03-29-01 Cedar Ridge

EASEPRESS Interview: Mark Yahn L.A.D.C. Mel Solsvig L.A.D.C.

Preface: Addiction as continuing a habit despite harmful consequence has no foothold in mental health, according to Psychology of Mind, the basis of Health Realization. Teaching HR awakens students to their ability to realize the innate mental health. Meadow Creek in Pine City, MN and Cedar Ridge in Stillwater, MN are pioneer facilities which offer clients education in Health Realization. We interviewed Mel Solsvig, L.A.C.D. and Mark Yahn L.A.C.D.: counselors there. EASEPRESS(H): Would you tell the readers about your backgrounds? Solsvig (S). I've been a counselor for five years. I'm certified in Wisconsin, certified in Minnesota, internationally certified as a drug and alcohol counselor. I worked in traditional treatment until 1997, about six years, in a hospital based treatment program. I then came to Cedar Ridge and have been here since. Yahn (Y). I've been at Cedar Ridge for just over five years - four of those years as a counselor. I Was trained in a more traditional model.. I learned Health Realization here. H. Does your employer dictate what you teach your clients? Y: The model that's used here is Health Realization. The administration gives us freedom. We have supervision, but how we structure our therapy groups, and what we do in those the groups, the management leaves to us. S: The point is that we're Health Realization based. As a team we made that decision, not just the management. As a team we decided that is the model we want to use. H: why did you opt to use the HR model? Y: When I first started here, it was much more eclectic. We used some other models in combination with HR, primarily rational emotive therapy. We found that didn't work too well. I think we have the greatest efficacy with HR. I think we hear, not just from the in-house staff, but across the board from consultants to the people who refer clients to the program, that we have a great deal of success using this model. Potentially it's so life-transforming, not just in terms of maintaining sobriety but in quality of life in every aspect that, I think, the results speak for themselves. H: Can this be taught in conjunction with RET? Or any other model. Y: I don't say that it can't be done but I don't recommend it because there's some incongruence. For instance RET: the primary focus is content of thought, where ours is not. Ours is more the role of thought. S: It's too confusing to use other models. Everybody here has been trained in other models. I think some of those skills come through in the way that we teach, but the model, itself is HR. I you tell them on one hand, "Don't get caught on content, don't get stuck on content," then on the other hand teach them something that get's them stuck, it's contradictory. It just doesn't work. Guys get confused. Guys don't have to be here very long before they can tell HR from something else. We have consultants [come in] sometimes that aren't real well versed in HR. [Clients] pick up on that in an instant, and we hear about it. Y: I think there are valid approaches in other models. We never try to disparage those. I know that we have a consultant here that is working with some twelvestep approaches, and also subscribes to HR. I think what we try to do as counselors is let the person make that decision on what concepts they want to apply to their own life. But I think all of the in-house staff is on the same page: the model we teach is HR. H: Are there any pitfalls, caveats; is there any potential harm in teaching this? Are there any disclaimers? Y: Sometimes people misconstrue what we say. They interpret what we say in a way that is not intended from us. I would like to emphasize that the focus is on innate health, rather than pathology. I don't think that we disavow that pathology may exist, but we don't focus on that aspect. We focus on nurturing and enhancing one's innate health. S: Back to the last question, to follow Mark on this question: What really makes sense to me about the model that we use is that it focuses on health. A very simple thing occurred to me. If you want people to be healthy, it makes sense to me to teach them about health. If you want them to be sick, it makes sense to me to teach them about sickness. If you want them to be diseased, then you teach them about disease. That's why I think this model makes the most sense. Not only that, it's just so logical. For me it's absolute truth. I think that when we teach people about the way their minds work and when we teach them about thought as the creator of their experience - as the source of their experience - in my head, that's absolute truth. In my mind it's the only ethical thing I can do. It's beyond a nice thing. For me to do something different would be dishonest. The caveats, the pitfalls: I agree with Mark that what we say gets misconstrued and I think that what happens for some people, probably the worst thing that could happen, is that they have a tendency to want to get off their medications before they're ready to. People do that. They've think that because they've gotten the nice ideas