In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Leeds, sits down with David and Susan Kenney, the founders of Emergo Academy.
During their conversation, the Kenneys provide insights into their company, Emergo Academy, which is renowned for its coaching, training, certification, and educational services. Their primary focus is on the training and certification of recovery coaches on an international scale. They elaborate on their unique ‘brain-first’ strategy for lasting recovery, which pivots around five pillars: physiology, psychology, spirit, connections, and lifestyle.
David and Susan underscore the significance of comprehending how the brain is implicated in addiction and the way it influences behavior. They challenge the common belief that altering the brain’s wiring can be achieved externally, through methods such as medications or vagus nerve stimulation. Instead, they promote an experiential therapy technique that enables individuals to relieve trauma and actively restructure their brain.
The Kenneys address prevailing misconceptions surrounding addiction treatment and underscore the urgency for more skilled and certified recovery coaches in the healthcare sector. They underline that recovery is a long-term commitment, and they strive to inspire hope by prioritizing personalized life plans over traditional relapse prevention programs.
Wrapping up the episode, the conversation turns towards their forthcoming book, “Actualized Recovery”, and their ambitious objective to prepare 1,000 ‘actualized recovery coach warriors’ over the next three years to effect a meaningful transformation in addiction recovery.
To learn more about Emergo Academy, follow this link: https://www.emergoacademy.com/
Transcript:
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:00:19]:
I’m really excited to hear about the program that you have. I was looking at the website and yeah, please, just tell me all about it. Tell me what’s going on with Emergo Academy.
Dave Kenney [00:00:30]:
Well, Emergo Academy is a coaching, training and certification and education company and endeavor for us. But we specialize in helping people with becoming recovery coaches. And so what we offer is an international certification in recovery coaching. And we’ve got accreditations both in the US in the world of addiction and the UK about our coaching training program. We have been affiliated with the university, so our academic or our teaching part of our program has been vetted quite heavily and is very solid. And so it’s an international certification of recovery coaching. And the real story, I guess the backstory to this is how we got here wasn’t actually by design. As much as we all like to think we’re smart people, it was more.
Susan Kenney [00:01:22]:
If you asked us a year ago, there’s no way we ever would have said, this is where we’d be landing right now. So we saw a need to be able to help at that time, teens and young adults that were struggling. And our background is education based, and we just saw really great kids that were struggling in life and maybe making some bad choices. And we saw their lives spiraling out of control. And we looked at each other and said, we got to fix this. We don’t know how we’re going to fix this, but we have to fix it.
Dave Kenney [00:01:58]:
But we had a hypothesis, and this kind of leans into your world is, what if we could change a brain or help a brain? Because learning challenges addiction issues and then mental health issues we all knew somehow connected with a brain. And then we stumbled into Dr. Amen’s work, and the first book we ever saw was change Your Brain, Change Your Life. And then the puzzle pieces just instantly started to fall together because that was our first exposure, 2009 or so, eight or nine. That was our first exposure to this thing called Neuroplasticity, which I’ve been writing about now in my PhD and studying about it. So we’ve created a brain first approach to recovery or to lasting recovery. And there’s an integrative part, but actualized recovery is the methodology. It’s called actualized recovery. That’s our book. And what we’ve now taken is that methodology. And we’re teaching that to coaches to be able to impact people in the world and help more people than we’ve ever been able to do before.
Susan Kenney [00:03:04]:
And it’s not theoretical. We started our own live in recovery program in 2011, and we still worked with clients privately. So everything that we hypothesized, we put into action, and lo and behold, it all works. Everything tied together that’s in the last.
Dave Kenney [00:03:22]:
Twelve years, over 2000 clients and families, which we learned very quickly. The families have got to be involved and part of it was coaching. And we have trained over 200 people to be professional coaches in recovery with a specialization, psychologists, masters of psychology, social workers, educators, and just coaches. And so we’ve created this little team and then the pandemic hit, which caused us to close our recovery program. Well, actually we could have stayed open, but business wise we couldn’t meet the criteria that was being placed on us, the restrictions being placed on us. So we closed the program from a business point of view and looked at each other on what do we do, what do we do that’s really what’s next and what do we do that was really well? And what do we do that we love? We love teaching and love helping other people, and we love helping people in crisis because I don’t believe anybody’s bad. We’ll get into this in a minute. I don’t believe this is a willpower character defect thing. And so then we went, why don’t we teach more people? So our goal, dr. Leeds, maybe you can help us with this with your podcast, but our goal here is to train 1000 coaches, turn them into actualized recovery coach warriors, we’re calling them, and help them business wise, get 1000 clients. Then we’ve impacted over a million people. Oh, by the way, we want to do it in three years.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:04:50]:
Oh, wow.
