Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction

What I Learned About Addiction from Matt Butler’s Prison Concerts

• Casey Grover, MD, FACEP, FASAM

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This episode is an interview with Matt Butler, a singer-songwriter who has performed in jails and prisons across America for a decade. He shares how music creates transformative spaces for healing in correctional environments.

• Matt's musical journey began after writing songs for a documentary about recovery high schools
• Music penetrates emotional defenses faster than conventional approaches, allowing inmates to be vulnerable
• Songs like "Good Friday" and "Time to Be a Man" directly speak to experiences of addiction and incarceration
• Hypervigilance in prison environments makes trauma processing nearly impossible
• Music temporarily changes the atmosphere, allowing emotional expression typically suppressed for survival
• Trauma and addiction form a vicious cycle that's particularly difficult to break while incarcerated
• Reentry challenges include practical barriers like employment, housing, and basic skills deficits
• Many successful recovery stories involve people transforming their past struggles into purpose by helping others
• Creating spaces where people feel safe and accepted is essential for healing from addiction and trauma

Please check out Matt's album Reckless Son, the one-man show he performs in correctional facilities across the country.

To contact Dr. Grover: ammadeeasy@fastmail.com

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Addiction Medicine Made Easy Podcast. Hey there, I'm Dr Casey Grover, an addiction medicine doctor based on California's Central Coast. For 14 years I worked in the emergency department, seeing countless patients struggling with addiction. Now I'm on the other side of the fight, helping people rebuild their lives when drugs and alcohol take control. Thanks for tuning in. Let's get started.

Speaker 1:

This episode has been on my to-do list for quite a while. Today I am talking to musician Matt Butler. He is a singer-songwriter whose niche is performing to incarcerated people in jails and prisons. I met him last year when he came out to California. One of the surgeons at my hospital heard his story and set up an educational event where Matt performed the music that he plays in jails and prisons to our doctors and nurses, and so we used his performance to educate about addiction.

Speaker 1:

I had the pleasure of having dinner with Matt later that night after the event. He's an incredibly intelligent person and he has a lot of insight about what happens in jails and prisons, particularly about how addiction is often a reason why people get locked up and how we need to do more to treat addiction. So please check out Matt's album Reckless Son. It's the one-man show that he puts on when he performs in jails and prisons. I will include excerpts from two of the songs from the album Good Friday and Time to Be a man during this episode. Here we go. All right, apparently, it's Christmas and my birthday today, because I am speaking today to Matt Butler. So, matt, welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to catch up with you again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, merry, christmas and Happy.

Speaker 1:

Birthday dude.

Speaker 2:

What a special day this is.

Speaker 1:

My wife always says that She'll be like oh my gosh, is it Christmas and my birthday? This is amazing. So I've been. After we met last year. I've been really excited to talk to you, hear more about your work. Why don't you just start by telling us what you do?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I am a musician, I'm a singer-songwriter and for about 10 years now I have been performing inside jails and in prisons, really all across the United States.

Speaker 1:

How did you get started?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the origin story. It began with being asked to write music for a documentary film called Generation Found, which is a documentary about recovery high schools, which are high schools where the student body are exclusively kids that are in recovery from substance use or other mental health issues, and so I wrote a song for that movie actually the song, just One, which is on that record and when the film came out, the film itself was almost like some sort of a community advocacy tool where it would get screened at colleges, people would bring it to their communities that were interested in creating their own recovery high schools and so forth, and then it would be at galas and charity events and I would actually tour with the film where I would go to these different events and I would perform the song live and as a result I ended up meeting all kinds of people that worked in addiction recovery, nonprofit stuff, advocacy, and there's this huge overlap, as I'm sure we'll discuss today, between addiction and incarceration. So I met all kinds of people that I wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to, and at one point in that process, in that journey, I saw a video of men singing in what is called the harp unit of the Chesterfield County Jail and that initially stood for Heroin Addiction Recovery Program and then later became called helping addicts recover progressively, to be more inclusive of all kinds of substance use. And when I saw this video it just struck me as music in that context was really more of this sort of transcendent thing. Watching that was like this is what drew me to music in the first place.

