Breaking Through Addiction Podcast featuring special guests discovering a variety of mental health issues. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Rob. How are you? Thank you so much. Great to be here. Good. So I'm really excited to talk to you. Um you specialize in addiction recovery, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 1:37

So we do we do addiction, alcoholism, uh trauma, uh, depression, anxiety, PTSD. So kind of everything to do with psych is what we treat.

From Childhood Drinking To Homelessness

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Okay. Now you you mentioned you've had your own struggles, right, with uh alcoholism. Um tell us a little bit about your journey um through that and kind of what led you to doing the work you're doing now.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

So I was born into a musical family, but also an alcoholic family. Took my first drink on stage playing professionally with my auntie and uncle, age nine, and then kind of went through most of my schooling drinking, on and off, got to college, lucky enough to get to college. Nobody in my family ever went to college. Um, dragged my way through that. Um become a I was a musician, always, no matter what, I was always playing music. I have two PhDs, behavioral science and psychology, um, and just really just carried on drinking until everything was out of control. So I'd married, got two beautiful kids, uh, two beautiful girls, realized I couldn't stop drinking, went into treatment, come back out, uh, drank on the way home, and eventually lost my children, wife, cars, practice back in the UK, and event and eventually became homeless. And I remember sat on the streets pouring down with rain about 10 o'clock at night, thinking, what the hell just happened? Like I had everything, the big house. I come from the projects, I come from very low-income parents, but lots of love in the house and fun and games. But yeah, I mean, it it stripped everything away. So when I finally did get off the streets, had kind of a spiritual awakening, but I was angry with the medical fraternity that they couldn't tell me what was wrong with me. And medical fraternity still baffled with alcoholism. They think it's the same as addiction, which it is not. Um, so yeah, I I decided that when I got off the streets, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life studying, caring, and looking after people like me. Um, because horrendous things happened when, you know, I was in my uh addiction. And uh that's what I did. I was studying the brain way before people thought the brain was uh hardwired, uh, and still did, as you probably know, until about 10, 15 years ago. I always knew it wasn't. Different things happened to me. Remember being outside a liquor store once when I was homeless. I have 10 pounds, I'm shaking violently, I can't speak. I'm going into delirium tremors. So for those guys who don't know what that is, unless I get alcohol or hospital in the next 20, 30 minutes, I'm gonna die. The guy, five o'clock in the morning, the guy opens the shop, not supposed to open till seven, or sell alcohol till 10. But this guy knows me. I go in, I'm shaking like a leaf. I put my 10 pounds on the counter. He puts the bottle of vodka on the counter, and this is what happened. Hey buddy, all of a sudden headaches went, shakes start, everything went. I remember in slow motion looking over to the shopkeeper and looking back at my holding the bottle. And all of a sudden I thought, it's not about the alcohol, it's not about the alcohol, and that's what started my studies over the last 30, 35 years, I think it is. It's like alcohol has 1% to do with alcoholism, and the same with every other addiction. Is it wasn't it was never the problem. I never I never I never had a drinking problem, I had a thinking problem. My brain was broken, hypothalamus basal ganglia. Um, and I couldn't stop. So my studies are still ongoing now. We've just got into research and Alzheimer's. Um so yeah, that's what we do. That's how I got here. I'm in San Antonio, Texas, right now. We do have offices in Dallas, Manchester, England, uh, London, Switzerland, and Spain. And we do what we do because we love what we do.

Why Medicine Misses Root Causes

SPEAKER_00 5:49

What do you think? So it sounds like to me that that there may perhaps be a large segment of the medical industry or whatever that's a little clueless, it sounds like, on some of this. And what do you think? Is there resistance to your research, or is it just looking the other way? Is it just like old thinking? Like, what is what is kind of the difficulties there?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