Susan Kenney [00:04:53]:
It’s doable when you break it down.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:04:55]:
Yeah, that’s a great goal. I’m curious about changing the brain and the idea of neuroplasticity. Because plasticity these days everybody is looking for a way to fix their brain, change their brain. A lot of people are interested in the new explosion of psychedelics and Ketamine therapy. They’re like, let me go into one of these clinics and get an infusion. And they talk about brain growth. The dendrites of the neurons start growing and connecting with other neurons and communicating better. But it’s kind of a scary thing. If someone said, oh, go to a Ketamine clinic and your brain will grow and develop and improve. I’m like, well, I don’t know, I’m like a little scared of that.
Dave Kenney [00:05:46]:
I’d like to see the studies. My studies don’t show that. My studies actually show that that’s not how neuroplasticity develops. Neuroplasticity works based on HEB’s law or Hebian theory, which is the more a neuron fires, the stronger it wires. The only way to make a neuron fire isn’t through thought and isn’t through chemistry. It is through an action. And so if you think about brushing your teeth, you can’t use a chemical or an outside in approach, which is a tablet or hallucinogenic. You can’t bring in through chemistry and outside in approach to create neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is the mother of all things with our brain. And that begins to help our brain rewire. But you think about brushing your teeth? The only way if I’m a right hand dominant. So are you right or left hand dominant, doc?
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:06:39]:
Left handed.
Dave Kenney [00:06:40]:
Okay, so tonight try your right hand. Assuming we have the same kind of hands, they work the same, dexterity is the same. Why can’t I use a toothbrush the same way? That doesn’t make any sense. Except until you look at neuroplasticity, the brain has not been wired to do that fine motor skill, but you can rewire it in a very short period of time to work with your right hand as well as you do with your left hand. But you can’t do that by talking to a therapist. You can’t do that by taking a tablet. You actually have to do something. So we use a lot of experiential therapy to help the brain rewire.
Susan Kenney [00:07:17]:
Dr. Leeds, you hit on a great topic that I’m really passionate about. We’ve always said if something works, we’re all in. If we find that it is actually beneficial for the brain, we’re not arrogant. We would absolutely consider it in our work with people over the last twelve years, working intimately with people. What we found is marijuana, psychedelics, any of those drugs that force the brain into change, have long term effects that are not healthy for the brain. And they lead to other complications and the brain relies on them and begins to shut down in other places. So that’s been our experience. That is definitely what Dave’s talking about. When you force the brain to do something, so even take it to the extreme of ECT, there’s ECT treatments now for the brain. You are shocking the brain from the outside in hoping that you’re going to create change. We’ve worked with people with ECT, and I’ll tell you, the people that came to us had change, but it wasn’t the change that they were promised. So the best way to help a brain and a person is to look at more holistic ways of saying, okay, if the brain isn’t functioning properly, how can I support this brain in order to bring it back into function and balance? And there’s so many holistic things, and the longer that you do them, the healthier, the happier and the more settled the person becomes and they get their life back.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:09:05]:
Yeah, that makes sense. So what you’re saying to me makes sense in some ways. Like I was thinking, I haven’t practiced piano for years, and if I tried to play an arpeggio, I’m going to mess it up. But if I sit there and practice, my hand’s going to get better and better and better at it. Same thing with brushing my teeth with my right hand. I think maybe after a couple of times or a week, if I’m really deliberate in my practice, I can probably better. Now what about, say I’ve got some OCD symptoms and I have to check my front door factors of twelve? I don’t feel comfortable, I check it three times. If I check four or five, I got to go up to six. Now I have this whole routine and almost pulling the door off the hinge and sometimes take a picture of the doorknob of me twisting, and I’m like, okay, I have proof that I checked. It like crazy stuff like that. Or some people do it with the oven or stove. What kind of deliberate practice could I possibly do to get past first of.
Susan Kenney [00:10:05]:
All, everybody’s an individual. So everybody that would have symptoms like OCD symptoms may have a different wiring in the brain to end up having to check things over and over again. We can have patterns in the brain that aren’t being, um, they don’t continue, so it doesn’t finish that thought process. You can actually have physical things in the brain, like you’ve had concussion or you’ve had illness. So there’s different types of traumas, and they are chemical traumas. So things can happen within us chemically. We can have physical traumas like an illness, or we can have a concussion or an accident, something like that, and we can have emotional traumas. Any of those can lead to symptoms, one of them being OCD. So work backwards and go upstream and go, okay, how can we help this brain process whatever that trauma was, and how can we get it to come back into balance? And then the symptoms that you have at the back end are no longer prevalent.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:11:17]:
Okay, yeah. So likely if I if I have those symptoms, there’s likely some trauma in the past that hasn’t been released.