Speaker 2:

Beyond some sort of like entertainment, this was like real, like soul, and I thought to myself maybe they'd be interested in hearing some of the songs that I've been writing for this film and songs that had to do with substance use and recovery and addiction. And because of all the people I'd met in that process working on the film, I had some people I could immediately ask about it and literally within a week or two someone had arranged for me to go and perform at the heroin program of the Albany County Jail in New York and I went and did that show and it was just a life-changing, epiphanal thing for me and it went really well. The sheriff was really impressed and all of a sudden people started talking about it. While I was touring was really impressed and all of a sudden people started talking about it and while I was touring, people would ask me if, while I was in their town playing a show or doing an event, if I would also perform at a jail that was in there, or a prison, and I just I always said yes.

Speaker 2:

And it wasn't long until I realized that those were the most fulfilling shows and those were the experiences that I was really after. And then that was it. Man, I started a small nonprofit in order to fund myself doing this, but I just went on my own Kerouacian adventure performing in prison. I have crossed the country many times playing in prisons and I have been doing it ever since. That first show was November of 2016. And the last time I did it was earlier this month. I was at Clallam Bay Corrections in Washington State.

Speaker 1:

So you and I were talking a little bit before we started recording. Locking people up when they have addiction clearly doesn't work right. I often say I'd like to congratulate drugs on winning the war against drugs. Right, drugs won. Whatever we're doing hasn't been working. Talk to me about the response that you get from inmates when they hear your songs. Do you feel like you change minds, change hearts? Are they more open? Talk to me about what that's like.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was the thing that was so striking about it from that very first show on, was that like as an artist. I had never in my life, as someone who'd been playing music since they were 15 years old, I had never in my life felt like an audience had heard me that way. I had never felt as seen as an artist or as a human as I did in those moments. And I think there that in my experience, people that incarcerated, they can often feel unseen and unheard, and so in that moment of performing and there is something about music that just really penetrates past the intellect and penetrates past certain types of defenses that we have that it was this sense of like being mutually seen by one another, and that was just transformative for me. I'd never really felt anything like that before.

Speaker 2:

They similarly instantly started opening up about their experiences, because typically the way these performances go is they're not quite concerts and that there's a real audience performer divide. They're much more of a conversational thing, where I would play songs in order to almost prompt a discussion, and what I've been told is that with music and with these songs and with playing it, counselors in certain programs will say to me that a few moments of the music will do more to build trust than they're necessarily able to do over the course of a year. And that's not just to downplay the amazing work that coaches and counselors do in those environments, but there just is something about music in particular that, just like I said, it just penetrates so much faster.

Speaker 1:

I'm looking at the playlist I made on my iPhone for your Reckless Son album.

Speaker 2:

When did you write Reckless Son, and how does it relate to when you started actually playing in jails and prisons? Yeah, so I wrote that record over the course of many years and there are nine songs on that album and the body of work that that all came from was over 30 songs that were written over a period of years and some of those songs, like Good Friday, I wrote before I ever even played in a jail or a prison. Those were based more about experiences that I'd had and the experiences of other people that I knew growing up. And because I had songs like that when I first went into a prison, that's what allowed me to make that initial connection, because I've never been incarcerated. So it's like this idea that like how do I connect if I haven't had this shared experience? But there I do have shared experiences and I do have a certain understanding of what it feels like to be imprisoned in my own mind, in my own body, in that way. And so once I started playing those songs and that kind of put me in this place where all of a sudden these men and women were opening up to me and sharing their stories, that's when I started to write the rest of the songs on that record that are really from the character's perspective, the character of someone who's been incarcerated, and so those songs are really written, you know, over the course of 2016, 2017, 2018. And then I had the opportunity to make the record and put the record out in 2023, along with the sort of theater, the one man show performance that I do with those songs that you've seen.

Speaker 2:

At this point, I have to imagine that I've worked relatively intimately more with others, less than others, with over 25,000 people inside correctional facilities. I perform for over 1,000 people just this summer alone and this fall alone, and I've been doing this for 10 years. The amount of stories that I've heard, it's epic, it's unfathomable. But those songs, it was this process of really intense synthesis. So much of this material comes in and then it has to be rearranged by your unconscious in order for it to come out in a way that's truthful and authentic. But it, but those songs are really. It's like all of these people that I met were synthesized from the perspective of just one character that's taken on the moniker of reckless son.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the song. Good Friday. I hear my patients begging their mother to let them in. Mom, it's me, let me in. I need to clean up. And then the character in the song acknowledges I understand why you tell me no.

Speaker 3:

Mama, let me in to take a shower. Know I said like Good Friday, Mama, come and go. And I know that's why you had to tell me no.

