Human Up Season 1 Ep 11: The Power of Connection in Recovery with Brandon Lite

This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 1, Episode 11 with Brandon Lite, which you can watch and listen to here:

Dave: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Marlon, and I am super excited today to be joined by Brandon Lite. Welcome Brandon.

Brandon: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Dave: Yeah, good, good. Me too. To me, I think you're the youngest guest I've had so far, and it's so important to me that millennials at younger generations embrace behavioral health being of service and kind of what the Human Up movement stands for. So I'm excited. One, I like you two because I work with you, but also I think you're what we call a millennial, aren't you?

Brandon: I think I fall into Gen Z.

Dave: Okay. It says millennial.

Brandon: I was born in 19. Oh, I was born in 1997.

Dave: Oh, you're right. That's the next, that's Gen Z. So you missed millennial by one year.

Brandon: Yep.

Dave: Alright, so even newer than a millennial, you're a Gen Z. Do you identify as a Gen Z?

Brandon: I do not, but I do hear that a lot regarding my age. You're the youngest or Yeah, I'm aware that age is an important part of summer's culture.

Dave: Right? Yeah. At the same time, I'm actually a boomer. I'm the last of the boomers, and when people call me a boomer, usually it's done so as sort of a dig, and I just brushed that right off, but I think that's an eloquent way to put that, your age. It's part of culture, it becomes part of your identity

Brandon:

And it intersects with every other aspect of life.

Dave: Right. Well, I'm excited. You recently earned your certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor intern your CADC. Congratulations.

Brandon: We're right at the end. We're right on the end of the application.

Dave: Okay, awesome. However, you are a, let's see, you're a peer recovery support specialist supervisor.

Brandon: Yes. Yeah,

Dave: That one you are right now.

Brandon: Yes.

Dave: What is a peer support? PRSS. What is that?

Brandon: A peer support is somebody with lived experience that helps guide someone through the recovery process. I see it as a much needed part of the puzzle, especially in a treatment atmosphere like we see here at Vegas Stronger, but we could see peer support in many different locations, whether we could say the needle exchange, places where they haven't yet found recovery. That'd be a great place to break down some ambivalence that someone might have to trying something different. But as peer support grows, they have understood the need for supervision, more ethical practices, and to make it more professional. So there's boards now and laws pertaining to peer support and even now a peer support supervisor title.

Dave: Yeah. I've been in the healthcare business for 38 years, and peer support specialists are still a relatively new phenomena. At my prior treatment center Solutions recovery, I had lots of, we call 'em BHTs Behavioral Healthcare Techs, who had what you called lived experience and they were in recovery and I learned the value of them. But it's still relatively new that this is a discipline that people can become a peer support specialist, and it's important that whether you're in prevention, education or treatment and we're in treatment, that in treatment, that there is a peer support aspect to connect with clients to help instill hope, to show them the way in really a non-judgmental fashion.

Brandon: It's hard to explain. That was a good explanation.

Dave: Okay, thanks.

Brandon: Look, I can tell you what to do. I can give you all the tools that you need. We can create a plan with person-centered goals and that you come up with yourself, your counselor or therapist can say, this is what you need to do. Here are the goals, but if for some reason you just don't do 'em, then nothing's going to happen. Peer support is that hand the hold to walk you through that.

Dave: Yeah. That's awesome. You mentioned two words, and I'm going to pin you down on 'em. You said you're due to lived experience.

Brandon: What

Dave: Is lived experience? We all have lived experience.

Brandon:

Yeah. I do have lots of lived experience, 27 years of it. Yeah. When I talk about my lived experience, I talk about homelessness, I talk about incarceration, I talk about mental health and substance use.

Dave: Oh, so when you're talking about lived experience, this experience that could help have you connect with clients who are dealing with homelessness or dealing with a substance use disorder or dealing with a mental health crisis.

Brandon: I might be wearing a nice jacket, but sometimes I have to say, look man, I was homeless for six years. I understand.

Dave: Okay. That sounds like lived experience to me.

Brandon: Yeah.

Dave: You also mentioned a word, kind of the most important word to me. You mentioned the word recovery, and I'm glad you mentioned it because lived experience and recovery are actually different things. Let's try to do this. What's recovery?

Brandon:

Many people have different answers.

Dave: Your

Brandon: Yeah. If I look at SAMHSA's definition of recovery, if I broke that one down, it's like I'm living a better today than I did yesterday. I'm a little more hardcore than that. My definition of recovery is a complete abstinence from any mood changing, mind altering substance. Right.

Dave: Okay. That's substance use recovery.

Brandon: When we talk about mental health recovery, usually it falls into I'm taking my meds as prescribed for my doctor.

