Dr. Deborah Haskins | Chief Clinical Consultant, Evive Board Chair

Dr. Deborah Haskins has spent 30 years training clinicians, building treatment frameworks for underserved communities, and asking the question most of the field won't: what if the problem isn't the person with the addiction? In this episode she sits down with Adam and Christina to talk about the gaps in clinical training, the cultural barriers that keep entire communities away from traditional treatment, the complex relationship between spirituality and recovery — and shares something deeply personal about her own lived experience of trauma that reframes everything she's built her career around.  

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🔗 RESOURCES & LINKS
🟢 Evive — Digital support for gambling behavior change
🌐 https://www.getevive.com/
📱 Download the app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/evive-gambling-support/id6450926060

🟣 The Broke Girl Society with Christina Cook — Community and recovery support for women
🌐 https://thebrokegirlsociety.com/ 
🎙️Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-broke-girl-society-podcast/id1575593868
🎙️Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/74DP23EzfR6WPpPMLYq45x
📺 YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thebrokegirlsociety

🎧 The Modern Meeting Podcast with Adam Lyons — Gambling recovery, real talk
🌐 https://themodernmeeting.com/ 
🎙️ Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-modern-meeting/id1779060982
🎙️ Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1jMSSKkadnvzbvZl33dzZc
📺 YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@ModernMeeting
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🔔 Subscribe to Evive Live for new episodes featuring the clinicians, researchers, advocates, and people in recovery who are changing how we think about gambling harm.
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Evive Live is produced by Evive, a digital health platform dedicated to gambling behavior change. Views expressed by guests are their own.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome back to eVive Live. I'm Christina Cook.

SPEAKER_02 0:04

And I'm Adam Lyons.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

In this episode, we had a great conversation with Dr. Deborah Haskins, who is on eVive scientific advisory board. She's given so much insight to the work that we do at eVive. And, you know, it's it's always interesting to get a little bit more background about people that we work with in the space and kind of better understanding how they've ended up in it, what their hopes are for the work they're doing and how it's going to impact those who are struggling with gambling harms.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Yeah, it's like I uh all I kept thinking about was it's like a good news, bad news type thing where it's like, or not even good news, bad news, but it's like it's it's inspiring, but also depressing. Like it's it's depressing that she's been doing this for like 30 years. No, I guess that's the inspiring part. The depressing part is like where we still are at as a space. You know what I mean? Where it's like this we're talking like in the in the late 90s, she was she was talking about addiction and gambling, and and yet we just have so far to go. But it's the people like her who have made everything else possible. You know what I mean? So I guess that's like I guess that's the silver lining of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Well, if you're if you're like us and and like to kind of know the people who are working in the space, who are making differences, who are trying their best to help those who are helping people like me and you, uh, this is a conversation for you. So let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of EVIV Live. My name is Adam Lyons from the Modern Meeting Podcast. I'm here with Christina Cook from the Broke Girl Society, and today's guest, you know, I I think this is the closest thing to royalty, Christina, in the in the gambling recovery space. She is an internationally certified gambling counselor, she is the president emerita of the Maryland Council on Problem Gambling. In 2021, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council on Problem Gambling, a bunch of other accolades that we'll eventually get to. But Dr. Deborah Haskins, welcome to Evive Live.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I am so excited and just want to thank you for all you're doing for gambling recovery and care public health.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

