Dr. Samantha Harte on Addiction Recovery, Trauma Healing & Purpose Driven Life

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1:03My name is Allie Jackson. I'm the host of Finding Mr. Height, a dating and relationship podcast that I've been doing for four years now, sharing my positive and practical approach to dating that's built on my own life experience. And I wanted to share another experience that I've had, my secret behind monetizing my show. It's called Red Circle. And I was just telling my colleague about how much I love their platform. With Red Circle, not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience, but I also love the support I receive in ad sales. It's not just typical ad sales either. It's targeted opportunities based on my show and my life.

1:33And the platform is super simple. You just set your preferences and Red Circle matches you with sponsors that align with your show. You can vet every opportunity and their platform gives you great analytics. More recently too, my Red Circle team has brought me opportunities outside of my podcast on social media to really augment the podcast partnerships, bring them full circle. I just can't recommend them enough. If you want to give it a try, go to redcircle.com to get your free trial. That's redcircle.com for a free trial. Today we're sitting down with Dr. Samantha Hart. She is a bestselling author.

2:03She is a top podcaster. She is also a founder and CEO. And this is a woman on a mission. Please welcome Dr. Samantha Hart. Welcome to another episode of Coffees. It's so good to be here. Thank you. Thanks for coming. And it's been so great just to meet you and know you and get to know your vibrant personality. and you have a mission and you're a woman of service and a woman who's just really just destined to do great things. So I just wanted to have you on the show, share what you're doing with our folks and help you in any capacity that I can. So I like to start my show the same way I start the show with every guest.

2:44What is your morning routine?

2:49I wish I could tell you that I had an elevated God consciousness first thing in the morning. But right now my morning routine is very, very basic. I have my cup of coffee and if my children are not awake, I try really hard to not touch my phone for everything I know about dopamine and what our phones are doing to the depletion of dopamine in our brains. So if I can delay that gratification even by 15 minutes and just sit in silence, which is of course when I get downloads from God, that's the ideal way to start my morning. It doesn't always go that way because my kids might beat up the sun and tap me on the nose before I get a chance to do that.

3:37but I do many spiritual things all through the day if I don't get it done in the morning. I mean that's powerful Samantha like you're the first person I heard that really just hit the nail on the head with with the you know the delayed gratification the mitigating the dopamine hit immediately. I never even heard that and I asked everybody that question so I don't take a conscious effort to delay what looking at my phone because it's the only place I have my clock. yeah I mean this is the world we live in I don't have a clock either but it's a new practice for me and I can't tell you how many times I've promised myself to look at my phone less if it is near me it will not happen they are so highly addictive and that is now a new practice to say you can wait there is nothing that is that urgent for the first 15 minutes of your day where you have to touch your phone first knowing on a neuroscience level what it is doing to dopamine which is just giving us these super quick hits just like drugs where we are then going to crave it and probably check the phone hundreds of times more than if we waited.

4:57Same thing if I want to be more conscious with my children. If that phone is in the same room as me, there's no way that I'm not going to check it. Yeah. Even though I'm consciously telling myself, please don't. Please be present with your children. So this is a level of mindfulness that I'm practicing right now. Now, why don't you give the audience just a quick 10 ,000-foot overview of what is it that you actually do? Today I coach people and when I say that, the fullest expression of coaching somebody is helping people build pain-free bodies and purpose-driven lives. I have a doctorate in physical therapy and so for many, many years I ran a private practice that was all about whole person, whole body.

5:47And it's very hard in our healthcare system to see a patient for 60 minutes at a time. There's almost no practitioner whose time you will get in an undivided way for that long. And I loved it. But something I noticed clinically over the 10 years I ran the practice was what I came to call the soul sickness in the patient. These underlying emotional cycles of dysfunction or addiction that were not just enhancing the inflammatory process and making their pain worse, but sometimes just getting in the way of them doing the prescribed thing they paid me all this money for that was going to make their pain go away.

6:26And it bothered me, but it wasn't something that they paid me to treat. I wasn't yet a personal growth coach. I was just Sam, the doctor of physical therapy who could make your body move really efficiently and get you out of pain. And all the while, I'm today 16 years sober from drugs and alcohol. I was living this spiritual life and navigating life on life's terms and finding myself in pits of despair over and over with a new life circumstance that I would be faced with and having to elevate my consciousness again and again and again out from that suffering and into a state of resiliency and hope and joy.

7:13And it really wasn't until I lost my sister three years ago to a drug overdose that I felt the absolute calling to take the spiritual side of wellness and put it at the epicenter of everything that I do. So today, when I coach somebody, I can coach their body out of pain and into preventative movement patterns with my eyes shut. But I am equally, if not more, interested in coaching their spirit out of a place of suffering. And the way that I do that is by using the 12 steps of recovery that are old and a bit antiquated and taking them as a fresh approach, a modern and trauma-informed approach, which is ultimately in recovery what saved my life.

