Ep30 Addiction Treatment from codependency to self-recovery

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Chris Langley: Hi, welcome to Addiction Recovery Place Podcast, the podcast championing addiction treatment professionals around the world. I'm your host Chris Langley. I'm very pleased to introduce today's guest, Nancy Johnston from Virginia. Nancy is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Substance Abuse Treatment Practitioner who is in private practice. Nancy has done clinical work for 47 years, and one of her specialties is codependency, which she's worked with personally and professionally for 35 years. Welcome to the Addiction Recovery Place podcast, Nancy. It's so great to have you with us today.

Nancy Johnston: Thank you. And thank you for that introduction. That hits a lot of marks.

Chris Langley: Excellent. we're looking forward to hearing about your work. That's for sure. And I really appreciate you taking the time out of your very busy schedule to talk to me today. So I'm sure our audience are going to really enjoy listening to you today. So let's get started, Nancy. Can you tell us about yourself and your career?

Nancy Johnston: Yeah, so 47 years, no one wants to sit and hear me describe all 47 years. I will say that the stories I'm going to tell today about my work with codependency, Chris, weave personal and professional. So I'll start with the professional. I came out of graduate school in a counseling psychology program, working with adolescent juvenile delinquents

as their therapist. I quickly realized, and this is the late 1970s, how many of them had problems with alcohol or problems within their family system with alcohol and some other drugs as well. My field, my graduate program, had not taught me anything about addiction or substance abuse.

In that early part of my career, I realized that I couldn't help them as a mental health therapist if I didn't also know something about addiction and recovery, and so that's what I did. I set off to gain my own parallel knowledge base on addiction and recovery, and that's been part of my whole career is having my feet in both mental health and in addiction.

There has not been a lot of us who do that straightforwardly. I carry licenses in both fields, but I recommend to anyone studying to become a therapist these days that, both areas of work because they inform each other and my mental health is affected by addiction around me. While I was realizing I needed to know both of those areas, I

I got involved with someone who ended up going into recovery for alcoholism, and in the course of their going into recovery, I realized that I should participate in a 12-Step program for family and friends of alcoholics. My doing that then took me out of the professional world and started at a very slow pace, and again this is the early 1980s, waking me up to my own issues with codependency.

When I went into that 12-Step program, I had no idea. I actually thought I was going to support the recovery of someone else, which in those eras, that's part of what it was to support the recovery of the other person. But I had no idea the extent to which my overhelping, overgiving, overmanaging, overfunctioning,

not in a blaming way, and that's going to be a very important dynamic that I talk about today. It's really important we not blame codependence and see it as your fault. It's more that I turn the focus on myself and understand the things I am trying to do to help actually aren't. And they are not only not helping.

I am not taking good care of myself as I overextend for somebody else. So in those first sort of half dozen years of my career, I started integrating, as I've already said, addiction work into my mental health work, and then my awareness of the codependency. Al-Anon has an outstanding phrase in its welcome that really guides a lot the work I've done for 35 years on codependency and that is, "we keep the focus on ourself and not the alcoholic."

Now I'm all about balance and you're going to hear me talk about that. In this case balance of focus on others and focus on self. But that notice that we keep the focus on ourself, I actually describe it as a billboard for a lot of the work I have now created that evolves into what I call self recovery.

So there's, 47 years in a nutshell as a, rough sketch of things, how it started.

Chris Langley: Goodness me. So you, entered a 12 step program just to go through that experience and then

Nancy Johnston: Oh

Chris Langley: come out with

Nancy Johnston: no. For my own recovery.

Chris Langley: for your own

Nancy Johnston: Okay. When I entered. It's Al-Anon. When, I entered it, it was not to have that experience. It was after a meeting or so, it was realizing I had work I needed to do. For me, that would help me be weller. Absolutely. And therefore, the person, who I'm describing, ended up being my husband,

and we shared 38 years of sobriety. As I've said to you, he passed away this past year, but all of those decades were him in sobriety and me gaining greater understanding of myself so that we could have a more balanced relationship.

Chris Langley: Thank you for explaining that to me, Nancy. I really appreciate that. I'm obviously very sorry to hear about your husband. We're just going to move on a little bit. Your speciality codependency is very specific, but really interesting because when we first met, I've never come across this model before.

So can you tell us, can you tell our audience about codependency and how you work with your clients, please?

Nancy Johnston: Yeah, so I'm sure I imagine many people watching this podcast know that, codependency emerged as a topic in, I would say, around 1985-87, with Melody Beattie's work called "Codependent No More." It really is a useful book in that it was the first, announcement or helping us to see this issue of, what I call, loss of self in others.