Speaker 1:

It just, man. I just got goosebumps just now, but I can see how, when you go to a correctional facility and you present your persona performing of the reckless son who's trying to get it together with addiction, it just, it must hit home beyond belief yeah, like prison is this thing where you walk in and inevitably it's very intimidating and that's part of what it is Like.

Speaker 2:

Vulnerability is something that is a serious liability in that environment. And then you see somebody who's covered in tattoos and they have an intimidating presence and then all of a sudden they're talking about their mother and it's oh my God, it's impossible not to feel the sense of empathy. And then you realize that, like the incarcerated are this abstract concept to so many people, and then you meet somebody and you hear them talk about their experience with their mom and you're like these are really individuals with stories and like this person, this is someone's son, like this is someone's brother, this is someone's father, potentially. And that story Good Friday is one where I started playing that early in this journey and I was blown away because some of that is my story and some of my friend's story. I was simultaneously comforted and highly disturbed by how many people related to it and said it was their story.

Speaker 2:

And it is this thing where writing that song was also meant to be like how do I put myself, even though I haven't had the experience, how do I potentially try to empathize with the mother character in that song and try to understand the pain of what that must be like to have to say no to your child in that situation, when a mother has been burned over and over again as far as how much a parent might try to do, and the lyric is good Friday, I'll come and go, I'm going to come in, I'm going to clean up, I'm going to get a meal, I'm going to take 60 bucks out of your purse and then you're not going to see me again for another three months. And it's like at some point a mother has to protect herself and put up a boundary, and it's. I just can't imagine how painful that must be, and that was what that song was about trying to achieve.

Speaker 1:

We talked about it with a family this week. I was in clinic and I've got a mom who does not know what to do with her son and we both had this look of he's going to end up incarcerated for a long time. And, oh man, yes, I didn't realize that you would explicitly consider the mother's perspective in that song, but you nailed it.

Speaker 1:

The other song that, I have to say, really threw me for a loop was Time to Be a man of just something goes bad and dad hands you a bottle of Jack Daniels and just go to town. And I remember actually the interview you did with NPR you actually mentioned that one inmate was like man. That song, time to Be a man, really messed me up. That was very profound.

Speaker 3:

One night he came home he said I lost my job and your mama's gone. He pressed that bottle into my hands. He looked me in the eyes and he said, son, it's time to be a man Time to be a man, Time to be a man.

Speaker 2:

I've been reading a lot of sort of almost spiritual but anthropological literature about rites of passage and coming of age and what is this moment where we go from a child to an adult in society and what does that? Initiation or coming of age is this idea where you move from a child's perspective, which is much more inherently and naturally self-centered, to one where you're concerned more about your community and something that's a greater good and how do I serve something larger than my own personal interests? And when that isn't available to a young person, they'll try to find it some other way and they'll find it through addiction, where they feel they belong. And incarceration is a rite of passage. It's like you see it in Goodfellas, that scene where he's walking out of the jail and all the mob guys are there clapping for him and they're like, yeah, you're one of us now because you did your first bid and it was wild to me. And that's what that song is about. It's like these sort of these rites, these kind of inverted rites of passage that take place this father figure who's saying drink up, it's time to be a man. And then this idea of when you go to prison, the cop says to you it's time to be a man. And what was interesting to me is it was written ironically in that sense.

Speaker 2:

But then when I started playing it in prison and I was terrified to play it in prison, terrified to play that for the first time in prison, because I was so afraid it was going to be considered patronizing and that it was going to be considered patronizing and that was going to not get a good reaction. But when I started playing that, those guys, the words that they heard, more than anything was time to be a man and they felt that they wanted to hear, that they wanted to be told to grow up and that they felt that they were children in a lot of ways and it was like wow. It was a much more literal response to it than I intended and I was blown away by that because the idea that they were willing to express that in that environment was such an unbelievable act of courage in my opinion. Like just to admit to something like that, to say in a prison, I feel like a child, like I've never grown up, Like that's the place to be tough, that's the place where you act like a man like a tough guy and those kinds of admissions that I've heard in that environment just blow me away Because, like I said, I believe they're just like miraculous acts of courage and the irony is that is the path to manhood.

Speaker 2:

In my opinion, that is the path to adulthood and in that context I don't necessarily separate the concepts of manhood from adulthood. I just use the phrase because the phrase is such a colloquial phrase and has such an impact and such an implied meaning.