So happy to have you. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

So, yeah, I mean, you know, you spent 25 years as a counselor educator before moving into consulting and advocacy work. What did teaching counselors for that long teach you about what the field was kind of not getting quite right?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yeah. Well, I think that that's a really good question and a good start. I actually uh, you know, was on the faculty for 16 years at Loyola University, Maryland, training up uh folks to become psychologists. Then I left Loyola to go over to Trinity, Washington University. I was there for eight years training clinical mental health counselors and school counselors, and uh, you know, what was really great is because uh Trinity's mission is steeped in social justice and advocacy. So that was just wonderful because a lot of the students came ready uh to amp it up in their communities because they're already advocates. But over the years of my academic profession, and that included the last four years through 2025 teaching at Johns Hopkins University for four years, I got instantly recruited after I taught retired to develop a course on diversity uh in psychology. And in my career as a council educator, as a professor teaching psychology, I've you know basically always focused on uh really teaching aspiring clinicians, practitioners, researchers, public health practitioners, etc., uh people who may be going into social work, even undergrad students, etc., to really focus on how to best serve communities that are culturally diverse. Because many of these communities that I'm a part of myself as an African descent individual are not individuals and families and community members who have embraced Western health care in the traditional format. And so my whole profession has always focused on using alternative modalities that basically I had to create because it wasn't apparent or present in the literature. The uh the academy wasn't teaching me as a candidate in the programs as a master's student as well as a PhD. So for me, I had to really think about you know, what does this mean for when you're at the grassroots level, engage with people in families and communities who may never embrace traditional health care, they don't feel comfortable even going to a 12-step meeting because in many of these cultural communities, one of the important uh strips that you have been taught uh by your families, and you probably have heard this too, and you your family may have said this, is you don't put your business in the street. And so, for a lot of people, they view even going to a 12-step recovery meeting as putting your business in the street. They don't really trust the whole idea of anonymity, they don't understand what that concept means, they don't that's not a language that they may be using, and so it's a new vocabulary and it's a new sort of relationship to introduce to them. And so what I learned was uh also unfortunately that addictions is not included consistently in training models, and so in many of the traditional psychology programs, uh psychiatry might be different because they do have addiction medicine, so they get it, but in traditional, say psychology and maybe even in some social work programs, they are not exposed to addiction. And I was one of those persons in my master's in counseling program. There was not at that time in the 80s a required course on addiction. And so for me, I remember thinking, you know, this is a thought I had, people get high because they're immature. I really believe that people got high because they were immature, and I think that that perspective developed because I also looked at my family, and I had family members who were struggling and breathing through addiction. And as a child, when you're growing up and being exposed to that, you don't understand it. And part of it is because the adults aren't talking about it. We know there's an elephant in the room and everybody's doing a dance around it. No one is called the addiction elephant, nobody is talking out loud. The parents and the adults are not explaining to the child that daddy or mommy um is has a chronic uh illness, and we're gonna try to get daddy or mommy some help, or whether it's an auntie or uncle, or et cetera, et cetera. Uh, and so what happens is people like me never got the explanation. Then I went into practice as a gambling, as a mental health counselor, working at the college level, and working with individuals coming in from the community, enrolling in college, uh, and teaching them uh in this curriculum that we had, little eight-week courses, uh, but being a counselor uh is very different at the college level because you're not really, you're not doing long-term therapy. You have to refer students out if you recognize that