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What's going on everybody?
Today I'm with Laura Khalil from Khalil Family Wellness.
Miss Laura, she deals with addiction, adolescent to adults. She does her private practice. She offers outpatient services.
We're going to dive a little bit into that. We're going to talk about addiction, some of the plans for Miss Laura and the future.
A little bit of her backstory as well, I think it's important for people to learn more about you to really understand how effective she can be in an addiction treatment setting.
So we're going to dive into that right now.
How did you get into this field to begin with?
How did I get into this field?
Yup.
Way back, way back the way I was.
It never was my intent to get into this field. Law school was actually my dream. However, life circumstances took me down a different path.
And put me in a position of looking at that rabbit's hole that many people have to look down in order for them to face adversity.
By the grace of God, I was able to turn away from the rabbit's hole and start a different journey that allowed for me to embrace gratitude and servitude.
And I met my husband shortly after I moved back home from Dallas, which is where I lived for several years, and put me on a quest of a holistic approach to life.
And I was sitting at a chiropractic convention probably back 30 years ago while I was in the midst of my brother's addiction, my mother's addiction to the chaos.
And there was a chiropractor standing in front about 500 people talking about his ability to manage the disease of addiction without drugs.
He owns one of the oldest facilities in Miami. He was a co-founder of the first drug court with Janet Reno way back when.
And he was being featured on the Discovery Channel for his work without drugs.
And I turned to my husband stating to him that this is what I needed to be doing. So put me on a quest to be able to do postgraduate work in addictions and compulsive behaviors,
leading me down to the path of wanting to have a holistic of practice to help individuals to face adversity without replacing one substance and behavior with another.
And that was a process of which I was 40. I had a baby at 40. I was doing postgraduate work and I opened my practice in 2007.
A non-drug practitioner, meaning I never used other drugs, Suboxone, Mathedon, any of those types of substances to help people curb the craving mechanisms or the urges.
And I helped them produce chemistry naturally in the brain so that it would sustain serenity, calmness, clarity so we could work on developing basic schools for
proactive thinking and education to sustain the stresses biochemically, physically and psychologically.
As an addiction therapist, some Monday morning, what are you going to do today? What's your day looking like?
Monday morning starts off with about 30 minutes of spiritual meditation, reflection, prayer, and identifying my agenda for the day.
And I come to get a workout in before I go into the trenches. And I get to the residential block-down facility that I work at.
And I do an inventory of the weekend. I identify what needs to be addressed for the week and prepare for whether it's a process group or a cognitive skills group.
And then I also identify what clients I need to see in my private practice so that I can make sure that they check in with me on a daily basis.
All of my private practice clients check in on a daily basis. I schedule their drops because they have to drop two times a week for me and do my groups,
check in on them during the lapse of time between my groups, and attempt to send them inspirational, positive thoughts before I go back into my other groups.
Finish up the paperwork and then I have back to my private practice and meet with clients or if I have Zoom sessions, I prepare an agenda for us to discuss,
identifying their wins, their losses, how their day was on a scale of one to ten, what were some of their struggles, what coping skills did they think that they had,
and if I had a crisis in between, then I have to sort of be adaptable because everything is subject to change.
Everything is subject to change. There is no normal.
You work with both people, mandated by the state of Michigan because we live in Michigan, or federally I guess.
I guess it could be, you know, it's just a department of corrections.
So what would you say you enjoy more? Do you enjoy working with private practice people more or do you enjoy working with court mandated people more?
From a practitioner's point of view, it might seem like you'd get maybe more out of it working with people from, you know, mandated by the state.
I love a good challenge and both present equal types of challenges at different levels.
In my private practice, I'm more geared towards working with families because you need family dynamics to support the process of recovery.
So I truly enjoy working with families and really want to continue to elaborate on that concept that it takes a village.
And you need that in the process of recovery because one individual who struggles, it's difficult for them to sustain therapy when they know that the environment that they're living in is conflicted with what was in the past as opposed to what is and moving forward.
Yes, and family members need to be educated about the disease of addiction so that they understand that what they see in it, their loved one has familiar qualities to it.
However, they have to understand that the way of thinking has to change. We never want someone to change who they are.
We want them to change the way they think about things and that's extraordinarily uncomfortable.