Speaker 1:

So as I learn more about addiction, I'm really learning about the interaction between life traumas and addiction, and one psychiatrist I interviewed on my podcast described it to me like a snowball. So let's game this out for one of the individuals you played to this summer Difficult home life, parent with addiction, maybe physical violence in the home, verbal abuse in the home the traumas begin. Start to experiment with drugs and alcohol first. Interaction with law enforcement that's traumatizing. Going to jail for with law enforcement, that's traumatizing. Going to jail for the first time, that's traumatizing. Going to prison, the violence. Essentially in the world of gangs, their currency is violence. It's how they keep each other's distance but hold their ground. It's all about violence and just the trauma, just like snowballs and really and I'm quoting Dr Gabor Mate here but everyone who has addiction has been traumatized. How are you respectful of their trauma when you bring in these difficult songs, when you play for them?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I certainly agree with that and I think that's one of the sort of the tragedies of the way the system works in most cases. I will say that there are certain facilities I've visited where the cultures are incredibly collaborative and supportive and they have success. But I think typically the tragedy is that hurt people go into prison and they emerge more hurt and the thing that's sad about that is that it's really in the country, in the whole community, in the whole society's best interest that people emerge from prison. They come out of prison healthier than they were when they went in even economically, that makes the most sense.

Speaker 2:

the recidivism. Is this like massive economic problem as well? But? But as far as your question and how trauma is respected, one one thing I'll say is that the trauma is so evident and the hyper vigilance is so evident, and I knowvigilance is so evident and I know those two things are connected that a traumatized person is in a state of fight or flight to some degree and they're hypervigilant, like just as a sort of anecdote.

Speaker 2:

When you play a, when you perform in a prison, you know it can be an auditorium of 500 guys. If somebody opens the back door of the gymnasium and steps in, every single head in that room immediately pivots. Everyone's attention will go to any single noise, any single new person that walks in, somebody walks out, everybody watches, everybody is so aware of every single thing that's going on in the room. That does not happen when you play a theater. That does not happen when you play a singer-songwriter club. If you're playing a singer-songwriter club and somebody walks to the bar to get a beer, the entire club does not go up and start watching the guy going to get the beer. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes, and that, to me, is just such an indicator of not only the trauma but also the state that that environment keeps people in, which makes it impossible to actually heal a bit. Your nervous system has to calm down at some point right In order to process the trauma.

Speaker 1:

Yes, hypervigilance is one of the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder and the first part of healing is to get out of the trauma. It's very hard to treat someone with PTSD if they're still being traumatized. So, to answer your question, if they're still incarcerated, it would be very unusual to make progress, unless, as you point out, there are some very collaborative progressive programs. But yeah, I have one patient and he actually wants to get back to his community and talk to young kids about what it's like getting into a gang and getting into prison and he's taught me so much about the stuff that he was asked to do as a gang member in prison. And with this gentleman, all I do is listen for 30 minutes and he's processing, but now he's safe, he's married, he's got back together with his family and his grandkids. He's teaching his grandkids how to make models and wire electronics. But, yes, he could not have processed that in prison, but he can now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the thing that the music allows is that somehow and this is like the magic of this experience is that like temporarily, changes the energy in that space where all of a sudden, people seem to be able to feel things that they're otherwise not really allowed safely to feel in that environment.

Speaker 2:

So when you play a song like Good Friday and you see a guy start to weep, it's again it's like a miraculous thing because it's like that's not something that you can really do in that environment with any degree of safety, like you're not supposed to be crying in there, and so, for whatever reason, music can do that, where for that hour, two hours, three hours that we're doing this work, all of a sudden the vibration in the space changes and people are able to experience an emotion that they otherwise can't. I played in a juvenile detention Clallam County juvenile detention in Washington earlier this month and I started playing Time to Be a man and within the first verse this 17-year-old kid started crying and he said after the show he said that his father had died while he was in there and that he had been stuffing down the pain of losing his father for the past four months while he was locked up in juvenile and that he felt he could not allow himself to feel anything about that. And as soon as I started singing that song I grew up in a quiet town where most folks don't want to stick around except for guys like my dad as soon as I said the word dad, he started crying and said to me this is the first time I've felt anything about my dad while I've been here. And so the songs that tell me if I'm right about this.

Speaker 2:

But also with trauma. You don't want to re-traumatize someone, but don't they have to end the experience in some way by feeling it, because they're still going through it, like they're frozen in it. And then, or even with grief, if you can't allow yourself to experience grief, it like stays with you, it continues to weigh on you.