Chris, when I teach codependency, I often use my circles to explain what we are talking about. Briefly, I see a relationship as two people. This is a self, and this is a self. We want a healthy connection with self, who we are and our own boundaries. This person has their own self and their own boundaries.

In an unhealthy relationship, for the most part, what we have are enmeshed relationships. These circles overlap in a way that myself and their self is not individuated, and often we stay stuck there. Codependency can be really an enmeshed relationship. I know a lot of the current literature on research studies.

I've made that my business because I've written several books on it as, it's gone on. And, Actually, it's interesting. I can't find her name this second. She is a London person doing a lot of really good work on talking to people who identify as codependent, and they describe those relationships as enmeshed.

Enmeshed would be this. Alienated would be where we're in a relationship, but we're really not interacting. What we are looking for, the third dynamic, is a healthy relationship, where my sense of self and this sense of self, we do our own work, and then we're able to come together and intersect however much we want, share whatever we would like, for our relationship, keeping our connection with ourself, though, so when we need to set a boundary or do something, we can, and acknowledging that this other person has their own self that's different than mine.

I think often we want that I'm right, or you have to be like me, or you have to know what I know or do what I do. But in fact, it's healthy that we're acknowledging the individuation of the other person as well, and honor when they need to step aside. So a healthy relationship has this nice, even flow that I say involves mutuality and respect for self and for the others as well. So how this relates to addiction is profound because it was first identified in the addiction field. We first called the family members, co-alcoholics. That was the partner, the spouse, perhaps a parent even that was inadvertently, and this is so my spirit, inadvertently contributing to it.

Chris, I'm going to say, I keep talking about the importance of non-blame because codependency fell into its own little, dark hole. We learned about it and then people started feeling like it was blaming the person who was the codependent and that it was creating a very negative image of them as an enabler and them being at fault.

Even now, bringing the word into our fields in a way, and this is what I'm working actively on, in a way that says, "no, this is a real dynamic. We really lose ourself in someone else. Our balance really can be off, and therefore, it's really important that we look at it not as a pathology but just as a way of being that has helped us in the past perhaps from family of origin but does not serve us well now."

In an adult, Ideally, Chris, this is an adult to adult relationship. So if I bring it into the recovery world, which is easy because I'm doing that all the time, a codependency is much broader than we see it in much broader ways than just addiction now. If each person is working on their self in a healthy way, this person, let's say it's the codependent, the person in recovery from codependency really wants to be working on their own recovery and letting this other person do their own recovery as well.

Now, there is the interaction and there's some good schools of thought about how that can be helpful. But what I'm sharing with you and our population today, meaning who the people who might be listening and watching, is that it is super important, this person may be able to help this one, but this person needs to do their own work for their own health and their own sake.

That's pretty much what I do. I learned a lot of stuff through counseling my own, receiving it and 12-Step work. In Al-Anon, and then late 90s, a client was leaving my office and said I had used an Al-Anon phrase, detaching, and she said, "Nancy, I understand what you mean by detaching, but how do you do that?"

And Chris, as a therapist who really likes to work at deeper levels with people, I thought it was an outstanding question because whereas we know detaching is I would say shifting away from being reactive and creating enough space so that we're responsive. That is a lot of work, actually. We really can't just say to someone who's used to rushing in and helping to do that and it stick.

It's very good, but how do we do that? That's why the Trusted Programs, we say, keep coming back because it's hard work. So that is one way to learn these things from the Al-Anon program, but through mental health also, and that's, I've expanded the work. I've brought the wisdom of 12-Step into mental health.

I did that when she said, "how do you do that?" I think my whole body of work opened and expanded in that moment. I jotted a quick list of internal things to do that I realized a lot of people could benefit from because as the day went on, I saw, again, I'm talking about codependency as losing self in others.

Another way I talk about it is overfunctioning for others and underfunctioning for self. I could see that theme in a lot of other people. So I ended up creating groups that poured into a handout that ultimately poured into my first book, which is "Disentangle: When You've Lost Yourself in Someone Else."

This first came out self- published by me in the early 2000s. And then Central Recovery Press picked it up. It's a great press. They have many recovery books, and they picked it up. This is the second edition that we've done of it. This came out in 2020, and it's a full of skill sets in four areas of facing illusions, detaching, boundaries and spirituality.

