Special guest Candy Finnigan, a nationally recognized Professional Interventionist and Certified Master Addiction Counselor III, shares her insights on addiction and recovery. Known for her role on A&E’s groundbreaking series Intervention, Candy is also the author of When Enough is Enough: A Comprehensive Guide to Successful Intervention, a widely used resource for family interventions. In this episode, host Dr. James Flowers and co-host Robin French dive into a candid conversation about the evolution of the recovery industry, personal transformation through interventions, and the powerful impact of authentic healing.
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Change Is In The Air With Candy Finnigan [Episode 7]
Meet Candy Finnigan
Welcome to Understanding The Human Condition with our host, Dr. Flowers.
I am so excited, Robin.
We have a special guest.
One of my favorite people in the world and someone I love dearly. Certainly, someone who is very close to me and one of my best friends and mentors.
She’s funny.
You cannot beat her humor. Who is it?
Candy Finnigan, I’m so grateful that you agreed to do this. Thank you for being here. I know that you are super busy. I know that you have a hundred people a day calling you for intervention. Thanks for doing this. How are you?
The old Zoom interventions are a little strange. I’m okay. I’m fighting the elements. The weather out here right now is bizarre, a lot of fires and 121 degrees. It’s crazy but I’m tired of being in my house and I’m tired of wearing a mask. I’m not going to give any of it up quite yet. It’s been a scary time for all of us.
I’ve had the pleasure of being in Candy’s home many times. I wish that she could pick up the computer. It’s the best gingerbread house I’ve ever been. I walk into Candy’s house and say, “I’m home.” It’s so warm and comforting and loving. Her husband of 50 years, Mike Finnigan, lives with her.
Just for today though.
It is so comfortable and that house is full of love. Every time you go to Candy’s house, there is sitting out some treat. Something that either she’s cooked or something that she’s picked up, but you don’t go to her house and not have some little snack or something sitting out. It has the most amazing kitchen.
Don’t ask for dinner. Just ask for snacks.
We should probably read her bio. We already went off track.
Why don’t you read her bio?
Candy Finnigan is a professional interventionist, a certified master addiction counselor, and a featured interventionist on A&E’s groundbreaking reality series, Intervention. She’s a nationally recognized author of When Enough is Enough, a comprehensive guide to successful intervention, which is a guide used by so many to conduct successful family interventions. Candy is also very involved in the creation of the Musicians Assistance Program, which is now part of Music Cares, which grants financial assistance for drug and alcohol treatment of musicians and those involved in this industry. I was curious how your journey started together. How did you meet? When did all this begin?
Candy, how did we meet? I remember.
We met on Tuesday morning in 1997 on a rainy day in Arizona.
That’s the truth.
I was bringing a client to a treatment center and he headed the evaluation program. It was not as extensive as the Flowers Institute, but it was a conceptual idea. I did an intervention and took a client there. After four days of his extensive evaluation, he called me and he goes, “They are going to be pissed.” I said, “Why are you pissed? She doesn’t need treatment. This is not her problem.”
I think it was so cutting edge at that time that this particular treatment center had about fourteen tracks. It could be anxiety, depression, trauma, Holocaust survivor, you name it. It didn’t do them well because James found so many other things that came before. Maybe they were drinking and drug use was not that. It was much more medicine. We sat down and started talking about pain management and we were off and running. I met several people who were experts, but I never met anybody who understood it. We have a lot of experts in our field, but none of them get to the core issue of psychological rebound pain. I’d never heard of any of those things until that Tuesday morning.
Addiction is not just about substance abuse—it’s about finding what comes before it and treating the whole person.
Thank you.
The Evolution Of Addiction Treatment
We lost track and then we gave track and we lost track. I guess maybe we reacquainted each other maybe 5 or 6 years ago and it’s been on. I have to call him all the time, check on him, and make sure that I’m doing something correctly because I don’t have a lot of people who have the same ethics that I do. I have to call somebody who believes in this industry as much as I do and is long-term. I call him with gossip and I call him with hearsay. In the last couple of years, it’s been difficult for me because treatment isn’t what it used to be when I got involved 31 years ago.