Dave Kenney [00:11:25]:
So I’ll give you a story that a young man, russian immigrant young man, parents brought him to us. He was what you might call a germaphobe, but to an extreme life debilitating level, like not wanting to touch door handles, not wanting to share forks and utensils even though they’ve been washed. He wanted his own put aside, and only he got to use it. So that’s a very debilitating thing. Forget about going out over a grocery store and pushing a cart. That’d be impossible. Working with us in our program in the brain first approach and using some experiential therapies as well, we began to help his brain reset. And the issue there, too, was trauma related. He had a trauma when he was born. It was a newborn trauma, if I recall right, he had a birth trauma. I think it was the cord that was wrapped around blue face, lack of oxygen, and the brain went into this parasympathetic dominant state response. And we have some technology which is non invasive technology out of Scottsdale, Arizona, and it’s created by brain state technologies that allow us to see approximately how old somebody is when they had a trauma. And we can see this because the brain develops at certain ages, life, and over time. The month that he was with us, I don’t remember he’s four or five weeks with us. And over time, he began to not be as paralyzed by germs. And one of the days I actually took them to the dump.
Susan Kenney [00:13:04]:
Not intentionally, but what we did was a very experiential program. So when people came to us during the day, there was normal things, right? You do your dishes, you make your bed, you provide for the whole group, the community. So Dave texted me and the group, the coaches, and said, pablo and I are headed to the dump. And my eyes went, exactly. Oh, my gosh. But if you look at so the parent, we took pictures a lot to send back to families. You can only imagine the parents of this young man getting a picture of him at the dump, right? It was just beyond none of this is forced.
Dave Kenney [00:13:48]:
This was late in the program, and he had overcome so much. I even left my memory that this was a challenge for this young man, and it ended up being a beautiful experience. This was not forced. He didn’t have to get out of the car. He didn’t have to touch anything. He said, come on and help me out. And he started helping out and pitching in. That was the miracle of this. And then let’s fast forward after our program. I don’t know. Six months later, a handful of months later, we got a picture. Where was he?
Susan Kenney [00:14:17]:
Disneyland.
Dave Kenney [00:14:18]:
And he was in Disneyland for the weekend or the week, riding, rides, doing everything. We’re getting pictures of him on the log jam going down. That’s the gift that you get to give people when you come from a brain first approach, fundamentally is beginning to release that for him. That parasympathetic dominant brain pattern, that state of fear and emotionally frozen and scared. By the way, a lot of cutters we see with that as well, and there’s lots more people. But that’s one story of helping people with OCD. And my last thought of that too, dr. Leeds, is you’ve got to break the pattern. That’s the first thing you have to do. And gently, first of all, we’ve had people with a lot of ticks and things and got to go in and out of a doorway six times. Okay, do you want to keep doing this? No, I don’t want to do this, but I have to. Okay, what part of that where does the pattern start? What happens at the beginning of the pattern? Well, I tap myself. Okay, what would happen if you walk with your hands in your pockets? Well, I’d want to tap myself. Okay, but what would happen? Well, I don’t know. Neither do I. Let’s try that. It’s not a forced thing. You have to have somebody committed to wanting to change, not somebody being forced to that. We never subscribe to that. But you have to change the pattern. And this goes for smokers. We’ve had this before where people don’t want to smoke. And they say, But, Dave, I always have a smoke in the morning with my coffee, and I’m not giving up my coffee. What happens? I’d get my coffee, I go out on my deck, I go out on my porch, I have my smoke. Okay, what would happen if you got your coffee went into your bathroom? Well, I won’t smoke because I never smoke in the house. Okay, so here’s how to begin to rewire this trigger. This pattern is to avoid the deck in the morning with your coffee and go into the bathroom with your coffee. What do you think? Boom. It helps.