there's some issues. So I decided then that I really felt that I wasn't helping people that needed to help the most. And I felt that I was working more with people who had more privileges because the county that I was working in actually has one of the highest per capita incomes in the state, in the United States. And I really felt like I wanted to work with people who were struggling, and that would include really advancing my skills, and I decided I really needed to understand addictions better. So when I went through my my PhD, and you have to do a 12-month rotation in an internship, I specifically decided to do it in addictions and dual diagnosis at the time, it was called. Joanna Franklin at the time, great, she had uh mentored and taught people around the globe. And she happened to be the clinical director of the unit at the Psychiatric Institute of DC. So just imagine how blessed I was to end up in the addictions department and core it was called dual diagnosis at the time. She was a clinical director and she was trying to integrate gambling, addiction, and problem gambling into their service delivery. And so, because my PhD was in the pastoral counseling area, Joanna quickly uh identified me to be the spirituality consultant. And so what she did was she gave me the opportunity to facilitate for the uh addiction groups, dual diagnosis groups, as well as the substance abuse groups that also were integrating gambling. She was teaching me how to provide treatment to people who experience gambling harm, and she was also uh wanting me to help them with what I call the soul behind the high. Because at the basic core of every human being, actually the word soul in another language mean the word psyche, let's start with that, you psychology, psyche. The word psyche means soul. And so what I started to experience when I worked with largely men who had developed a dependency, and we had a few women at the time, I really started to see, you know, at the human level, every person is struggling with these soul challenges in the world, whatever world, every family has been affected by addiction. Whether it's someone in your immediate family, whether it's someone in your distant family, whether it's a community member, whether it is someone on your job, whether it's someone that is a person attending your faith community or a spiritual community or indigenous communities, everyone at some point before they leave this planet, they will be impacted by someone who has an addiction. And we know that well because we know that people who experience gambling harm has effects for every person experiencing gambling harm, 10 people are affected. Okay, and so that's I'm pretty sure very consistent when we look at addictions across the board. And so, as an educator, I always had my clinical practice because for me as an educator, I always felt that it was important for me to best educate if I was still actively supporting people who had addictions and had mental health challenges. Because I never liked when I had a professor who had not seen a person in 25 years, or they stopped into encountering people at the human level, and so it was all theoretical. And for me, that that wasn't good enough. I felt like you know, it's a disservice to the students and the learners if you're only being taught by people who don't have a fresh understanding, um, whether they're working as a supervisor and their clinicians or their supervising uh peer specialists, uh, whether they're involved with people who lived experiences, whether they're doing community-based work as an educator. Um, that we need to be keeping it fresh because I think that's when we do our best work as educators. So that's really how I got started in the profession during my doctoral program. And I was always when I started my private practice in 1994, which was a year after I finished my 12-month um internship at the Psych Institute of Washington. And um, and so I started to see people with gambling problems, people with co-occurring mental health and addiction problems, and people who may not have had an addiction. But I started to take leadership in 1998, specifically uh working with Joanna to travel around the United States to train up the workforce. And we started in Detroit when they built the first uh casinos in Greektown. Because in Detroit at the time, in Michigan, people would cross into uh Windsor, Canada, to gamble. And you would you could barely get over the bridge uh on Fridays because it was lined up. You know, they would get off of work and they would take the bridge over into Canada to gamble. As soon as they developed the casinos in Greektown, then of course, then they started, as we see everywhere, um, started to develop more gambling challenges, public health challenges.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