But if you look at medical training, they're getting they're gonna train on addiction or alcoholism. Um alcoholics are born and drug addicts are made. Um you know, when we look into the neuroscience behind it all, I think that A, too much money is to be made with alcohol, and B, a well person in America is a lost client. Because it's all about the pharmaceutical companies. I ask people all of the time, have you ever been to the doctors? Is give you a pill for your ailment or disease or whatever. You've taken the pill, it's cured your disease, and you never have to take the pill again. And the answer is no, you haven't. When you're taking a pill that has 25 other symptoms that it can supposed to cure, and while you're looking at the famous commercial with the lady and the bikini and the guy on the ship and everything, and he's telling you there's 25 ways you can die from taking this, we have a problem. But nobody's bold enough to stand up and say it. And I've been doing this for 25 years. Um, and got my license stripped off me. Um, took me four months to get it back. They said I was harming people. I'd lecture to those guys today, which I still find weird. It's like neurone science tells us that you can cure addiction, you can cure any addiction. You can't cure alcoholism because we're born, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, and the amygdala um are different to any other any other addiction in the world, and we've proven this, of course. Um, so yeah, I just think that most of them when I do conferences and speaking to doctors about this, most of them are like, oh my goodness, we didn't know this. So we sent our research and stuff. We're now speaking to Robert Kennedy uh about some new stuff that we found and going forward with, but it's been a long, long battle of people laughing, mimicking, walking away from us, trying to humiliate us, you know, because it's new science. People really don't like change. I mean, you ask, we could go on the high street right now and we could ask 100 people what is alcoholism. I mean, it can include 50 doctors in that, and they're gonna say one thing it's someone who drinks too much alcohol, or somebody who can't have nothing to do with that. You know, you can't drink yourself into becoming an alcoholic, but you can take enough drugs to become a drug addict. That's the addictive personality. Both show the same, both is devastating, don't get me wrong, but one you can trace back to fetus level, the other you can't. 99% of people, doc, that come to us with a staunch heroin or crack cocaine started in the doctor's office. 99% of people, and I've seen over 11,000 people. It's insane, but nobody wants to know.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yeah, I can I can totally understand that, you know, uh in the industry, whether you're talking medical or whatever else, they have their sacred cows, they have their their like source of supply or whatever. And the beauty of when you I I I'm a big proponent. I think I know where you're gonna go with this on the next question, but but I'm gonna let you say it anyway. I'm a big proponent of of understanding that it's all about the brain and the way we think. And that's it, that's whether you're talking about addiction, alcoholism, sickness, all kinds of like relationship issues, whatever it's the way we think. But that's also what's the beauty of that is, what the beauty of that is, is I'm in control of how what I think and how yes, yes. So I want to get to uh so my next question is um you know, you talk about thinking. Really, when you say that, like what do you mean? What are you talking about? What do you mean it's not what we drink, but the way we think and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

So learning patterns start, everything's in patterns, guys. Learning patterns starts at home as we're a toddler. Mom says, Don't put the hand on the under the stove, it'll hurt you, it'll burn you. And we put our hands on the stove, and then it burns us, and the first lesson we learn is whatever mom says is true. And then we go through our childhood traumas that are so normalized back in the day that they don't seem like trauma. So people go, Well, I've never had a car crash or a divorce, and it goes way deeper than that, but they normalized it. So the thinking patterns come from enmeshment and learn behavior around earth. Sony things like somebody saying, That's a stupid shirt. Why'd you want why'd you want to buy you that? Uh because alcoholics are more sensitive. We've proven that as well. So it's the thinking patterns that create. So, in layman's terms, as I grow up, I know quite well I'm never going to be blonde enough, tall enough, thin enough, or rich enough. You get a young kid, a girl growing up in a violent alcoholic house. She's six, seven, eight, nine, something like that. She witnesses dad coming home at least two or three times a week, drunk out of his face, uh, and getting into a fist fight with mom. Next morning they get up and mom says, Oh, I'm sorry about last night, I love you. And dad says, Oh, God, I'm sorry, I love you too. The child is obviously thinking that violence equals love. So when she leaves the house with that thought patterns and thinking behavior, distorted thinking, especially subconscious, she will attract the guy that ends up being bad to her or ends up being horrible to her. To the point that she meets a good guy who's really nice to her, she'll self-sabotage that relationship because it doesn't feel normal. It feels weird. Yeah. So them thinking patterns create the belief system that we are A, B, and C from the past. Like my mum and dad used to drop me off at their friend's house every Friday. We used to stay overnight. Mum and dad went drinking, so early hours, went home, slept it off, picked us up. Nothing wrong with that. What they didn't know, because we thought it was normal, so we didn't tell them, is when my parents drove out the driveway, we had to play with three or four adults, there's about eight kids there, the run around naked game. And they would run around after us in the dark and tickle us. I didn't know that was sexual abuse. I just thought it was a game. So when I say we normalize things in the past, it's only now that things have started coming out. Is I act this way now because back then somebody said, done, heard, seen something that affects me as an adult going forward. So nobody's perfect, nobody has a perfect life. But if you can't keep relationships, can't keep a job, you're depressed most of the time, or you're anxious, go right back to what it started. You have to uncover, discover, discard of that trauma. And we we have lots of tools here, like the breath box and brain spotting, to pull them traumas out one by one. And you can live a life beyond your wildest dreams. Yeah, I mean, you you really can with 11,000 patients and a 98% success rate is unheard of, but it's true. Stop stop letting people tell you you can't do stuff. It's not true. Just because you come from the projects doesn't mean you can't build one of the biggest empires in the world. It's not true. You can.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