Susan Kenney [00:16:24]:
So Dave mentioned in the beginning, too, dr. Leeds, when you approach anything like this, any struggles people are having, there’s no shame. You’re not looking at it from a lack of willpower. And you look at this young man who had a debilitating case of what was diagnosed OCD. And you look at the root cause, look at what happened. We have trauma in the brain and nervous system that hasn’t been released. It’s still in the brain, and it’s getting worse. Right? It actually, over time, gets worse because the brain is trying to release it, except that people’s worlds get smaller. But there’s no shame when you look at it going, okay, the organ itself isn’t functioning properly. Once we get the flexibility and the balance to that beautiful brain, we can release this urge that you have to do all of these things. And even one of the things that happened in the end was we had water bottles for everybody. Somebody picked up his water bottle accidentally and drank it. And in the beginning, he would have absolutely flipped out. At the end, he shrugged and said, whatever, it’s massive. How freeing is that for this young man’s life?
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:17:48]:
Yeah, it sounds incredible. And, yeah, I know going to Disneyland is probably scarier than the dump for a germaphobe.
Dave Kenney [00:17:59]:
Yeah, well, he was having a great time, and the family just were in.
Susan Kenney [00:18:03]:
Tears because the family was locked down under this, too. He had another sister. The parents couldn’t go anywhere, the family couldn’t travel anywhere, and all of a sudden, the whole family has freedom. Wow.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:18:19]:
Now, a lot of the work you do is with addiction. And I saw on your website, I saw some big organizations. There was Asam, which is a major organization that credentials doctors to become board certified in addiction medicine. I think there was another one right under that, and I can’t think of the name.
Dave Kenney [00:18:39]:
So there’s NADAC, which is the National Association of Addiction Professionals. NADAC has looked at our program and has approved us as an education provider or education approved, I guess that’s what it is. And so individuals who need CES for their professional credentialing can go through a program and get CES. You don’t always have to, but that’s an assurance of the legitimacy of that. We’re actually speaking at the NADAC National Conference in October in Denver, Colorado. So we’ve applied and been accepted and was a competitive process there. We got ASM the American Society of Addiction Medicine. I’ve been a long term member of that. I was a member of the Canadian one, too. We’ve got Act Online, the association of Training Organizations. They’re out of the UK, and they’ve looked at us as a coach training program. So they looked at us non recovery, addictions wise. How are we with our coaching training? We looked at ICF for coaching and steered away from that just because recovery coaching is I feel we need more flexibility than what ICF kind of affords in our education and teaching, but our.
Susan Kenney [00:19:58]:
Coaches can use the hours to go towards ICF certification if they want it.
Dave Kenney [00:20:02]:
And then the other thing is, Susan and I are both trained, and we were invited by Dr. Amen himself, Daniel Ayman, when we met him in Vancouver, he heard about our program and instantly said, you got to be an affiliate of us. So we’re one of the few affiliates here in Canada that work with the aim and method and aim and methodologies, that’s part of our learning and education. So that’s part of our education and learning journey. Wow.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:20:31]:
It seems like with addiction treatment, canadians are way ahead of the Americans in the US. In addiction treatment. You guys have so many I don’t know if you would even agree with some of the stuff going there. There’s the supervised consumption sites, and they’re giving people drugs so they don’t have to get dangerous drugs from drug dealers. And there’s also another guy that’s been on my podcast. He works with the Three Principles, a spiritual movement which I think started in Canada, which is kind of like an alternative to the Twelve Steps. So many great things come out of Canada. Actually, some of my favorite music and musicians are from there also.
Dave Kenney [00:21:17]:
And we got good hockey players, too. Our thought on that is, for a short period of time, do what you need to do to help with somebody who’s, in an extreme case, do whatever needs to be to keep people alive and stabilize, and so whatever medication may need to be, then do what we need to do as a society. But ultimately, the drug sites are still delivering a poison and still keeping people hooked. So we truly believe and wish we were just in Vancouver a week ago, nine days ago, at a beautiful Persian wedding. Our first ever Persian wedding. Crazy fun. A lot of dancing and great music with a good friend of ours, or good friends of ours. But we had to drive through East Hastings in Vancouver. Well, if it’s not the worst, it’s one of the worst five, six block areas in North America. The issue there isn’t that people are struggling. The issue is how society and governments have turned their back on people and.
Susan Kenney [00:22:25]:
Given up and harm reduction and harm.
Dave Kenney [00:22:27]:
Reduction is not we said this. What’s harm reduction?
Susan Kenney [00:22:32]:
When you drive through this area, there’s so much harm. Even driving in a car, I don’t feel safe. And I know that there’s crime that’s been elevated. There’s blocks and blocks of stores that have had to close. Let’s put who is at harm as.
