The Tell Before The Tell

Some people think relapse kicks the door down. It doesn't. It tiptoes in wearing a disguise made of "totally normal" excuses — and by the time you notice, it's already been there for weeks. Doc Jacques on the tell before the tell. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

This is a story about a phone. Not a smartphone story like technology is ruining us all. None of that. This is a story about one specific phone belonging to one specific guy. And what that phone taught me about the human capacity for self-deception. Which is basically unlimited. Four months clean, doing everything right, meetings, sponsor, groups, the works. Model clean, honestly. If I gave out golden stars, this guy got a folder full of them. And then I started noticing the phone. Not doing anything dramatic. It's not like blowing red or whispering to him. It's just face down. Always face down. On the table, face down. In his pocket, face down. I genuinely start wondering if this guy has developed a moral objection to the concept of a screen. He's never looking at it. And to be clear, I wasn't plain detective. This is just one of the skills I've actually got after all these years. Noticing the small, almost imperceptible shifts in how somebody carries themselves. And what got me wasn't that he was hiding something. It's that he was hiding it in my office. From me. Like some part of him forgot I was the guy trained to catch exactly this. Then it's the traffic. Every Tuesday, traffic. Every Monday, never Wednesday. Just the one specific, apparently sentient traffic jam that shows up exclusively to ruin his one meeting a week. I looked into it later. There was no construction, there was no accident. There was, as far as I can tell, a conspiracy between this man and the Department of Transportation. And I was the last to know. And here's the thing about relapse. Nobody tells you this part. It doesn't come through the front door. It doesn't kick anything down. It doesn't come in screaming and yelling. It comes in through the smallest, dumbest little cracks. Face down phone, suspiciously punctual traffic jam. It's almost. It's almost impressive. The commitment to the bit. By the time the truth came out, weeks had already passed. Which means the actual relapse, the one, the one that mattered, had nothing to do with the substance. It happened earlier. Quietly. In a decision when nobody else was in the room. That discussion never occurred in front of another person. Everything after that was just paperwork. So that's the story. A phone that wouldn't look at anybody. A traffic jam with impeccable timing. And I'm the guy sitting in the room who's sitting there watching it and being paid, frankly, to notice those things. And it turns out, your gut already knew, three weeks before your evidence did. Addiction, it's the great deceiver. It's the teacher of how to lie. I'm Doc Jock. Stick around.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

This is Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard. If you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jock DeBurker, the licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason. Walk that road with no sugar coating, no magic pills, just the truth about what recovery really looks like. Quick note, this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Alright, so today we're going to talk about something that every addict does. Every single one of you. And the people around them see it happening before they do. And I see it at my office, usually about 10 minutes into a session. I'm talking about what I call getting your sneaky on. Getting your sneaky on is an interesting, complex, strange thing to have happen. It's when the behavior shifts before the using shifts. The deception starts first. The lies, the hiding, the disappearing acts, the who-me faces you give to people. It's like the opening act before the main event. And the main event is you going back out and picking up. Here's the thing about sneaky behavior. It's not as sneaky as you think it is. You're hiding in plain sight. And for people like me, who are trained and skilled at working with addicts and helping you get into recovery, we can see it a mile away. So what does getting your sneaky on actually look like? Well, there's this thing that you experience. You're feeling uncomfortable. You're not feeling yourself. You're feeling off a little bit. You're not gonna go right out, especially if you've been working on recovery for a while. It doesn't matter how long it's been, it could have been three months or ten years. But there's this pattern in your voice. There's something that starts talking to you, and that's what addiction does, it starts talking to you. There are classic signs of that sneaky. The disappearing act. You start getting harder to reach. You're texting back in five minutes, now it's three days. You got your reasons. There are always reasons, but none of them are actually valid. Another one is hiding in plain sight. You're right there, you're at dinner, you're at the meeting, you're in my office, but you're not actually there. You're checked out. The lights are on and nobody's home. I can see it in their faces when they come in. The distracted contribution to what's being talked about. It's right in front of me, and I can see it. Plain dumb. Oh. I didn't know you meant that. I thought you said Tuesday. I must have misunderstood. No, you didn't. You heard exactly what I said. And at the time, you repeated it back to me. There's an awkward clumsiness that starts happening when you're playing dumb, and it's very noticeable. Then there's saying one thing and doing another. Going to a meeting, but not going to a meeting. Calling your sponsor, but not calling your sponsor. Going to work, but not going to work. Really, it's it's kind of a version of what we call gaslighting. You're saying one thing, but you're doing another. And it's very comical, uh, aggravating, and