What I find really interesting uh about what you're saying is that um how much of my thinking I inherited from my parents, even that that was negative and I thought was negative at the time. Like instead of like even though I rejected it, you know, as a as a kid, and saying that's that's stupid, da-da-da. I still find myself at times you mentioned uncover, is like I'll still have these epiphanies at times that go, that's something dad would have said. That's something dad would have taught, and it's totally dysfunctional. And and it's like, how could you know, here I am 54? I haven't yet rejected that because I didn't know it was there. It was just like running in the background, you know, influencing my behavior until I read read something else else that really gets me, and I go, oh wow, that's amazing. And that's when I go, you know, then the contrast sort of appears. And I'm guessing for a lot of people that's true, right? There's a lot of what I like what I call personal commandments or or personal like sub sub-programs that are running in the background that people know and it's influencing their behavior. How do you how do you like you mentioned uncover, discover, and and what I forget what the third one was, but tell us about that process a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

So the subconscious brain with trauma, which is 99.9% of people uh based on childhood trauma, will run the show most days. So the subconscious brain wakes us up because lack of oxygen. We need the conscious brain to kick in. So when the prefrontal cortex asked for a solution, because that's its job, in milliseconds, it'll scream out to the brain, conscious and subconscious, give me an answer, give me an answer, give me an answer. What we find is because of the childhood trauma, the answer will come from the subconscious brain, which is always negative. It was all that stuff, you piece of crap, you're a waste of time. Uh, here's one for me. How many times have I told you, Robert, you can't go to college because you're too stupid? I don't know. Start to believe that stuff, you know? So it's always coming back to negative. What we need to do with we have uh another company I created called Breathbox Studio, which is a software that redesigns and redeveloped pathways away from trauma. We use brain spotting, which is a bit like EMDR, but no light to anything. NLP, subliminal messaging. And we go back one by one and we pull, especially with brain spotting, you're looking for a flicker in the eye, when it when it flickers, there's a there's a it's attached to a trauma. So you may sit there waiting for a minute, or I've I've waited for an hour sometimes, not moving, and they have to keep the eye on the red balls at this kind of one thing, and they'll sit there for as long as it takes until something comes out, and something always comes out. And it's a genius, it's only been around about 15 years, don't quote me on that, but it's very new science, like all our stuff is new science. But um, and then you address one by one as they start to come. And the amount of people, doctor, will say to me, I've got nothing, I'm fine. And then we do the the breath box, and then we come in in, we do the NLP, and then we put them on brain spots, and then we find out that the dad used to molest them every single day for like 10 years when they were a kid. Well, the vet the brain is very good at protecting you from going insane, so it stores that stuff, and you think it doesn't exist or you've forgotten all about it, you can access every single one of their memories by using the right methods, and they will come out at the most inappropriate time. Like if you're going for this big job you've always worked for and you've suffering from the trauma and the alcoholism, and you think you're clean and sober now, 10 minutes where you're going to go into this room, the subconscious brain will start and release all that stuff. Who do you think you are? This is an imposter. So you doing you don't belong here. Who do you think you are? You man, and all of a sudden we self-sabotage the interview and we don't get the job.