So can I jump in here? And there's something I really want to focus on that you said, and I'm I'm hanging on to this thought because I have actually seen this happening. You know, as an educator and somebody who is really trying to help those who are helping us, right, better understand what they need to do, what all the knowledge base and everything like that. One of the things that I see that happens most often, or one of the, you know, out of the thousands of conversations I've had at this point, when it comes to connecting with therapy counseling, is their bad experiences, right? And you had said something specifically about when it comes to addiction, a lot of times it's seen as maybe immaturity or like grow up and and make better choices, right? I specifically had a conversation with somebody that that their their therapist just last week said that to them. You need to grow up. And she was trying to figure out, and so she came to this the space and she was trying to figure out is this information that's hurtful or is this information that I need to hear? Like trying to process, is this tough love, or is this like an actual like, hey, you need to grow up? You know, because we hear that a lot in the space of like you're you're you've got to, you know, make better choices and stop this behavior, and like they they tie it into immaturity. And a lot of times I'll I even have occasionally said, well, I need to adult better, right? Or something like that. But I think the way that you kind of touched on that, and then my own like connection of of seeing that and seeing so many people who experience how that relates in their own sessions, like as an educator and as a as somebody who who really pours themselves into making sure the next generations or the people that you're educating really understand how much language impacts that that connection and how much like that interaction is going to impact this person. Like, what are your thoughts around that? Can we kind of dig into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Absolutely. Definitely. Wow, there's a lot there. Uh so let me just start with first of all, going back to the reality that a lot of the curriculums, the training programs, do not have a required addiction course. Okay, at the master's level. If you graduate from what's called a K-Crep, which is a counselor accreditation, it is a required course in those curriculums. But if you graduate from a psychologist training program, you might never have taken an addictions course. You might take psychopathology and it sprinkle one lecture. All right. And it all depends on who the professor is, who the instructor is, what their background is, what their interests is, what their exposure is. And we can see how everyone's particular biases are based on what they were conditioned to believe, okay, and how they develop perceptions and perspectives about it, how it impacts how they can be compassionate or not towards the individual seeking gambling care, or addictions care, or mental health care. And a big part of this is addictions work as well as mental health work. This is what I used to say to students. When I when they took an exam, they would have cases that they had to problem solve. Think about it theoretically, approach it. Okay, now you are the individual providing services. What are going to be your attitudes? How are you going to structure the how are you going to develop a relationship with this potential client? And what theoretical model are you going to use to provide treatment? Um, and how are you going to be able to evaluate whether things are going well? What are you going to do when you start to experience countertransferences? All right. And so, what kind of accountability structure and support do you have set up? And so my students would say, Dr. Haskins, you know, the exam was really challenging. This was a real, these are really hard cases. And I said, Well, this is real life. This is how it's going to be when you do the work. This is really what is this the standard. This is what you're going to see. It's not going to be these cases where the person has one issue going on. You're going to see that people are coming in with histories of adversity that have not been supported, histories of trauma that have not necessarily been fully supported, beliefs and experiences, whether they were family experiences, whether they were also culturally sort of socialized, then they are being socialized from the greater world that they are impacted by, how media impacts them, how the educational system impacts their thought systems and what they believe. So now you have practitioners who are in the healing space, and a lot of times those responses come because of a lack of real training on sort of the range of human experiences. So one of the upcoming conferences that I'm going to be speaking at this coming week is the Turk Addiction Conference. And I'm going to be presenting on integrating spirituality and actually what I'm calling it is uh alley experiences. How do we help people with alley experiences? People are coming in, everybody, with an alley experience. What is an alley experience? It's those experiences that people don't want to, you know, have in the front of their house. The alley is where you put that stuff in the background. It's smelly, it's nasty, it's, you know, things that you want to hide. Take it out, it's the trash. You put that in the alley. I want people to know that everybody comes with an alley experience. And that includes all of us as peer recovery supporters, leaders in the field, uh, people like me who is a practitioner, public health individuals, researchers. I don't care who you are, everyone before they leave this planet at some point is going to have an OLI experience. Or someone close to them that they were affected by. And so I think that it's very unfortunate that that client received that message because what is that going to do? It will push that person out of traditional help seeking. And understandably so, because it really is giving them the message that there's something bad about me. Something is wrong with me, and something is bad about me. You know, and so what the clinician is doing is probably repeating the language and the evaluation that they've been socialized to. You know? If you're not doing certain behaviors by certain developmental turning points, then you're not adulting.