It really is about how do I cultivate self that doesn't lose myself and stay enmeshed. within this relationship and recovery. The difficulty in addiction, and I think of addiction way beyond substances. This could be addiction in a number of process addictions as well. I don't want my addiction to the addicted person to be a problem for the relationship, for the person, or for myself.

Codependency at its far end can present as compulsive and obsessive, which we also call addictive.

Briefly, and then we'll spring off of that, then I created it by 2011. "my life is a border collie freedom from codependency," and it has a very different take it's metaphorical stories, but about my border collie and about codependency,

with lessons learned. Again, it's all to strengthen self. Then it's all evolved into this book, that came out in, June, of 2024, from, PESI, Professional Educational Services Institute, where I'm actually training therapists to understand and think about how to think about codependency, diagnosis, and then a full detail of treatment ideas in it. It also invites us to look at ourself as a therapist and to pay attention to how our own codependency can come into play as we're trying to help someone else. And in doing that, If we're not careful, we can be not letting, we want to foster their growth, not their growth we think they need, but the growth that is true for them.

So it really many helping people do well to pay attention to their own overfunctioning for others.

Chris Langley: Wow. That explains it so well. It really did make sense and how you explained it with, the circles as well with how relationships

are intertwined

Nancy Johnston: Thank you. The circles have been a part of my work forever. They started out just me drawing them on a flip chart, and then I started doing talks in bookstores, and I was like, "I don't want to carry my whole flip chart in." So I cut these out of for anyone watching who wants to use it, go for it.

I teach at conferences a lot, and I go to some store that has office supplies and I buy, plastic file dividers that are colored and then I cut my circles out of them. I have a whole raft of different sizes, and I hand them to clients to work with to describe the relationships and what they're trying to do as well.

Chris Langley: Now that I can see how that works very, effectively, Nancy, you mentioned your, great workbook that you've done. Can you tell our audience about this work, and how it was received by other professionals?

Nancy Johnston: Thank you. What I would say is, I am not, a total national name at this point, but I am teaching at a national level for PESI. I do webinars. Once a month, six hour webinars that are training clinicians in how everything I'm talking about and the workbook content that is training them.

And Chris, it's really interesting. I don't know that there is another book workbook training clinicians, and I really appreciate that PESI has been so interested in me training clinicians. So I always have very good attendance at them. When I speak at a conference, I usually limit my numbers of attendees in a room to 30 or 40 because I'm interactional, and I like conversations.

I always fill the room. People have been really, I would say in the last half dozen years, there's been, and I know we talked about this, I know it's something we're going to chat about. I call this the "next era." We are in what Nancy Johnston is declaring is the next era of codependency recovery.

So the first era was Melody Beattie when she brought forth "Codependent No More." That book is still millions sells millions. It's still really popular, and we started paying attention to it and really important other people wrote about it. Pia Mellody and Claudia Black are two pioneers that I should cite, Sharon Webb.

You may have listeners who know all of these. Where these are people when all of us who were working in the selfhelp world, then knew some of these names who were helping with early codependency recovery. But then somewhere in the 90s, the Next Era moved in, which I've already spoken of where

it was perceived, as I've already said in as blaming. I'll just keep it simple as blaming the codependent. And so people don't want to identify as codependent because that has a lot of negative connotations. I don't think the intent was that it happened that way, but it did. Things quieted down in it, but what I understand has happened and my current experience out in the world, writing and teaching and marketing is that there is an increasingly strong interest in it now. This is the new era. I would call it the third where younger people are just like, "what is this?" how it's playing, there's a whole lot going on with relationships with narcissistic people with toxic relationships. I think that's where not to blame, but the dynamics of being so externally focused can cause us to get stuck and tangled, to use my word, Chris, in these relationships that aren't serving us well.

And so I am trying, and I do feel like I'm being received well, to deepen the clinical work we can do with folks who are as opposed to self centered, they are othercentered.

Chris Langley: That's, amazing stuff. How you've taken it to another level and you've got a new generation of therapists. Now they're acknowledging your work.

Nancy Johnston: Chris, that's a great way to put it, is it is a new generation and they are interested in my lifetime work, on it. Yeah, and so I am running some self recovery cohorts online, and those are small. Those are for not just therapists, but anyone who would like to deepen their work on codependency and have a healthy relationship with self.

I think in the winter, I'm going to start, an online clinicians consultation group with people who want to work, learn more from me directly, who might have the workbook and want to learn some of the nuts and bolts and talk about some of the problems they are running into as they use that material, or hey, how about successes they have. Yeah.