Speaker 1:

I'll tell you that I was diagnosed with PTSD at the end of last year from my work being a doctor in the emergency department the stabbings, the shootings, the domestic violence, the sexual assault, the hangings and so I've learned a lot about PTSD and my niche in addiction medicine now is PTSD and addiction. And it's funny to say that because a lot about PTSD and my niche in addiction medicine now is PTSD and addiction. And it's funny to say that because a lot of addiction medicine is helping people to process their trauma. But yes, the way I look at it is that essentially, ptsd is when our fight or flight response is broken and it's overstimulated and it goes off at improper times, and so what the person has to do is find safety so that they're not actually needing their fight or flight response, and then they have to process what they've been through and it's like negative energy that's stored and it has to come out in some way and that could be talk therapy. And one of my patients I talked to her this week oh my gosh, she's in her twenties too many sexual assaults to count. She was held prisoner and hostage because of her drug use at one point and I asked her like how are we going to get the trauma out? And she's now in a very safe place and she's got a good connection with me. I'm encouraging her to use art to draw and then to be able to talk to me about what she's drawing. And that may not work and we may go down the direction of equine therapy, where she's able to focus on the animal and feed off the animal's interaction with her as a way to regulate her emotions better.

Speaker 1:

There's so many ways to do it, but, to answer your question, it has to come out somehow, otherwise, essentially, it's this vicious feedback loop and the best way to think of this is that lizards have a fight or flight response, but they don't get PTSD. Humans have a complicated enough brain that we always want to know why that we always want to know why. So the lizard gets startled and it scurries off and then it goes to do lizard things like eating and sunning itself. Right, humans are like I just got beat up, like why me? Why today? What could I have done better? What happened again? What if those guys know where I live? And essentially, the fight or flight part of the brain sends it up to the frontal lobe, the complicated human part of the brain, the complicated human part of the brain, and this was never meant to be understood. It was simply a survival mechanism.

Speaker 1:

And so you get this vicious feedback loop where the attempt to process the trauma leads to unresolved questions and it raises more anxiety what if it happens next?

Speaker 1:

And then the human part of the brain will send it back to the fight or flight and it becomes this like vicious feedback loop and eventually we have to learn to process it and understand it and be aware of it. And, like I was just telling my therapist yesterday, one of my patients really triggered me last week and I was not ready and I had to talk through it and tell her the why and what was the reason why that was so triggering for me. And I've got to be ready for next time because it's going to happen again. So, yes, so that was a very long answer to your question, but yes, people have to process it in some way. And I'd be curious, matt, and I don't know if you want to share anything about your own reasons for getting into this, but music can be extraordinarily therapeutic to process one's own trauma and you mentioned kind of some of your stories are in your songs has it been therapeutic for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think first of all, a long answer is appreciated, because this is my opportunity to speak to a pro, an expert. Here I'm trying to learn and I'll also just say I'm a layman when it comes to everything, like I'm an amateur at everything, everything but. But I I know in my experience with music there's like a very big difference between understanding something intellectually and then understanding something experientially, or having it's like the knowledge degraded in a way, and, like I mentioned earlier about all of the stories that I heard while doing this work, that they had to work their way into my own conscious, and it was this process of synthesizing all of this information and being able to put it out in a different way. So for me there are things that I can know with my head, but being able to write a song about it, at least a good song about it, to write a good song about something, something I have to understand it with my heart and in that way I've for a while thought about songs as the byproduct of something they're like secondary to something that's like the actual work is like something that's occurred in my heart and soul and unconscious mind, and then it's like the song is like a skin that you shed and you're like this is the result of a process that has happened internally. And so for me writing music is incredibly therapeutic and I have cried writing the songs and singing them myself.

Speaker 2:

And sometimes I'll sing a song like Good Friday, and there'll be a woman sitting there in the front row and she'll start crying and I'll start crying and it was hard for me at certain points to perform certain music because I felt like I was re-traumatizing myself, sure, like I was reenacting something.