8:06and whatever the pain point is in the person's life, whether it's chronic people pleasing, perfectionism, being obsessed with the beauty and body standard, whatever is killing their spirit, we do the 12 steps around that thing and they have massive amounts of breakthroughs. They have pattern recognition. They have strategies that fit into the picture of their life that they can take with them forever. So at the end of 12 weeks, somebody who coaches with me literally has the tools they need to not get hurt and to feel joyful even in the face of suffering. And I just can't think of more important work than that.

8:56That sounds like very, very powerful work that you're doing. You're making massive moves and changing people's behaviors, their lives. What's one story that really has resonated with you besides what happened to your sister that you can share with the audience? When I was five years sober, I had my doctorate and I was working for somebody else in a PT practice. There was a dream to maybe have my own practice one day, but I couldn't see my way forward through that. and this guy that I was married to had been with me on the front end of my addiction and we survived. We did not go to therapy. We did not do the healing that was really required but I thought oh my god this man stayed with me and then he started pulling away and pulling away meant we don't share our finances.

9:58We don't share intimacy. In fact, when you try to initiate intimacy, I'm going to turn away from you and reject you. I'm going to be out of town all the time. I'm going to leave my ring on the nightstand. And in early recovery, the 12 steps are infused with the word God. And I came from a house where God is for the weak and God is for the fool. And if you believe in God, you're an absolute idiot. And the only person you can count on is yourself. So I was physically sober when this was going on in my marriage, but I was spiritually bankrupt. And what happened to me was I basically went to the brink of insanity in sobriety.

10:40Why? Because as this man's love was leaving and his love for me was my higher power, that was God to me. And if it wasn't there, then who was I? I was nothing and I was no one. And what I was doing was doubling down on childhood patterns that kept me safe. I was trying to control this man at all costs. I will make you love me. I will make you forgive me. And then once you do, I will be okay. Well, I'm sure you know how this story turns out. That doesn't work. and for me I had accumulated enough time in sobriety to go this is rock bottom because rock bottom is where you don't want to die but you can no longer go on living the way you've been living and I remember a sober girlfriend said if you're going to stay in this marriage right now you can't live like this you need to find a place and sign a lease and start to heal.

11:39And when that happened, a woman who was in multiple 12-step programs came into my life and she said, what if we do the steps on your marriage? And I was open, right? Because pain is a circuit breaker. And what I mean by that is you're living a certain way. Most of the ways we behave are automatic, right? They're just because the brain would have to use way too much energy if we were conscious about everything we did until that automatic behavior or pattern stops working completely and is causing you pain or misery. And then you wake up. So that feedback loop is interrupted. It's like a circuit that literally fries out.

12:22And I was in that space where there was this window of opportunity for change. And I was very lucky that this woman was in my life and she had the approach that she did because I said, what do you mean do the steps on my marriage? Well, step one is I'm powerless over alcohol or whatever the substance is and my life has become unmanageable. Great. I was pretty clear that substances were not a thing that I should toy around with. I was pretty clear that they would kill me. So then what do we do with that step? Well, I'm powerless over my marriage. okay that's become pretty clear tell me more I'm powerless over what happened between us before we got married that I cheated in my active addiction again and again and again and that he's really angry that we didn't stop and heal and do the work first I'm powerless over whether he is cheating on me or not I'm powerless over the future of the relationship and that I was so sure he was going to be the father of my children one day and it's all collapsing.

13:24And when I try to exert power over him and by the way any other person place thing or situation my life becomes unmanageable in the following ways. I'm obsessed with what he is or isn't doing. My happiness is literally contingent on someone else's behavior. Someone else's perception of me which means I have no worthiness that's birthed from inside of me. Very dangerous way to live, right? And if all of that is true, then what do I have the power to change? So all of a sudden, the steps, if they were once an accordion packed with information, but it all sounded religious and patriarchal, this woman took the edges of the accordion and just expanded it so I could see myself inside of them.

14:17and the most amazing thing that happened to me this is when my healing began is when we got to the ninth step which is making an amends and I was five years sober and so I had made tons of amends to people I had made tons of amends to my husband who I had cheated on before we got married and she said have you ever made an amends to yourself and I hadn't and we hear this kind of thing all the time in the world of self-help, you know, forgive yourself, love yourself, forgive yourself. I was run by a voice in my head that said, do better, try harder. You're not smart enough. You're not pretty enough.

14:59You're not fit enough. And that voice helped me accomplish great things in my house when I was young that kept me safe, in the world culturally that gave me a ton of accolades and dismantling all of that and being able to have someone give me permission to say not just when you were little but in this marriage what would it mean if you forgave yourself if you actually believed that you were a person who didn't deserve to be punished for something that happened between your husband and you five years ago if you were a person that deserved love and fulfillment and forgiveness what would you say to yourself instead well I hadn't even considered it I didn't even know I was allowed to consider it as I started to do that kind of work which meant that for days and weeks and months I was consciously listening to the way I was speaking to myself and when it was not nice which was all the time I stopped and said what would somebody who loves themselves say instead.