However, that discomfort is what perpetuates the feeling of compassion and you need compassion in order to gain wisdom from your past experiences in order for you to sustain long-term recovery.
So you have shown interest in working with children, right?
Yes. We talked briefly about this earlier today. Explain why that is because you have an extensive resume as an addiction counselor, you're board certified, you go through all the trainings, you put in mega hours, unnecessary, crazy hours to work with these people and these families.
How long have we done this for?
I have been a board certified addictionologist since 2005.
2005, so it was 17 years.
17 years of working with people, working with people with addiction issues and now today you're looking at it and you want to be more involved in youthful addiction therapy, correct?
My mission is really to educate.
I believe that you educate children about the management of stress biocomically, physically and psychologically. You can teach them proactive skills.
Just like in the martial arts, you have to have a basic training and that basic training never changes. You just have to adapt to the circumstances in your body.
My body at 60 has to adapt to my abilities to develop my skill sets as a martial artist from 40 years ago.
So you have to teach children how to adapt to the environment because anything and everything can happen in today's society.
So we have to teach them the basic understanding of maintaining stability, anchoring themselves, being able to redirect negativity and to use triggers.
The only way to do that is to teach them the basic skills of helping them help themselves, understanding self-concepts so that their self-image, their self-ideal and their self-esteem has consistency to it.
So no matter what comes their way, because we have a lot of bullying, we have a lot of racism, we have a lot of prejudice, we have a lot of ignorance when it comes time to today's interaction within our community and the humanity that's missing.
So most definitely children are important so that we can teach them proactive skills.
It's like a grooming process almost to a certain extent, right? Because you're a product of your environment.
Obviously people have those tendencies that are maybe genetic, right?
There's some evidence that supports that addiction is genetic.
You have genetic predisposition. You have environmental dispositions. You have biochemical genetics.
However, the reality is addiction is rooted in a decrease within the biochemical capacity of the brain that contributes to the physical capacity of the brain and body communicating to each other.
And then of course you have the psychological stress that only compounds the stress of an environment which dissipates in child's ability to maintain function on a day-to-day basis.
And they ultimately regress into just survival mode.
Because everyone deals with stress differently.
It's kind of another thing that I wanted to touch on because you focus on helping people help themselves, right?
Yes.
So I could do it for you but you wouldn't like me.
And I can tell you what to do but you wouldn't like me.
And my Sicilian mom voice comes out often you definitely wouldn't want that which happens all the time when I have my groups.
The reality is you have to do this for you.
It is. Nobody can fix your problem for you.
You're not going to go through a program. You're not going to go through any program and be magically cured or fixed.
There's nothing wrong with you as a person.
It's the amount of effort. How bad do you want to stay addiction free in your life?
I feel like you have to have that desire or at least that connection. You had mentioned a connection. People are missing a connection to humanity.
Do you think that is one of the driving forces behind a person's addiction?
Possibly.
I think a driving force behind someone's addiction is their fear of facing past experiences, identifying what their limiting beliefs are,
and removing their labels. Often times when you have no concept of who you are, your past experiences, your limiting beliefs, and labels dictate how you react to a situation as opposed to learning how to respond to situations.
And you have to have a willingness to endure the discomfort in order for growth to occur and gain compassion for the circumstances that you had no control over.
And most children have no control over the circumstances in which they live.
So we have to teach children how to develop coping skills to stay focused, stay rooted, and allow themselves to be kinder and gentler to themselves, even though their environment is toxic.
And for me it has always been my faith. So my faith has carried me through this process to turning my pain into my purpose and being able to sustain my conviction into having a holistic approach to life.
And I use that as my agenda every day that I teach, and helping people help themselves. You have all the control.
When you say you are powerless over something, you give your power away to someone else.
And you have to either live in fear or you have to live in faith, and that choice is yours.
And I think that most children are growing up in an environment where they live in fear and faith is the furthest thing from their day to day process.
Every day is, I feel like a lot of people go through it. You open your eyes every day and they are like, alright.
Sometimes when you wake up, there is just a little bit of a heavier weight.
And once you learn to deal with that, life becomes a little bit easier. You want to wake up. You want to face the day. You want to be motivated. You want to do something positive.
You want to help people. You want to help yourself. Your whole attitude changes once you learn how to deal with your emotions.