Speaker 2:

And I have had to, at different times in in my life, take breaks from certain music and take breaks from the prison work as well, and I will say that sort of covid was like a forced break from that because nobody could go, no volunteers could go into correctional facilities at that point. But there is like a line and I'm I'm sure you understand that in your own experience. And then there are people that my understanding is that, like, sometimes people unconsciously seek to re-traumatize themselves, and my wife has either been concerned about me doing that sometimes when I get a little too rattled from some of the prison work, because simultaneously I'll become the receiver of huge psychic burdens from people. But I know you had a reaction there when I said something about re-traumatization, so I'd love to hear what you have to say about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I'm going to give a shout out to my CrossFit trainer, who is the single smartest person I've ever met and lived experience with difficult life circumstances and honestly knows more about PTSD than anyone I know and she's an incredible human and will work out and will just kind of free associate with trying to understand how we can help people. And I've actually had some of my patients go see her because of the safety that she creates in the workout and the free space to be able to speak what's on a person's mind while doing squats, burpees, whatever, and here's how she described it to me and this makes sense to me. So a lot of my patients cannot sleep and it makes perfect sense. They have been traumatized, they've been beaten, they've been raped, they've been assaulted and when you're asleep you are vulnerable and the brain knows that. And so insomnia is the brain trying to protect itself.

Speaker 1:

Now let's imagine a young woman is sexually assaulted by her stepfather. Hypothetically, that male-female relationship is horrible, it's toxic, it's traumatizing, it's violent and the brain wants to resolve it. Remember, we talked about processing and moving on from the trauma and a lot of times these women will gravitate towards similar relationships because they're trying to resolve the original trauma. In other words, their brain says I got to fix it, I've been traumatized, how do I fix it? And they get into a relationship and they see the similar pattern and they'll get back into it and it's re-traumatizing because they're still trying to process the original trauma. I can't name the specific psychological theory behind that, but it makes perfect sense and it is so devastating for my female patients because there tend to be these cycles of domestic violence and abusive relationships and that's how she explained it to me is they're still trying to process the original trauma and then, as the next trauma happens, it adds more to what the brain is trying to resolve. That's heavy man. That's what we do in addiction medicine.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but it's that's like very I don't know, it's just like very profound as well. That's a big idea.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, matt, I guess here's what I would say to give you a sense of kind of what I've learned from just talking to people who have been traumatized. And most of my patients have some sort of legal history. And the other addiction doctor in my practice, the very lovely and beautiful Dr Reb Close, who happens to be my wife you got to meet her when you were out here in Monterey last summer but she goes into jail and we do in-reach and we try to reach people while they're still incarcerated. In fact, today she's going into juvenile hall to take care of patients. And there's two things that I would say that I've learned that really helped me when I feel like I'm not making connections with patients. The first is that addiction, incarceration there's a story. So you go to prisons and jails.

Speaker 1:

I go to schools so in 2024, I spoke to over 5,000 students and when I go to these schools these kids are just eager and excited and they raise their hands and they have great questions. And if I go to a fifth grade class and ask those kids what they want to be when they grow up, none of them will say arrested, incarcerated, in prison, addicted, overdosing or homeless. And a lot of my patients have a lot of guilt and shame and I have to remind them. I'll say don't forget me. Being your doctor was never part of your original plan, and we always have to reconcile their lost dreams and to help them move on and set new goals. And the other thing I will say is I think it was actually right before we caught up with you. Last year we adopted a dog. Stay with me, I'll make this make sense. So we go to the animal shelter.

Speaker 2:

I love dogs, man, I'm in right now.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I'm a big believer in emotional support animals. I write tons of emotional support animal letters for my patients. But so we go to the animal shelter. We want to pick out a dog and there's this little white kind of husky looking dog and very defensive body posture, the tail's between the legs, she's hunkered in, she's scared, and the other dogs are all bouncing off the walls and we're busy people. We cannot deal with our hyperactive dog. So, and the other dogs are all bouncing off the walls and we're busy people, we cannot deal with our hyperactive dog. So my daughter says hey, dad, look at that white one, she looks cute. So we asked the staff to get her out of the kennel and to come to the meet and greet area and she's again defensive posture, tail between the legs, she's even shaking a little bit and we're going. Gosh, anxious dogs can be destructive Like this is just not going to work. And they said hang on, one of the staff's been working with her, let's just see what happens.

Speaker 1:

And this staff member comes out that had been working with this dog and the dog just lights up like a Christmas tree you know that dog's smile that they have and the tail. And we went. She's scared and we took a chance on her and so she is now ours. Her name is Pixie and she has blossomed into the most loving, incredible part of our family, and her nickname is Safe and Loved, because that is what she needed and that is what all of us need, and so what we try to do in my addiction medicine practice is give people a place where they feel safe, and love is maybe the wrong word because it suggests intimacy, but they are cared about as human beings, and that's really where we've made so much transformation is that people feel safe and accepted in our practice.

Speaker 1:

And what's so hard is that is the antithesis of everything that isn't happening in a jail or prison.