16:07And then I had to think of that and practice saying it. In that work, I heard the whisper of God, the whisper of my intuition. And that has been the love of my life. That has been the thing that nudged me to wrap my arms around myself in those lonely days in that apartment when we were separated because no one else was there. and I would just cry myself to sleep. That was the one that said, oh, I know you picked purple flowers for your wedding, but you also didn't know who you were when you did that. Your favorite color is actually blue. So you should make your business cards blue. My book is blue now.

16:46My furniture was accented with blue. It makes me feel a certain way. Oh, and by the way, this woman you're working for in the clinic, she doesn't see your value. And there's a whole need in the healthcare market that isn't being met, which is all these patients who are 60 % better, that insurance is like, yeah, we're done paying for this, but they want to be 100 % better. You're going to fill that need. You're more than qualified. You don't need to be a doctor making$33 an hour anymore. Go get what's yours. Go help people in a meaningful way. And so Strong Heart Fitness was born. Every good thing in my life has been been from the whisper of my intuition so that marital crisis literally saved my life and sometimes it's those wake-up calls for people that really is what they need you know marital whatever crisis people are in now you manage to rewire your brain now let's be real like a lot of people don't buy into rewiring their brain what part of your brain when you rewired it really refused to be healed.

17:57Well, let's address the first thing that you said, which is not buying into it. I mean, there's so much science about the neuroplasticity of the brain, right? That the brain is malleable. It gets harder as we get older. The longer we practice certain thoughts, actions, and behaviors, the harder it is to change them. But science has proven to us that we can. Yeah, I'm actually going to bring on a doctor called Dr. Rewire to this show. Oh, I know him. Yeah. He's amazing. Yeah, he's coming on. First off, I'm doing his test and then he's going to come on after. Yes, I want to do his test too. The DNA test.

18:34Yeah, it's pretty wild. What's out now and what we can unpack. You know, it's so funny that you're asking this question right I recently sat down with David Guillaume do you know who that is no he's he's an unbelievable businessman but I think beyond that spiritual advisor and I paid a small fortune to sit down with him and do a coaching session and I remember we were unpacking some parts of my story. And he looked at me and he said, what are you getting out of suffering? And it was so startling, because consciously, I'm like, what? I don't, I don't want to suffer. I've had so much suffering in my life.

19:23My whole life's work is to overcome my suffering and to help others do the same. And I've been thinking about it for weeks, because one of the things that was coming up was my relationship with money and I grew up in a house where there was never any and when there was money you spent it because you never knew when I was coming back right and in the wake of losing my sister I did the most healing work I've ever done in terms of leaning into my pain but still I was running a little because if you're an addict the thing you're avoiding is feeling pain and uncertainty and lack and fear it just feels like too much and there's no question when she died that I was like this pain could literally kill me it could lead me to a relapse which would kill me.

20:22It could kill my spirit from wanting to just be here on earth in any kind of joyful way. And so in the pockets of time where it felt too hard, what did I do? I spent money. And I didn't think a lot about it. You know, my husband makes a lot of money. He was supporting me while I closed my clinic down to write my book and do this whole rebrand. And it became an issue. And only in the last few months have I gotten to this belief system, which is, haven't I suffered enough? Why can't I just fucking spend the money? Right? Why not? You try losing your sister to a drug overdose. You try having your husband cheat on you for five years with the same woman and gaslight you for two and tell you he's not.

21:17You try losing your dad in a state of anger with him and then running and feeling regret and shame. You have miscarriages, you have postpartum depression. This is the new Weight Watchers, built for real life and real results, no matter what mode you're in. Maddie went all in for her big day and lost 33 pounds. Emily lost 85 pounds and hit her goal while still living her life. Weight Watchers gave me the tools and I feel amazing. Join the millions of members and lose weight with the number one doctor recommended weight loss program. Lose more at WeightWatchers.com. At six months, participants in a clinical trial of Weight Watchers program lost an average of 12 pounds.

21:55You, you, and this business of self-entitlement and self-pity that's baked underneath that and how dangerous that can be because yes I've suffered we all have suffering to contend with but what am I gonna do with it now what am I gonna do with it so I think you know interestingly back to the beginning of this conversation about the cell phone and the instant gratification even in sobriety everywhere you turn there's instant gratification. There is a quick way out of your suffering and it really comes down to choosing your hard because there's almost nothing as an adult that if you have a choice to make that's either easy or hard.

