Breaking the Circuit: Stop Self-Abandoning and Start Living w/ Dr. Samantha Harte pt. 1
Welcome to Journey to the Sunny Side, the podcast where we have thoughtful conversations to explore the science of habits, uncover the secrets to mindful living, and of course, your own mindful drinking journey. When Samantha Hart lost her sister to addiction, she made a vow. She would help others heal, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Today, Doctor. Samantha Hart, licensed physical therapist, trauma informed expert, and author of Breaking the Circuit, is a leading voice on emotional resilience, self compassion, and breaking the deep rooted patterns that keep us stuck.
Speaker 1:In this powerful episode, Samantha shares how she evolved from a traditional 12 step background to creating a modern, neuroscience based approach for anyone feeling stuck or disconnected. Even if you don't relate to the 12 Step world, her work offers a fresh and accessible path to healing one rooted in breaking old emotional patterns, rebuilding self trust, and reconnecting with your intuition. We explore how soul sickness shows up in everyday life, why self love isn't just a buzzword, and how small shifts in self awareness can create lasting change. If you've ever felt like something in your life isn't lining up, even if you can't name exactly what, this conversation will hit home. Okay, Samantha.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You've got a lot of great information. You've got a really great story. You're doing some amazing work, and I wanna get into a little bit of that story for you to share here today. So can you walk us through the journey that led you to the work that you're actually doing today?
Speaker 2:Oh, man. Mike, where do I start? I once upon a time, I was doctor Samantha Hart, physical therapist with a private practice in Santa Monica. And for many, many years, it was deeply fulfilling work. Because when I came out of graduate school and I saw the health care landscape and how broken it was, I was very naive.
Speaker 2:I mean, here I am thinking, ugh, I have this sexy degree. I can really get people out of pain. It's just so incredible. And I'm a hundred thousand dollars in debt making $33 an hour only treating the symptoms and not getting to the source of the problem. It's like a punch in the gut.
Speaker 2:So I worked for a woman for three years to get my clinical expertise going and have some mentorship, but I worked under a model where I only saw one patient at a time ever in my whole career, which is amazing and really rare as a physical therapist, as any type of health care practitioner, unless you decide to say, I'm not playing in this system, and I'm going out of network. Mm-mm. And so I then thought, well, we're still missing the mark here because these patients that I'm treating are getting discharged when they're 60% better, but they wanna be a % better. They wanna run again without knee pain. Who is teaching them how to do that and at what price point?
Speaker 2:And it was everybody but the physical therapist. People have an idea that their insurance, because it's so expensive, and I understand this, should pay for their physical therapy. And then if they want a luxury service like ongoing personal training, they'll pay three, four, five times as much in catch. And I was like, what if I trained my patient? And I just proposed that, and I made my price point competitive with a personal trainer except that I have a doctorate.
Speaker 2:So that was how my business was born. And so is this cash based practice, very movement oriented, very much correction, biomechanical retraining, functional fitness, and ultimately injury prevention. And so people loved that I could treat and heal their injury and then prevent them going forward. Or if anything popped up like an injury relapse, if they have a chronic condition like arthritis and it flared up, they knew they could come into that session that day and we could spend more time on the table doing manual therapy. I could essentially cater to whatever their body needed.
Speaker 2:And it was it was awesome. And all the while, I'm living this separate parallel life in sobriety. Right? I'm sober from drugs and alcohol. And I'm going to the 12 step meetings, and I'm being confronted with really hard things because life is on life's terms, and I can't control it.
Speaker 2:And I'm navigating it the best that I can with the spiritual tools that I have. And I'm starting to notice that there's not much difference between all of us addicts in the 12 step rooms and these high net worth patients coming into my clinic. What do I mean by that? Well, almost every person I've ever treated with the exception of only a few are suffering from some kind of spiritual malady. And I wanted to diagnose them with what I call soul sickness.
