Revisiting Addiction Recovery with Jim Geckler
Jim Geckler joined 12 Geniuses back in Season One to bravely and candidly share his personal story of addiction and recovery. During that episode in December 2018, Jim discussed how to express concern for loved ones suffering through addiction, as well as how to intervene and get them the help they desperately need. After that episode aired, Don became personally aware of at least one individual whose life was changed by Jim’s appearance on the show, with that conversation spurring them to seek treatment.
This week, Jim and Don catch up to discuss how the treatment field has changed over the last three years. Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to adaptations, with virtual health care quickly becoming instrumental in providing treatment services. They also talk about the effect that the pandemic has had on drug and alcohol abuse, and about how you can spot the signs that someone you care about might be suffering from addiction.
Jim Geckler is the CEO of Harmony Foundation in Estes Park, Colo. He has been sober for more than 20 years and, during that time, Jim has helped thousands of people move toward sober, productive, meaningful lives.
Resources From This Episode
Connect with Jim on LinkedIn
Find out more on the Harmony Foundation website
Follow the Harmony Foundation on Twitter
Connect with the Harmony Foundation on Instagram
Connect with Don on LinkedIn
Follow Don on Twitter
Transcript
Don MacPherson:
Hi. This is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses.
Jim Geckler is CEO of Harmony Foundation, a drug and alcohol treatment provider in Colorado. Jim first joined the podcast in Season One.
Today he joins us to talk about how the treatment field has changed over the last three years, how virtual health care has become a mainstay in providing treatment, the effect of pandemic has had on drug and alcohol abuse, and how you can spot when someone you care about might be struggling with addiction.
This episode of 12 Geniuses is sponsored by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful and emotionally intelligent leadership.
Jim, welcome back to 12 Geniuses. We first talked in fall of 2018. Could you tell us what has happened to the drug and alcohol recovery field since then?
Jim Geckler:
There's been continued growth of facilities offering care for people. I know that in Colorado, we continue to see organizations come into the state to open both residential, outpatient and partial hospitalization or day-treatment levels, so it continues to grow as a kind of competitive market for folks. There's a lot of private equity coming into care, and you can get great care at some private equity places. I'm a little bit biased toward nonprofits, but you can get great care there.
Obviously, the biggest thing that everyone has dealt with has been the pandemic. So March 2020, the mask mandates were starting to come, the travel things were starting to come. We're starting to get an understanding that this was spreading very rapidly. Colorado had some pretty big spikes of cases, and we had a meeting and shut down all unnecessary traffic to campus. So family programming no longer was happening on campuses. Family couldn't come to visit the people who were in treatment, just like in every hospital, where you couldn't come in anymore.
Family is a very important part of the support of people in recovery. You need a place to land, you need to repair relationships, so that was a concern and a struggle for us from the get-go. How are we going to engage family?
We had launched an intensive outpatient program that was happening on campus about five months before, it's right around Thanksgiving, that would have individuals coming to Estes Park on Friday, doing clinical programming Friday night, Saturday all day and Sunday morning, and then going home. We knew that we couldn't do that kind of exposure where people were coming in and leaving. So in about three days, we moved that to a Zoom platform, really having no idea what that was going to look like or how long we were going to do that.
We were in the middle of launching a second outpatient program at our Fort Collins facility, right about the same time that COVID really hit, and that also went virtual. So we had these two programs that went virtual. We ended up marrying them into one for a while, and we moved one of the clinicians into a different role.
We continue to offer services on campus, so we continued to bring people in. Some of that was a little roll of the dice because we didn't really have an understanding of what COVID looked like and how it was going to affect people.
I will say we have great gratitude for the [Paycheck Protection Program], the PPP. We have a great relationship with our bank, and we were right in that first round on that, and that meant that we did not have to make knee-jerk reactions out of fear. When we did have some census issues, we didn't have to let people go, which I was grateful for because it would have been a terrible time.
Don MacPherson:
There's a couple of things that I want to follow up on. The first is this idea of virtual health care, which has been coming along for quite a while in terms of technology, being able to provide different things for different patients, but the pandemic has accelerated that, obviously. Is that here to stay in terms of addiction? Are you going to see online AA meetings, and is it going to be more common that counselors are going to be meeting with patients virtually? Or will we revert back to how things were done?