Because I think that identifying your emotions is even...
I mean, that's a very good question.
It's definitely the first step. I feel like statements. And I feel like a lot of people don't have that skill or they just don't think about it enough.
I think most people have the ability to compartmentalize, however they lack mental toughness.
In order to sustain long-term recovery, you have to develop mental toughness, which means you acknowledge where your weaknesses are and you cultivate resources that sustain your commitment and your conviction in wanting to move forward one step at a time with a mindset of wanting to be empowered.
And when you wake up, like, I feel like, and you let your emotions get the best of you, it consumes your thoughts, it controls your life. And you have all the power when you allow yourself to remove, can't not, won't and try, out of your vocabulary and you focus on what you want.
Yeah, I remember you focused a lot on that. And that was definitely something in the beginning, working with you in an outpatient setting.
Because it's a lot different, you know, in and outpatient setting versus inpatient setting.
I'm a 10 times harder on my outpatient clinic and clients than I am in anywhere else I work in. I really love being in private practice because it allows me to incorporate the family and families need to be a part of this process.
Because there's greatness that comes when you understand your weaknesses, and you work towards developing a agenda that allows for you to consistently train yourself to enjoy your life even amidst all the chaos.
And words are powerful. Words are so powerful. You have to speak into existence what it is that you want and remove the can't not, won't and try.
Explain why. Why shouldn't people use the words?
Why should people remove can't not, won't and try for the vocabulary? Because you limit your beliefs within yourself when I can't do something, I'm not going to do something.
You tell a child to stop running, don't run, don't run, don't run, what do they want to do? They impossibly want to run.
You tell yourself, I'm not going to smoke, I'm not going to smoke, I'm not going to smoke, then all you do is feel like you're depriving yourself.
You want to learn that to be able to develop discipline is much more empowering than depriving yourself from something.
So when you say, I can't eat that, however, I'm choosing to eat this. You're empowering yourself and allowing yourself the opportunity to take control of your emotions without allowing yourself to feel as though you're depriving yourself from something because you're developing discipline.
And in recovery, it's necessary for you to have self-control and self-control really truly is consistent discipline and consistency over time equals results.
And this is how you get long-term sustainable recovery is by developing self-control and using words that allow for you to be empowered by what you're saying and what you're doing so that you can strive for excellence every day and do all things with integrity.
And that is how you remove strife from your life. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's daily work. It's never going to be over. You work at it every day.
It'll be over when you're dead. Right. Maybe.
Right now you want to strive for excellence in everything that you do because you've been granted this opportunity to live your life, clean and sober.
And I mean clean and sober by the fact that it's more than just the substances, it's behaviors. And you've demonstrated consistency in your behaviors with conviction that's allowed for you to move forward and educate and allow yourself to serve a community that allows open-mindedness, which is what we need in this process.
Right. Yeah. That is definitely the first. The first step is definitely open-mindedness because you have to be open-minded.
It's because you have to be receptive to it. I personally have went through a program knowing it's only 21 days. It's only 30 days. I can get through it. And I can just, you know, I can just go back to what I know, what I know best.
But it's after those 21 days, after those 30 days, this one you start wanting to work with someone like you, outpatient, therapy process, even to get in to initiate the process of getting into treatment too.
I mean you're like the whole package deal. You're always available to help.
Treatment is really and truly just a big jigsaw puzzle. We know what the big picture is. We know what we want our life to look like. No one chooses to live in a world of addiction.
And I don't care how many times somebody says, I just like getting high for the sake of getting high. No one likes to get high for the sake of getting high.
They get high because they need to feel good in the moment for whatever the reasons.
The reality is, is that when you pick out a jigsaw puzzle, you pick it out because of what it looks like. You know what the big picture is going to look like. Treatment only provides us an opportunity to dump the pieces out and look for the corners.
We only have enough time to look for the corners. And one corner might be safe and another corner might be extraordinarily dark and dangerously painful.
So then we have to focus on the other corners and maybe just maybe find a little framework which we can contain the emotions and prepare you to do outpatient work so that you can continue to allow yourself to develop the framework, put it together because you got to work from the inside out instead of the outside in.
And that's why family is so important because you need that internal mechanism of nurturing within a family unit to sustain long-term recovery without finding yourself becoming more obsessive about something, compulsive about something, replacing one behavior with another behavior.