in their head about what HR is, they jump off their medications right away, and it's too early for them. Not that they couldn't be off their medication after a period of time, or be at a reduced level, but they want to be off it now. They try to rush it. That's probably the biggest problem. Y: I think it needs to be addressed that some people may need to be on medications permanently. Nobody here is saying that there isn't a vital, an absolute necessary role for medications. Because there is. Link to: www.easenonprofit.org H: Why has CD been seen as chronic? Y: I don't think there's any question that it can be chronic. We wouldn't say that it can't be, because most of the people that are coming into extended care are chronic. I think what you may be asking is do we subscribe to a disease model, or a disease concept. I personally do not. Is it life-threatening? Absolutely. Is it progressive? I believe so. The debate will continue for some time as to whether Chem Dep. is a disease. We don't focus a whole lot on that concept. We don't emphasize that. S: I personally don't think it's a disease either. I think that whole disease thing has served it's purpose. It got people to be more sensitive to the problems people have with chemical use. It took a lot of the shame out of it. And it got insurance companies to pay for treatment. So it served its purpose. It got insurance companies to help people. That was a good thing. I don't subscribe to the disease thing. I think it's habit. I think people are not powerless. It think they have some say in it. As for as it being chronic, I think it can be considered chronic and progressive. Certainly the more you [use], the worse you get. You do more damage to life and to yourself. In that way it's progressive. Do I think that people, once they learn HR can go back to [using]? That debate comes up. There are some folks in HR that think that's possible. In my mind, I don't think it's wise. It's like going back to hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. If it hurts you, why do you want to keep doing it? So we certainly are abstinence-based here. We know...we can't tell somebody whether they can or cannot drink. They're going to make up their own mind about it. We certainly suggest that it's not healthy for them, but we couldn't make them not drink if we wanted to. So, if somebody asked my advice, I'd certainly encourage them to abstain. H: I know what health is. What is realization? S: That's a good question. I talked about this in group today. I just talked to somebody who came to treatment because he had this realization that just hit him when was out drinking, that he was going to die if he kept doing it. He had an insight about it. That changed his life. He decided that he's got to go get some help. So he sought [some funding.] He had an insight about it, he realized that the course he was taking, the path he was walking was deadly for him and he needed to change. What I'm saying is that realization is insights that people have. The one I talked about in group today: I had this beautiful picture in my mind. The initial insight is that it's an inside-out world instead of an outside-in world. That's the initial insight that people need to get, in order for the other insights to happen. For them to be able see things like "mind, thought and consciousness." To be able to see the principles, to have insights about separate realities, or moods and feelings. If you don't get that it is an inside out world, you aren't going to be open for those other insights. The picture I got in my mind as I was sitting in group was: I just got a new computer, and I'm not a computer person. But it's like Windows. When you put that pointer on a button and you open a window which gives you more selections. You select another button and you get another window, then you open another window, then you open another window. And you can keep doing that. But until you open the first window, you don't have access to the other windows. It's the same thing with this [HR]. Once you start to realize that at the core you have innate health, once you start to have that insight about it, then have the ability to have more insights from that insight. And it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper, much like the screens on your computer go. You go further and further and further. Y: Mel uses windows. I liken it to doors. To me it's like opening doors to awareness. As we practice and become habituated to being in our health, understanding our health, we continue to open doors in that awareness. Some people may see it as levels of consciousness. However you care to define it in your own thinking is OK. For me, the picture keeps expanding. The awareness keeps expanding. We get mindful of more and more things. Myself: Before I knew anything about HR, when I was first exposed to it, logically it made perfect sense. But it was the experiencing - taking from the intellectual into a deeper and deeper place inside my own awareness - that allowed the insights to start coming. And that's our natural state. We prevent ourselves from experiencing insights by