Jim Geckler:
I don't think it will ever totally revert back. There's a whole kind of generation of people now who've never been to an in-person AA meeting, who have been active in Alcoholics Anonymous for 18 months.
There are huge benefits of what happened. I mean, the changes, when you talk about, like, AA meetings, I have a couple of meetings that I attend regularly. One is based out of Los Angeles, and another one's based out of Minnesota, and I sit in my house in Colorado and attend those meetings. It's a relief. I mean, there's stuff that's nice in that because, in my role, if I go to an AA meeting in Estes Park or in Boulder, the room is filled with alumni. In the meeting that I went to in Boulder recently, there were six alumni there and an employee. It can be challenging for me in those spaces to be completely honest about what's going on in my life and with my recovery. So I would actually say, on some levels, my recovery is richer from this last year because I've connected in a different way. I have a sponsee in the L.A. area who I've never met. We've only talked through Zoom.
Eighteen months ago, we had a need to say, "This will work," even though we weren't a hundred percent sure that it would, but to say, "This will work, this is what we can do, and this is good care." The information coming out of it is that it does work. The studies that have happened show this is an effective way to treat this disease.
The struggle, then, is how do we refill these rooms? So if that works, do we need to go back to in-person outpatient? You and I are sitting in the same room right now. We could have done this with me sitting in Colorado and you here in Minneapolis. It's a different experience because we're in the same room. We have body language stuff going on.
When I look at the counselors that manage a group of eight to 10 people on a Zoom format and are able to keep them engaged, that's a special skill set. I think we'll see counselors who are now coming into the field continue to improve that, but that's completely different, and not everyone can do it well. There's so much that happens because I'm looking at you and I'm talking to you and we're engaged. But I can see someone over there fidgeting, and now they're uncomfortable on the other side of the room. We lose some of that.
There's a huge benefit because — and I hear this from our counselors who are doing virtual aftercare groups, alumni support groups, family programming, outpatient — you're getting a glimpse into people's homes that you don't always get when you're doing a group in a clinical setting. So if you were on Zoom right now, I would see a lovely painting and a clean wall and a nice, what is that, a love seat? If your life was in shambles, I would see it.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, that's interesting. Many people didn't let people into their homes for weeks or months, didn't see family members, only saw colleagues virtually. Have we seen a substantial rise in terms of drug and alcohol use and addiction?
Jim Geckler:
What I'm pretty sure of is we have not seen the effect of that yet. When we are seeing people come in now, I think they're a little bit more advanced in their disease than they were. If people are staying in their apartment or their home, and no one is coming over, and they're drinking all day long, who's going to know that, if they're not going to work or church or family events?
So we're finding more people that come in who have gone a little bit further down the path, and they're having more physical consequences, more liver disease. I think that's just starting, as we start interacting more. I think families got back together and some of them said, "Oh, this is a problem," to where it had been going on now for 18 months, and people didn't see that. So we had a spike in folks right after the 4th of July.
Don MacPherson:
And this is, I think, one of the most important things that we're going to discuss here, is we are starting to see people we haven't seen in a long time. We're seeing friends and family members. We're celebrating holidays with these people. We're going back to offices. What sorts of things should we be looking for, identifiers when somebody might have a drug or alcohol problem? And then how should we address that or talk to these folks?
Jim Geckler:
I'm a big fan of honesty. If I see somebody showing up in a way that's unhealthy and I care about them, I will say something in a kind and loving and supportive way. Not in a group meeting, not in a vindictive way, but to sit down and say, "I care about you. And because of that, I need you to know that I smell alcohol on you when you come to work. I have noticed that you're not as reliable as you once were, and that concerns me."
You do take a chance on losing the friendship. You take a chance, if this person is a supervisor, of losing your job. You take a chance of them leaving the organization. I would rather live with that chance and do what I believe is the right thing than to watch someone suffer around me and not say something.
Don MacPherson:
What are some of the most common traits that somebody might display or demonstrate?
Jim Geckler:
Absenteeism, quality of work, trusting your senses. So if someone smells like alcohol and you talk to them, they say, "Oh, I put too much cologne on today," trust your gut.
I would also say that HR is your friend in this. You can talk to your HR specialist.
You can also recommend the EAP. I know the EAP has been very helpful for a lot of folks that we work with in EAP.