If I’m sad, I always call him up and go, “Is this happening?” He goes, “Yep.” It’s a big money. When I got into this business, it was to help people who were dying. I guess it was a tiny bit of competition, but you could call a clinician and go, “Can you do this? Can you do that? Will you do this?” There’s none of that anymore. You’re promised the world and you maybe get a block if you’re lucky.
The collegiate part of it is not there. It’s missing these days.
I have to trust people who believe the same way I do. Dr. Flowers has treatment centers, which are both stellar. I know he’s been involved in other treatment centers and they were stellar.
Thank you so much. That means a lot to me. You and I talked over the weekend a little bit about what it means for the human condition. What’s your idea of what the human condition is, Candy?
There are a lot of different levels of the human condition. I think we are conditioned starting to grow up. We’re conditioned by our families. Until we grow older and wiser, we follow those traditions as our conditioning. I am not the woman I was raised with. I was raised in Kansas by an oil family. I loved my upbringing. I’m tickled to death. I got to be from the Midwest. I don’t have the same standards that my parents did because first of all, it’s 2020, not 1958.
I honor the way I was raised with honesty and truth. As Dr. Flowers can tell you, I don’t mess around and try to be nice. I go right to the truth. Sometimes the truth will set you free, but first of all, it’ll piss you off. That’s my analogy. I don’t have time to make nice all the time. It’s funny, because on the show, everybody goes, “You are so tough.” I think, “Please.” If I only get one shot at somebody, I have to be honest with them. I think that we’re conditioned in many forms. I watched families being conditioned to live with addicts. I watch wives being conditioned to do as I’m told, not as I think.
The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.
All of us have different human conditions. My main human condition at this point is people tell you they’ll do something, and they don’t. I guess words, respect, and the truth are an intellectual ability to think out of the box. We’re conditioned that if this is what’s told to us, that’s the way it is. James and I aren’t like that. We’re going to search around and pick up the rock and make sure. If it is as told to us, then we will follow that. I think that we have other things we’ve been conditioned over the years to care about the patient, where people care about their money.
It’s called authenticity.
Be authentic. That’s an odd word in this day and age.
Isn’t it a little bit? Talk about being out of the box and being authentic.
In one of the interviews that you did, you were talking about what you called Bradism since you were touching on the family situation. I love that subject where the child that’s acting up gets all the attention and then the good ones are overlooked. Can we touch on that?
It’s on because of the kid that’s left behind, the straight-A student, the one that gets into Brown, the one that’s never been in any trouble, they have more trauma than the addict. The only way you get attention if you have Bradism is never-ending. The addiction is such a small part of it, but that’s how you get the parents’ attention.
We had an interesting case where this father’s story of this girl was so tragic. I thought she was going to die any minute. I went over there to do this intervention. I took one look at her and went, “She’s high as a kite. What’s the matter with you, people?” She did have an actual symptomatic disease, but she worked it like crazy. They didn’t want to send her out of state because they had to change her diapers, particularly. I went over to her house when she got on the plane to come to Dr. Flowers. I found 14 or 15 bags of cocaine. That’s why she had a lot of these symptoms and she stayed up all night. She did not have insomnia.
I called James right away. They said, “She’ll never be independent. We give her $5,000 a month.” She now works on her own. She has her own apartment. She is an outstanding citizen because I got her away from the addiction, which was her parents. They were so addicted to her. They came down for family and they called me and said, “What if we don’t think she’s doing as well as you all do?” I said, “Call me afterward.” He was sobbing when he called. He said, “I lost my little girl and she’s now a woman.” I said, “Welcome to real life.”
That was a fun case to work on with Candy. I got involved early on pre-intervention when she was working with the family. Candy did the intervention. I think Candy called me and she said, “I found 15 bags of cocaine, 15 bottles of this, and 3 bottles of that.” No wonder she’s not sleeping at night, Adderall and Vyvanse and everything else under the sun.
She was so amassed with her mother and father. Her mom and dad flew with her, I remember. I picked them all up at the airport myself and they flew in. Candy was like, “The parents are helicopter parents. They’re going to come in. They’re going to try to stay involved. I’ll keep them as far away as I can.” I remember she was helpless and she knew how to do nothing in her life at all.
Except for drugs. She was buying them at 7-Eleven.