unknown 22:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Right? Yeah. Oh, that that's that's how the interpretation is. But this is where this is another major problem. This is what I love. One uh writer who is a spirituality author, and I'm not gonna remember his name, but I think his last name is Swinson. And he said in his book, and I love this, he said that the pathology, if you will, is not the addiction. The pathology is in how we view the person with the addiction. The pathology is in the in society. Society is the pathology. Society is the disease. So the person with the addiction, you know, is on a healing and recovery where we're trying to get them to it, but really the work that we've got to do at a large pers way in a large way is we've got to work on societies stigmatizing of people who have an addiction and a mental illness and a mental health problem. Because I heard someone say that if you had cancer, you would be treated with a lot of love and compassion. But if you have an addiction or a mental illness, there's a lack of compassion, particularly if it's chronic. If you have a chronic condition like diabetes or hypertension or heart disease or heart failure, or you know, some other types of uh, say Parkinson's disease, neurological, people are gonna love on you, they're gonna, what can I do for you? How can I help you? What kind of support do you need when they come to their appointments and they say have a return to a behavior that doesn't support their medical condition and they have a relapse? People don't say you need to, you know, grow up. They're gonna say, okay, let's let's talk about what did you do last week? What happened? So, what I do when I'm working with my clients is I normalize, and I'm sure a lot of my uh uh gambling counselors and practitioners who are doing it really good work, this is how we want to do it. What I say is we want to normalize, for example, that the person has urges and cravings, and every session we start with a check-in, like we do on a vi. We do a daily check-in. How are you doing today? What are your cravings like? Are you having any cravings? Are you having any urges? Because guess what? That's normal. Some people are gonna be like they're gonna always say if they have nicotine dependency. Some people are able to break it and never desire to smoke again. Some people are gonna say, I have the craving every day. And that's the same thing that happens in gambling, addiction, and problem gambling and other core occurring. And so, what we need to do is we've got to normalize these risky behaviors that are normal if you have this chronic disease and brain disease. And if you are noticing that you are craving, then let's took let's talk about your toolkit. Let's try to tighten things up. What are you doing that maybe you did before that was working well, and now you stopped doing that strategy? And guess what? Now you're getting lured into online gambling, you're you know, you weren't a sports better before, but now you're finding yourself getting pulled in, okay? So so I think uh Chris Christina, I want to say I really regret that that's happening, but we know that it happens a lot, and I want to say to the Vive community: if you have a clinician or a helper that is not helping you in the way that you need, that feels compassionate and you feel supported, talk about it, you know, be really honest about how you're experiencing whatever you experience and if and what you need to be different. And that's called boundary setting. That's what we're trying to do with people in recovery, right? Or people who are developing emotionally intelligent, emotionally mature strategies and skillfulness. Okay, we want to teach them how you can set boundaries with the people that you interact with. If they do something that hurts you, you can have a conversation with them about it. A lot of people will just flee because that's the normal sort of flight or uh, you know, stay or f or fly away from the stress, right? You're gonna leave or you're gonna stay in it, right? Uh, but if that person still doesn't support you, that's a signal that it's time to find someone else that will.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Also, I think too, when we're talking about stigma and we're talking about, you know, identifying that this is a spiritual problem, this is a disease, it's also the person themselves, right? Like, like people don't want to admit that it's an actual disease, or they they say, or they they just think they they can, you know, stop it with willpower and stop it with you know just shame, right? But so uh just to go back, speaking of like spirituality, you know, knowing that you are um, you know, your PhD is in pastoral counseling, I I want to ask you, you know, one of the hot topics, especially in 12-step meetings, is people can't identify with the higher power, right? They can't they they have a hard time with that step that says you need to hand it over to someone greater than yourself. And you know, I know for me, my first six months in recovery, I used the fellowship itself as my higher power because I had a complicated relationship with God and I've I've now come back to God. And just I want to kind of, you know, in your experience, uh, is that an area of opportunity where I think you know, we need to lean into. Listen, yeah, it doesn't have to be God or whatever you say, but realizing that you can't do this on your own, yeah, and you do need some type of spiritual connection, some higher power. I think it's something that we need to really start campaigning again, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