Dave Kenney [00:22:50]:
A society, people die there every day. So first let’s create a program where we handle people in crisis and let’s get them stabilized by whatever means. We’re into that. That’s like somebody after a car accident. Let’s get them stabilized and let’s handle with the pain. Let’s deal with the pain. Let’s take the same methodology in medicine and apply it here. Here’s why. If addictions is related to the brain, and here’s the problem with addictions. You cannot get one single definition in the world. That’s a futile effort to try and get that. But the two general thoughts are it’s a brain disease or it’s a brain disorder. So let’s debate disease or disorder. The commonality are the two main thoughts. It’s not spiritual, it is brain related. The brain craves it. The brain chooses it. The brain creates the action, the brain gets relief.
Susan Kenney [00:23:47]:
And it’s a physiological craving, right? You are physically, which means that it’s driven in the body. So we have to look there first.
Dave Kenney [00:23:55]:
So actualized recovery is the brain first approach to lasting recovery. But there are five integrative. We call them principles or foundations because it’s not brain only. So physiological. So the brain and the body and physiology drives psychology.
Susan Kenney [00:24:13]:
And that’s important to understand, is that we’ve got to look at the physical body first and it’s an integrated physical solution. So it’s brain, but it’s also everything else that’s happening in the body. We have to look at the body first.
Dave Kenney [00:24:29]:
The second principle is psychology. And we lean into more of a positive psychology, more of Maslow’s teachings, looking at strengths.
Susan Kenney [00:24:39]:
What are people great at? What are they unique at, and how do we build on that?
Dave Kenney [00:24:44]:
Victor Frankel’s teachings, which talks about there’s a stimulus and there’s a response. And in between the two, there’s a gap. That gap might be really small, it might be a nanoiset, but there’s a gap. And that means I’m not powerless. And twelve step programs say I’m powerless. If you use science and if you follow science, they’re saying and Victor Frankel taught us this in one of his great books, man Search for Meaning. But there’s a stimulus and there’s a response and there’s a gap. And in that gap is our freedom, is our power to choose how we respond to any stimulus. We humans like to give that away and say it’s not our fault and blame something else because then I’m not accountable in whatever that is. Why I’m speeding, why I’m late for work, why I’m overweight, why I’m overweight, why I drink so much, you yell at me. It’s too stressful. We like to do that to justify an action. The other one is spirit. Spirit is important. Who I am, how I smile to you. Yeah.
Susan Kenney [00:25:50]:
This is that part of yourself is undefinable and so unique. And it’s why, if you have more than one child, you understand that each child has a different spirit.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:26:02]:
Yeah.
Dave Kenney [00:26:03]:
Finding a meaning. Like you have a meaning, you have a great meaning. Well, your work every day as a doctor brings meaning to you and others, and that’s also a spiritual connection. And then the fourth one is connections we like to talk about. Connections are not family. The connections around you are like the roots of a tree, and that supports us and helps us grow.
Susan Kenney [00:26:27]:
So if you imagine a tree that has no roots, when something happens, there’s no stability to it. So we need deep connections and like friends that you can call on and have a good conversation with when things are going wrong, that’s the connections that we need, right? To feel safe.
Dave Kenney [00:26:50]:
The last principle well, they’re all key principles is lifestyle, specifically, a brain healthy lifestyle. Make choices. Food, nutrition, drink. What I am putting in my body, what I’m not putting in my body, that help my brain optimize and perform at its best. Because the brain drives behavior. It’s not our people. Psychology and neuroscience agree with not a lot, but this they agree on. Brain drives my behavior. My behavior is defined by my choices and my actions, whether I’m a smoker, whether I’m a drinker, whether I go for a run, those are driven by the brain. So let’s live a brain healthy lifestyle.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:27:32]:
Yeah, it makes sense. Almost sounds like the brain is a computer, and you’re reprogramming it through specific actions, and each one’s a little bit different. So you have to figure out, how are we going to program this one? We got to figure this one out. Now, each person is a different computer. You don’t program a computer by holding a book up to it or whatever. I mean, you know, like like, here’s a keyboard. You got to sit down and type on the keyboard and program it. It takes action, and you’ve hit on it.
Susan Kenney [00:28:09]:
It is the most sophisticated hardware. The brain itself, I don’t think we’ll ever understand the intricacies, but it is physiological, and it connects then to the mind. So if you think of the mind as the software, we absolutely have to get the brain functioning at its very best. So we practice CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. But what we learned very early on is, first you have to have the brain healthy and in balance. Then you can do cognitive behavior therapy, and people change very, very quickly.