She lives in Beverly Hills but bought drugs at 7-Eleven. About 85 days into treatment, she was doing fantastic and her mom said, “We’d like to have her on a budget and help her establish her budget.” We said, “We’re working with her and that’s absolutely part of it before she discharges and what have you.” Her primary therapist eventually sat down with her and she said, “It’s Friday afternoon and what I want you to do over the weekend is think about your budget. What do you expect your mom and dad and what do you think that you need to budget to live your life on a monthly basis? Let’s talk about it on Monday morning.”
She was so excited to go do her budget and she came hopping in on Monday morning and she said, “I have my budget ready.” The therapist sat there and I wish Candy had been sitting there. The therapist was sitting there and she said, “I’m so proud of you for putting your budget together. What is it? How much do you think that you need a month to live?” This girl was 21 years old, I believe.
She said, “I think I need $50,000 a month.” The therapist said, “Do you mean a year?” She said, “No, I was thinking $50,000 a month. Do you think that’s reasonable?” She said, “Let’s call your mom and see what she thinks about that.” When she left, eventually, she got a job. They negotiated and she had a job. She’s working and she’s doing fantastic. Her parents are giving her $2,500 a month now.
Conditioned To Be Sick
I’m sure by now it’s down because they bought her house and five cars and so on. You talk about human conditioning. Now that child had been conditioned to be sick. Here’s what happened. She went through three huge hospitals here that are teaching hospitals, like universities. They couldn’t find anything wrong with her, technically. They dreamed up this irritable bowel syndrome. This is the second person that I’ve had this happen to that they kept this child sick. It’s the same diagnosis but in different hospitals. I guess it’s the easier softer way to diagnose that. Her dad said, “She cannot fly because of this irritable bowel.” It wasn’t true.
Is it some form of Munchausen?
Yeah. We talked about that, but they thought they were being good parents. She made up the thing that she was a sick little child. They didn’t make her sick. She realized that when something was wrong with her physically, she got more attention. They didn’t want anything wrong with her mentally.
They wanted the perfect daughter.
When I told them about the drugs, they said, “She’s so exhausted all the time and tired. Maybe this gave her a little boost.” I said, “No, you don’t get a boost with cocaine.”
Was she an only child?
We never talked about her dependents because she did anything she could to get attention.
She sure did. Was she an only child? I don’t remember that. I don’t think so.
She had a lovely brother who was older, Their parents bought beautiful condos that they were in at that time. He was on the third floor and she was on the second. He spent his whole existence trying to take care of her too, and reporting back. It was exhausting. She had a sober companion with her for maybe 3 or 4 weeks before we did the intervention. They were getting paid well. I said, “Did you go through all their doors?” She said, “We don’t go through people’s doors.” I said, “I’ll be right over. I’ll be right there. I go through the drawers. I go through all the drawers.
You know where to look.
I thought, “This is highway rockery.” She had certainly been conditioned to accelerate this and not get well. What was she going to do when she got well? If she had not been with Dr. Flowers and away from her parents, she would be exactly where she was five years ago.
Family comes first, but that doesn’t mean enabling the behaviors that hurt them.
That has to be quite a tightrope to get them away from their child. How do you tiptoe around that?
You don’t tiptoe around it. You just say, “I’m going to work with your daughter.”
I’m a big believer, at least with emotional and mental illness and with dependence, no matter what it is, any type of addiction, that you cannot be where you are at. I’m a big believer she has to get out of town. “No, we don’t want her to go away.” I said, “I don’t care what you want. You’ve been doing this long enough and haven’t been successful. It’s time to grow up. It’s either that or you’ve heard your eulogy.”
That’s the end talk that I give at an intervention. Grow up or you’re going to have to love them to death. It’s like this one woman that I did talk about human conditioning. She said, “You’re not taking him away. If he’s going to die, he’s going to die in his own bedroom in my house.” I said, “It won’t take long.” I got him to treatment and she went and picked him up because it was hot and it was Palm Springs.
Candy’s Childhood And Family Life
He had to share a room. I had the pleasure of going to Candy’s childhood home last year in Kansas. It was an amazing trip and Candy invited me to speak with a federal judge.
Criminal defense attorneys and judges in the network.
It was amazing going back and driving through the city and seeing where Candy grew up. What was that experience like? Candy grew up, as she said in an oil family and grew up with a Cessna family and all of this. What was that like for you?