Speaker 2:But that's not in the diagnostic code book. And it's not why they hired me. So it's almost like an itch I couldn't scratch. And what do I mean by this? Right?
Speaker 2:They're not substance abuser. These are ordinary folk. But when I would see them and I would say, how did it how did it go? How did your home exercise program go? Or how's this feeling?
Speaker 2:Did you get a chance to practice this or do less of that? Well, you know, I got home and my husband was supposed to do x y and z and he and he he didn't. And so obviously, I had to take on the load myself because otherwise, it's not gonna get done. And I ended up staying up until midnight because by the time I had any time to myself, it was super late. And that and then I was so tired the next day I slept in and I didn't get to do it and so right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Any number of things, any any cycle of emotional dysfunction was being presented to me. Chronic people pleasing, perfectionism, obsession with the beauty and body standard. And it was getting in the way of their body pain being cured. So the long, long answer to your question is that, and and we're just gonna we're gonna drop this bomb right at the beginning of this talk.
Speaker 2:On 03/13/2022, I lost my big sister Jessica to a drug overdose. And when that happened, splitting myself between a physical and a spiritual practitioner died too. And I made a vow, not just that I was gonna write a book about the spiritual side of wellness, but that I was going to integrate the physical and the spiritual realms when I coach people from that day forward. Because what good is it to condition your body if you're punishing yourself all the way through? Right?
Speaker 2:For me, time and time again in my own life and in my clinical experience, if we are not spiritually fit, at some point, everything else will suffer, including our body. So to not address that, at least in conjunction with the body, feels like a crime to me with what I now know and what I have to offer. So my work is much more comprehensive now, and it's much deeper and more meaningful to me than it once was.
Speaker 1:Quiet story. And well, first of all, my heart goes out to you around your sister. So but, obviously, it made a shift that you're carrying on something as benefit to the world. So I loved how it's coming out in that way. For anyone and I completely buy into the physical and spiritual connection.
Speaker 1:However, I think there are a lot of people that find difficulty just hearing the word spirituality. So Mhmm. Can we dig into that? How do you how do you see spirituality in the context that we're talking about now? And how do you talk to people that maybe can have that objection?
Speaker 2:I love talking to people about their objection because I was that person. First of all, when I got into AA, I was so, so, so, so angry and not at all ready to get or stay sober, let alone work the steps in the language they were in and in the way they were presented, right, which was very god heavy. So forget about spirituality. The steps sounded religious, and it felt like I was entering a cult.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And as far as I was concerned, I had a little drug and alcohol problem, but I didn't have a life problem. In fact, I had evidence to the contrary that everything outside of me was fine and dandy. I had a doctorate. I had a boyfriend. I was fit.
Speaker 2:I was affording an apartment in Manhattan in my twenties. Don't tell me I need to change everything about what I believe and and then get down with a god that I was taught doesn't exist in my house that if I believe in means I'm an absolute idiot because I was told the only person I can count on is myself. And look at all these things I have that I've created and accomplished when I rely solely on myself. So forget about spirituality. It was like this religious suffocation that I felt.
Speaker 2:And, god, did I fight that program tooth and nail. And not only did I go to one meeting after a cocaine overdose because I was very scared about that, heard what they were saying and said, I'm good. Didn't go back for a year and a half. When I went back again, it was because the guy I was dating found this prescription pill bottle that I was using that wasn't prescribed to me, of course, that my father who played the role of family enabler kept driving into the city whenever I asked for it. And he looked at me with such disgust that I was sure he was gonna leave me, and then I was nothing and no one.
Speaker 2:So I went back to the meetings, still angry and in no way ready to do that kind of work. Even though they kept saying, this isn't a religious program. It's spiritual. I was like Wait. We're gonna Bullshit.
Speaker 2:Bullshit to all of this. Right? So let's start with why. And this is me speaking in hindsight. Right?