You have to work from the inside out. And that's why we have to be proactive. You have to work from the inside out after you contain the borders of what you're working on.
For sure. Because when you're in that cycle, you're doing that cycle, life goes by very, very fast. You don't even really realize what you're doing, what's going on, all that matters is I need that first before anything.
The need becomes needy. I heard one of my clients as we were working on what she understood about the disease of addiction, she said the need becomes needy.
As you grow in life through your addictive behaviors, starting out as a child, throwing temper tantrums, throwing toys, eating toys, cutting, eating, how many children do we know that eat their emotions away? Or those that don't eat their emotions away? That becomes addictive behavior.
Those are the types of things that you have to begin to identify in that jigsaw puzzle of your life of where it really began and begin to stop asking yourself, why do I continuously repeat this behavior and say you need to ask yourself, what have you done, what has been done to you, what must you let go of, what must you forgive in order for you to move forward and understand that there are a lot of circumstances within your life that you had no control over and they took pieces of you away.
And those pieces you can never replace. You can only keep those puzzle pieces you're talking about. You can't take them back and put yourself back together. I have a tattoo right here and it's like a metal, you know, hydraulics and gears.
It's like the inside of my arm basically. And it's kind of like a reference to exactly what you're talking about. That's basically the symbolism behind that tattoo, you know, getting that piece back in my life.
And every time when I go back to it in my head, if I have to replant, I have missed Laura there the whole time and it was a lot easier. I would say it was a lot easier working with you than it had been working with other people in the past because of your attentiveness to what's going on like you really care.
I care because I truly understand that the disease of addiction is more than drugs and had I not walked away from the rabbit hole 40 years ago, I probably would be sitting in one of the mandated facilities doing outpatient.
But my gratitude allowed for me to empower myself and identify that each day requires an agenda, one from conviction, one from the gut, one from the heart that allows for you to get up every day with gratitude, no matter how difficult the day is and then end your day with gratitude so that you can start your day with that gratitude and end your day with gratitude.
And everything in between is just a test.
Even if it's just as simple as I feel grateful in the morning to yourself. You know, when listening, probably, you know, maybe you're significant others, but you know, I feel I'm really grateful for today. It's something to practice because it's a total lifestyle change.
Well, it goes back to what I said earlier with regards to the difference of compartmentalization and mental toughness. Mental toughness means you face adversity head on, knowing that it's going to be difficult, knowing it's going to coil your blood, sweat and tears, knowing that's going to take your breath away, knowing that it's the devil attempting to break you because you're getting closer to success.
And that's mental toughness because you never give up and you never ever can give up. And when we allow our emotions to get the best of us, yes, I break down and cry daily sometimes when the stress of being in one facility, of reading my private practice or a string of individuals that are overdosing consistently now.
I can tell you that we've lost a significant amount of people due to the fentanyl increase and other things. One stupid little quirky thing can take your life away and that's why we have to be vigilant and developing present time consciousness on a day to day basis.
And yes, you have to start your day with gratitude because you can wake up in the morning and the devil's already whispering to you. You've got to do this, you can't do this, you can't do that and you have to remind yourself that you can and you will and you have. So you have to have mental toughness to embrace gratitude in the morning to start the journey and end the journey.
And everything between you just simply identify as a test of what you've been able to accomplish just for today.
Right, just for today. That's definitely if you're in the recovery community. It is definitely a very cliche thing you hear just for today just for today. There's a lot of truth to it. If you don't say it, say I'm grateful right because that's all that is about.
I want to talk about the last thing as future for you said you wanted to work with children. How would you explain it. I want to develop a resource center for you that can identify.
Where they are where they want to be a lot of young people have no coping skills they have unsafe environments of which they are unable to express their emotions so teaching children how to reframe from reacting giving them the ability to learn how to express their feelings.
We have a lot of clients you know young people who struggle with their identity, whether it's sexually or whether it's gender identity whether it's being in the household of parents who are drug dealers. Parents that use drugs parents that have criminal backgrounds and young people need to understand that.
They have no control over their parents or the environment they live in however they do have control over how they cope with that and I want to help empower them I want to arm them as the warriors that they can be because you have to be a warrior.