Boeing, beach, Cessna, and Lear. I’ve always gone back. I don’t go back as often since my parents died. As you well know, you met Todd. I’m still close friends with people that I grew up with. My mother didn’t understand alcoholism at all. She said she never knew one, but her brother died of cirrhosis. I promised her that I would not ever speak at a 12-step convention. I did launch my book there in a darling little bookstore. I went back home because no one was as shocked as my hometown that I wrote a book. I could barely get to school. I went to a girl’s Catholic convent school, by the way.
I heard some stories about that. I’ll have to tell that one day.
I was very close with Mother Superior. It’s a type of situation that I think James was comfortable there because you sit down at a table of friends and they aren’t strangers. Amazing people showed up from different parts of Kansas to I guess watch me perform. I don’t know.
They did. We walked into this huge ballroom, by the way, where Candy had her wedding reception 50 years earlier. It was this amazing beautiful ballroom full of judges and attorneys. We all know that Candy is on television all the time, but she walks into this ballroom and everybody turns around and these judges run up to her. I don’t remember your nickname, but I think there were three or four nicknames. You’d have thought the Queen of England walked into the ballroom and it was an amazing fun experience of watching that. You met your husband during your freshman year of college. What’s that plate behind your back there?
That’s my jam, please. I went there to college and met my husband. How could it go wrong? The two pictures on either side are pictures that Christopher O’Shea and Felicia sent me of an artist in New Orleans who’s a hawker too. Once you’re a Jayhawk, you’re dead. I think my hometown doesn’t know Candy is an alcoholic because I was always on my best behavior when I went home. My parents had no idea.
I called them from treatment and they went, “Honey, that’s not you. It’s your husband.” I’d been blaming him for years. I honored and respected my mother’s wishes. When I got asked to speak, I thought, I would love to come and share my story. I didn’t go into great detail like I usually do because my family was very prominent. I wasn’t going to start telling them how ignorant they were about alcoholism and addiction. Kansas is backward. It’s in the right square in the middle of the United States and there’s one treatment center.
I guess they’re opening another one in December and everybody goes there, not once, not twice, but 4 or 5 times. It’s not a very good treatment. They don’t do any follow-up with 12 steps or anything. They send you home and pat you on the fanny. I didn’t want to go and bash this. I always said, “If I had a lot of money, I’d buy a farm and put all these people to work.” These little addicts come and grow food and act like humans. I loved going home. I loved going home still, but it’s a very different place than where I am now.
You went to college and you met your husband. Your husband became a famous musician and you didn’t travel around the world with him. You stayed at home raising your children.
I didn’t have kids for eight years, but you know what, here’s my analogy. If he would have been a brain surgeon, I wouldn’t have gone to work with him. I don’t want to sit in a concert hall and hear the same thing over and over and over again. I love music but I married a man that was going to be an attorney and play for the Celtics. Somewhere, it went wrong. I thought he’d outgrow it. I didn’t enjoy the lifestyle.
I moved from Wichita, Kansas to Marin County above San Francisco in February of ‘70. I didn’t know my astrological sign. I’d been married six weeks. People were twirling and making dresses out of their bedspreads. I thought it was the most bizarre place I’ve ever been. The whole county smelled like patchouli. Patchouli is a real trigger for me. All I’d done was smoke bad weed that had no THC in it. It was broke. I had a lot of things to learn, but I was never comfortable there. It was like torture for me.
When we got married, I had no idea we were moving, by the way. I doubt I’d have married him, I always say. Being married to somebody who loves their work and is good and highly respected is a real joy. I have to tell you, it’s such a wonderful relationship with my kids because he was gone from April to October every year on tour.
I was lucky enough to be a stay-at-home mom. It all worked out as it was supposed to. My husband played with Crosby Stills in Nashville for almost 30 years. When they were courting him to come and play, we went to The Forum which is a huge place here. Everybody in the place knew this song that they were singing. I’ve never heard like, “Teach the children.” I mean it’s a nice thing, “Is there like a bouncing ball or something that’s going up that everybody knows the words?”
You weren’t a Sharon Osbourne?
No, I worked for them for five minutes. I love the man, not the job. It became very easy. I have wonderful friends in this business because Mike was actively involved in recovery. After I got sober, he got sober. As the old story goes, if he can get sober, anybody can. He started mapping music here. I have been involved in helping other people and that’s what kept me sober.