22:46It's two hearts and you have to choose which one. Are you going to choose the one where in the short term it's easy but in the long run it will create suffering or lack or unhappiness? Or are you going to do the opposite? Are you going to do what's harder in the short term for the sake of long-term happiness, just like the phone?

23:12And my work from now until the end of time, which I don't think is unique to the addict, but it is especially true for me, is that even when something as horrible as losing my sister happened? Can I turn toward what is the hardest in the short term, which is feeling it all in exchange for long-term contentment?

23:44And when you say feeling it all, you're talking about not embracing any sort of addiction. Correct. Not running from your pain for immediate gratification. Correct. And just sitting there and doing the hard work, which is all the feelings of everything you don't. And after you feel it all, then what steps do you take? You know, the thing about feeling it all is that it's the most natural thing in the world. You know, emotions are just energy inside of us, right? And so when we run from that, not only does it not go away and it just goes somewhere else and manifests differently, it if we feel it it runs through us it discharges and we literally go from a sympathetic state in our nervous system to a parasympathetic which is where we have more access to god consciousness so the very nature of letting yourself scream cry rage whatever it is and getting to the other side is not only do you now have evidence that you survived that very painful thing that you didn't want to feel but you have clarity of mind which is going to be the thing that births the new idea the next right thing it's where everything is born not running is where everything good is born but it's so scary for so many of us we're also not taught to do any of this right we're taught to push and grind and get the thing outside of ourselves, get the money, get the house.

25:24I mean, everything we're conditioned to believe is the opposite of that. And then life has its way with us, and we're going, I don't understand. I did everything I was told to do. Why am I miserable? Right? And so this work in the world that I'm trying to bring to people is a way to return people back to themselves. again and again and again so that if and when everything is taken away they are still whole yeah now we're now in this like world where people are buried with self-help noise it's like everywhere you turn there's like i'm coaching you for this or yeah i'm doing this and even you and i had this discussion like how does your platform of improvement, self-help improvement, interseeking improvement.

26:22How, how does it differ from all the other noise that everyone hears all day long on social media? Yeah. I mean, what I, besides yours is really hard. I think though, if, if we numb the dark, we numb the light. So for, for as hard as someone's willing to work, as deep as someone's willing to go, that's as good on the other side as their life is going to get, right? So that's what I'll say to challenge what you just said. And believe me, Joseph, walking away from just branding myself as Dr. Hart, expert at body mechanics and injury prevention, which was really after a while an easy sell because my sessions looked a lot like a personal training session, right?

27:08So don't train with your trainer, train with your doctor. Oh, yeah, I want to do that. And now I'm entering the land of life coaches. Talk about an identity collapse, an ego collapse, and a very saturated market. And all I can say is I have had to ask myself, one of my great core wounds is codependency. and in the work I'm doing today I'm like oh so is this your latest way to fix and save everybody else to validate your experience here on earth Samantha is this now the way you're doing it and the truth is I don't think so because I was a living, breathing embodiment of working the 12 steps in a new way and how it changed and saved my life.

28:15And it didn't save my sister. Right? And I don't have regret or guilt about that. I can only speak to what changed and saved my own life. And when I work those steps in that modern way around my marital crisis and I've been working the steps again and again around every other really hard thing that's happened and it's given me a pathway through my pain, I can speak to that, right? That is my experience. So there are millions of coaches. There are not millions of coaches who have a doctorate in physical therapy, who have a best-selling book, and who have 16 years sober and there's not one other coach that has my story and my story can help at least somebody else and I know that because I've experienced it yeah and it makes my pain worth something my story is my differentiator and that's what I want to ask now it's like you you turned your story into your brand which you then turned into a business you know what do you think the hardest truth is about monetizing trauma

29:36that's a fascinating question the hardest truth about monetizing

29:45trauma because not a lot of people could just turn their hardships into a business and you you did that you walked away from a successful business and now you're you know coaching people on the most traumatic problems in their lives i think if i'm understanding your question correctly one of one of the hardest spiritual concepts that I've been wrapping my head around is did my sister die so that I could be this dialed in to my purpose did the fact that her soul's correction and that it was unable to happen here on earth become the very thing that gave my soul the path to its destiny. And making sense of that loss in a way that doesn't feel like I springboarded off of the back of her death to have my name known around the world.

31:05and being able to coexist with the loss and say, I'm going to do everything I can to learn everything I can about how to navigate a loss of this magnitude and many others to help as many lives as I can without necessarily going. She died so that I could live.

31:37so sometimes there's this strange relationship around how good I feel with who I've become how sure I feel about the mission that I'm on because it would not have happened at least I can't see how without her dying and so did one have to happen for the other to happen it's it's strange it's a very deep big question right and and god's timing though you know right we can't can't change that god has a series of traumas happen to us to just really refine us yep yeah and unfortunately you you had one major trauma that really molded who you are now. The flip side of that is that what a gift of the dying that we can learn how to fully live.