And you know what, that's been one of my criticisms of uh not I'm not critical of the 12-step fellowships, but what I'm critical is of the uh in in a in a in a in a not bad way, but one of my concerns have always been that step one, there's an assumption that people are gonna be able to do that. And the re and then you move, you can move, you know, that you know, they're gonna be able to move through. And once they accomplish that step, then they can move to the second step. But the reality is that the whole notion of being in a relationship with a power greater than yourself is complex. Because for a lot of people, particularly depending on their family of origin experiences, um, depending on if they're breathing through trauma, whether they're where they have been harmed, they've been hurt by someone, including faith spaces. Okay? There's been church hurt, there's been um spaces where they felt that God abandoned them. You know, one of my clients told me, he said, you know, I don't believe in God because he was uh a person who uh his parents were not equipped to care for him and his siblings, uh, and I think they were dependent and depending in abusing drugs, and so uh the children went into the foster care system. The grandmother then decided to take two of the siblings, but didn't take this older sibling. And so imagine this child is in a system that likely has not been a touchy-filly love, there's joy, there's peace, there's happiness. These systems have not been like wonderful systems for people in foster care. It depended on who your foster care uh parents or caregivers were. But a lot of times, you know, you have a person like this former client who he said, you know, I'm not, I don't trust God because what God, if God is all knowing and everywhere, um omnisperson and omnipotent, that means he God is knowing and knowing what I've encountered in the world. Why would God make me go through this? Why did God allow my grandparents to take my siblings but left me in the system? Why would I want to follow a God like that? Okay, so a lot of times there's these experiences that impacted the person's relationship or any notion. First of all, maybe they never had an experience with the higher power. There was that wasn't part of their home life, their living. So if they never had that, they don't understand it. It's an abstract, right? And so the other thing is if it there's been hurt with the higher power that they have been, that has been presented to them. And then the other thing that I noticed, and this is reflected in the research, and my research mentor was Dr. Ralph Piedmont, who was a personality psychologist, and his work was in the pastoral counseling, pastoral psychology area, and he did images of Jesus and images of God. And what he would do is have people rate God, or say, from a Judo-Christian uh perspective, he had them fill out a personality instrument on God or on Jesus. And guess what? It was no surprise. We were really struck by the males versus the females. Okay, now this was before we had, you know, more than the two gender system. There was no binary like recognized during that time. So on the research part of it, you would ask if you're a male or you're female. But what what what we would see is that the females would rate God as loving, God is a nurturer, God is someone that I feel soothed by, God is a person that I turn to, I run towards, I don't want to run away from. Whereas the males would say, God is a punisher, God is uh uh is hurtful, God is this authority uh structure that takes away power. So just think about it for a moment. The way we socialize men across societies is that when you're our infant, you are under sort of the auspices of your primary caregivers, your primary attachments, a parent, uh your parents, or whoever steps in to be your caregiver. Hopefully it's a healthy attachment, but we know that there's been insecure attachments, anxious attachments. But men, at a certain point, when they start moving towards adolescence, they are socialized to establish their own authority. And so then they move into growing into manhood where you're expected to be in charge, to be in control, to implement your power, and you don't have a power with someone else. You're the power, you're the one driving what your vision for life is, what your destiny is gonna be, how you're gonna implement work, relationships, etc. etc. So I think that that's one of the dynamics that we see as part of this recovery journey, because you also have gender differences. What we noticed, for example, in Detroit, uh the Michigan Council uh executive director would say, you know, now Detroit, you imagine, was predominantly African American. All right. Uh, and this was in the late 90s. And he would say, you know, we see really good outcomes with our black women who become addicted to gambling. You know why? Because at the core, they have this connection to spirituality that has been a part of their growing up or they have evolved into, and they when they encountered this mental health challenge, this brain dis disease, this chronic condition, because even if they didn't have pre a precursor to these issues, they're they have a good prognosis, they're able to more instantly connect to a relationship with God or a higher power because they already had one. We have the hardest time with men of color. And I really do think it's something around the whole notion of masculinity and giving up power, but we also have enough scientific evidence to say that when people have experienced trauma and some adversity, that giving up power is the last thing they want to do. Because power was taken from you. What you're trying to gain is power back. And we see that with women. That's why you know the Brooke Girls Society has been wonderful as a community, because there are a lot of women in the community when they go to the male owned, you know, has been populated by males in 12-step recovery, like GA or even Smart Recovery, for example, or AA and NA and some other 12-step programs, they don't feel comfortable because they may feel or experience the males even in 12-step recovery as being in charge, being in control, and maybe they feel looked down on. And sometimes they've had experiences where the message has been, oh, that's all you've uh you're in debt, that's nothing. I'm in debt for 200,000. You you're in debt for 10,000. Um, why are you here? I mean, that there's been some of the encounters uh over the years that people have talked about uh and have presented those challenges. So I know that's a long answer to a very short question that you presented, but I think what we want to say, uh and what I want to say and what we're saying together is that recovery is a journey. And what that means is that what we're inviting people in to consider new relationships, and you get to decide what those new relationships are gonna look like. And so, what I used to say to my students