I remember when I was active in my addiction many years ago, I had a boss at a clothing company I worked for who called me in. His father had died of alcoholism, and he told me what he saw, and it was painful. I did not get better then. It was many years until I did, but I always remember that. I look at that now as a moment of incredible kindness of that man, that he was willing to put himself out there and to say what he saw. It's a very respectful thing, I think, to let the people we know, know what we see.
Don MacPherson:
When somebody thinks there's a problem and they reach out to Harmony, for example, is there a battery of questions that somebody would ask them to identify, "Oh, this person might be in the category of they drink a little bit too much, but it's not a problem," or "This is definitely a problem?" How is that assessed when a family member or a concerned friend is calling Harmony?
Jim Geckler:
So there's two different things. The family member and concerned friend, we really talk about what they're seeing and how it's affecting them, them being the family member or concerned friend. When we talk to an individual who is either interested or has been pressured into making the call, and I'm a big fan of pressuring people into making the call, very rarely do we wake up in the morning and say, "Today is a really great day to change everything in my life."
Change happens because we get uncomfortable. Having a family member say, "Here's the phone call. Let's sit together and make this call," lives are saved like that every single minute of every day. There's a whole guide of things from the American Society of Addiction Medicine, which is called the ASAM, and that we kind of qualify what level of care someone needs.
Although it's interesting because, if you and I are brothers, and I call about you and say these things are going on, and then you have a conversation and say, "Yeah, I enjoy a beer once in a while. He's on my back about it all the time, but it really isn't a problem, and I've had no consequences in my life," and then in the conversation that Sonia or Daniel had at Harmony with me, I told them that you had been fired from three jobs in the last two years, that you've been divorced, that you have two DUIs, that you've had a bankruptcy, but in your world, everything's OK because you've got a beer in your hand.
It's always a combination of the identified client's approach or outlook at what they're doing and how the world sees it. I didn't have a problem for a very long time because I had drugs and alcohol, and people left me alone. Lots of other people had a problem with me, but I didn't have a problem. And as we talked about in the last podcast, and you know I worked in intervention for a very long time, and that's kind of the basis of intervention work, no matter what the approach is there, is that alcohol and drugs are coming into my life through you, and I love you too much to stop the relationship with you, but I'm not going to have this relationship with alcohol and drugs anymore, so I need to make some changes. That's kind of the basis of what I believe is a quality intervention.
Don MacPherson:
I don't have data to support this, but I'm certain if somebody did a media study on this, they would see the number of stories that are being done about the opioid crisis has really decreased. We don't hear about it as much, and I wanted to ask you about that. Are we still in a crisis in this country related to opioids, or has that gone away?
Jim Geckler:
I think we're still in a crisis. We see fluctuations in chemicals as they come in. We're seeing a rise in people who are abusing crystal meth, which it kind of cycled down a while ago. If you can't get fentanyl or opiates over the borders, you have to figure something else out. That is my educated guess as to why we've seen a rise in crystal meth recently because you can make it with things you buy at Home Depot.
It's also interesting because the big focus there on the opioid pandemic was around young people. I think as schools stopped happening, you stopped having some of that interaction. So you didn't have people in school giving drugs to each other to the same degree when people were doing remote schooling. So the lack of interaction there kind of did do a stopgap.
Don MacPherson:
Have doctors modified their behavior in terms of just automatically prescribing painkillers and opioids?
Jim Geckler:
I believe that's happening, and, obviously, the Purdue lawsuit and that entire legal action against the family and the organization has ripple consequences.
Don MacPherson:
I was on this couch a handful of months ago, and I received a phone call on a Sunday morning, and it was a friend of mine I hadn't talked to in a long time. I've known him for 29 years, and he said that the first podcast that we did changed his life, and it was the catalyst to him getting recovery or going through recovery. I was just floored by that, and I was so proud. We helped change a life, and I want to thank you for that, and I want to thank you for, once again, being a genius.
Jim Geckler:
Well, thank you very much. I'm honored to be a part of this.
Don MacPherson:
Thanks for listening to 12 Geniuses. During next week's interview, we're going to check in with futurist Rebecca Ryan. She and I will talk about the future of work, the implications of working from home and why she believes there is a power shift away from employers and into the hands of employees. Rebecca’s episode will be released Aug. 17, 2021.
Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.