Speaker 2:Because I didn't understand any of this at the time. Why was I so absolutely against what I was hearing? Why was it so frightening? Because it butted up against every single childhood belief that kept me safe when I was a girl. My house was so unstable growing up.
Speaker 2:And self reliance was pressed down my throat, coupled with there is no god, that the idea of suddenly having to dismantle that entire identity, because my identity was what I could achieve, and that is what kept me safe and loved. There was no way unless I was at rock bottom and I had nothing left but to try what they were suggesting, there was no way I was gonna get behind it. If you are hearing the word spiritual and you're recoiling and it's triggering, it's because whatever tools you have learned to use in your life have probably saved your life many, many times and are probably still serving you today. It was not until five years into sobriety, five years in a marital crisis that I was sure I could fix and save like everything else I had done in my whole life. And it absolutely failed, and I was going insane in recovery, in fits of rage, in constant anxiety.
Speaker 2:That I slept on so many people's couches hoping and praying my husband would forgive me. That guy who found the prescription pill bottle, who was a boyfriend, became my fiancee, and he became my husband. And only once we were married and I was sober did all the wreckage show up. And the way he pulled away from me was so so painful and frightening for me that I did everything I could to fix it, and it didn't work. Rock bottom.
Speaker 2:I don't care if you're an addict or not. If you wanna if you if you don't understand spirituality or it feels weird to you or foreign to you or woo woo to you, Maybe you haven't been at spiritual rock bottom yet, which for me is a place where I didn't wanna die, but I could no longer go on living the way I was living, which was controlling, managing, and manipulating the world around me. I couldn't anymore because I now had evidence that not only was it not working, it was fucking killing me to live that way. I was miserable. So what happened?
Speaker 2:How did spirituality enter? When we're in that much pain, the blessing of pain is that it's a circuit breaker, which means we've been looped operating in whatever patterns we operate in for a variety of reasons. Right? How we're hardwired, our upbringing, what we've learned, cultural conditioning. And then something stops working for whatever reason, and we are in pain.
Speaker 2:This also, by the way, goes for the body. It's exactly the same. We move the same way. We have movement patterns. They're fine.
Speaker 2:They're fine. They're fine until we cross that invisible line, and they're not fine anymore. The stress is too much on the knee, for example, and now there's a pain signal. Circuit breaker. The feedback is interrupt and we have a window of opportunity to change, to build new feedback loops.
Speaker 2:If we don't or if we're not desperate enough, we'll slide back to the familiar movement pattern or the emotional coping pattern because it's so small. I had the window of opportunity, and in that window, this woman in recovery who I heard speak at a meeting, who had killed a drunk driver in her using and seemed happy and joyful with her life became my sponsor because I was like, I don't know how you're living the way you are with what has happened, but I wanna learn from you because I don't know what else to do, and I don't wanna die. And she said, what if we do the steps on your marriage? I'm like, what do you mean? Well, instead of constantly saying I'm powerless over alcohol and cocaine, in my case, What if we put the spotlight on your husband?
Speaker 2:You're powerless over your husband. You're powerless over what you did to him when you were an addict, over the fact that you guys didn't heal all of that before you got married. You're powerless over the fact that he's pulling away from you. Whether he'll ever forgive you and the future of their relationship. And when you try to observe power over him, your life becomes unmanageable in the following ways.
Speaker 2:Well, that was so easy for me to see. I had been going out of my mind, sleeping on air mattresses and sofas and couches until finally signing a lease of my own and just being in this horrible place of depression and despair. So unmanageability was crystal clear to me. Then if all of that is true, then what do I have the power to change? So we start to go through the 12 steps in this completely different way.
Speaker 2:And finally, I I start to get it. I start to be able to get down with it. She's not shoving god down my throat. She gets it. I don't know how I feel about any of that.
Speaker 2:It's it totally scares me. It sounds super religious. Fine. Like, totally fine. We get to the ninth step, making an amends.