Dave Kenney [00:28:47]:
So I know you know what CBT is. But CBT, for everybody listening or watching is a thought drives a feeling. The feeling drives an action. And so the idea behind that is, if you want to change the action, first, you got to change the thought. Here’s the missing link to that. In our studies, in our work, the missing link is if somebody is stuck in a parasympathetic dominant state, the young man we talked about in a parasympathetic dominant state, his thoughts are one of fear. And so, okay, you’re teaching him to challenge the thought, but as soon as he challenges that and says, no, that’s a false thought, it’s just a thought, it’s not real, the next thought is going to probably be a negative thought.
Susan Kenney [00:29:31]:
Right.
Dave Kenney [00:29:34]:
Working at the level of thought without helping his brain get relief actually is kind of a it’s kind of a child. You’re, you’re, you’re trying to row upstream. It’s not going to help until you begin to help the brain release and reset. And he can view the world differently, so he’s getting different thoughts which create different feelings, which means, I’m excited to go to Disney. And the action is he gets to go to Disneyland.
Susan Kenney [00:29:59]:
And the same for people in Fight or Flight, you have somebody that is in a response of Fight or flight. It’s like the gas pedal. There’s a brick on the gas pedal, and they’re just go, go, let’s go. And they’re aggressive and they want to take it on. So before you do any sort of behavioral therapy, you’ve got to bring balance and relaxation to that very overactive pattern.
Dave Kenney [00:30:27]:
I know some psychologists who are now doing some amazing work, but the first question they’re asking their new clients is, what did you eat for breakfast? What did you have for lunch? Because if you’ve had two Red Bulls, a couple of Danishes, and a coffee as you walked in the door, their brain is on fire. And the ability to get them to stop and become and thoughtful becomes impaired, not impossible. It’s certainly impaired versus eating a brain healthy diet.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:30:58]:
Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. I would imagine a lot of therapists don’t ask that question.
Susan Kenney [00:31:09]:
Yeah, I I don’t think there’s a there’s an emerging neuroscience approach to therapy, and we’ve certainly seen it change. So when we started in our first program, 2011, we went into the bookstore. There was very little on brain two or three. We were way ahead, and people thought we were lunatics for looking at the brain first. And now the brain is the new block.
Dave Kenney [00:31:36]:
Right.
Susan Kenney [00:31:36]:
It’s, it’s everybody wants to learn more about the brain, so we have this we would just feel like we got a head start for whatever reason. We had this idea in 2008, and we’ve just had more ability to research it. And I don’t think there’s another program that was ever like ours. We haven’t come across another one in North America for sure that was working on brain first and the efficacy of that, when people understand it, when therapists understand that, it revolutionizes things. So we’re not the only ones. Now we’ve got friends. But it just makes sense.
Dave Kenney [00:32:24]:
Like, you.
Susan Kenney [00:32:25]:
Said in the beginning, people don’t wake up in the morning and want to fail. And that was our premise in the beginning. No children, no adults wake up and say, man, I really want to screw up today. I really want to fail that test, or I really want to drink a drink that I don’t want to drink. So let’s throw that out because nobody does. So what is it? What creates that outcome for people that absolutely want to do better in their life? And you look at what drives behavior, it is the brain. So we’ve got to start there.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:33:04]:
Yeah. When you mentioned fight or flight and the synthetic or parasympathetic nervous system, a lot of people these days are talking about the vagus nerve. And there’s different devices and therapies and techniques that can somehow access the vagus nerve. And I think at Stanford, they’re actually like wiring into it directly, which I don’t think anybody wants to do. They’re actually doing surgery and implanting electrodes and dialing up electric current to the vagus nerve to try to treat depression.
Susan Kenney [00:33:33]:
Which is that outside in approach again.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:33:36]:
Yes.
Dave Kenney [00:33:37]:
There’s a lot of technology you can buy online, too, that claims a lot of things. Here’s our learning. If it’s an outside in approach, if it stimulates the brain, if it forces the brain into a certain pattern, if it uses magnets, I would run away from it because your brain unique to you. So a neurofeedback, for example, which has been used a lot, but in our experience, we’ve had a lot of people come saying it wasn’t lasting. Neurofeedback takes brains to an average. So your brain and the three of us, we all have different brain patterns and different abilities and different optimizations. I don’t want to take you, Dr. Leeds, to a place of average in your temporal lobe or in your frontal lobe. I want to optimize that. And your brain is really smart at being able to do that. So technologies that force the brain and tablets and chemicals that force the brain are not healthy for the brain.