when I would teach them in counseling, I would say, as an adult, you get to decide who can be in your environment, what healthy people can be in your environment, and that also includes institutions institutions that have not necessarily been loving, have not always been supportive, have not always seen the person, a person who's LGBTQIA plus on the spectrum, or have endured diversity, you know, where they don't feel seen, or men of color, black men have felt very invisible and still feel invisible, or other men of color. You know, if they don't feel seen, the goal is, you know, you get to decide who will be a part of your life now as you are getting healthier, and we're not gonna impose on you what that's gonna look like, who that's gonna be. You get to start to you're invited to reflect, to process it with this community, to get some feedback, but you have other members of other communities that you can add, because if you're not getting it over here, maybe you need to go over here. You know, you get to create and and sort of co-create and multi-create with the people who are part of your village now. And anybody who is not supportive and is not peaceful, and that includes professionals who are saying things like, you need to grow up. I think that is an a time where I would say that the practitioner, if I was the supervisor or I was the colleague that the person is talking to, I would say, I want you to share what are you experiencing in your relationship with your client? What are you experiencing with your relationship with this um person who you're a peer recovery uh supporter of? Um, what happened when your client relapsed? How did you feel? Or when your client missed set, you know, the last two or three uh uh scheduled times, what how did you feel when that happened? What did you think? What what did it do in you? How did that sort of connect in you? And let's talk about it, let's process it. Because when you can talk about it, that includes myself, then I may need to talk to a colleague to say, okay, this is what I'm experiencing. I don't want to say this to my client because I don't think that this is gonna be experienced as a support from me as a therapist. So what do you think? What's your perspective? What what might be these are some of the reactions I'm having. Do you think that's like perhaps my own stuff that could be getting in the way? I start with what I thought about people who had addictions. I had that perspective because I had people in my family, including my father who had a gambling addiction, but people in my family, but also seeing people in the community who had addiction, and I was seeing the collateral damage, and I didn't understand it. And so the only thing I was left to reflect on was to kind of think my way through it in my own uh naive uh understanding until I got into the program and said, okay, well, wait a minute. What I noticed when I got into the uh profession, uh actually, that everybody was affected by addiction, whether it was the client, whether it was someone in their life, whether it was, I remember I had a client who was Korean. Her husband was a uh a minister. She was an adult child of an alcoholic. And who would have imagined that this minister's spouse would uh be abusing alcohol? But this was a person who had had untreated, unsupported ACOA, you know, and guess what? As a child, if you have a parent who has an addiction, then you missed out on a lot. Your emotional needs didn't get cared for. And so what did that child do? That person wanted in their love partner to be loved and cared for in a way that their original family didn't. And guess who she married? She married a minister. Like who g guess what ministers do? They care for everybody else. They they care first of all, number one is g their God, all right, their deity, or their their spiritual uh you know, leader or whoever it is. Uh and so probably the most unlikely person that they didn't think that maybe they may not have uh or sh maybe thought twice about uh selecting as a partner with someone who isn't caring for the world, or go into counseling so that you can process why that's a need. And what are you gonna do when your spouse or your, you know, who's caring for the world and is not gonna be home, you know, to sit around the table when or to cozy up and watch, you know, TV with you or have conversations or intimacy in the way that you need. So anyway, that that's a really good question. It's a little a great opportunity. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Yeah. And you like all the questions that we have, you've like answered within the questions. Like you, you have really just like jumped on all the things that we really wanted to pull out of you because you've been in this space, you know, working in this space for 30 years. You you've made, you know, you took in the way that you explained kind of recovery. Sometimes I think we oversimplify, try and oversimplify what recovery looks like. But but even like recovery, but when you were kind of really breaking it out of like how layered recovery is on the treatment side and the peer recovery side. And it's like there's all these different layers and bosses to it. And we're also like, yeah, we can look at what we experience and kind of see see the connections, right? The patterns, the behaviors. There's connection in that. But when we're looking at kind of our backgrounds and what's happened in our lives and how we've been cultivated and things like that, very much the you know, the the life that we grew up in, yes, like there's gonna be uniqueness to the treatments that we may need in order to um navigate this in the right way, right? And and kind of more to the point of like talking to somebody who is um, you know, it's very, very important that when you're seeking treatment, that you're seeking treatment that that really aligns with what you need, right? So when you're looking at a gambling, gambling treatment, you want to make sure that they are actually certified in gambling. Because if you go to a certified gambling therapist, yeah, they're not gonna say things to you like you need to grow up. Absolutely. Um, you know, my grandma used to to gamble like that. So I I get it, you know what I mean? So it's a very different kind of dynamic. And just through your whole conversation, like you really touched on all those different elements. So to kind of like close out and and bring this episode full circle and kind of what we're trying to do with this podcast is identify what's happening in the space, which you were so graciously did, but you also highlighted that the work we still have to do, right? Around stigma, around cultivating uh more awareness in different communities and things like that. But what what out of all of that gives you hope for the work we're all doing for the space for the people who are still struggling? Where's what brings you hope in all of this work?