perpetually keeping our minds so occupied with other things that we can't experience them. When we start to relax and clam down, that's one of the doors. There are many, many doors. H: Would you like to give me Mind Consciousness and Thought in five minutes or less? S: Five minutes or less? The way we look at it, it's the source of all things, universal intelligence. It's the life force that we all have and that everything in nature has. It's where everything comes from and everything goes to. There's a theory, and I think it's more than theory, that all energy that ever will exist, exists now. It always has existed. It just transforms. It doesn't disappear. Same thing with knowledge. All knowledge that will ever exist, exists now. We just haven't realized it yet. We call that mind. The hard thing about mind, of course, is that it's the source of Thought and Consciousness, so it's hard to get your thoughts around it. Because you can't. We don't talk about mind as much as I'd like, because it's formless. Y: It's almost like trying to capture the infinite with the finite. Our minds are not capable of perceiving anything that's infinite. S: It's more of an awareness, or realization, or an understanding that we have that it exists. It manifests itself in many forms. It manifests itself in human beings, in nature. H: Are clients asked to have faith in it until it's realized? Y: No S: I probably do this more often than [Mark does]; I do lectures on the principles, Mind Thought and Consciousness. I have more turnaround, I have to do it more frequently. When I first started doing this, teaching HR, I was terrified to talk about Mind because I didn't think people would understand what I was talking about. I thought it would spook them and scare them. Of course, that was my own thoughts scaring me. My experience is: Of I don't know how many hundreds of guys I've talked to, not one of them didn't have some kind of understanding of what I was talking about. Not one. There's a lot of folks that are atheists, agnostics, and all of that; all those labels that people hang on themselves - but they could understand that there's an energy source, and a life force, and an intelligence in the universe that is beyond their intelligence. Everyone can understand that. And that's enough. And Thought. Most people know about thought. We have all kinds of thoughts. They come and they go, You cannot stop thinking. You must think. You have no choice in that. What we have a choice in is how you think or how you use that thought; what you stay focused on. But men have to think. You have no choice. Otherwise you don't exist, you're dead. Thought is really important because that's how we experience the world. That's how we experience life, via our thinking. And Consciousness is our senses. Without our senses, thoughts would be neutral. They are neutral in and of themselves, but combined with your senses, they become real. That's how we have an experience of life, through our Mind Thought and Consciousness manifesting and coming together to create our experience of life. Those are just the three simple principles. Actually they're all one in the same and they all happen at the same time Y: To get this all clarified, I think Joe Bailey does a really good job in The Serenity Principle. H: Can this be applied without an intervention? In office visits? S: What we teach here is innate and we're not giving anything you don't already have. Some people naturally live HR. We all know people like that. They just have this sense of ease about them. They kind of go through life and things don't stick to them. They glide through life; they always seem to be light-hearted and happy. It's not that they don't have their habits; everybody does. But they don't get caught up in their thinking so much. They aren't out in the future or the past. So, can you do it without intervention? For sure. I think just picking up one of the books...you read it and you're impacted by it. I think your life gets altered automatically. When I read Joe Bailey's book in ‘91...I read it twice. The first time I read it for a paper at school, and the second time I read it for myself, because I was impacted by it. And it did affect my career. I worked at traditional treatment but what I read in that book did impact the work I did. Not only that, it raised a lot of questions. It probably confused me a lot because what I was dong didn't match up with the truth, so to speak, of HR. People get this without needing intervention. Y: What we talk about here is innate. You experienced perfect health at times in your life, as does everybody. For many people, that's confined to a very small period of time in early childhood, until the development of negative patterns. Why this isn't alien to most people, why most people find it so logical, (and a lot of people who really understand HR see it as unadulterated truth), is that they've experienced this before. So it doesn't violate their understanding. Most people have that understanding at some level. When people come through here, it's just a reminder of what they already know. H: What do you see as changed