Michael Roesslein: And we’re live. We are here with another episode of The Natural Evolution Podcast today. My guest is a friend. These are always really fun episodes to do when I’m friends with somebody off camera as well. Our guest is Jen Bruce. Jen, thanks for doing this.

Jen Bruce:

Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me today.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, it’s going to be fun. Jen is a functional nutritionist whose passion is teaching people how to use nutrition, lifestyle, and alternative medicines to support their recovery from addiction, chronic stress, mood swings, fatigue, chronic pain, medication dependencies, and a lot of other chronic conditions so they can feel good in their own skin and experience true freedom, even when it seems impossible, and I’d say kind of with under the areas you work in especially when it seems impossible. So really interesting convergence of specialties there. And I think today we’re going to focus quite a bit on the addiction piece, but not necessarily what people might think regarding traditional addiction recovery and where holes are and where people struggle. And frankly, why is it so often unsuccessful I think is another topic we could bring up.

So I’m curious. I haven’t run into very many people in doing this for quite a while now who work in that space of like nutrition, lifestyle, and addiction recovery as kind of a specialty. I’m curious if you’d like to share a little bit about how you wound up there.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, really, it was informed by my own experience and my 17 year journey through my own addiction to, primarily, alcohol. When I got into recovery, when I had my first drink like 11 years ago, what I learned early on in my recovery was that the addiction… And I like to use a broader term of this in today’s world and in the Western and in the culture too. Just anything that’s like taking us away from our true self that we continue to do, regardless of the fact that it brings negative consequences into our life. And so that can be substance use disorder, it can be relationships, shopping, work, like all kinds of things. But in my case, it was with alcohol primarily. But then I came to realize that that’s not really the issue, that’s the medication or the solution to the issue.

And what had carried with me since I was a young girl and what was still remaining after I was able to learn how to live my life without turning to drugs and alcohol for relief was that the anxiety, the depression, issues with immunity like chronic health issues, chronic pain, those kinds of things were like still lingering. And when I first got into recovery, I went through the traditional route, which was the 12-step fellowship. Back then, there wasn’t a lot else available. There wasn’t a lot of resources online like they are today. But I realized early on that there’s going to be more healing needed than just working on my mind. I committed myself to the 12-step process and it was wonderful and it saved my life, but I was one of the many people that found that, not to disregard the beautiful progress I made there, that I needed like 24 steps, right?

My first mentor had worked in the field for 35 years. She’d been in recovery for 36 years. She ran a sober living house for women out of her house in LA for 31 years. And the first thing she started to teach me about besides the work we were doing in 12-step was the importance that nutrition and self care and a holistic approach to healing my health were going to play if I was going to change the way I feel effectively so that I don’t need to change the way I feel anymore, which is what I define as a sustainable long term recovery.

Michael Roesslein:

Okay. So like many in this field or fields that we cover, it’s from personal experience borne, a career and a trajectory of wanting to help others with what you learned. And there’s a few points in there I think, is one, sometimes when people hear the word addiction, I like that you pointed out that that can mean a lot of things. I think a lot of people listening to this or listening to anything that where addiction comes up, immediately, they’re like, “Ah, this isn’t for me. I don’t have an addiction. Or I don’t whatever,” because they’re not an alcoholic, they’re not shooting up, they’re not doing things that they view as “Those are addicts”, yet they have like 106 pairs of shoes in their fridge, or in their closet. Not on their fridge. That’d be a whole different disorder. In their closet. Or every day they binge out on Netflix for seven straight hours. Or every day they, I think… Or food, or every time they get upset, they eat a pint of ice cream or things like that.

I think that so much when it comes to addiction in the broader sense of the term flies under the radar. People don’t really view it as like a problem or something that even needs a solution or doesn’t apply to them, like, “I don’t do anything like that.” And I think mentioning shopping and unhealthy relationships, people addicted to drama, to stress, to all these things that the same root causes and healing routes tend to apply to all, whether somebody is doing retail therapy or they’re drinking or using substances or people or whatever it is. So I just think that’s really important to point out, because I used to be one of those people that was like, “I’m not an addict.” And then once I started to learn more about it, I was like, “Oh, actually I use this thing and this thing and this thing so that I don’t feel those things.”

And you mentioned that as well that you had great progress from the 12-step program. And our intention here is not to throw shade at any program or any organization out there, anybody who’s getting help in any sort of way, but I’m pretty familiar with 12-step program. One of my best friends is seven years clean through the program. I think the 12-steps are great. And I like how you mentioned, “I learned I think there should be 24-steps” because in my understanding of the 12-step program, there’s not much discussion around nutrition or lifestyle or the way people live their lives, or even around root causes of addiction of like, “How did I end up using this thing or doing this thing or why was I doing it?” It’s a lot more about like, “How do I stop this behavior?” And that’s a great triage, like that’s a step that has to happen. But I agree that I think there’s more steps I think involved.

So you mentioned root causes and I think you mentioned some things mind wise, but you work in a physical way with different types of root causes that people might not realize. I think we could talk about trauma and how trauma leads to addiction. And I think there’s more discussion around that now, which is great and it’s awesome to see that really going. But I think things like nutrient deficiencies and vitamin deficiencies and sleep and poor lifestyle habits and things like that don’t get mentioned. And so, in that area of nutrition and nutrients and vitamins and lifestyle, I guess, how does that come into play as a root of addiction? And then where does it come into play in the healing and recovery side?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah, sure. So the way that I’ve come to work with people and that I’ve been able to pretty radically heal myself is to understand even in the progressive movement now where we’re starting to hear more discussion on trauma and emotional healing and these kinds of things in addition to what we’ve been doing in the past, which is just working on the mindset, changing the behaviors, is dropping down even deeper to what these things mean and recognizing that they’re all connected, and the root is chronic stress. It is trauma. Trauma is a chronic stress. And just recognizing that it’s not we need to heal the trauma and improve our lifestyle and our nutrition, it’s like when we’ve been traumatized, if somebody has this even medical label of PTSD, it’s not an emotional wound alone. It’s actually a physical wound too.