PTSD Veterans And Moral Injury

SPEAKER_00 18:04

So a lot of our clients, of course, we specialize in women veterans, but veterans in general experience a lot of different traumas in their military service. You're talking about childhood traumas, but is this effective too for like um you know traumas that don't don't hit us? A lot of you know, a lot of military people they go into the military, they bring with them childhood traumas. I mean, most most if you look in any crowd, civilian or military, you know, a bunch of people, most people have had traumas. But some people come into the military and they've had, you know, a good childhood. And of course, as I work with them, you you still uncover some childhood things, but forgetting that for a second, just the traumas they experience in the military, whether it's combat, sexual assault, whatever, like these things, because of the unique nature of the of the military, where you become so enculturated, and it's like a family, and it's it's very you become very close to people, you're sort of like linked and and connected to people in a way is beyond just like a job working at IBM or something, then they experience this trauma. It can have this life-changing effect on them. Um and can your process still work with you know, working with those things, people with PTSD and that sort of thing, moral injury, etc.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah, we we we we work with veterans. Veterans are huge for me because um we're not gonna get into this, but how the veterans are treated in this country is it's just yeah. Um so we work with uh PTSD and and and veterans and stuff, mind distortion, and you know, you can't expect any human being to go and see action and come back normal. You can't do it. And and for people who, any doctor, anything think that's okay, you know, you get back with your family back home, you know, you've seen somebody short, their head's blown off, you've lost a leg, whatever it is, and we try and carry on, going, let's go, let's go. Yeah, nobody's stopping them and going, whoa, whoa, let's let's just look at what just happened because now conscious brain, it's okay, I can deal with it. It's like, guys, if you've ever seen a dare being hit by a car but not killed, it within 30 seconds, a miracle happened in front of you. As the cars, the dare's hit by the car, it scoots across the road, it lays still for about three or four seconds, then it jumps back to its feet. What it does next is miraculous. It will shake violently for a few seconds. That dare is just shock all that trauma off that just happened, and on it goes about its way. Yeah, which basically means the same day and same time tomorrow, it could get hit because the trauma's gone. We don't do that. We stuff it down and stuff it down and stuff it down. I mean, we've worked with a lot of government people and CIS people, the army, the navy, uh, of these poor guys coming back. And, you know, it's it's what they've seen could be advantageous going forward in the workplace. But every single soldier that we've met or worked with, that's one or two or ten things in the past that keeps reoccurring. And a lot of military people that come home, especially women, you know, they get married, now they're a housewife, and all of a sudden they're not supposed to, you know, look back on their career, they've got responsibility, they've got kids, and the trauma gets left behind. And sooner or later, it will explode. So the breathbox studio that we created, which is, you know, it's all online, so you can do it anywhere in the world, is especially for that. We we treat our veterans with that, and again, 98% success rate. Um, because we've all been there. We we have veterans working here, we have alcoholics who've recovered, we have all kinds of stuff, because the reason why we think we're different is first we have to pass an assessment to get in. But secondly, we treat this very seriously. You know, we we know how the vets feel, we know how the addicts feel when they come in, because we've been there. And it's very important that if you haven't been there, gone through, you know, say, action in Afghanistan and seen all these crazy things happen, unless you've been through that yourself, you cannot treat them because you you can't get your mind around that what you've just seen, and again, stuffed away, and sooner or later it's going to break. And I'm For one, I'm sick and tired of you know seeing our soldiers coming back and next minute they're homeless. And you know, it's just it's devastating for me, you know. I became an American citizen about four or five years ago, and I don't know whether it's just me, but I took that responsibility very, very seriously. Like I there was guys there in flip-flops and shirts, I'm like, you disgust me. I'm there in a an American bow tie with my suit on, you know, it's a big privilege for me and a big honor for me. So yeah, I uh I take it really to heart with these guys. I think that we should look after them, we should protect them, because if it wasn't for them, man, we wouldn't be sat here doing this uh podcast.

Retirement Identity Loss And Isolation

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, I appreciate that a lot. Um one of the things that we we we see and what happens with veterans is it's not it's after they retire. Uh if they now they if they they sometimes they may come from deployments with PTSD, or a lot of the women that we work with have been sexually assaulted, and that's where their uh biggest mental health challenges come from. But for many of them, too, it's after they retire because when you're when you're serving, you're working so hard, you're so busy, next mission, next mission, next mission, next school, next PCS, whatever. Um, then after you retire, all that grinds to a complete stop. Yeah, even if you even for guys that go um unless you unless you go like to Blackwater or something like that, one of these contractor overseas things. Yeah, but for a vast majority of people, a lot of veterans go back to work for the unit that they left, but they're then they're doing admin stuff, it's still much, much slower. But everything slows down, and you know, like for me, it was a couple of months. For other people, it takes longer or shorter, but a couple months in you're still looking for forward to retirement. I I'd spent 32 years in the army. I was still looking for retirement. I was I just thought, you know, gonna so you it's it slows way down for the first couple months, it's just great. No getting up early for PT, no all putting on the uniform, all that stuff. But then it can really just hit you like I just spent even for a guy who spent 20 years, I spent 20 years getting up early every day doing these routines. And it's not just that you don't have the routine anymore, all this stuff that you've been pushed down, traumas and so on, they start to surface and they start to to beckon and they start to like haunt you, you know. And so people need a way to release that stuff. Um, and it sounds like what you're doing could be a really good tool for that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

100%, you know, 100%. Well, the quickest way to make somebody insane, we did some research on death row some years ago in Hunt, the prison here. And uh most people that got to the chair or the needle um uh were insane. So two quick ways to make somebody insane that will reoccur is take your identity off you and isolate you.