Speaker 2:I'm five years sober. One of the people I hurt the most was my husband because I had cheated on him tons and tons of times when we were dating before we got engaged and married in my act of addiction. I had made so many amends to him. None of it seemed to work. Didn't change anything.
Speaker 2:And she said, have you ever made an amends to yourself? And I hadn't. It hadn't even occurred to me to do that. And here's why this is so, so important. This woman giving me permission to forgive myself for some of my worst offenses allowed me to start paying attention to the level of self laceration I was carrying with me day in and day out in recovery.
Speaker 2:I'd feel good for a second. I'd remember that my marriage sucked, and I'd go, this is what you fucking get for what you did, Samantha. Or when I would say to my husband, you know, this isn't adding up. Just fucking tell me if you're cheating on me. And he would look at me and say, I'm not the cheater.
Speaker 2:You're the cheater. And I was the cheater. So I believed him because there was no possibility that I could be forgiven for what I had done until she allowed it. So I start to get into this rigorous practice of shifting the negative self talk into a more compassionate self talk. A shift in tone.
Speaker 2:Why the fuck did you just why did I just do that? I wonder why I just did that. And so anyone who's experiencing guilt, regret, or shame, that is the practical tip. Shift the tone. Become curious about why you're doing what you're doing instead of berating yourself.
Speaker 2:Why? Well, not only are you gonna feel better, let's just start with the basics because it's absolutely unmanageable to be beating yourself up all the time. It's unmanageable. It is not joyful. It is not why we are here, and it's not what you're gonna wish you did at the end of your life when you look back on it.
Speaker 2:But what finally happened is that I could hear the whisper of my intuition after decades of silence. This is the most spiritual thing that has ever happened to me. Getting back in communion with my highest self, the highest part of me, the part of me that is the most loving, the most curious, the most compassionate, the most clear, and honoring what she's telling me, taking action in the direction she is nudging me has changed everything in my life, and that is deeply spiritual to me. So when I say god today at sixteen years sober, that is what I am talking about. And if the world could just let go of their conditioned beliefs around whatever they think spirituality means and understood what we all have a god given instinct of right and wrong, of good and bad, and we learn not to trust it.
Speaker 2:It's conditioned out of us, whether it's from trauma, childhood, culture, we'll get that out there over there, and then you'll be happy. Self abandonment has become the new normal. How scary. The most spiritual thing you can do is stop abandoning yourself. Well, I hope for anyone who's listening, who's anti spirituality, that that creates a brand new lens through which they might see and hear that word.
Speaker 1:I love it. It's a powerful message. It's a powerful story. It's relatable. And if anything, the message around loving yourself, being kind to yourself, giving yourself grace I mean, how many times have we looked back?
Speaker 1:If you even have difficulty now, how many times have you looked back possibly ten years and said to yourself, why was I so hard on myself? I mean, even some people will say, you know, I look in the mirror and I'd be like, I I don't look good. I you know, maybe I look old. And then ten years later, you're looking at yourself and you say, why was I so hard on myself? I looked great then.
Speaker 1:You know, if if anybody listening to that so self love and self compassion, oh, man. I just love that one so much. This podcast is brought to you by Sunnyside, the number one alcohol moderation platform, having helped hundreds of thousands of people cut out more than 13,000,000 drinks since 2020. And in fact, an independent study showed that Sunnyside reduced alcohol consumption by an average of 30% in ninety days. And as one of our members shared, Sunnyside helps me stay mindful of my drinking habits.
Speaker 1:It's not super restrictive. So if I'm craving a glass of wine with dinner, I just track it and I move on with my week. If you could benefit from drinking a bit less and being more mindful of when and how much you drink, head on over to sunnyside.co to get a free fifteen day trial. You'll get access to everything that we offer, including tracking and planning tools, coaching from our experts, a vibrant community of people just like you, and the motivation and advice to stay on track with your health goals, all with no pressure to quit. That's sunnyside.co.
Creators and Guests