This chronic stress drains the vitality and can keep our immune system not functioning properly. It strips the vital nutrients. It’s like if we’re in a car and our foot’s on the gas pedal and we’re constantly going 100 miles an hour, it’s really similar to what the body’s going through when we’re living with chronic unresolved trauma or chronic stress in the present moment, whatever it might be. And these things have to get worked out in layers because generally, if there’s been intergenerational trauma, it’s going to drive our behavior. If we’ve had unhealed trauma in our own life, it’s going to continue to replay itself in our daily life until we’ve resolved it. So the mindset work, the deep emotional healing, the spiritual healing that we do, has to coincide with understanding the fact that these issues affect the body too.

And we can look at brain scans and see that the brain actually becomes altered and damaged after these experiences in one’s life. So I like to equate it to somebody got a real thrill and like to jump off building tops and cities. And finally one day fell down and didn’t get to the other side of the building that they were jumping from and broke all their bones. If they just stopped jumping off the top of buildings, they’re not going to get re-injured perhaps, but that person’s also going to need to go to the hospital and get their physical body repaired. So in a similar way, if we’re not bringing in the recognition of the way that this chronic stress damages our bodies, our brains, our nervous systems, our gut health, our immunity, we’re never totally going to get to the other side of this because our body and our brain needs to be functioning and be healthy in order to have a healthy mind. You know? So it’s really difficult to fix the mind with the mind, especially if the brain isn’t online.

And so getting back to the trauma piece too and the addiction thing, most of us are escaping daily in some way to soothe that unhealed chronic stress that we’re living with in today’s world and especially in the American culture. And whatever we’re doing to distract ourselves is taking us away from living our life and being in the present moment, which is the only way that we can do that, right? So there’s a lot of talk about substance use disorder and addiction and, “Oh, I’m not that,” but in some ways, people that have gotten to the point where it’s so painful that they have to turn to substances, they’re almost at an advantage because that’s when it gets so bad that you’re forced to start doing the things that you need to actually change to get the life that everybody wants, but very few people are motivated to do the work that it takes to get there.

Michael Roesslein:

Sorry. I was muted. I like the analogy. I’m sharing the house with family right now so I have to strategically do the mute. But I like the analogy with the broken bones. It’s like a lot of damage happens to the brain, to the body. We get nutrient deficiencies, you get the gut. I’m sure there’s damage especially with alcohol. And the nervous system, it’s like removing the substance. Stops putting gasoline on the fire, but it doesn’t put out the fire, it doesn’t repair the damage of the fire. And I would guess that part of the reason why, and you probably know better stats than I do, but for more conventional recovery like if somebody goes into rehab or they enter some in-patient type of program or whatever, the success rates for recovery especially when it comes to drugs and alcohol, I think we’re seeing around-

Jen Bruce:

We’re having an earthquake. Just a second.

Michael Roesslein:

Oh, wow.

Jen Bruce:

I’m in California.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, that was a significant…

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. Hold on a sec. I’m sorry. Whoo!

Michael Roesslein:

Our first ever live podcast earthquake. Are you all right?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah, I’m fine. It happens here.

Michael Roesslein:

I could hear that.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. The whole house just… I had to make sure my computer didn’t fall over.

Michael Roesslein:

That was a real one.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. All right.

Michael Roesslein:

Cool.

Jen Bruce:

I think we’re all good.

Michael Roesslein:

Awesome, bonus. Okay. Wow. Wild. Do you need to take care of anything? You need to contact someone or anything?

Jen Bruce:

No, I’m good.

Michael Roesslein:

Okay, cool.

Jen Bruce:

I’m good.

Michael Roesslein:

Wild. Train of thought. Statistics, recovery rates, really low success rates. People going into treatment programs or outpatient or inpatient or rehab, like really, really low success rates. How much of that do you think has to do with the fact that like, “Okay, these people did stop taking these things, but they’re deficient across the board. They have this, this damage, this damage”? I can’t speak from experience. I used to consume a lot of things, but I never would’ve considered myself an alcoholic or an addict. I’ve never been through withdrawal. I’ve never gone through that process of removing that thing and then dealing with how I felt afterwards, but I’m guessing that part of the reason people feel so terrible when they first come off of substances is because of those deficiencies, that damage, right? So then it’s way harder to stay clean, stay sober, or stop doing the thing that you’re trying to do because you feel awful, you can’t focus, your brain’s not there, you’re depressed, you’re anxious, right?

Jen Bruce:

Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, statistically, we see… And I always like to say in the addiction treatment industry the statistics are probably a little bit vague. But what we do see generally… And this has been my personal experience too because I’ve gone all around the world. I’ve been deep in the yoga recovery community, the nutrition for recovery. I’ve been around all the recovery communities at one point or another in a different locations in the world. I’ve worked with clients going through traditional treatments like the Betty Ford Clinic. And many of my clients go down to Mexico to utilize ibogaine, which I’m a huge proponent for as well. But I see the success rates about the same across the board no matter what, and it’s about an 8% success rate, right?

And so in my niche world of like nutrition for addiction recovery, there are I know a few people that run holistically-based treatment centers for addiction and also mental health recovery because it all kind of comes together. But in those programs where they’re using the things that already work for people from traditional recovery programs. And then in addition to those things and in addition to the mental, spiritual, emotional healing that we must go through with, they also bring in things like nutrition specifically for healing the brain and body from whatever the people have been through. And in those treatment centers, and this is two years post-treatment where they check back in with people, it’s like an 80% success rate, right?

And so it’s not that like any one way is superior over the other. And like I said, it’s so important to incorporate all of these things together in addiction or mental health because it’s physical, it’s mental, it’s spiritual. It’s that when we bring in the physical side of the piece then we’re creating a much more stable foundation. I like to use the analogy of like a three legged stool. So the recovery process, whether it’s addiction, whether it’s trauma, whether it’s mental health, it has to be… A lot of people take the spiritual route, right? And we can do it that way. We see people doing it that way, but it’s like the relapse rates are really high. It’s not so much that that route doesn’t work, it’s just not meant to be a standalone process, right?