unknown 25:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

So if you imagine you're the army, your number, your name, your rank is your identity 24 hours a day. You come out, now you're Daniel, you know, just his name's Daniel, you're getting no respect, your identity is not being met, and you're being isolated. You might go back to an apartment or a small house, and you don't see the world and like the deer, you know. Um bit by bit it'll start the subconscious brain will start to release that stuff. And if we look at the suicide rates alone with with ex-military, it's insane, absolutely insane. But nobody's gonna report the real real stats, by the way, guys. There's another controversial piece we're not gonna get into. But the real stats behind um veterans committing suicide is is is aghast, absolutely. So I think everybody that's that's been in the military needs to come out and and for me, do the breastbox studio. Um we're actually gonna create a um ex-military group session, so it's really cheap for people. But you need that, man. You you can't carry on. There's a huge change. You you know, it will drive you insane if you're not careful. And like you said, it was could be a few months, it could be a few years, but sooner or later you can't store that stuff away and accept and expect it to stay stored. Isn't that how the mind works, especially when we're not busy with ourselves and we've got time on our hands?

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Yeah, exactly right. I think um I I think we're just wired to to be um productive in some way, to to have some work to do. And it could be it could be volunteering work, it could be, you know, I do nonprofit work, of course. It can be, you know, it doesn't have to be a job job, but it could be it could be like, hey, making up all this time. When I was when I was in, I was always deployed or or TDY, whatever, I was always traveling. My daughter's uh junior in high school, so I get very involved with her theater stuff. She's into theater, so so like this weekend, I I spent a few hours on Saturday helping the kids build props for their upcoming upcoming play and stuff. It can be like it doesn't have to be, you know, a job, but but we do need uh to be actively involved in things. Uh it's just the way God created us. Yeah. And when I hear people talking about, man, when I retire, what are you gonna do when you retire? I'm gonna fish. I'm gonna go fishing. And I just think you're probably gonna be dead in three to five years unless you come up with something else besides fishing, unless you're gonna make it like a professional fishing gig. You know, we're just not wired. Now, I think as you get older and you you don't have the physical body for things, you know, the things you do, you know, could change and the things you're involved in, you know, becomes more of a mental game, or or there's nothing better than mentoring and coaching people. Um, but there has to be something that that gets us up in the morning and and gets us excited, don't you think?

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Oh, you have to be, especially when you've been doing it most of your life, just to cut that off straight away. I mean, the body's dying already. I've seen people leave the military at, I don't know, 46 and be dead by 47, but not pass away until 90. It's like the the whole of the life has just disappeared. You can't come away from that conditioning of keeping busy and having routines. Routines are what make brilliant and amazing and successful dads and all that stuff. It's routine, routine, routine and patterns. When that routine is taken off you, uh you're just lost, man. You're just lost. And I think the need for communities with a healing uh process is needed badly uh for military because we feel they feel isolated when they come out. You know, you're part of a team in there, part of a family, and all of a sudden you're one of two billion people that the man on the street doesn't really care for, you know. And it's just you've got to replace. You know, some people call it you swapped an addiction with addiction. Well, there's some good addictions and there's some bad addictions, but if you just stop anything abrupt, like the guy that works for a company for 40 years and all of a sudden they let him go. That guy's gonna die when within 12 months, 18 months, he'd be just lucky if he doesn't replace that. Right. Most people feel you rejected, uh depressed, you know, they don't know who they are, what to do, how to think for themselves, all that stuff. And this is the stuff that we need to get these people active in every day.

What Treatment Looks Like In Practice

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Yeah. So so tell me about the pro the tell me about your treatment process, how long does it take, kind of the basics, and then when somebody when does somebody finish the program or that may not even be the right the right way to say it. How how does it how does it work in general like that?

SPEAKER_01 30:57

So unlike most people, when you call us up, we don't ask for insurance details, um, which most people will because they want to charge you and get you in, you have to pass an assessment, mostly be referred from somebody. Uh, but you have to pass an assessment. We don't take insurance, but um, it's a three-month process by the time all chemicals and neuropathways and behavioral changes happen. It's one hour a day if you don't die telehealth or in one of our offices. And we change everything about you. We change the way you think, we change the way you act. If you want to start a business, we'll, you know, we'll build a website, we'll get your cars, we'll get you on your way. If you want a promotion, if you want your kids back, it's totally tailored around how to get you there. Uh for the Breathbox Studio, it's like twice a week, uh, an hour a time uh online, and you can go as many or as little times as you want. Um, and that's kind of ongoing. We have 97 programs for all different things, ranging from 20 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on what you've come here for. But usually, you know, people stay three months, four months for for at the studio, and then three months with me.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

So, so who should reach out to you? What kind of person?