Dave: Well, I like that. That's clear and definable. So if somebody says they're in mental health recovery, I could say, so do you have any medications you take and do you take them as prescribed by your doctor? And if they said yes, I could say, well, that sounds like you're consistent. And if somebody says they're in recovery from say, opioids, I could say, well, do you refrain from taking any opioids at all? And if they say yes, you could say that they're in recovery.

Brandon: Yeah.

Dave: Let's split that one down a little bit because there's a little more there. To me, that sounded like abstinent to me, that's different than working a recovery program.

Brandon: I feel like abstinence is needed in order to find recovery.

Dave: I agree with you. Well, for me,

Brandon: But here's the thing. I couldn't judge a recovery though. So if I were to give someone a definition of what recovery is, to me, the bottom line is abstinence. So I couldn't judge what happens after that abstinence, but that's what I could see. That's the recovery

Dave:

For me personally, recovery has been a process that I've engaged in to become more aware, to identify and behaviors that I've had, negative behaviors, most of which were rooted in selfishness, that I was truly mostly unaware of until I got into this recovery process, which again, it's the most beautiful thing in the world to me. I often tell people I've lived two lives. I had this one life of 40 years mostly driven myself. And I've had another coming up on 20 years of life where I've been working a program of recovery, which also includes a spirituality piece, which is also, it's hard to put our finger on. I am not going to tell you I am a Buddhist or I am a Catholic. To me that would be selling it short. I would say I regularly engage in prayer and meditation. I would tell you that I develop a conscious contact with a power greater than myself, and I try to have that power direct my life more than this power, because this power got me into a world of shit.

Brandon: So you have a disease model of addiction that you treat with 12 steps me to.

Yeah. Yeah. It's hard because me too, right? That's how I understand addiction. I've gone to personal therapists to where I've sat down with them and their understanding of addiction was a lot different than my understanding. That's an immediate cutoff. I no longer trust anything they say after that, regardless of how much school they did. Kind of like, oh no, you became an addict when you took that first drug and it affected your dopamine levels and you were chasing that same dopamine rush. And then I'm like, no, I was an addict on my idea way before then.

Dave: Same.

Brandon: But then I have employees right now that don't work a 12 step program that have a different idea of what addiction is and what recovery is, and they do fine. They live a life just like I live, and it blows me away. I watch 'em closely. And whether it's church, they still live by the same value. So I don't know how I could, they don't meditate. They may pray, they don't work the 12 steps in the sense that I do, but they still get the same results, so I wouldn't know how to explain their recovery. Right.

Dave: That's fair. And I'm glad you talked to employees because to me it all begins and ends with our clients, and the same holds for them. Not all of our clients have come in and done recovery. I do. I happen to go to a different fellowship than you. And I love that. And I would guess that almost of our clients don't dig deep into a 12 step program, but many of them stay abstinent. Many of them, many of them get housed. So I agree. Although my definition of recovery includes a 12 steps, I don't get to put that on our employees or our clients. It's a personal decision that each of our clients make for themselves. Now, I like you draw the line in abstinence that if we have a client who comes here and their recovery is different than mine, but they believe they could use heroin on Fridays, I would call that not recovery.

Brandon: The hard part is, okay, so the landscape is becoming more liberal in that sense, more harm reduction. And when we talk about peer support as well, they train you to be aware of harm reduction and the multiple avenues to recovery. Even if we look at motivational interviewing where we're trying to draw out a person's internal motivation to change, that requires trial and error. When we're talking about opiate addiction, trial and error is deadly. So where does it become enabling to? Where does it become, I'm doing mi Right?

Dave: Right.

Brandon: Go ahead and try your way if you don't want to try the 12 steps, but then they may die. Right?

Dave: Yeah. That's a big part of the trick in our business. I have a client right now I'm seeing, and his position is he doesn't want to use Fentanyl anymore, but he still wants to drink smoke weed and take Adderall. And I'm his clinician and and I agree, smoking weed, drinking, doing Adderall is better than doing all those things and fentanyl. So his life's probably a little bit better, although we're processing his fifth relapse now. And it is interesting because he's not willing, he's not yet willing to give some of those things up, and he's having trouble seeing the link between the dialogue that goes in. And to me, it became really clear. I found I could not use drugs until I had it's right between two and three beers. Once I have the third beer, Dave's ability to not do it leaves. So I guess if I didn't ab dot your hard core mentality of abstinence, I probably could have negotiated doing one or two. But to me, once I'm having one or two, three is so easy or I start doing larger ones, it's just a slippery slope. My gestalt, my overall realization was just that as you were talking about on opiate use, you could die, is that one of these times I could die and it's like, is one cold beer worth dying? Because that's the way the math started working out to be. And just to me, when I would break out my calculator, let's see, jails, institution or death, they're over here and happy, joyous, and free are over here. And the end of the day, I don't need my calculator to figure out which path do I want to take.