Or if we bring in the psychosocial aspect of it and even work on those tools, then we have two legs on the stool. So like then we get a little bit more stable. But if the wind blows, which life always does like we just saw a few minutes ago, it’s still pretty easy to get knocked off on your stool. And so when we’re following recovery pass that just like have one or two legs on the stool, it’s going to be like we have to be much more disciplined. There’s a level of freedom we don’t have in our life. Whatever we’re doing, we have to do it very regularly. And when stress arises, we’re much more likely to kind of get tipped over.

Now, when we bring in the third leg, the physical leg, and put that on the bottom of the stool with the other two, then we’ve got a really strong foundation that is pretty unshakeable and recovery becomes much more natural and much more graceful. One of my teachers would always say that the key here to sustainable recovery is to build up our inner resources so that we can meet demands of our exterior life. And there’s a gap there. For anybody that’s been through like a traumatic event in their life or has struggled with something long term like addiction, our reserves are going to be low. We’ve been burning through them. And many of us may have been born that way because we were born to stressed mothers who have been born to stressed mothers and on and on. So filling that gap with our resources, then life can happen and we can be okay no matter what.

Michael Roesslein:

The stool analogy is perfect. I was starting to try to think up an analogy and then you just drop the stool and I’m like, “I can just stop trying to figure that out. Jen already has it.” But yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You mentioned that you can do scans on the brain and you can tell the brain of an addict or an alcoholic, or different types of addictions do different things to the brain. I’m guessing there’s specific nutrients too that oftentimes people… I don’t know if that would be substance specific or substances as a whole, but I’m wondering if you can just share a couple common nutrient deficiencies that you know for sure. Like if somebody’s fresh into recovery and they’ve been struggling for a long time, odds are, they might be deficient in X.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. Yeah. And this is a great biohack that I use with people and it’s used with nutrition for addiction recovery, and it’s called amino acid therapy. And so, we can look and we now know through genetic testing and by the many decades of studies done by doctors like Dr. Kenneth Blum and others that there’s 12 genes associated with addiction. And again, genetics come into play, but we know that genetics are just a response to our perception of our environment now and the outcomes can be changed. But when we see people that have addictive tendencies… And this is a spectrum disorder too. It’s not like you have the diagnosis of addiction, like kind of Blum coined the term reward deficiency syndrome, and there’s four quadrants. And within each quadrant, there’s two rows of symptoms. And only 1/2 of one of the four quadrants, so 1/8 of the syndrome is substance use disorder.

We can see depression. Different kinds of depression too, like depression… You go into your Western doctor and they just have you fill out and see if you’re depressed or not. There’s different kinds. There’s apathetic depression where we have no motivation, where everything’s flat, we just don’t care, versus… And that would be like a dopamine deficiency. With dopamine deficiency and the low motivation, we’ll see things like ADD, ADHD type tendencies. And then we’ll see a tendency towards addiction to stimulants whether it’s coffee or cocaine or methamphetamines. And unfortunately at younger ages, when children get diagnosed with these types of things, they get put on medications that are stimulants, so that raises the likelihood that they’ll grow up I think by about 75% to become drug addicts. So that’s dopamine.

We can look in to see like depression that’s more irritable and angry and obsessive and things like nightmares and phobias and cravings for carbs and sugar and alcohol. And also, people that might respond well for a while to antidepressants, that would be indicative that they’re low and serotonin. And so with dopamine, we can bring in a nutrient like tyrosine, which is an amino acid. With serotonin, we can bring in a nutrient that’s also an amino acid called tryptophan or 5-HTP. Many people probably know about that. With addiction and the reward deficiency syndrome, we can look and see with the people that have endorphins have a tendency to be highly emotionally and physically sensitive to pain. We’ll see even in younger kids like tendency towards self harm because that releases endorphins.

We’ll see tendency for food addiction, but in the form of bread and dairy products, because gluten and dairy actually turn into morphine-like substances in the brain and can trigger the opiate cycle for people. And then these people will tend to go for numbing substances like opiates and sedatives. And so with endorphins, we’d bring in like a DPA, D-phenylalanine, which is actually a synthetic amino acid that was created quite a while ago to bring in to help reduce chronic pain patients needs for opiates. And that can work wonders, right?

And then GABA is another one that’s associated. And this is all the dopamine reward cascade in the brain. Low dopamine is kind of like the broader thing that we see associated with addiction because that’s the pleasure, getting a sense of reward out of things in life. So reward deficiency would be doing sometimes very extreme things in one’s life in order to balance that out because we need that sense of reward and pleasure in our life so badly. But another one involved on that pathway is GABA. People that are deficient in GABA tend to be overwhelmed, really stressed out, really tensed. And they will turn to things like sedatives, barbiturates. These are the people that we see going to the doctor with “anxiety disorder” and getting prescribed things like Xanax. And we can bring in the… The nutrient for that is actually GABA or L-theanine. And those both target the GABA receptor in the brain.

There’s a little bit of controversy around whether or not GABA should be working though, because theoretically, it’s too large of a molecule to pass through the blood brain barrier. So for those that want to go with that school of thought, then L-theanine is a really good nutrient to bring in. And then importantly, to know when we’re using amino acids to correct the brain chemistry, it can do wonders. Some people will feel better in 20 minutes. And most people report unbelievable improvements after a few weeks in a few months. But when we’re looking at bringing these in, it’s important to know that these nutrients don’t work on their own. They require co-factors, which are just other nutrients that work with them to create the end product which are neurotransmitter. So it’s also really important to take a high quality full spectrum multivitamin mineral supplement, because chances are you’re depleted in those two.