Speaker 1:

It is fear, it is shame, it is judgment, it is being behind bars, and I'm really curious as to what you get to see in your work about people transitioning out. The transition out is so hard because they're so distrustful, they have so much trauma, family suspicious spouses are worried and there's no place for them to land that they can feel safe and cared about, and we really struggle with trying to create that in our practice. But coming back to why I brought up these two stories, realizing for me as a doctor that no one ever wanted to be addicted. Growing up and understanding that and realizing we all just want to be safe and accepted helps me to see where people are struggling the most and point them in the right direction. And sometimes it's the medicine. We've got to treat their PTSD with medicine, but more often it is just giving them a place where they can feel accepted. And that's the beauty in my mind of AA meetings or NA meetings is you go and you can feel accepted.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the re-entry thing is like and I certainly agree with all of that and I love the story about the dog and I hope I get to meet Vixie at one point. She's lovely.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but I think that along with that emotional component, as far as re-entry, it just becomes like to use a phrase that I feel like it's like a buzz phrase but like this idea of a path to normalcy. I remember telling this story. I made this very short documentary a bunch of years ago about a woman named Jenny who was a mother who was incarcerated and was to be taken away from her children when she was incarcerated. And this little nine minute documentary we shot about her sort of making her children when she was incarcerated, and it was little nine minute documentary. We shot about her sort of making her way back in to society. And I remember showing it to my father and he was really moved because there was a part of the movie where she just was like, oh, I just want to have Sunday breakfast with my children. And he was like, wow, it's like everybody just wants the same thing in that way.

Speaker 2:

And when someone comes out of prison and it's that much harder for them to get a job, when someone comes out of prison and it's that much harder for them to find housing, it's like sometimes they come out of prison and they're in debt because they have different kinds of fees they have to pay to the jail, to the courts, their personal relationships are damaged you talk about people have to mourn their lost dreams. That's the same thing. It's like you have this lost time. You have to accept that I have lost these years, which I'm sure can be fruitful in some ways that people can use them. They can be spiritually fruitful If accessed to you, could be educationally fruitful, but for most part it's something where, like you, you have this thing taken from you and, along with needing to feel emotionally safe and loved, you need to be able to support yourself, you need to be able to feel productive, you need to be able to feel useful and purposeful and all of those things that like allow us to build self-esteem, because without those things like, how do you rebuild self-esteem?

Speaker 2:

And so to me, there are all these pragmatic components to the reentry experience that are so hard, and there's a part of my show where I talk about a teenager that I met in Virginia in a prison, named AJ, and the conditions of his life were so shocking to me because it was like this is such an inevitability for him to be incarcerated Like an entirely drug-addicted family, having spent a lot of his childhood in juvenile facilities, being arrested at 17 and having to spend four years in jail.

Speaker 2:

And then, at the end of this story, it's revealed to me. He tells me that he can't read and to have an extensive criminal record, to have all of your siblings either dead or drug addicted. To not have any work experience I mentioned that the only job he's ever worked is a job where he cuts lumber and everybody that does that job with him. They get high on speed while they do it, and with all of that, along with the idea that it can't even read, like how do you put a resume together if you can't read it? And so how does someone like that find their path to a normal life? How do they not end up re-incarcerated or worse?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's actually where getting into working in recovery is transformational. So if you apply for a job at Safeway and you have a criminal record, they may turn you away. If you apply to work at a drug and alcohol treatment facility and you're sober and you have a criminal record, welcome to the team. Most people that work in the addiction treatment community have lived it themselves or have really close ties to it like a family member, and what I can tell you is kudos or condolences. You run a nonprofit, we run a nonprofit. It's a lot harder than we thought.

Speaker 1:

Oh my God, it is yeah, but we hire folks that are in recovery for our nonprofit and we have folks that talk about when they were homeless and talk about when they were incarcerated. And it's amazing we have to talk about email etiquette and Zoom etiquette and how to balance a checkbook and we were literally over lunch last summer talking about compound interest and retirements and one of the gentlemen who works for a nonprofit it's on my to-do list to record him on the podcast but he one day and I wish I just put my iPhone down and recorded he just spewed out what it really takes to rehabilitate after addiction, jail and prison and it's years, it's needing stability, it's needing mentorship and 30 days in a residential treatment program just isn't going to cut it. And essentially he's I mean he's doing great. I think he's his two-year soberversary is like next month, but yeah, it's.