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Anyone's going through some mental, we call it mental wealth because we truly believe you can get over it and be cured. Uh, anyone's depressed, anxiety, alcoholics, struggling with drugs, PTSD, um, especially veterans. So, rightly or wrongly, I don't care because I don't really give a shit what people think about me today. I'm 65, I've got everything I need. I'm just I'm still in the game because I love people and trying to help people, but we charge about 10% of what so veterans get 90% off, is what I'm saying. Wow. You know, so oh, you can't do we're doing it, shut up, that's it. You know? So anybody who belongs to a group or an online uh community, uh, them guys are welcome. It's it's a ridiculous low price that everybody can afford, even if you're unemployed, you can afford it. Um, so anybody who wants a life change, um, especially if you're divorced, it's like you want to change your life no matter what's going on with the guys. But you have to pass the assessment before you get in on my side. On the breath box side, you can just call up, let's say 10 people called you and say you want to get into this, we'd organize one night or one afternoon whether that group specially comes on every week or twice a week. But that community is treated differently. So if it, for instance, a group of people that are going through or already have a community, nobody would be let into that. That would be isolated for that 10 or 20 people every week. So we can still all become family and trust each other. And then we have open groups, you know, where you can just jump on and do individuals, or you know, we we tr we have sliding scales, we you know, I'm a concierge doctor, is what I do. I work with A-list celebrities, actors, movie stars, musicians. That that's I only check on four patients every three months, but we have a bunch of people here just as qualified as me. So the best thing to do is call, just call the number on the website. And if if now, if you're a parent or a loved one of somebody going through any of the things that we've discussed today, there is a room at the end of the offices where my wife and her assistant sit all day long. And what they're doing is giving you advice. You'll never be sold anything, but they're there for advice because my mom and dad know nothing. My mum and dad died earlier than they should with cancer because of my situation. So a lot of people are scared, a lot of people don't know what to do. If your husband's come out to services and he's acting crazy and you just love him and you know he's this is not him, call the number on the website and say you want to speak to somebody you're a parent or a loved one. Now you can call that number 20 times a day. We don't care. We're never gonna say, or don't call that. You can call that number 20, 30, 50, 100 times a day. We'll have patience and we'll walk you through. And uh we give you advice that my I would give my children.

Changing Thoughts Versus Taking Pills

SPEAKER_00 35:12

That's amazing. Um, the services that you're providing. It's so amazing. And again, like I was saying earlier, um, you know, I I have my my own like self-develop self-development things I'm doing, and it's all about how I think, changing the way I think, and so on. And the beauty of it is that I know that despite whatever thinking patterns I have, they can be changed, and um I get to decide how I feel, how I how I um think about things. I can I can decide um any given situation that happens or thing that happens, I get to decide is it good or bad.

unknown 36:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Um and it's about sort of changing things that I used to think would happen, because unexpected things that happen to everybody all the time. I would judge them as bad, so I would be distraught. Right. Well, now it's like, okay, what is good about this? How could this be a good situation? You know, if how could this what is good about this? And that that sort of thinking, and I I realized how many things I judged as being bad that were like, oh, actually, when you think about it this way, it's a good thing, even though it might have caused me pain at the moment, or whatever the case is. So there is this where whereas when we're talking uh pharmaceuticals, uh we're talking about taking in some ways it's easier to take a pill, but 90% of the time we're talking about changing symptoms, but not about the real cure. And so when the if you think about now, I think things work together, right? So if you have anxiety, depression, the medicine can help you and it's useful to whatever. So I'm not not not saying anybody don't take medicine, but yeah, the idea is the medicine can't change the thoughts that led to the feelings of anxiety, depression, whatever. You know, I watched watched my dad growing up. Um you know, even when things were going well, like we had we had things were finally where we had some money, finally things were going well. He would sabotage all the time. And he had it wasn't until many years later I found out how traumatic his childhood really was. I mean, just very violent, very so it sort of makes sense like why he would sabotage. The problem is when you're a kid and you're growing up in a household, and and every time he sabotages, everybody else gets to be miserable, yeah, or unhappy, or or move, because we moved a bunch of stuff. You carry that with you, and it's hard to, you know, like I said, even even thought, even thinking that you rejected has a way of like sort of becoming subconsciously running in the background. So so it is difficult, right, to to change one thinking, especially the deep thing. Um but but the idea that I can if I can get the understanding that I really have the ability to completely change uh the way I experience life or the way life is gonna happen, but the way I experience it mentally and therefore emotionally is a powerful thing, but it's gonna take a lot more work and effort than just taking a pill.

unknown 39:15

Right?