in a successful client? Do you see them as immune? Y: I think people get conscious of changing their habits. They take dysfunctional habits and transform them into healthy habits and ways of thinking. S: I think that people that you would call successful - I think they all are, whether we kick them out or they leave early or whatever - the ones that the world would classify as successful have gotten that initial insight. They're not chasing their happiness externally any longer. Not that they don't slip into that from time to time, but they're looking in, they're looking in the right direction. That's what makes them successful. They've had that initial insight and are less likely to look outside themselves for happiness or serenity. And they're more aware of that, I think...more cognizant of the fact that for forty years of their life they've been looking in the wrong direction. That's all they really need; to see that. And the rest will unfold. H: Do you see clients resisting this or scoffing at it? Y: All the time. S: That's their habit. Y: I would probably say that while their doing that, yes it's their habit, is a reflection of their level of understanding. As people become more receptive and open to truth, their level of understanding starts to elevate. S: We've seen some guys here, and I know other trainers who have seen people, who were the most difficult, who asked the toughest questions, who, as I like to call it, play Trick the Counselor. They really want these bizarre scenarios - the What-if syndrome. And I've seen some of those guys and I know other trainers have seen them actually turn out to be the biggest advocates of HR. Because they've had to come further to see it. Or they had to get more junk out of the way. The truth is the truth. So we really work at trying not to get focused on people's behaviors and what they're saying or the content. You can deny the truth all you want with your mouth and your thinking. But in your heart you know truth, right? If I know something's true I can sit here and argue with you all day long, but in my heart I know it's true. That's kind of what this is. I don't care if they argue about it and they scoff at it. The truth is the truth. They can't deny it. Internally, they can't. Verbally and intellectually, they can. But spiritually they can't. So the more we let go of all that stuff, the better teachers we are. We all know that. Sometimes we get caught up in it. Y: I think that Mel is also saying, if I can just tag this on the end of that, is we're just offering. We're offering information. What we're teaching is nothing new. This is archaic information. It's recently packaged under HR but Mel is right. Truth is truth. We're not here to chastise, or to congratulate people when they reach that insight. We offer it. Whether a person utilizes that offering is up to them. There's the element of free-choice here. Mavis [Karn] used to say, "Try it on for size." See what happens. People are going to find out if it's truth in their own experience. H: Do you think HR is easier to apply with someone's who has not been exposed to traditional treatment? S: That came up in one of my groups. One of the guys had an insight and was not too sure about it. He felt that it's almost like [the two schools] need each other. I don't know what he meant by it, but I think he was on to something. In his mind anyway, he needed to have the twelvestep experiences and have seen that fail, in his mind, in order to be open to this [HR]. I don't necessarily agree with that. I used to think [we'd have more "success" with untreated students], but I don't anymore. I think [the traditional ideas are] the intellectual stuff that's on top. And the truth is the truth. Once they start seeing - it doesn't matter if they've been alive for twenty years or fifty years or what they've been exposed to - doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make the truth any less the truth. Y: Whether a person realizes their own health or not comes from their own thinking. I don't think that what a person has in their memory is the determinant of whether HR makes sense to somebody, or whether it effects change in their life. Just because I know something about hot-air balloons doesn't mean I don't know anything about auto mechanics. It's two different things. I know a lot about the traditional approaches and I don't think it impaired or enhanced - either way - my ability to experience these principles. S: I want to piggyback that a little. You're asking a lot of questions I heard in my group today. It doesn't matter what kind of therapy you go to, what model it is, what kind of counselor it is, what their beliefs are about how to help people get healthy. They all go to the same place. It's all about people wanting to feel better. They want to feel peaceful. They want to feel serene. It all goes to the same place, it's just different methods we're using. We just think this is a lot simpler and easier. It's not as complicated as folks make it. Regardless of what kind of approach you use, there's only two ways to feel better about your past, for example. One is don't