Chris Langley: Wow. Big plans, Nancy. That's for sure. When, we first met, you told me that you went to the United Kingdom and obviously being a Londoner myself, I was very interested to hear about your work. You worked with some, fellow British organizations and Noel Bell, who I've obviously heard with, of who's one of the UK's most prominent psychotherapists. Can you tell us about how you went to London to speak to these services and professionals?

Nancy Johnston: Oh, it was, a lark. It was an easy thing. I was traveling with my daughter who was photographing a dance company out of Chicago and who were performing in London and down in Brighton. As a pioneer of what I'm doing, I had been paying attention.

Sometimes we Google ourself. I don't know if you've done that, but okay , let me be clear. I don't do social media, everybody. I do LinkedIn, but I'm not on social media. I will Google myself and Noel Bell had written a blog, and he was working with the stuff from the border collie book, and I was like, "that's cool. Who's Noel Bell?" And so I reached out to him, and he and I have a couple of interviews on YouTube. He has a really good understanding and interest in the topic. And so if your listeners are interested in two, clinicians talking about it. I was in London, so we weren't across the pond.

I was there. So it was just enriching to have those conversations. But while I was there, I had picked up the names of some people. I had, I think I knew about them because I had presented here in the US in Hyannis, at the Cape Cod Institute for Addiction. The UK had its own parallel, Institute, and I had picked up some names there

of some folks at Steps to Recovery. So again, if we don't promote ourselves in some way, the world won't know what we're doing, and I'm just trying to help. So I reached out to Steps to Recovery, and they were great. And they were like, "are you here?" And I said, "yeah." And they said, they had a residential house,

"do you want to come for the afternoon and do a workshop with our staff and with, the residents here on Disentangle?" It was on Disentangle because Chris, we're tapping into an important thing and that is codependency, it's in all of us, actually, to various degrees. People in recovery from other addictions, I have been told, often at conferences, that if that it can be a cause of relapse, that if the person is not tuned into their own losing self in other people, some either relationship they're pursuing or tangle in a relationship can lead to a relapse of their own addiction.

And so that's what Steps to Recovery were, they totally understood that, as does Noel, and wanting their residents who were recovering from probably substance addictions to also have this piece on relationships and codependency recovery too. It was great. I felt quite at home there

and quite familiar. I know we talked about wondering the difference between services there. I really can't speak to the differences. I'm not that well informed. I can just say I felt at home. I was with my people in recovery who know mental health and addiction, who were smart and caring, and we all spoke the same language.

And it's a great place to be when that happens.

Chris Langley: Absolutely. Absolutely. That was amazing that you were able to go and talk to a service in Britain about your expertise. That must have been an amazing experience

Yeah.

for you and for the residents.

Nancy Johnston: Yeah, Noel wrote an endorsement for the workbook. He wrote an endorsement for the 2nd edition of Disentangle as well. So I stay in touch, and I haven't been back over. Many things have kept us all, like a pandemic. But I'm open to talking to whoever is interested and training wherever I can.

I will say though, Chris, that's where PESI's work is great. Anybody in the world can listen to and watch or purchase the webinars that I do for PESI..

Chris Langley:

Actually I'm going to ask about PESI now. Can you explain this organization, and how it works and how it helps professionals?

Nancy Johnston: tThey are in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and do lots of training for licensed people and for clinicians. It was interesting. I was on the NAADAC morning, whatever the postboard is, and somebody had written, "how do I get my CEUs?" I'm not here to sell for PESI. Let me give that as a disclaimer, but what PESI does is it does offer a wide assortment, broad assortment of classes that you can take and it's for licensed people so that we can get our credits are continuing education units for whatever our certifications and licenses are.

So they're that's what they do.

Chris Langley: Fabulous, absolutely wonderful. Because you mentioned that this organization to me before. So I was grateful for you explaining that to me, Nancy. You told me that you've given talks at conferences and online presentations. Can you tell us where have you spoken in the past and whether you have any more talks scheduled for the future?

Nancy Johnston: Yeah, I have as I mentioned, been at the the Hyannis, it's, let it slip out of my, my brain again, but I have commonly presented regionally at the Virginia Summer Institute for Addiction Studies, the Virginia Counselors Association. I presented at the American Mental Health Counselors Association, the Carolinas.

Conference for Addiction Recovery. Oh, I'm sorry, the Cape Cod Symposium. There it is. Thanks, Cape Cod. Yeah. Everything I do, every opportunity I have to teach is not just teaching the people in the room. Their questions inform me about understanding what helps me to recover. How do I connect with myself in mind, emotions, body and spirit?