So the amino acids come from protein. They’re the most broken down end result of digesting our protein in our body. And so we can get them from the diet from… Animal protein is the best source with therapeutic levels for amino acids. But unfortunately, when most people have been through long term chronic stress, the digestive system isn’t working properly. So this is a beautiful way to bring these nutrients in so they can be like bio available to the brain right away. And then when we use them, it can help curb a lot of the cravings, the negative behavioral patterns, and even boost our mood because that’s the big obstacle I see for most people that feel these ways to take the first steps that even doing what they need to do to heal themselves. So amino acids would probably be my first go-to for people.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. Thank you. That was really thorough. I read a book on that. I don’t know, a long time ago, right when I first started in this field. And then I kind of winged it. I didn’t have anybody to help me or guide me or test me or anything. And I was like, “Oh, I’m that. But I’m that. But I’m that. But I’m also this and I’m this.” So I was taking piles of amino acids. And I think the work you do in working with people to kind of help them figure out, “Okay, I might benefit from this or maybe in this dose or help people” I think it’s important to have guidance. And these can be pretty easy, quick things you can try. Amino acids aren’t very expensive. I think the DPA was a little expensive when I was trying because it’s the synthetic one, but most of that stuff is pretty cheap.

And I take L-theanine. That’s also in green tea for people who are tea drinkers. It blunts the jitteriness of caffeine, which I like to drink tea. And I like to not be a jittery mess. So I take theanine in the morning. And it helps with that. So that’s a great… These things are… It’s not a mystery. These symptoms can often be this deficiency. And this neurotransmitter and these amino acids can go there. So I think that that’s probably not something that’s taught to people fresh out of into recovery in a 12-step program and going through any sort of treatment in a lot of places. So I would guess when you mention people can have reactions in 20 minutes or a couple weeks, that it makes it much easier to stay on course and do what you’re doing. If you don’t feel apathetic, if you don’t feel overwhelmed, if you don’t feel as anxious, your baseline, like you said with the stool, is much more stable and this can be really helpful.

So I guess that covers my initial… I wanted to talk about the different aspects of recovery, what brought you into recovery. And then I guess this is missing, this type of biochemical physical. You mentioned physical. Does exercise come in somewhere here? I didn’t even think about that, but I would guess that that’s a pretty important part of a recovery program.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. Yeah, it totally is. And so even we keep shrinking down what we’re talking about, but it’s so important for us to not just get on… I’ve learned on my own healing journey. I was always looking for the next thing I was going to discover and that was going to fix me, right? And then I got wise and realized that it’s not ever going to be one thing. It needs to be all of it, and different things are going to serve me at different times. And so when we’re coming in, and I just want to get back to you saying that you tried amino acid therapy and it was so many supplements and all this stuff. That is really common feedback. That was my experience too.

So I love to use those as a biohack to be able to get over that first waves as we’re swimming out to calm our seas. And it’s the fuel that we need to do and show up to our recovery meetings or our therapists or our family or whatever it is so that we can actually absorb and digest and get the nutrients out of the work we’re doing on the emotional level. But then the nutrients aren’t the only thing that produce these chemicals in our body, right? So exercise is awesome for endorphins. Another thing you’ll see with people that tend towards low endorphins is getting addicted to exercise, which can be a thing too, right? There’s a tendency after we’ve done nothing for so long. And if we’ve had depression, if we’ve had anxiety, if we’ve had addiction issues, it’s very unlikely that we’ve had a good regular exercise routine.

So what I experience myself and what I see so many people doing is trying to jump into all these like fad workouts and CrossFit and all this stuff and all the benefits. And this can be the same thing with the diet too, right? And so what I’ve learned is that we really need to meet ourselves where we’re at. Healing is better than trying to reach the ideal. You don’t want to take somebody that was on the couch being a potato for many, many years and start training for a marathon right away. That person’s going to need to start walking around the block first and getting their body moving.

And so, at the beginning of the recovery journey, and especially when we’re healing from trauma and stress, I think it’s vital. Also, keeping in mind that time is usually an issue for people, money, so if we can knock some birds out with one stone, it’s great. So like mind, body practices, gentle movement like yoga or something else like that is amazing. Because we don’t want to overexercise at the beginning because what’s also going to be happening… And one of the reasons that we see dopamine deficiency is it relates back to chronic stress or unhealed trauma, is that our adrenal glands have been overworked for so long. And there’s a condition called adrenal fatigue. And it’s basically our adrenals aren’t outputting enough cortisol and adrenaline anymore, which we need. I mean, that serves… We’ve had such a negative viewpoint on these stress hormones in our society because we’re under so much stress, but they actually animates us, give us energy, give us focus. We should wake up refreshed in the morning.

And so when we start to go and over push ourself with exercise, we can continue to do the damage that’s been done from stress. Because when we talk about stress… And that’s really where my work comes in, it’s to open up a deeper, broader understanding of what stress is. It’s not just a bad relationship with a spouse or a job that we don’t like or whatever it might be or something that happened to us in our childhood that we haven’t worked through yet. I mean, stress on our body can be that we’re working out too hard every single day at the gym. So it’s really important for us to check in with ourselves and see what’s actually feels good. We shouldn’t feel destroyed or exhausted after a workout, and then we build up. What’s going to be good for somebody right now at the beginning of their healing journey is going to be really different six years later. So movement every day, super important, but pushing ourselves, maybe giving us the opposite results of what we’re going for.

Michael Roesslein:

Gotcha. I saw that when I used to work with health clients. And a lot of them, I got a disproportion. I don’t know how, but when I first started… After I finished the FDN training and started to run some labs, I would get people who wanted to run these hormone panels and the stress and all this stuff. I was getting a disproportionate amount of women who ran marathons and distance runners, endurance athletes, and then figure competition type models to get super, super shredded folks.

My first recommendation to both of them, which lost me a lot of clients, was your hormones are destroyed because of the thing that you do all the time. And whether it’s in the gym five hours a day or running 20 miles a day or whatever, my recommendation started like, “I’ll work with you. The first thing is that you’re going to have to dial back your training because we’re not going to be able to get anywhere if this is at this level.” And they were like, “Well, my other stress levels are low.” And I’m like, “I don’t think that your grasping the amount of stress it puts on the body to run for three hours.”

