Can you trust Yourself?

This episode looks at the controversy around being someone who is constantly wrong and yet needs to trust themselves in order to be right. How can someone who fucks up their own life trust themselves? Why can't we do it even when we try? And why understanding this changes everything about the way we view addiction.

Transcript

austin hadley's video recording-1 (Detached audio): 0:00

Welcome back to the podcast, my friends. It's you. It's obviously you. You are the only one who knows how to solve your problems. But, you feel like you can't. And you feel like you can't because you don't trust yourself. And you don't trust yourself because why the fuck would you trust yourself? I always thought this was the funniest concept in treatment. They would take you in and spend like six months explaining to you why everything that you do is wrong. The ways that you think are wrong, the way you see the world is wrong, the way you act is wrong. And the whole time, right behind them, they've got a picture that says some corny shit like, Trust yourself. It would be like going to a sweatshop in China and putting up a sign that says, Fight for your right to a fair wage. They're just not going to do it. However, you do need to trust yourself and you need to be able to do this before you can ever hope to make any progress with your addiction. So in this episode, I'm going to explain not only why only you know what you need, but also why you can't find it and how this is going to change everything about the way that you address your addiction. So first, what we've got to do is understand how someone like me and you, or anyone else for that matter, could go from being so bold and doing things for themselves and making their own decisions, to being completely helpless, to being stuck in a spot where they feel like they need someone else to come in and give them direction in their own life. How do you go from being the person that does what they want and what they think is best for them to the person who's looking for someone else to give them answers? Well, what you would have to do in order to get someone into that position is you'd have to take them and convince them that every single motherfucking thing that they've ever done is wrong. That everything that they think in their head is misleading them even if this is something that humans have done since pre written history, you have to convince them that them doing it is wrong and that because they've done it, they have a problem. To illustrate this, just imagine you take a five year old child And once they finish their dinner, you give them a piece of candy. After they eat that candy, they're not satisfied, they want more. They want more candy. Would you punish that child? Would you tell that child that they were sick, or that they were wrong, for continuing to want more candy? Or what if you had a dog, and you fed that dog some table scrap? What What if that dog kept begging even after you'd fed it? What if it wasn't enough? The dog would just keep eating and eating and eating no matter how much you gave it. Would you whip the animal? Would you tell that dog that it's a bad dog because it continually wants to eat? Hopefully not. In my opinion, that would be considered child abuse and animal abuse. However These are things that our people do all the time with our kids and our animals. Admittedly, we're not the best kid and animal owners. But we do this and we think in these ways because we have been trained that having a craving or an urge, something that is making you act a certain way, is bad. It's demonizing. It's terrible. And you should never do it. You should never fall and give in to those temptations. Or it means you're weak and you're bad BUT THAT ISN'T TRUE. You can see it when you look at a child or a dog. You can see it in these examples, but you can't see it with yourself. That's kind of interesting, isn't it? You can see yourself as the bad one, as the villain, as the evil person who has a problem that makes them act a certain way. But when you look at a kid wanting candy or a dog wanting more table scraps, it's obvious. This child and this dog aren't bad. Of course not, that's ridiculous. They're wired for this. The child is wired to want more candy in the same way the dog is wired to want more food. They're not bad. They're not evil. They are survivors. They are doing what they are programmed to do in order to survive, meaning that they are acting in their own best self interest. And there's no logical reason to punish something for acting in its own best self interest, even if you disagree. That the kid should eat more candy or that the dog should have more table scraps. And if this concept applies to children and animals, why wouldn't it apply to you? Why wouldn't it make sense that you yourself may be doing something that is within your own best self interest? If you're able to lose sight of that, And say, what I did must have been crazy and out of control and reckless because I have a problem. It's easy to believe that you need someone else to come and fix you. Now look, if you're going to make this work for someone, you've got to put a title on them. You've got to take them from being exactly what they are, which is a human that has made choices that they thought were the best choices for them. And you've got to put them into this category of something else. For us, that category is a drug addict. but you've gotta work outta that. You are not just a drug addict. Once you become that, you become wrong because once you accept, you are just a drug addict. You can have someone else come in and tell you that you are wrong. You see how that works? If you're a drug addict, you're wrong. That's a parallel. That's a direct correlation between those two concepts. And if I can come in and tell you that you are wrong, what does that mean about me? What do I have? I have the right way, right? If I can tell you and I can identify that you are the one that's wrong, that obviously means that I am the one that's right. And so if you are trying to do the right thing, you need me. You have to listen to me because you are the one that's wrong. That makes sense, right? And this method works. It's applied Universally if you're like me, when you dribble a basketball, that basketball hits the top of your foot and the ball spins across the court and you go chasing it like a jackass. That's why I don't dribble a basketball. But if someone came and said, Austin, you are dribbling that basketball wrong. It obviously means they know the right way to do that. And at the same time, when I spin the yo yo down, that shit doesn't come back up. It just goes down and it doesn't even keep spinning. I can't walk the dog. I can't do anything. If someone knows about yo yos, they can come to me and say, Hey, Austin, you're doing the yo yo wrong. And then they can show me the right way. But we're talking about your fucking life here. We're not talking about basketballs and yo yos. We're not talking about something that anyone can do because if anyone could do, then anyone could be you. Anyone can learn to dribble a basketball. Anyone can get good at doing the yo yo. But nobody can get good at being themselves by having some other person come in and teach them. So you see the problem here. What is the right way to live? What's the right way for you? Who else is going to tell you that answer? Look, this isn't rocket science. That's all I'm saying is the more. that you let other people tell you what you need for your life, the further you are going to continually fall from getting what you actually need. Because what you actually need is hiding somewhere inside of you. So this brings us to our final question. What is that that you have? What is it inside of you and how do you find it? Because you've tried, right? I know you've already looked. That's why you gave up. You see, You used to be very bold. I know you did. You used to do the things that you thought were right for you no matter what anyone else said. I did too. And then something happened, right? It crashed. It all fell apart. And when it all fell apart, we decided this was no longer the way. We decided, like they say, I'm going to get clean. And we did it. We stopped using. And then it didn't work. We got to the point where all there was, was cravings. That's all you could see. It's all you could hear. It's all you could think about. Just the cravings. And you started to believe that those cravings were actually you. That because it was in your voice, it was what you wanted. And more importantly, because when you got past all of those cravings and they started to die down and you looked into yourself to find the answer, it wasn't there. In fact, what you found was that there was nothing there. This is the most unsettling thing in the world because you used to be someone. You used to have something there. And now after all of the damage and all of the chaos with your addiction, you come back to find that there's nothing. All there is, is cravings. But that's the key. That's what there is. That was the point of all of this. What used to be there, you didn't like. That's why you left it. And now that you've come back, You're no longer looking for an answer. You've found what you're looking for, and what you've found is a question. And it's a question that you have wanted the answer to your whole life. Instead of looking for the answer to it, what you need to do is ask that question. Much love and respect to all my people. I'll see you guys in the next episode.