Susan Kenney [00:34:35]:
So here’s what’s great. You’re talking about science, and the more people begin to understand the vagus nerve is important. Yeah, but if you look at the five principles that we’ve employed, changes happen over time. You can also fix somebody’s heart, but if they don’t adopt a lifestyle that is different than they had before, then they’re going to have heart problems again. So this is starting at, okay, we need to build a program that is specific and unique for that person that changes how the brain is functioning over time. But they have to be responsible for those changes. This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t you go in and get your vagus nerve stimulated, and all of a sudden everything’s going to be okay. You’ve got to be responsible for that change.
Dave Kenney [00:35:30]:
So, Dr. Lee, if I could jump this is the book that we’re writing actualized recovery. It’ll be out this summer, it’s available early purchases, and it says actualized recovery. It’s not about twelve steps. Recovery is a brain thing and it explains why we’re directly saying that. And actualized recovery and the five principles and the brain first approach, how it’s effective. But that’s the methodology. You asked me the first question about a Mergle Academy. Here’s what I get so excited about. And we’ve got a Master class coming up on the 21 June and we, we have them throughout the year. But this is the opportunity for coaches or anybody who wants to help people, whether that’s with trauma, trauma awareness, trauma recovery, addictions, soft addictions, hard addictions, those repetitive broken those cycles that we continually kind of self destruct ourselves in our lives.
Susan Kenney [00:36:30]:
If you’ve got self destructive patterns, you’ve got trauma that has not been able to process through the body. Therefore, the root of addiction comes from this trauma.
Dave Kenney [00:36:43]:
And that’s the exciting part is we coach our coaches and teach them that we’ve got an eight week certification course and then we’ve got an eleven month Master’s program. And people in the Master’s program then become kind of part of our staff and our group and everybody gets to be one of our actualized recovery warrior coaches. So that’s the exciting part is to take this knowledge and it is proven and shown to be highly effective and go out and make an impact in the world. And most coaches today, I don’t know if you’re aware of this most life coaches today, the number that I’ve studied and found is around 70% of life coaches today do not make an income. Why do you want to become a life coach? By the way? We both originally were life coaches many years ago. Why do you want to be a life coach is to create change. Well, recovery coaching creates phenomenal change and you get to make some money doing it.
Susan Kenney [00:37:42]:
Here’s the reality. You’re a medical doctor. The medical system is overloaded everywhere. We need to have people that are specialized in recovery to be able to support people in the medical system. And that’s what a recovery coach does. It’s that person who is specialized and has learned about trauma and learned to help lead and guide people from the crisis back to making good life choices. And that’s the brain first approach to doing it. So it’s a necessary we need recovery coaches right now. The world needs recovery coaches more than ever because it’s so critical. If you look at every population in the last few years, there’s a lot of suffering that’s going on, a lot of increase in substance use, and we need to help that.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:38:43]:
And people who are in recovery that have overcome active addiction, a lot of them want to give back. They want to find a way that they can help others.
Susan Kenney [00:38:52]:
This is a way to turn your pain into your passion in a way that you become part of something that actually provides people with hope. There’s a lot of recovery things that are hopeless. Right. They build in a relapse plan at the end. We don’t build a relapse plan. We build a life plan. The lifestyle of being brain first and taking care of your brain makes it so much easier for everything else in your life to change. So what we do is filled with hope.
Dave Kenney [00:39:33]:
I want to jump on that about the relapse plan. So NLP neuralistic. Neuro linguistic. Sorry, Programming. NLP teaches us in the world the power of our words. And our words can actually rewire our hardware, our neurological hardware. And if we say to somebody who’s on a diet, let’s create the plan for when you come off the diet, then don’t start, because the diet is never going to work.
Susan Kenney [00:40:02]:
You have your cheat day built in.
Dave Kenney [00:40:04]:
And so to say to somebody who is new in recovery, well, let’s create your relapse prevention program, you’re telling them right away that it’s hopeless. You’re going to blow this up. Now. I want to state that that may happen. Smart Recovery, by the way, is very good at this in comparison to a couple of other groups that I won’t name. But Smart Recovery, which certified in as well, didn’t even mention that.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:40:36]:
I saw on the website smart Recovery.
Dave Kenney [00:40:38]:
Smart Recovery.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:40:40]:
Sorry.
Dave Kenney [00:40:41]:
Yeah, they do some great things, but if you slip up for a weekend and start to drink and come back Monday, you don’t go to day zero again, as though everything’s blown up. Shame about it going okay. Welcome back. Glad you’re here. What can we do moving forward?
Susan Kenney [00:40:58]:
What did you learn?