So I’ve seen that too in the world of addiction too, like people, “Oh, I got clean.” And I’m like, “Oh cool. What are you doing now?” And they’re like, “I run marathons.” And I’m like, “Oh. Okay, cool.” Now, the marathon obviously isn’t going to be as destructive to certain aspects of their lives, like the running, as whatever they were doing before. And I’ve seen the replacement of one with the other, because it’s the neurotransmitters. They’re looking for the same kick, the same feeling.

I almost raise my hand when you’re talking about the dopamine. Learning about low dopamine has really helped me, like little tips about like if you have a bunch of things to do in a day, make a super simple little boxes you get to check off instead of checking boxes or crossing things off. They’re like little tiny rewards throughout the day for you, dopamine deficient friends out there. That’s been a big changer for me.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. Yeah. Dopamine deficiencies actually served us at one point, like with the genetic testing that I work with sometimes with people. And also the chart that I use with people to fill out for the amino acid therapy, it’s just really interesting for people to get to see how they’re made, because the main gene that’s associated with dopamine deficiency, they call the warrior gene because it was people who used to be the hunters and gatherers and tribes. And that inborn… Like I have it. And what it feels like is that I burn through dopamine super fast, right? It’s like that girl that can have six cheeseburgers and stay super thin because our metabolism’s just crazy. Those of us who struggle with the dopamine balance thing, it’s really that we just have high metabolism. We metabolized dopamine faster than other people, which would’ve made us the star hunters and gatherers back where our people came from. And I’ve gone back my family lineage and they were like-

Michael Roesslein:

Just hold on, I want to pause that. That would cause a feeling that’s good that you get from catching the thing, or finding the thing, or killing the thing or whatever it is. It would cause that high to go way faster. So then you’d be out hunting again or finding more things, right?

Jen Bruce:

Exactly.

Michael Roesslein:

So that’s why I used to jump off planes all the time.

Jen Bruce:

Exactly. And so when we’re talking about addiction and these distractions from life being a broader thing in today’s world, we can really look at how our consumer cultures designed to catch that aspect of ourselves and become distracted all the time. Exactly. The phone.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jen Bruce:

And the screen and social media. And these-

Michael Roesslein:

The dings, the buzzes, the notifications, the messages, the dings, every single one of those is designed by people who understand these things very well, right? To give you the little ping, “Oh, I feel awesome. I just got a thing,” right?

Jen Bruce:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Roesslein:

To keep you attached to this.

Jen Bruce:

Exactly.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah.

Jen Bruce:

So this is how this spiraled, and addiction starts and ends too. And so yeah. Is it switching out to running marathons better than having a heroin addiction? Absolutely. But I really feel like most people that are still in these cycles don’t even understand. So when we get a better understanding of how we’re wired and why we are the way we are and recognizing that it was actually a thing that could serve us and that one of the main laws in physics is that we can’t create or destroy anything in a close unit, which goes all the way from ourselves, all the way up to the universe, is like rather than trying to beat this thing and stop it, we need to say, “Hey, this is how I’m wired. How can I transcend this and transform this into something that’s going to serve me rather than tear me down?”

Once I understood that I metabolized dopamine like that, I can base my lifestyle in a way, understanding that how I am and allow that to serve me rather than to constantly be bringing me back where I never wanted to go back to again. You know? So this understanding is huge.

Michael Roesslein:

It allows you to have more compassion for yourself, too.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Understanding a lot of these things really helps me. And even bringing it to the addiction itself, I think we tend to… I’ll just speak for myself. I don’t want to speak for other people. But when I notice that I have an addiction or a repetitive pattern or some sort of thing I want to not do, or that I view as bad or whatever, there’s an immediate jump to vilify that, like, “I’m shitty because I do this thing” or “I’m bad because I do that.” There’s this jump to that. And at one point, doing that thing probably saved your life or helped you be able to survive how you felt or the conditions you were in or where you were. And the part of you that wants to still do that thing is still trying to do that. It’s still trying to help you. It’s still trying to, like, “Oh, that’s really painful. Let’s not feel that. Let’s do this. You remember this? We like this thing. Let’s do this thing over here. This is safer. Let’s keep you from that.”

And realizing that in the work that I’ve done in GABAs program and elsewhere, I think that for me, making changes and shifts away from certain behaviors or patterns becomes easier and more successful when it’s not adversarial. It’s not like, “That’s the bad me. This is the good me” or “That’s the devil. This is the… whatever, or the demons.” I don’t like when people use those words, “Oh, that’s my demons.” It’s like your demons were like, they had your back when nobody else did. And so I think reframing that. Have you experienced that? Or could you speak to that angle at all?

Jen Bruce:

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s been my experience and the requirement for forgiving myself. It’s crazy to come out of destructive patterns and realize that you were doing certain things. But at every point, it was serving me. And when we have these patterns arise, it’s even in our physical body it’s not that our body’s sick or broken like we’ve been led to believe. It’s compensating. Our body’s perfect. And it’s got innate wisdom that will never understand. So yeah, I totally relate to that.

And even on today’s plan where I’m doing a lot better, but if I start to feel off or there’s some depression that comes in or something, it’s like, “What is my body trying to tell me right now? What do I need to do to take care of myself?” And that’s the path. I don’t think that we ever even get out of this completely. I think it’s just having a greater level of an awareness, viewing it in a way that it’s not a bad thing and we’re not being hard on ourselves because shame is like the most toxic poison and the biggest obstacle that we will ever have on our healing journey no matter what we’re healing from. Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. That was missing for me for a long time. And the shame is what was driving the behaviors. So that can be its own driver in avoidance of shame. That would be a whole another podcast.

What I wanted to touch on before we go, we don’t have much time left, is that I want to get a little controversial. You work a little bit outside of the box even when it comes to more progressive recovery approaches. And that is the involvement or integration work around plant medicine and psychedelics when it comes to recovery. Some people might be like, “Wait a minute. Are you talking about doing drugs to stop doing drugs?” Is there a conflict there, a contradiction?