Brandon: What's funny is I never had that inner dialogue. Not once did I ever think to myself, I need to stop getting high. I partied. Even being homeless, it was one big party. I do what I want, what I want, zero responsibility. I had fun. There was very rarely a bad time. I just couldn't stay out of the criminal. I couldn't stay out of the criminal system. I would get arrested. The time between charges would get lower and lower, and I would stay out of jail for a week and then catch another felony. And my inner dialogue when I got clean this time was, I'm going to get over on them by doing what probation wants for me. Watch this. I'll get over on you. And it ended up just working.

Dave: That's awesome. How long were you on probation?

Brandon: Oh, four and a half years.

Dave: Oh,

Brandon: Yeah, that came.

Dave: So you getting one over on him for four and a half years was enough for Brandon Lite to develop a new neural pathway, whether you realized it or not.

Brandon: Yeah. And the four and a half years went really quickly compared to when I was sitting in jail thinking about, oh man, it's going to be four and a half years.

Dave: Right. That's awesome. And I'm so proud of you. Now, I think you also volunteered some of your time and you manage a text line for nami?

Brandon: I do. I get paid for that as well.

Dave: Oh, okay. What do you do?

Brandon: It's a teen crisis text line. I don't think they, like when you say crisis, right? It's a teen text line. It's a peer support text line that teens will text into. And a lot of the times they're in crisis when they, it's a lot to text a line or a hotline and say, I want to talk to somebody. So when you get to enough pain to do that, normally it's a crisis. So we get a lot of suicide. We get a lot of severe mental health, not a lot of substance use, but I spend 15 hours a week at home on a laptop, logged in with a few other coworkers waiting for someone to text in, or they can be referred by a therapist or a facility and ask that, Hey, here's the phone number for the person. Can you guys reach out three times a week? Right. So I'll send some outbound texts. I'm checking in. How are you doing? Everything good? Yeah. It's very simple, but it's powerful. Right. All right, so I'll go back to my childhood.

This was during the time where let's arrest people and throw 'em in jail, the war on drugs. And I would go to juvenile court at 12, 13, 14 years old, and they would say, we're going to send you upstate to Caliente or Spring Mountain for six months. And then I'll drag that out for a year because the obsession and compulsion I want to fit in, takes over and I act out. And finally I get to go home and my parents would say, Hey, we're going to move to a new neighborhood. We're going to a new school. We're going to get you away from all of that. And of course, the first thing I do is seek out what I know and what I'm comfortable with. And those are the kids that smoked weed. And that got in trouble, and it was easy. So my support system was rich for me without anyone knowing it. I played baseball and I skateboarded, and they were trying to save my life a danger to myself and others. And they didn't realize that what they were doing was ripping me from my means of playing baseball and building maybe a healthy support system without realizing it. So the cycle repeats. And maybe if I had a text line of some consistent support, maybe I would do better.

Dave: Nice. Oh, so you develop authentic connections with human beings via text?

Brandon: Through text, yeah.

Dave: Do they test you?

Brandon: They do. So there's always that fear, I'm going to say something wrong. And these two jobs compliment each other. I like being a low level employee for one company at least. I just go to work and take orders, and I'm not overextending myself. So I would sit at Vegas stronger in some interventions with some counselors. I've been counseling for 30 and 40 years and I'll listen to 'em. And they're very to the point. There is no thought process as getting by 'em, no thinking error goes unlooked at. Right. The second the client states something that is in conflict with what's really happening, they'll point it out and go wrong. And I'm like, oh my God, that's harsh. But the reaction the client has becomes, they respond to it Well, they go, okay, you're right. Lemme do this. And sometimes in tears, okay, we're going to do this together. And they really respond well. So I'm like, let me put my big boy pants on one time and try this so I can move over to the text line. And especially with relationships, that's the easiest one to work with people on, because I know all about the terrible relationships and I got harsh or I didn't enable the behavior that I saw.

I got supportive, but assertive. And it responded well with them too. Right.

Dave: Yeah. That was something at solutions, that was a big learning lesson for me. I had a therapist by the name of Angela, and to me, she had the best confrontation skills and whether I was asking her to do something or she was talking in group and with a client, if they talked about something that was incongruent with their treatment goals, bam. No sugarcoating, she just will call that out. And she would do the same thing to me in management. And I remember my first reaction was like, how dare you? But then the realization that shit, she's right. There is a conflict here. I had a deep appreciation for her, and I still do to this day that she's somebody who told me the truth. And it sounds like that was kind of part of your lesson when talking to teens or talking to our clients. I think they appreciate that we tell 'em the truth.