Dave Kenney [00:40:59]:
And really, it’s about focusing on lifestyle. And we have seen over and over and over before somebody uses there are signs long before they use that led them, that were like, red flags, yellow flags, red flags. They weren’t going to work. They weren’t getting up. They left the routine. They stopped working out. They changed how they’re eating. They’re changing their friends. They’re starting to hang out with the bar friends again, but they’re drinking water at the bar. Well, there are typically signs way before somebody starts to use that are lifestyle oriented, that if you with working with a coach, you can catch those. You’ll alleviate that trip and fall.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:41:44]:
Yeah, well, that’s true. Definitely. There’s early signs that a person could catch that they’re going down the wrong path.
Dave Kenney [00:41:57]:
Typically, there always are if you play it back. Because one of our first questions when we get that call, and we have had that call, is, okay, what are you drinking? It’s the first question. What? What are you drinking?
Susan Kenney [00:42:11]:
How much water are you drinking?
Dave Kenney [00:42:12]:
I’m drinking Red Bulls again. Well, because that changes the brain. Right. And it’s starting to overexcite the brain. This isn’t hard. This is a decision. And mindset, which we love as well. This is a mindset about not what you don’t want in life. Our teaching on this is what do you want in life and everybody that.
Susan Kenney [00:42:37]:
We worked with, I personally can’t stand the word sober. If you look at the definition of sober, and I can’t imagine that anybody wants to define themselves as that, it’s boring, it’s dull, it’s lifeless. But what we look at, and this is the psychology that we practice, is this positive psychology, is creating what you want. Well, I don’t want sober. I want exciting, I want adventure, I want love, I want relationships, I want to travel, whatever that is. So in crafting this life as an actualized recovery coach, that’s what we help people with, is what do you really want? Because it’s like a GPS. You have to put in what you want in order to achieve it. And now you’ve got the map. So when life happens, because life is going to happen, you know how to get back on that map again. You still know where you want to go.
Dave Kenney [00:43:42]:
Dr. Leeds, I offer you a challenge. The next time you go to a restaurant, I want you to look at the menu. I want you to figure out everything you don’t want, and I want server. Everything you don’t want, that’s it. Stop there, because you’re not going to get what you want.
Susan Kenney [00:43:59]:
And the server is going very frustrated.
Dave Kenney [00:44:01]:
Frustrated. And when we look at what we don’t get so if I’m on a diet and I focus on I don’t get pizza, I don’t get ice cream, I don’t get it, I feel this huge weight, and it will win over time, right? Versus if I focus on what I do get. I have a wedding coming up, I’m going to look amazing. The summer is coming up, my grandchildren, and I want to be able to play with them. If I focus on what I do want, this new eating diet lifestyle, which I prefer the word lifestyle, not diet, but that new way of eating becomes so easy.
Susan Kenney [00:44:38]:
And Dave, what you’re talking about is we look at most people in most programs approach the problem. So they’re looking at the symptom and they’re creating a short term plan for looking at the symptom. What we want to look at is I want to take people to their best well being, to the opportunity to have autonomy and make decisions that really fit with a value system. And then we want longevity. What everybody wants is vibrant longevity. So when you’re looking at any type of recovery, and recovery can be addiction, but it can be grief related, it can be physiological, you’re recovering from having cancer treatments, whatever it is, what you really want is somebody who’s going to guide you through that process, and that unlocks your personal extraordinary. So this isn’t about focusing on what we’re deficient in and looking at the problem. We have to rise above that. And emirgo is a Latin phrase or a Latin word for rising above. And that’s what works long term, is helping people create what their extraordinary is, unlocking all of the power that they have within by looking at those five principles.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:46:08]:
Wow. That’s incredible. Dave and Susan Kenny of Emirgoacademy.com, thank you for joining me today. This has really been eye opening. I think a lot of people, obviously people who are doing well in the recovery and they want to get back to the community, they can benefit by learning how they can be coaches and also doctors that don’t know what to do with their patients, with addictions because they’re overwhelmed with way too many patients. They have somewhere to look now. And I like your approach and I like how you’re not just another coach. You’re very credentialed. Your program is proven. It’s based on science. It’s been looked at by some very established and respected organizations that we all respect in the community, like Asam and the other ones you had mentioned. It sounds like a great program, and I think anyone listening to this should reach out and look at your website and reach out to you. So thank you.
Dave Kenney [00:47:11]:
Thank you, Dr. Lee, it’s a pleasure to meet with you. We really value your work in sharing the word to the world. And your podcast, I’ve been wanting to listen to it. There’s some deep learning in there. So I thank you for the opportunity to visit today.
Susan Kenney [00:47:27]:
Great work in helping have those conversations, solutions that are helping people make better choices.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:47:33]:
Thank you.