frustrating to the people that you're doing it to. Then there's acting like you're trying, but you're not. This is one of my personal favorites because it's the most creative. You show up, you do the minimum, you say the right things, you know what the right things are because you've heard them enough, but there's nothing behind it. The engine's off. You're just kind of coasting. You're just going through the motions. And in light of gaslighting, we have the blame pivot. The moment accountability shows up, somebody else suddenly caused it. Everybody else is the problem. You're just trying to survive all these people who keep messing things up for you. It's never your fault. And the cousin to the blame pivot is denial with a straight face. I've had clients who look me dead in the eye and tell me everything's fine while I'm watching them unravel right there in front of me. That takes a special kind of skill. I mean that genuinely, it's impressive. And it's gonna get you killed, honestly. And here's one that happens. People in re in rehab use this, people in uh detox centers use this, but this is part of the process too of getting your sneaky on. The distraction play. That's where you're starting drama about something that's completely unrelated. Creating chaos somewhere else, no, so no one's looking at the actual thing. It's the magician's trick. Watch this hand, not that one, and it's really effective. So where does this come from? This isn't new behavior. Here's what I want you to understand. This didn't start with your addiction. You learned how to get your sneaky on a long time before you ever picked up a drink or a drug. I would say the most common source of this is from childhood. Sneaky behavior is a survival skill that got developed pretty early. In homes where honesty wasn't safe, where adults couldn't be trusted, where telling the truth had consequences, it was adaptive back then, but it's destroying you now. So if you grew up in a house where the truth got you hit or ignored or punished, you've learned to hide it. You learned that the truth was dangerous. So you built a whole system around you about not being caught. And that system of deception and self-deception, it came with you into your addiction. And now it's running the whole show. It's your primary skill. The sneaky pattern is also about shame management. If I can keep you from seeing what's actually happening, you can't reject me or confront me or take something away from me. It's self-protection, but it's wearing a costume. You see, this is where arrogance starts kicking in. Arrogance is the enemy's gift to you. It's that weapon that you use to keep everybody at bay. And the sneaky behavior is arrogance with a poker face. You're not fooling anybody, you're just buying time, and everybody knows it, including you. But you've got everybody so concerned and worried that you end up forcing that up on people and they're afraid to approach you or call you out on it, which is why it's important for you to work with people who are in recovery. Both clinicians and the self-help people, the sponsors, the friends, the peers. In my practice, when I see someone start getting their sneaky on, missing sessions, vague answers, stories that don't quite add up, I already know where this is going. It's like watching a storm roll in off the water in the ocean. I've been on the beach for long enough to read the sky. I know what's happening, and I'm gonna call you out on it. And that's why you come to see people like me. So this idea of like hiding in plain sight. I've told you this story before about the uh the man who was an alcoholic, and I watched watched him come up to a little league game. He showed up drunk, he picked a fight with his wife over nothing, and he was gone in five minutes, eight minutes. He thought he was being clever. He thought he'd manufactured an exit. And every single person in those bleachers who happened to catch that, and I was one of them, knew exactly what was happening. Every person, and unfortunately, that includes his wife. That's what hiding in plain sight looks like. You think you've got everyone fooled, but your spouse stiffens when you walk into the room, your kids go quiet, your stom your sponsor stops picking up, your therapist starts watching the clock. The people who love you aren't buying it. They're just exhausted from saying something. You're not as invisible as you think you are. The sneaky behavior is like trying to hide an elephant in a studio apartment. We can see it. We're just waiting for you to stop pretending like you don't see it. There is collateral damage to being sneaky. Every lie you tell right now is a withdrawal from you're making from an account that's already overdrawn. The trust account. Trust, once it's gone, it takes years to rebuild. And the sneaky behavior is what burns all that down. You're not protecting yourself, you're protecting your addiction. That's the difference. And the difference is your addiction doesn't love you back. If you are a loved one and you're listening to this and you're watching this happen, you're not crazy. You're not paranoid, you're not overreacting. When your gut tells you something's off, it's off. Trust that. The patterns you're seeing are real. You don't need to catch them in an act to know what's going on. You already know. You just have to be honest with yourself. And like I said before, you're you're watching somebody and the sneaky behavior, and you're grieving someone who's still standing right in front of you. But here's what you do. If you're a loved one, don't engage with the individual lies. Address that lying pattern. It's not about the specific lie, it's about what the lies are telling you. So, what breaks the sneaky pattern? Getting honest, that's what gets you free. The sneaky behavior only has power when it stays in the dark. The minute you say it out loud, I've been lying to my sponsor for three weeks. I haven't actually been going to meetings. I told my