Brandon: Yeah. I don't want to beat around the bush

Dave: Because I love, we do assessments and I'll sit across from a person and I'll ask them about their drug use, and they'll just start listing it off and then talk about when's the last time you used in the parking lot before I came in? And it's really interesting that I guess the rapport that we build with our clients and the fact that we are rehab, it's like a little bit of a pressure release. They have to lie to the cops, they have to lie to their parents. They've been used to lying to everybody around, but now they're finally in rehab where you could actually totally tell us what's going on and maybe you have a major depressive disorder and you are choosing to deal with it with a serious alcohol use disorder. Fantastic. Glad you're telling me this. Now I'm going to talk about the incongruence, that that's actually depressant and you're making shit worse.

Brandon: Yeah. I think a lot about my time in treatment centers, especially as a youth. And it's funny because I would make stuff up just to look like more intense to the therapist, and I got caught. I did cocaine for the first time, and I got caught the next day by my PO with a drug test. So now it looks like I'm doing cocaine consistently. So that whole, the first time this guy does, and I'm like, why is no one listening to me? So that entire treatment session, the six months, actually, I dragged it out to 11. That 11 months, my gig was, oh, I used cocaine. I was like 14, 15 years old.

Dave: And you did it once?

Brandon: Yep. One time.

Dave: Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. I went through this thing where I would run three miles and my runkeeper would tell me it was 3.2, and by the time I got to work, it became four. And then later on, I'm talking to her at lunch. Yeah. I had a five mile run this morning, and I'll catch myself. I'm like, what the hell am I talking about? So to me, I always run with my runkeeper. I use it as a way to keep me honest because I don't want to lie about anything.

Brandon: It's funny. It all breaks down to the same thing, whether it was using or in recovery today, it was fear. I was scared of something. Right. Whether that's scared, never be loved again. Let me lie to you about how much I run so you can love me more.

Dave: Yeah. It does all come often, all comes down to fear. There's a lot of that. Yeah. I came into recovery 100% sure that I'm a kid from New York, and I was never afraid of anything. And boy did my sponsors have fun with me. Wow. I'm afraid of everything.

Brandon: Yeah. I'll show 'em. I get my whole neck tattooed.

Dave: Yeah, I remember you asked me before you did it, which to me was endearing and it told me you cared about your job. Although I also didn't see it. My role, I like the work you do, whether you're inked or not, that's your business. Now. It may not hold true if you want to become an investment banker, but certainly in treatment it seems to be the norm,

Brandon: Which is good. I think it helps with that rapport building.

Dave: Okay, nice. Do you have a cat?

Brandon: I do. I'll admit it. I'm a cat person.

Dave: Tell me about your cat.

Brandon:

That's actually something I learned about myself in recovery. But yeah, I have a cat. Actually, God, it's so funny. My cat can't do no wrong. My cat has full anonymity in my life. It's a cat. It's innocent. It can't do no wrong. So no matter what my cat does, it gets the best side of me compared to the rest of the world. But he had a hard life. His first owner overdosed and died.

Dave: Oh wow.

Brandon: Yeah. He moved on to the owner's ex-girlfriend who they ended up relapsing and deciding they're going to go be homeless and then moved on to me. So maybe the cat's bad luck, but his name's Jackson and he is a tuxedo cat.

Dave: How long have you had him?

Brandon: It's been about two years.

Dave: Oh, so you got 'em while you worked at Vegas stronger?

Brandon: Yeah, probably at the very beginning I had another cat and I didn't understand cat dynamics, so they do not like each other. They're territorial. Right. They're basically like wild animals that haven't evolved much since when they first encountered humans, but they just would not get along no matter what. I tried. And actually Jackson, he's jealous. He loves me and he gets jealous. So any other animal around, he doesn't do well. Eventually he kicked that other cat out the house, the one we had first, and she lives with a neighbor now.

Dave: Okay.

Brandon: Yeah.

Dave: So I named this podcast and I'm still sorting out what podcasting is, but I named the podcast Human Up. Could you tell me what does human up mean to Brandon Lite?

Brandon: I have to learn how to human up. I spent so much of my life and animalistic level just seeking for the next one. Whatever is yours, is mine. Living outside, just roughing it. Right. I was losing my humanity. The addiction took every piece of humanity out of me. Right now, there was still a small side that had some principles and values that I had learned as a child that we're in conflict, but eventually it just takes over and nothing matters. So this whole recovery journey is learning how to become a human again. This is all just one big human experience. I'm still learning. Right. Sometimes I got to think back to that emotion wheel and go, what am I feeling right now? Should be a big, the middle should say fear. Right?

Dave: Right.

Brandon: Oh, I'm experiencing fear right now.

Dave: Well, I am grateful that here at Vegas Stronger, you've had so much success, and all I expect is continued success with you. And we'll learn some lessons. We'll both stumble. But it's an honor working with you. It's been great having you as an impromptu guest on the Human Up Podcast. Brandon, thank you very much for being here today.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. I'm very privileged.