A lot of people don’t know this, and I’m sure this story better than I do but I know this to be true, is that the original 12-step program involved LSD. And that bill, the founder, utilized LSD in his recovery. And then originally it was going to be part of the situation to my understanding. And it was removed. And they went more of a teetotaler type of direction. But I can speak and I’m willing to speak from experience and of experience of a lot of people in my lives that psychedelics and plant medicines have helped the process a lot when it comes to shifting behaviors and shifting addictions and patterns and recovery from things like trauma and from just these loops and patterns. And so, I guess I’m just going to leave it open ended and see what you have to say back to that and not ask a specific question, but what have you got to say around that?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. Michael, thank you. My favorite topic. So yeah, my 13th step was yoga. My 14th step was nutrition. My 15th step was ibogaine.

Michael Roesslein:

What’s ibogaine?

Jen Bruce:

It’s a plant medicine that I’ll get into it a little bit. It’s the most powerful addiction interrupter on the planet that I know of. And I’ve really gone around the world and checked almost everything out. So first of all, what you were saying about psychedelics and the history of AA is correct. And you can actually read about it in The Big Book in Bill Wilson’s story. And it starts in Towns Hospital in New York City in the 1930s where he went through four entheogenic treatments called the belladonna treatment. And it’s in The Big Book. I taught Big Book’s workshop for six years to many hundreds of people. And so he went through the belladonna treatment several times, which was a entheogenic psychedelic therapy that was highly detoxifying as well as very powerful psychedelic. I think four times. And then the fourth time he was brought in a spiritual aspect that’s now AA and has been able to stay recovered.

It was so successful that at the time there was a physician that ran the “drunk ward” in the depression area at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which is very famous psychiatric ward. This position was also Theodore Roosevelt’s personal position at the time. They were seeing such great success rates at Towns Hospital with this belladonna treatment which is similar to Ibogaine which I’ll talk a little bit more about in a minute here, that they were running this belladonna treatment at Bellevue hospital for over 20 years. They didn’t understand the continuum of care, the holistic model of addiction recovery back then. They were looking for a “cure” and it wasn’t curing addiction, which we don’t cure chronic conditions typically. So they kind of threw the baby out with the bath water.

Fast forward, Bill Wilson writes The Big Book in 1939 and goes on to develop this beautiful system that we still have today all over the world. And in the 1950s, he went in to do research for LSD for 10 years because his depression was so bad. And so many people in the fellowship were struggling and chronic relapsing. And so after about 10 years of research in the field and being… I think Aldous Huxley was quoted as calling Bill Wilson and the greatest social architect of the 20th century. He brought it back to the board at AA and they voted it out as being something that would be part of the program for people who were still struggling. He also went on to do 13 years of research with nutrition and tried to get that into the 12-step program as well, which was also voted out, because back then they didn’t understand the role of nutrients in physical health.

So my story is that I was in the traditional recovery model. I did leaps and bounds of improvement, but like I said, I still had some depression. Anxiety had gotten better, but it was still there. And then like you’d mentioned a little while ago, like switching the opiates out for marathon running, I switched my addiction out for becoming a drop dead workaholic. I had a small girl. I was running myself ragged. And to talk about adrenal fatigue and the coffees at all the meetings, but I needed like eight or nine cups of coffee a day just to get by.

Michael Roesslein:

You kind of feel attacked right now.

Jen Bruce:

[inaudible 00:45:51].

Michael Roesslein:

I can relate.

Jen Bruce:

And I’d also been diagnosed with PTSD and all the things. And so, the guidance of my first sponsor was really hesitant towards medication. I don’t have any opinion either way, but I chose to not go that route and go more the spiritual route. But I was also brought to my knees because I wasn’t functioning and I couldn’t find the tools I needed. I’d been to India three times, really deep yoga practice. I was doing nutrition. I was therapy, all the things, and I still was suffering. And so I’d seen a few of my friends go down to some clinics in Mexico that had been high functioning opiate addicts, go down and get this treatment and come back in two weeks and be completely different people. Completely different people.

And so it was my last ditch effort after following six years of abstinence based sobriety before I went to my psychiatrist to get on medications so I could just function because I had a two year old girl to take care of. I went down there and I took the treatment. And it brought me through my entire life. It showed me where my original injuries had happened on the emotional level. It showed me-

Michael Roesslein:

This was the ibogaine?

Jen Bruce:

The ibogaine, yeah. It just brought me through. So I had all these visions. And then what I also did because I asked, “Show me why I wasn’t feeling good.” And I’d had this voice in my head that so much of it was actually in our bodies, which weren’t condition to not believe. And it went through and it cleaned my gut out. It cleaned my liver out. It cleaned my heart, brain out. It cleaned my brain out. And after my treatment, I came out of it.

And I realized, for the very first time in my life that I felt good in my own skin, and that my recovery of six years comparing to how I’d felt at this time versus like, “Oh, well I’m doing much better than I was back then,” I was setting an incredibly low bar for myself because I was comparing how I was feeling now to like almost dead. And I had been born this way. And it showed me that I was born with intergenerational trauma and that the post traumatic stress had been carried from mother to unborn fetus for generations in my family. And that that’s the work I really needed to do to heal.

I’d never been in my body where I didn’t have any anxiety, I had no pain, nothing. And so at that point, I came home and decided to dissolve my former career, which was very lucrative and I was very successful in. And I went back to school to do all the things I do with people now. So I’d seen miracles with psychedelics for addiction recovery and trauma recovery where I have not been able to see anything else even scrape the surface. So yeah, I’m a huge advocate for-

Michael Roesslein:

So if people want to… You mentioned that ibogaine and there’s also the iboga, the plant where it comes from. Can you just give us… That’s the medicine she’s talking about specifically. When we’re saying psychedelics, we’re talking about blanket statement about a bunch of different things, but specifically your experiences with the ibogaine. Can you just give a brief intro to what that is? And then maybe a little bit… Now, obviously we’re talking about subjects here that are not something you can just Google and go do, nor would we recommend that necessarily. But if somebody is interested, so I guess what is it? And if somebody’s interested in learning about it, is there a reputable source of information anywhere that you would recommend they check out?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. So yeah, we’ll start with iboga, ibogaine is the extract. And also I want to say that I’ve seen benefit with many different medicines. This just seems to be the one that’s particularly effective for mental health, unhealed trauma, and addiction. But it’s a root of a bark and it comes from a country named Gabon, Africa, from the Bwiti and Pygmy people. Gabon is like the spiritual center. It’s kind of the Tibet of Africa from what I understand. And the Bwiti aren’t necessarily a tribe. It’s like Yogi. It’s like a lineage. And they’ve been taking this bark as in initiatory rights, a passage kind of thing for thousands of years. Many people believe that it’s what kind of aided us from moving from being our ape-like cousins to humans and that the consciousness of humanity actually came from this plant. This plant is from where humans began. It’s very deep.