Speaker 1:

I think one of the reasons why we've done inReach into our local correctional facilities is if we can get people into addiction treatment as they come out and then they can transition to sober living, a lot of them start to realize, hey, maybe I want to be a drug and alcohol counselor and what's so cool about that is their dark past is what makes them successful and it like flips the story on its head and it's really cool to watch. And one of my favorite parts about the whole idea of treating addiction is when it's successful. It's called being in recovery, because you get your life back. It's just, it's amazing.

Speaker 2:

It's just, it's amazing, yeah, to make that transition and to be successful in it takes such unbelievable strength and character, fortitude and patience and compassion and yeah.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to ask you and I don't mean to bring up another musician in our conversation, but Jelly Roll is a very interesting figure in the circle that we've been talking about. Horrible lived experience incarcerated and a lot of his music gets played at AA meetings. I know his song I Am Not Okay is very popular in residential treatment programs. Have you found any uptake with your songs in the recovery community?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm obviously nowhere near as famous as Jelly Roll and kudos to him, and he also seems to use his platform for a lot of good works and seems to really be concerned with giving back, and I think that's this essential part of that transformation as well. It's like someone pulls you up on the ladder and then your hand has to be down pulling the next person up. Do you know what I mean? 100%. I think that's how you stay on the path. I think that's how that's meant to work.

Speaker 2:

When I first started doing this work and I think I mentioned this in the show that at one point I got a Facebook message from a woman who had told me that she was listening over and over again to the song Tell Lucy that I Love Her, and she was actually watching a video of it because I had not recorded the song at that point. But so she's rewatching the YouTube video over and over again and she said that her husband had committed suicide inside of a jail and that they had a son, they had a three-year-old together and she was listening to the song over and over again because she felt it described how she thought her husband must have felt leading up to him committing suicide. And when I got that message I was really blown away, obviously, so much so that I had to include it in the show because it just summed up a certain aspect of that experience so well and the family's experience, like how having a family member who's incarcerated can be so devastating to a family, not just to that individual. But I knew that when I got a message like that I was like wow, stakes are higher. I've crossed a certain line here where something I've written has really become a part of somebody else's story.

Speaker 2:

And I am of the school where I don't think songs originate from the songwriter. I think the songwriter is more like an antenna and picks up something and that the song is floating around in this sort of platonic, metaphysical universe and you just, if you're lucky, you can pull one down. But I think when you have a great song in front of you, I think a really honest songwriter will be able to admit that they're like wow, like I couldn't have thought of that, you know? And who wrote that song? Do you know what I mean? Like that's really what it is and and, like I said, to be a part of someone's experience of that kind of something so intimate and to be part of somebody's grieving process that way and I'm sure jelly roll is that for a lot of people it's an incredible honor and I feel very lucky and humbled to count that among my life experiences.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely, Unfortunately, as the hour always does, it has flown by, Besides coming to Monterey County, where we'll set up something with the local jails, prisons, juvenile hall justice involved high schools, that sort of stuff. What are you working on now? What's next?

Speaker 2:

I'm writing up a storm right now. I'm off for the summer. I'll start touring again in September, but I don't want to jinx it. I'm actually I'm writing a musical right now. I wanted to write another show. I was going to write another one-man show because I really I love to write songs, but I also really love to write stories and I love the idea of combining a body of work with storyline. But I realized I wanted to work with other people. I didn't want to write a one-man show again. I really wanted to do something that was more collaborative. And then I wanted to write for all kinds of characters. So I'm not a musical theater guy. I've never been in a musical in my life. I don't know anything about them, I've seen two or three of them in my whole life. But I started writing songs and I started writing a story and I'm like I guess this is a musical. I don't know what else you'd call it, but that's what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 1:

Love it. I have to say, Matt, I always learn so much every time I talk to you. I just want to say thank you for the incredible music that you write and I'm really excited for when you're back in Monterey County. We have a lot of connections in the criminal justice system here and I know your work will continue to make an impact and will definitely help our incarcerated folks here in Monterey County.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, and likewise I echo all of that you know. Thank you for all the awesome work that you do.

Speaker 1:

Before we wrap up, a huge thank you to the Montage Health Foundation for backing my mission to create fun, engaging education on addiction, and a shout out to the nonprofit Central Coast Overdose Prevention for teaming up with me on this podcast. Our partnership helps me get the word out about how to treat addiction and prevent overdoses To those healthcare providers out there treating patients with addiction. You're doing life-saving work and thank you for what you do For everyone else tuning in. Thank you for taking the time to learn. Thank you, treating addiction saves lives.