I want to at least throw that out, Chris, as a fundamental, very fundamental treatment thing. We get caught up in our thoughts. Or we get caught up in our emotions when in fact there are at least these four areas of self to pay attention to. Mental health has done so much to bring the body into focus.

Bessel van der Kolk's, "The Body Keeps the Score" really has woken everyone up to the importance of how my body is responding to stress, to worry, to trauma, which can well be a source of codependency. So part of my recovery model, this is a drop in the bucket, because there is so much, is to think of these four areas of self and help our clients learn how to tune into all four areas of self.

So back to your question. So when I'm at a conference and I'm teaching any one of the skills, I do get good questions that then make me stop and reflect. "Why does this work? How did I get here? What might make it a little different?" Yeah. Decades ago, early on with Disentangle, somebody in the audience said, this sounds like it's an Attachment

Theory issue, and attachment theory had not emerged, reemerged. It's old. It comes from the 1950s, but we were not seeing it. So comprehensively in our work as we do now, but when that person raised that issue, which is, "do I have a secure attachment or an insecure attachment and are my insecure attachments feeding my codependency?

Am I seeking a secure attachment, but in ways that are not helping me have a secure attachment with myself with, and certainly with them, I'm making them run away, or hide or go away or drink more, use more, gamble more, whatever, not blaming." So when that. conference person said, it sounds like attachment issues, and I was like, I was informed in that moment again, more than 20 years ago. And I started paying attention to it, researching it and have been fascinated. It has deeply informed the self recovery work I do with codependence. My biggest teaching right now is monthly for PESI on our webinars.

But I will be at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, DC next March and am teaching a three hour session there called, "Understanding and Treating Codependency" and the subtitle that they chose to use is "When your clients overfunction for others." So I'm really looking forward to this really large opportunity, Chris.

Chris Langley: Yeah. So that's coming up in March of next year, 2025.

Wow. Wow. congratulations for everything that you've done

Nancy Johnston: Thank you.

Chris Langley: To be invited to so many conferences and to have these experiences to explain your work. And, just must be an incredible experience and well, congratulations on that.

And

Nancy Johnston: Thank you.

Chris Langley: Finally, Nancy, you organize a Codependency Camp and this year you're celebrating its 20th anniversary. Yeah. Can you tell us about this?

Nancy Johnston: Yeah, Codependence Camp. We just did our 34th camp over 20 years. Don't do the math it. We started off doing it once a year and the campers said, and I understand why they said we need it twice a year, I pause and really offer a serious thing. I think no matter what we're recovering from, it requires daily connection with the work that we are doing.

"What is my, are my goals? What am I focusing on? What are the tools I am using? What will support my use of those tools?" I think we can go to a conference, we can go to camp, I'll circle back to that in a minute, we can go to Nancy's online cohorts and be inspired, learn, feel connected. But we can click off and we have such deep habits, whatever those are within, I'll keep angling.

I can talk it broad in mental health, but I'll talk about it from an addiction angle. We have deep patterns within us that if we do not have a daily way that we are practicing or staying connected with our work, we probably cannot change those patterns. We are creating new neural pathways.

I won't teach neuroscience here though. I could, but we are. And so it's so important that we have these daily practices. So camp, we went from once a year to twice a year. And now I have the cohorts, and some campers also attend the cohorts. Again, always trying to increase because the world invites us to be back in our habits.

The world expects us to be, I'm going to say it two ways, expects us to be who they know us to be, but more importantly, if we don't bring self-awareness, we will fall back into those very patterns ourself. We will offer when we need to say no. We will carry on a conversation longer than we need to.

We will step in and take something out of somebody else's hands when they've said, "I've got it." If those are our patterns, what are we doing to stay in touch with them on a regular basis? So Camp is always about learning new skills, but also reinforcing what we are working on. Chris, we keep it small. It's myself and my colleague, Margaret Kress.

She and I work extremely well together, and we keep it about eight campers. We will have up to 10 at times. It's an overnight camp, so we don't have so much space. We meet in a living room. We have shared meals around the dining room table. We have about 10 hours of workshops that we do.

It's not group therapy. It is workshop format. And I'm a clinician enough to know how deep we're going to go or not for the time and the situation we're in. I'm always, to be frank, my codependency presents itself as having, and your listeners may already have noticed too much information, too much knowledge.