So that’s been used over there for everything for thousands of years. Howard Lotsof discovered it as a recreational “dose” in the 1970s. He was, I believe 18, had an opiate addiction and found out after one night of taking the substance that he had no withdrawals and that he was felt in fact reset to his pre-addictive state. So that means that not only is the cravings for the substance gone, the withdrawal symptoms of not taking it were not there. But then all of the things that we’ve been talking about today that lead people to use substances in the first place, such as the depression, the anxiety, the carrying of the trauma is also gone. And from there, the medicine ibogaine was produced. The root bark is very bitter and you have to take a lot of it. It’s very unpleasant for most people. So the ibogaine was extracted and you can take it in a pill form. And that’s used in larger doses to bring people through a process that will break their addiction.

Now, that being said, there are contraindications. This isn’t something that you just want to order online and do yourself. There’s clinics with trained medical professionals, integration specialists, all kinds of things that need to be part of the experience. But, unfortunately it’s Schedule-1 in the United States. So we do have clinics in Mexico, Costa Rica, New Zealand. You can look around. But there are quite a few of us that are working on changing that here in the United States.

And then you can also find benefit from ibogaine if you’re not looking for a drug detox or a deep healing from severe trauma. I think a lot of veterans are finding great benefit from ibogaine floods after failure in even working with the Mayo Clinic for over 10 years. But if we’re not coming to it for that, a lot of people are finding benefit from just using the root bark in lower amounts where the risks that may come along with ibogaine aren’t present. It’s not as intensive in experience. And you usually get a week long retreat setting where can have more time to work with the medicine, and it will be a small group of people generally. And also we’re seeing that people are really benefiting from microdosing it, which microdosing means that you’re taking a small enough amount that you’re having a sub perceptual experience, which means you’re not tripping, you’re not high. You’re just getting the benefits of the medicine.

And it’s not just… Another example of what ibogaine is showing promise for iboga, is Parkinson’s disease. They’re microdosing Parkinson’s patients, which is a dopamine. That disease is very much related to dopamine imbalance. And so they’re microdosing people with iboga. And the Parkinson’s is turning around and the symptoms are going away. So there’s a great potential for iboga and ibogaine to also heal chronic disease and chronic illness. It’s just gotten a lot of attention because it’s the only thing that we found that works this well for interrupting people’s addiction. And again, it’s not a cure, it’s an interruption, but it’s the kind of reset that we’ve been talking about that the nutrition can help with too, but it just happens in such a short amount of time that it can really be a life saving thing for many people.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s really, really powerful stuff. And it was one that I have a couple decades of experience in research with psychedelics. And that one had kind of flown under my radar, because it’s not very well known in the states. And I’ve learned a lot about it from you and a couple other people. I guess I want to give a little shout to all the people doing all the work, including you there, and Humboldt for doing the decriminalization movements for entheogenic plants which is now passed in several places I know. I think Seattle, Oakland, California, they’re in Humboldt. I think Detroit, Michigan. I think there’s Grand Rapids or another place in Michigan I think.

So when you see these ballot measures that are going around right now for decriminalizing entheogenic plants or psychedelic plants, supporting those measures is opening the door to these treatments being more available for people. And for more people to have these opportunities, for treatment centers to be able to open, or anything around removing barriers and bringing things to be more accessible to people, in this regard, I think is huge and not making criminals out of people who are trying to access something that could save their lives. And so if you see those measures, even if you don’t feel like getting involved, please vote for them and support it because there’s a lot of people working really hard to increase access to these things for people that I’ve seen… I know a bunch of people personally in my life whose have been changed by these things. And I’m one of them, like I don’t know if I would be here.

Jen Bruce:

I wouldn’t be.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, I don’t think I will be.

Jen Bruce:

With all the stuff I’ve done, I wouldn’t be the same.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. I don’t know if I’d have made it through the abouts of depression that I dealt with, and so it’s important. And it’s a topic that needs to be talked about. I think that as these things become more well researched and more understood and more prevalent and the decriminalization goes forward, we’re looking at a revolution not only in mental healthcare, but like… Like you mentioned Parkinson’s disease, they’re going to find things out about some of these plants and these substances that impact our physiology in ways that they can’t mimic or create with pharmaceuticals. And most of them when done correctly or properly or safely, have very little risk for side effects in addictions and things that come along. You get the pharmaceutical drug, anybody who sees this commercials is like, “Here’s five seconds of what this drug does. And here’s 35 seconds of all the ways that it can kill you or harm you. Ready, go ask your doctor for it.”

And with a lot of these plants, that’s just simply not true. It’s just not there. And so I’m not saying everybody go out, find psychedelics and pound as many of them as you can. There are people helping with this. The preparatory work and the integration work are just as important as the experience itself, so make sure that things are being done safely. But that’s my shout to the people doing the decrim work out there, and it’s really important. And so, congratulations on getting it as far as you have around there.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

I know that you guys worked really hard on it. So yeah, I think this is pretty well rounded. So in the perfect world, there’s the steps and there’s the initial recovery programs that are in place. There’s the nutrition and lifestyle and movement. And then to you, the secret sauce or the booster would be some like whether it’s the ibogaine or like plant medicines and things of that nature can really get deeper into the origins of the addiction more so than anything else.