think about it. Number two is to see it differently. It doesn't matter what kind of therapy you take. [The therapy] has to either help you see it differently, or stop thinking about it. That's not different than what we're doing here. We're telling you that if you keep looking at your past the way you've been looking at it, you're going to have the same experience. The only way you get to have a different experience from it is by seeing it different. H: Do people want a substitute addiction, a gimmick. Is it unhealthy to adopt a healthy addiction? Y: Is there transference of addiction? Yes. It still comes down to the habits that people form. If you're in your health, you're not going to have that transference. You're going to see that before it happens. Can it happen? Sure, if you're coming from your habit self rather than your innate health. There's an awareness, if you're in your health, that you don't have to worry. Some of the guys scare themselves and I have too, in my history, about "What happens if..," and get busy in [their heads]. Just practicing and developing the habit of being in your health, safeguards you in a lot of ways. You just don't have to get caught up in those thoughts of addiction transference. M: My thought went right away to: Your happiness isn't in doing things. It's not about doing. It's about being, and when you let go of that idea about doing happiness, you're way less likely to transfer to some other kind of addiction. My second thought is that we all have habits that we're addicted to. If you want, I could say I'm addicted to brushing my teeth every morning, but it doesn't cause me a problem in life. A lot of habits are not bad habits. Weight lifting can be a very healthy thing, or a very unhealthy thing. Golf can be a very healthy thing, or a very unhealthy thing. I agree with Mark that if you're coming from a place of health, it's not really a problem. You'll realize that this is out of balance and this is costing me. H: How do you feel about the somewhat new ideas about treating CD and MI diagnoses concurrently? S: It is a relatively new idea. It's the only one that makes any sense, I think. That's the beauty of this model. It treats both plus much, much more. Mark said right at the beginning of this interview, [this model] addresses everything. That's the evidence these guys come to: "Gee, this isn't just about me drinking. This is about the way I act with other people, about parenting, about myself, about how I view the world, has to do with work. It has to do with life." So I think that's one of the cool things about this model. All we have to do is teach the principles. We can let go of the details. It doesn't matter if you were drinking or gambling to us. We recently had a guy come through with an eating disorder. We didn't focus on his eating disorder. We knew about it and kind of talked about it. But he said he gained six pounds and he felt great about gaining weight. It was freaky for him, to feel good about gaining weight. It wasn't his habit. But we didn't focus on that. That just happened. This [model] is true psychology, in my mind. Y: I think that when you start getting a sense - and I like the word balance - in one area of your life, that strongly influences all the areas in your life. When, in my group we talk about, you start using one principle, you start using all the principles because there is such a strong interconnection. We don't need to focus on the specifics, on the details. We don't have to replay the history over and over again. We have an understanding that health manifests in many ways. It touches all areas of your life. I think the only prerequisite is that you list all of your character defects! That was a joke. S: That'll help you. A lot of this model is listening skills. I mean really hearing people, rather than listening to my own thinking. Traditional models would have it that you tell me five sentences and then I have to analyze that because I have to decide what I'm going to do about that while you talk for another fifteen minutes. And I don't hear a damn thing you're saying. I'm busy listening to my own thinking. Making stuff up about you, right? Listening has been something that's been great for me to learn in this model. Genuinely hearing. Bold statement: I think what we're doing here [with this model], the best hope for humanity, to be honest with you. That's a bold, big statement. But I think the HR principles - what we teach - is the best hope not just for our students. A lot of them tell me that too: "This is the most hope I've ever felt in my life. Right now." I think that when people learn HR, one person at a time, that affects the whole world. Sometimes I realize the magnitude of what we're teaching. Y: We have people that are now teaching HR in other areas - other than traditional psychology. I've been in training where the majority of the people were in sales. There are school districts - and I cant think of a better place to have HR taught - that want all of their teaching employees to have some understanding of HR. Children not only teach us, we teach them. Link to: www.easenonprofit.org