We go too far. And so it's cute. So I'm almost always have too much information. And I don't want to do that. So I'm watching my, listening to my campers and seeing where we're at. I want them to leave also calm and connected with themselves and what they're taking with them for self-recovery.

Chris Langley: Wow. That sounds an amazing experience. That really does. I'm sure the campers really appreciate and experience every moment that they're with you because this is really, powerful therapy model that you've got here, Nancy. That's for

Nancy Johnston: sure.

Oh, thank you, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Langley: It really is. I'm really enjoying this conversation, Nancy. One of my final questions, I ask all my guests this, and it certainly relates to what we're speaking about here, but I get some interesting and varied answers to this. But can you tell me your opinion of harm reduction and how codependency can have a role in this?

Nancy Johnston: Yes. I'm not involved in harm reduction services, nor am I an expert in any way with it. I will say, I think it totally has a place. I think that mental health often is learning how to live in the gray. As opposed to all or nothing and codependency often operates out of all or nothing.

You do this or you hate me. I offered this to you and you certainly will do that for me. But if we talk about say substance addictions, I do want to say that I am, I do think abstinence is the path some people need for recovery,

and I see the value of meeting a client where they are at.

So I'm informed, I'm trained in motivational interviewing. Interestingly enough, Chris, I use it in treating codependency too, because I want to meet the client where they're at and see what they are willing to do. , That also relates to stages of recovery which are, I'll say very briefly, and your listeners, many know, pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and relapse.

We are often working with people in the pre-contemplation or contemplation. They don't even, especially with codependency, they don't even know what the problem is. So if we jump in too far down with action, but they aren't there, I don't think that treatment-wise, we're going to meet with the success that we need.

If we meet them where they are, help them see where this could go and, join them in that. Now, the other thing I will say about harm reduction and codependency, again, I don't offer it. So conversations are welcome about it. I think any. person providing care needs to be aware of their own codependency and to be responsible for am I doing this for me or is this helping them?

Am I really listening to them or am I taking it on my hands to do it for them? And I think no matter where a person is in their addiction recovery, I want to be empowering them. I think that's where we have to be really careful about our own codependency, that it isn't disempowering our client even when we're trying to help.

Chris Langley: I'm really glad I asked that question, Nancy, because that was a great answer and very relatable to codependency and harm reduction. That's why I asked. I think that's a really interesting answer. So thank you for that. Do you have a message, Nancy, for anyone who's listening to this podcast, who's going through addiction or going through a mental health trauma?

Nancy Johnston: I think that the door that opens recovery, I'll, summarize with what I call ingredients of change, but the top three are what I'll talk about. I think we have to have awareness first, honest, realistic awareness of how we are and how our behaviors and what we're doing are interfacing with the life we're living.

So awareness is everything. Awareness. Awareness. The second one comes out of program wisdom and that is willingness. Okay? So I see that me buying all of these things and filling my house with objects and boxes is now crowding me. Am I willing to pay attention to perhaps a spending disorder, a spending, a spending addiction?

Okay, I just pulled that out of my head as an example. Am I willing to do? And the third one is intention. If I'm aware, if I'm, willing and if I'm, then I need to, what am I going to do intentionally? Am I going to get to meetings? Am I going to do daily readings? Am I going to attend workshops? Am I going to find a friend who is also in recovery or who also understands me?

Am I going to give myself homework assignments that in between my therapy appointments? So awareness, willingness, and intention in that order. And I find often that we blossom in awareness, and then we have to spend a lot of time with willingness, and that's where some of the deeper psychological things are.

You would think that we would want 100 percent to change, but that's not true. We have these old patterns, and we have to dig deeper to understand. I do parts work as well. We have to understand what parts of me aren't willing and get to know those parts before I can be intentional. But do something to be intentional too.

So that's what I would say. Awareness, willingness, intentionality.

Chris Langley: tell our listeners how best to contact you and to find your services online, please?

Nancy Johnston: It would be through my web address. I'm sorry. Yeah. My website, which is nancyljohnston.com all lowercase. There's a contact on the tabs at the top there.

Chris Langley: We'll make sure that there's a link in these videos and all these podcasts, Nancy.

Nancy Johnston: Great.

Chris Langley: I'd just I'd just like to say. It's been a real pleasure talking to you today, Nancy, and to find an ad about your extensive career, your wonderful work and how it relates so much to addiction. It's been a real privilege to talk to you today and thank you so much for your time.

Nancy Johnston: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for all your great questions. I appreciate it.

Chris Langley: It's my pleasure. Thanks, Nancy.

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