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know where else I would’ve gone to heal my intergenerational trauma. You know what I mean?

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah.

Jen Bruce:

Which is the root of all of my health conditions, including my addiction, so yeah. And I mean, if I could give an example of how this all actually ties together in real life, I would love to do that just really briefly. I had a client last year. It was actually the most rewarding and most difficult experience of my life probably as far as my career goes. But he came to me and he’d been abusing nitrous and he’d been abusing ketamine. My friends knew him and called and I apprehensively said, “Yes, it’s not usually what I take on.” But I showed up thinking I was going to be able to sedate him. When he woke up in a more sober, coherent state, we could talk him into going into treatment, because he’d been in like a schizophrenic psychosis where he’d been violent at a lot of very public things. It was a high profile case in my small town. And I proceeded to do it.

I would normally do that, but it didn’t work. I’m really familiar with what I was looking at now. It was a nitrous induced psychosis, but I had to learn that as we went, as I sat with him for 18 days when he didn’t sleep, he was violent. The treatment centers wouldn’t take him because he was unstable. The psychiatric ward is full because everybody’s in crisis during COVID. So he’d get out, he’d get arrested. They’d shoot him up with Seroquel and a bunch of drugs and then let him out of the hospital four hours later. And it would just get worse and worse and worse.

I was researching on this as much as I could. I called colleagues. Some of them are top in the field. Nobody really knew what to do because this is unusual. Everybody was telling me that we had to get him committed and definitely he’d become diagnosed with schizophrenia and they have to be heavily medicated with like Seroquel and things for the rest of his life. And this was a brilliant man at age 30.

But I found a research paper and it turned out that they had discovered that high amounts of nitrous can sometimes cause the receptors for vitamin B12 to not be able to uptake the B12. And that nutrient is one vital nutrient to the functioning of central nervous system. It also slows the methylation cycle, which in simple terms is the liver’s ability to detoxify. So I knew that after looking at that research paper, that this man was in a psychosis not because he’d crack and wasn’t ever coming back, it’s because his nervous system had no B12 and there was high levels of industrial intoxicants in his body because the liver wasn’t working properly, and whippits where he was getting his nitrous from are full of industrial chemicals.

Miraculously, we got him down to this clinic where they were giving high doses of B12, NAD+ which detoxifies at the cellular level, it’s another nutrient. All kinds of beautiful vitamins flooded through his body. But then the other thing that they were giving at this clinic is ketamine. My colleagues and friends were like, “You’re crazy. You can’t detoxify somebody from dissociatives with dissociatives. And you can’t treat somebody with a ketamine dependency with ketamine.” But after three days of this treatment, he came back to us and he was violent and talking to himself. And like any person you’d see homeless on the street in an escalated episode, that’s what my client was like. His mother was there. She was mourning the loss of her son right in front of me in real time. It was so intense.

After three days, he was back with us on this planet, knowing where he was, who he was. After six days, totally back to sanity. Totally healthy, craving-free, voluntarily went to rehab. He now is with his dad. He’s back in college, has a full-time job. He’s sober and he’s healthy. He’s medication-free. He’s diagnosis-free. And he is got the rest of his life ahead of him at 30 years old.

And so, I just like to use that example because it was the nutrients and the psychedelics together that was able to bring this man out of what for most people would’ve ended up in lifelong insanity, institutionalization, homelessness, or death. And that with psychedelics… And ketamine can be a good place to start for people who don’t feel like leaving the country or may not have the access to plant medicines, like some of us do, to start exploring. But even with ketamine, it can become habit forming, and that’s one of the only psychedelics that has that potential. But when it was used in a therapeutic setting, it actually broke my clients out of addiction, which ketamine was one of the drugs he was misusing. So I just like to have that as food for thought and give that as an example of where we can use psychedelics as part of a holistic treatment modality in even the most extreme cases and see unbelievable results come out of it.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. That story’s wild. I can vouched for the validity of this. I was in a training with Jen’s partner during one of the training programs I went through the last couple years. Her partner was in my cohort of students who was also assisting in this, I don’t know what to call it, work with this guy. It was pretty intense. I’ll just leave it there. Before he got there, the work that you were all doing with him was the stories I was hearing about things he was saying and doing and what you were dealing with and all of that. It was really intense. And the turnaround was something that wouldn’t be believed if I didn’t personally know the people that were doing it at the time. So yeah. It’s powerful stuff and I’m excited to be able to talk about it more.

But for this conversation, we’ve got to end. And so we’re going to have some links down below in the show notes where people can find you in your website and your social media, but where would you recommend they start? If somebody’s interested in learning about you or working with you or learning more about your work, what would you like them to check out?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah, you can just go to my website. I have a few free gifts on there you can sign up for. You can always contact me and schedule a free 30 minute discovery session to see if there’s anything that we can do together that would be beneficial for you. I think I’m always putting up the latest and greatest things that I’m uncovering, you know? So get on my email list and stay up to date with what I’m doing, and that would be great.

Michael Roesslein:

Well, that’s rootsrecoveryclinic.com, right?

Jen Bruce:

Yeah. And then I will be launching the first round of my 10-week holistic health program for people recovering from addiction and mental health where we address stress management, lifestyle, medicine, diets, and even exploring the potential of psychedelic therapy such as microdosing for those that are interested. So again, if you just go to Roots Recovery, I’ll have information coming forward on that too.

Michael Roesslein:

Cool. Well, thanks a lot, Jen, so much. I’ll listen to multiple times to grasp. There’s a lot shared here and a lot of things that I think can benefit a lot of people, whether you’re a practitioner who tends to work with people that have been through recovery or you have clients or patients, or whether somebody in your family or somebody for yourself, or you’ve recognized yourself in a few of the things that we talked about but you’ve never considered that this might be for you. So much to learn. And I’m just grateful for the work you’re doing and for coming here and sharing it. And we’re going to be doing some more collaboration soon. So thank you so much.

Jen Bruce:

Thanks for having me.