You have to raise children to understand that they have to be accountable they have to be responsible and to do that they have to identify who they are and I think we need to develop a better education resource to help children identify who they are from the inside out based upon how they see themselves and how to cope with things they have no control over.
Instead of reacting they learn to respond and be kind and be generous to themselves first. You only can have a healthy relationship within yourself when you have honesty within yourself you're trusting of yourself.
You can communicate in powerful ways and some days we never can really do that when we're trapped in a toxic environment and be able to depend upon yourself.
Honesty, trust, communication, dependability and respect are the five essential traits for a healthy relationship. I want to teach young people how to develop that within themselves so that they can find their way through day to day challenges without seeking out high risk behaviors without choosing to engage in substances just for the sake of getting high.
It's to feel good. You want to feel good because you don't want to feel the pain and you got to feel the pain if you want to get the gain because you grow through what you go through.
You have to be able to sustain it and we have children who have a very limited capacity to develop that within themselves and I really want to create an empowerment zone for our children to learn how to develop those five essential traits to have a relationship with themselves first.
Instead of putting themselves out there seeking it from other people, seeking validation in all the wrong places.
Definitely a big need for that. These are our kids, our grandkids, our nieces, our nephews. These are people who, this is our family. This is our neighbor, this is our community. Public schools, for example.
Don't teach those things. Those are things that you learn from mistakes. You go through life. You go through public school, you make mistakes, talking to people, you make mistakes, teachers, you cheat on your homework, you make mistakes and you learn from them.
It's very generalized. It's not focused. It's not tailored towards the individual. You're just kind of left to think for yourself and you don't develop those traits. I 100% believe that it's more than, I think it's very necessary. I 100% support that.
You need a family center. You need to be able to empower the children and help adults learn how to heal so that they can develop healthy relationships within themselves with their parents, with their siblings, with their partners, with their children.
So when I talk about having a resource center for youth and also a component of that is to helping parents unlearn a lot of learned behaviors out of survival, I want families to be able to thrive and in order to thrive, you have to teach the village.
You have a strong nucleus.
You have the nucleus. Fear is the nucleus of your addiction and gratitude is the nucleus of your recovery and we are all in recovery. I've never struggled with substances, impulsive, compulsive behaviors, rescuing people has always been an impulsive thing for me way back when, how I've learned to put objective thinking into place to sustain my purpose and allowing young people to understand that you have to have boundaries.
You have to sustain those boundaries and at the same time you have to learn to thrive instead of just living in survival mode.
And when we live in survival mode, we lie, we cheat, we steal, we manipulate. We do things in an irresponsible fashion and we're quick to deflect.
When you're thriving in life, you take ownership and accountability and you apologize. You allow people to understand that you have remorse for the impulsive behavior that you engaged in and it's necessary for a family to heal and we have a lot of broken families.
We have a lot of broken children, we have a lot of broken adults and for me being in an environment that I work with a lot of adults, I work with a lot of young people as well and there's this huge gap and we have to find a way to bridge the gap.
That's why I work in an inpatient residential facility and sustain my private practice. I just want to build a bridge. That's been my ambition since I started back in 2007.
And the reality is we need that bridge in order for us to find a path back to humanity within our family units and it's one drop.
It's one corner of which the big jigsaw puzzle that I see, I know the corners of my jigsaw puzzle, I know the framework of what I want to establish, it's being able to sustain it in a society that wants quick fixes and there is no quick fix to this healing process.
Exactly. And it's exactly, you know, we need this, we need this for, you know, to teach these things. It's a different perspective that's tailored towards the individual.
How can somebody start working with you?
How can? Well, ultimately, you know, my office, I like to do a lot of consultations to identify where somebody's at, where they want to be. They can contact me at my office.
I do have a website, however, it needs to be revamped because I don't have enough hours in the day to do both.
So right now, if anyone wanted to do a consultation, which is complimentary from me, to find out where you are, where you want to be, you just go contact my office.
Contact your office. That's Khalil Family Wellness, correct?
Khalil Family Wellness and Intervention.
Yes.
Khalil Family Wellness and Intervention.
Okay.
Last week, I interviewed Sheila Mezzolini, my partner here at CBD Surgeons. We're going to talk hemp products, how we got started, and much more.