wife I was fine and I wasn't. The minute those words leave your mouth, the thing loses its grip on you. That's not weakness. That's the bravest thing you can do. But you have to understand what sneaky is protecting. There's always something underneath the sneaky. Fear of consequences, fear of losing something, fear of being seen as the person who failed again. This is what you perhaps learned in childhood. But you have to get to that fear. That's where the actual work is. Ask yourself, what am I so afraid will happen if I just tell the truth? That's what I ask my clients. Because whatever that thing is, that's what we need to be talking about in the sessions. Not the lie, but the thing the lie was covering. There's an accountability that comes with that. And so the the accountability versus responsibility is an issue. Being accountable for something is different than being responsible for something. Sneaky behavior collapses when there is real, consistent accountability, but not punishment. But someone who is going to ask the questions and expect real answers. Get a sponsor who won't let you get away with it. That's what I when I'm telling people about how do you pick a sponsor, you gotta pick a sponsor that you can respect and you're willing to sit there and listen to the truth. And many times it's because you see the person in front of you who's your sponsor, and they've actually had a harder time than you, perhaps. Or maybe they've understood and they've seen it and done it all, and they're not gonna put up with your crap. Get a therapist who watches for it. This is what I'm doing in my sessions all the time. I just speak the truth, and it's funny because the people who are my clients, many times they report to me, nobody's ever said that to me, or you said it in a way that nobody ever has. It's not about the way I'm saying it, it's the fact that I've built this trust with the client and they're willing to listen, they're willing to absorb it. You got to get someone in your life who loves you enough to call you out on your stuff without destroying you for it. And that's that is unconditional personal regard. That's unconditional love. So, what I'm saying is radical honesty is the best recovery tool. Step four, step five, that's the framework of honesty. Step four, it's really interesting. I tell people pretty regularly in my office, most, in my experience, most people who enter into step four and they're going to leave recovery, they do it at step four. They don't do it in step one or two or three. Oh, it's yeah, God's got to watch over me. I'm gonna turn myself over to a higher power. Okay, then I become their higher power in that moment because I'm the authority in the room. And then when we start talking about the truth, they don't want to, they don't want to deal with it. They're not ready yet to do that. They're not strong enough, they don't think, they think it will destroy them. They'll think that the honesty is something that will reveal something about themselves that's very difficult to face. The 12 steps are basically a systematic dismantling of that sneaky behavior. That fearless searching moral inventory. That's you stopping the sneaky. That's you putting it all on the table and saying, here it is, here's all of it. Judge me if you want, but I'm done hiding it. Understand the truth, and the truth will set you free. I'm paraphrasing scripture and using it out of context, but it really applies. You cannot receive healing with a closed fist. A sneaky behavior is a closed fist. You're gripping onto the lie so hard that there's no room for anything real to get in. You gotta open your hand, you gotta lay it down, then you gotta stop touching it. When when we use the the phrase lay it at his feet, we mean put it down, not lay it down and keep one hand on it in case you want to take it back. That's that's what addiction tells you to do. You know, I'm gonna say it, the enemy wants you hiding. Isolation is addiction's best friend. God wants you free. Those are your two options hide with the enemy, or be free with God. Okay, so to the person who is currently getting their sneaky on. I know you're listening to this and I and thinking one of two things. Either that's not me, I'm fine. In which case, that's the plain dumb response, and we just covered that, or you're listening and something in here landed and you know exactly what I'm talking about. If it's the second one, good. That's uncomfortable feeling. Right? It is uncomfortable. That's honesty knocking on the door. You have to be willing to be a little bit uncomfortable, which is about being truthful, because that will pass, and then freedom sets in. So if you're the person who suspects somebody is being sneaky around them and you you love that person and you sense that, you're not wrong. And you're not the problem. You gotta stop bending yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out how to catch them or convince them or fix them. You can't. I see it all the time in my office. People trying to fix the person that is the addict. You cannot fix them. But you can stop participating in that stupid dance, stop pretending you don't see what you're seeing. That's the key. And that's your truth if you're a loved one of an addict. So when you're trying to figure out how do we stop this madness, understand the truth, and the truth will set you free. That's it. Be honest, be truthful. Well, that's this episode of Doc Doc, Your Addiction Life Guard. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have, please like, subscribe, and recommend to your friends. If you have something you want to reach out to me for, you can feedback through docdoc.com. That's the podcast website. You can send me a message, check me, feedback, I'll do a picture. If you try and study any white, that's fine. Total we have total in content. Total means, give us the words given the tablet, but don't try to study that. What's ending? So until next time, this is dark job.