Breaking Limits And Building New Futures

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, and thought patterns so the neuroplasticity, we can change thought patterns to anything we want to do. Um most of uh people's neuropathways, there are billions, uh, are negative. Uh, but the the the mat the the fact of the matter is is this is like 300-ish neural pathways, thought patterns die every day in the brain. What are you replacing them with? Are you replacing them with past patterns that you don't even know, or past behavior, or you know, dad was violent with alcohol. Now I'm gonna you've got to start changing them thought patterns. There's quantum physics tells us if we act, we become. If we put ourselves, and I don't mean hoping, let's say, let's say you you're like me, you have no money, you've grown up on the project, you want to make something in your life, and you think money's gonna fix it. I used to walk my like a millionaire. I used to sit in my 10-year-old broken down car as a millionaire. I'd go back to my little bed sit millionaire, I'd think like a millionaire, I'd walk, I'd act, I'd do everything I can while I move towards that. Um and it happens. I mean, you know, what we do on a on a big on a regular basis, like the brain doesn't know the difference between the true and the false. So if you get up in the morning and go, I don't think it's a good day today, I've got a lot to do on it, you're right. If you get in there tomorrow and go, hey, listen, I've got lots that you're gonna keep me busy, I'm gonna have a great day, you're right. Either way you think about it, you're right. So part of the brain is called the basal ganglia. And it's our repetitive part of the brain, how we learn stuff. So if you're riding a bike, it's probably gonna take you eight to ten hours of doing it before you can ride it without thinking about it. Saying with a pilot, 10,000 hours. So the more we do something, and here's the quick either negatively or positively becomes a working part of the brain. Well, if you grew up in a traumatic house and you've seen lots of stuff, used to get bullied at school, that becomes a thought pattern that's a working part of the brain that then becomes a belief system that you're only and so a measurement in anything. So we got a thousand uh fleas from the pet store and we put them in this big mason jar. These are fleas, right? Nothing to do with us. But we wanted to see learned behavior. So we got them home, we put the cap on, we stabbed things in the top to make sure they could breathe, and we left them for three days. Now, fleas can jump three or four feet in the air, but when we took the cap off after three days, not one flea jumped higher than where the cap was, which we thought was interesting, but we left it like that. And the babies they had in the mason jar wouldn't jump higher than where the cap was, and they've never even seen the cap. So you see this learning behavior that will only go as high in life uh as as dad has gone or the family has gone. No one dare go higher because here's the belief system that you'll grow up, live on the project, you'll get a job if you're good enough or lucky enough. For$9 an hour, you're gonna love that job because hey, we can't be fussy because this is where it's just this, guys. It really is. And we need to smash them broken beliefs. I mean, look at me, for instance. I was homeless for 14 months. I died twice on the streets, and they brought me back to life, and I hated them then for that. It came to America. I have four businesses, uh, all multi-million dollar companies. My daughter got in contact with me four years ago after 30 years, and one of the leading authorities, me, in the addiction world, in the psych world, I speak at conferences, I'm on TV, I have books. How is that possible? That's how it's possible. I I we are in San Antonio, and I said to a couple of buddies, I'm thinking of opening a British tea shop, like British food, fish and chips, all that stuff. And my advisor called me and he said, Okay, first of all, no. And secondly, are you an idiot? And thirdly, it'll never take off. Well, I always believed it was. So, with no experience in restaurants, I brought my sister over from England with her husband, no experience in restaurants whatsoever. We opened on our first day. It was about two years ago, and it was manic because we didn't know what we were doing. Yeah, but now it's in the top 12% of restaurants in San Antonio, and there are at least two to five restaurants, well-known restaurants, closing every week over here. Yeah, and we're ahead. Why? We believed we could do it.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

Yeah. Yeah. I I uh that's amazing, and I'm totally with you. Um, this is motivational for me too. It's a good reminder of um I I think one one of the one of the things that that's really holding people back is and it's sort of like what I what I grew up with was this idea that your dreams are not okay, you know. So it it's like I when I was a kid, I had a lot of dreams. I'm gonna be a rock star, I'm gonna be a football player, I'm gonna be a baseball player. You know, and all that and every time I would tell my parents, like, I'm gonna be a rock star, whatever it was when I grew up, they'd be like, uh, you don't want to do that, that's you know, this and that, you know, I want to play. Football you're too small to play football, you know. It was and them trying to protect me was just you know hurting me. So then what what what happened was I uh once I decided to join the military, I became so determined to do it, I didn't give a shit what they thought, and I was old enough I didn't have to care, right? Yeah, um but then eat but it still sort of haunted me because in the military it would be like I want to go to this school or I want to do that. Uh fortunately, you know, the good Lord blessed me with mentors all along the way who were always in co uh you know encouraging me to do things I didn't think I could do. And I ended up accomplishing a lot in my military career. Most of many of the things that I accomplished was because somebody said, you ought to go do that. You could you can do that. So that encouragement. Um, but even even decades of accomplishment in the military, stacks of ribbons and all kinds of you know, just amazing accomplishments. Um after leaving the military, I still have struggled with some ideas about whether I should do that. Is that a goal I should have? Blah, blah, blah. And it goes skips over all that military experience that goes back to as a child being told that's that dream is not okay.