SPEAKER_00 47:35

You know, well, for one, I what brings me hope is I am spiritually connected. I myself breathe and live through spirit every day, every minute, every second. I'm also a trauma survivor in the worst way, homicidal injury, a son who was murdered during a home invasion, as well as a nephew the next year, and the collateral damage to our family. And I shared that because that is who I am today. I could not continue to work in the field of healing if I also didn't identify that my lived experience in reality is my trauma experiences. And because I always had spirit at the core, and I also had an intact ego because I had worked on myself to grow in terms of my mental health and well-being by participating in therapy as a young adult through adulthood, so that when I had encounters that were losses, I knew where to get my help. I talked to the God of my understanding. Okay, I had saw a professional who was licensed and certified, for example, as you um and I understand the importance, and that has helped me. But let me just say this encountering the experience of the death of a child and what I feel is the worst injury, it is a very humbling experience when you are breathing through trauma. And let me just say, as a person with lived experience of trauma, what I learned was this isn't theoretical, okay? What it taught me was how painful trauma is. And what that did for me as a human, breathing, gasping for breath, learning how to breathe, how to show up, if I was gonna continue to breathe and adjust to life without the people that I love dearly, my family, my spouse, my child, my nephew. I had to decide what was I gonna do. And I decided what worked for me because I did have an in-tech ego that I had been, you know, strengthening, and I feel blessed to have done that. I also had a relationship that was secure with my God, but also recognizing the challenges in that God relationship. But it's a relationship where I can question, and where I tell my clients and I tell my community members or anybody I talk to, you can always question your higher power. Guess what? Because we can just do that. That's how we grow, that's how we heal. And I have to be able to say, hey, what's up? What happened here? Why is my child not here? Why does someone's sin, I feel, took my child, our child away? Okay, from his siblings and from his family. So, and our family, and so many families out there. But because I had this humbling experience directly, it taught me that when people say they're in pain, now I understand it. And you know what I say? Believe them. Because you know what? My trauma taught me that when you encounter trauma, you feel like your heart has been ripped out of your very being. Not with a knife and surgically, you know, cut out and opened up, and they pull it out like you see on the TV shows, and they neatly, you know, repair and kind of suture things back together. When trauma happens, no, it's someone taking a butcher knife like this and pulling it and grabbing it and putting it in a in a zaged way, stripping it from your body to be left with trying to figure out how to put things back together, if at all. And the question is, what kind of supports internally does that person have? Do they have the internal strength to support them? Are they gonna be provided the hope that I have hope because we're training more people that are peer specialists, that are peer supporters, that are professional gambling counselors who are certified. We're encouraging addiction professionals and preventionists to understand this more and to get more training and learning. That's what gives me hope because I've encountered hope myself, and so that's the good news. I'm here, I'm here today, uh in 2016 minus 2013 is what 13 years, and I'm still standing up. And, you know, I have had people who have helped me to breathe, and you heard me talk about this at the conference. You know, people in this gambling recovery and gambling public health community is one of the most amazing communities that I've ever encountered because there's so much compassion and so much authenticity. We're not perfect, but when people are in pain, there's people who are gonna support you. You know, not everybody, maybe, but you can look to some people in this community that are gonna stand with you, that's gonna sit with you and say, you know, I'm here to help you breathe. Just keep just hold on. I want to hold your hand. So that's what gives me hope.

SPEAKER_02 54:13

Yeah, Dr. Haskins, thank you so much. Uh you're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 54:18

It's just a pleasure for me. Thank you. Keep breathing. Thank you so much, keep hoping. Keep checking in to evide every day. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 54:28

Keep breathing, keep breathing, keep hoping. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 54:30

Yes, thank you.