unknown 46:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:01

You know, you have to have the dream that the parents had, which why don't you just get a good job and uh all that nonsense? It doesn't even work in America now. So, so so um that's where I think where your help is is really helpful for people is to be able to get you know, like sidestep all that and get to the the deeper brain. I I think I truly believe God created us all for greatness. And so behind whatever programming we've been given by our parents and whatever, underneath all that is the spark of divinity that is if you can, you know, if you can connect to it, you can attach, you can with help, you can link to that. You can that's where that greatness can come from, despite your upbringing and all that, that that your life story is a good example of.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

And everybody can do this, guys. Show me your friends, I'll show you the future. If you have one negative person in your circle, you're never gonna do it. You know, the one that always says something like jokingly, passive aggressive, but funny is like, no, you have to hang around the peoples that you want to be. Most of our dreams, like you said, get kicked out of us by our family and friends. Don't be so stupid, you can't be a footballer. My answer that I tell every person I come across is says who? Who's making these rules up? Because I don't like them rules. So what we find is with the brain is that you can literally achieve anything you want to be. Now, I'm not into politics. I don't give a shit about any politics, they've never done anything for me. I'm not, I hate it and blah, blah, blah. But you've got you can't turn away the fact that we had a president first time around who had no experience in politics. What the hell? Don't ever tell me you can't achieve your dreams because it's just not true. Somebody's put that there. So our whole basis, especially with the breath box, is that you can, and we will show you from one hour that you can change. You'll believe that much about because it's subliminal messaging, and it's you know, changing the way we think, and you know, negative pathways are destroyed, and it's just amazing because I would hate for anybody to get to the age of 70 and 80, look back on their life and realize two things. One, there was nobody watching you, and two, you really could have done anything you wanted to do. Because that's the truth, that's that's reality, you know.

How To Reach Out Free Offers

SPEAKER_00 48:34

Yeah, I I do, and I'll sort of end with this. Um, but I do I look back um on a lot of things in my past. One, so I'll learn something, right? Maybe I'll learn a technique or or a a thinking, a good a positive thinking idea or process, and I'll go, man, if I if I would have only known this 30 I 30 years ago, I'd have skipped the last 30 years of being miserable about that particular thing, you know. So it's like, but then I but then the positive goes in, hey, at least I learned it now, and the last 30 years have not been miserable. There've been a lot of goodness in my life, so it's not like I've been miserable for 30 years, but still it's like, man, I would have loved to have knew this. Yeah. You know, thinking pattern way back when. Um, what is the what is the best way for people to get in touch? What's your website? What's the best way for people to get in touch with you or your group, your team to, you know, somebody says, hey, I want to really change who I am the way I think. What's their next step? How do they get in? How do I do that?

SPEAKER_01 49:44

So if you're listening, not watching, my name's spelt with two B's, R-O-B-B-K-L-I.com, is the main um website. Breathbox.studio is the mind-changing, beautiful software that's been created. And and I want to do this just for your listeners. And I've never done this before on a podcast, and I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

SPEAKER_02 50:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:11

Everybody that contacts me or you who's suffering from some kind of military uh-related TTSD, if you contact us, and we're going to do a free session for you guys. All you got to do is be at home with a computer, laptop, iPad with your headphones. We'll create a day and a night free of charge. Whether it's five or a hundred, it doesn't make any difference. I want everybody to listen to it and go through it. And uh just one session will change the way you are. Whether you want to do any more, I will talk about the, you know, make sure you get in and we'll talk about that. But sign up, guys. And the other thing is there's a book out there called Daddy Daddy, please stop drinking. Don't buy it on Amazon. Contact us or Dr. D, and we'll send you a free copy. I'll sign it for you and all that with the mailing free copy to you on one condition that you give it to somebody else when you finish with it so they can benefit uh from a journey that you probably have a lot in common with.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

Yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate that. We'll have all this on the website and uh YouTube and and we'll in the show notes we'll put all that information. Um but uh Dr. Rob, I really appreciate what you're doing for people. Uh you are absolutely changing people's lives, and that is um that is a uh great deed that you're doing um for for the world. I really appreciate it. We're happy to support you, and I I can't thank you enough for what you're doing for a military veteran. Um and uh uh thanks for being on our show. It's it's been amazing talking to you. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.