A Passion For Helping Others
The giving back, absolutely. What was it in your passion for recovery that brought you to being an interventionist and to the success that you have? I know you don’t look at being an interventionist as success, but in your life, you’ve had your own successes in television and books and intervention, and people all over the country in the recovery field look up to you.
Either that or the loaded ones. How many times have you heard somebody say, “I watched you.” I was so loaded.
Candy and I have been in many airports all over the United States together and you cannot walk through an airport without somebody running up and grabbing her or screaming at her and saying, “We were in Ohio together. We were in Ohio and we ate at a hot dog stand, a hot dog cafe.” The waitress who was serving us came over and this waitress had huge tears in her eyes. I’m not kidding. I was like, “What’s wrong?” She looked at Candy and she said, “You saved my life.” Candy said, “Excuse me? I don’t remember that.”
She still texts me.
She looked at Candy and she said, “I cannot believe you’re sitting in this restaurant and you saved my life. I saw you on TV and I saw you doing an intervention and it was on me. I got up off my sofa and went to treatment that day. That’s why I can stand here now.” What brought you to that passion?
It found me. I didn’t find it. I didn’t grow up thinking about being an alcoholic, going to work, and that thing. It found me through the Musician’s Assistance Program. Buddy Arnold was the head of this nonprofit. He would say to me, “Get in the car and go get this guy.” I’d go, “I’m walking into somebody’s house by myself. I don’t even know him.” He’d go, “Go back to what I said.” Being able to gradually convince somebody without even an intervention that this was the greatest gift and it was all being paid for and it was courtesy of him being a wonderful person and a musician even though he was non-functioning.
That started it and then I met a bunch of great addiction doctors in the early ‘90s. One of them was Dr. Bruce Heischober, who I’m friends with today. He said, “If we pay for you to go down and get intervention training, it was the psychiatrist for the Dodgers, the trainer for the Lakers, and something for the Angels.” They had to go get this intervention training. I didn’t know anything about it. They played golf all afternoon, and I sat and did the training. It was with Vernon Johnson, who was the creator of this process.
There’s the Johnson Institute in Minnesota, but this was the last personal one that he did. It was at the Scripps. I sat there mesmerized. I thought, “How do you get a whole family? This is such a secretive horrible terminal disease. How do you walk into somebody’s house and say, ‘Tell me everything horrible they’ve ever done that you love.’” That’s how it happened. You have to be a doctor to go to it, a PhD. He kept calling me Dr. Finnigan, which I of course didn’t answer, “That’s me.”
At the end of it, he took a look at me and he said, “I know you’re not a doctor. You asked too many questions. You have a gift. All I can ever say to you is if you walk in to help a family, don’t walk in there alone. You have somebody a lot more powerful than you to guide you through this process so they trust you.” That was the beginning of it. There were only 5 or 6 women interventionists back then. Of course, they said this is a man’s job and I said, “Uh-uh.”
There you are. She’s an amazing interventionist who has probably done many many thousands and she didn’t have to do it. She was married to Mike Finnigan, a wonderful mother and wife, and could stay home. She did this out of passion.
I didn’t do it as a job. I did it as my life work. That’s how we became so close. It’s wonderful to be able to say to people, “I’ll do anything I can to help you. I’ll go hell and back with you, but I’m not going to hell with you. I’m not going to let these people go with you either.” It’s very different than it used to be.
We could keep going for hours. I know because I cannot wait to come out and see you on a closing note. Give the audience your best advice. You have two amazing children, Bridget, and Kelly is an amazing musician and following his father’s footsteps, which is so cool. What advice would you give to people out in the world raising the two children that you’ve raised and being married to Mike for 50-plus years?
Family comes first. My kids were always aware. They weren’t aware when we were drunks because my son was three and my daughter was six and a half, but it was normal to them. When I got sober, they were so upset because I was going to meetings and I wouldn’t sit on the floor and color with them for 4 or 5 days. It’s that type of situation where I was honest with my children about what they needed to know, not what they wanted to know. I had a 12-step meeting for women and children in my house so my kids could be around it.
The key to transformation? Honesty, respect, and trust in the process.
Twelve kids came pretty actively for about five and a half years. Out of those, eight of them are now in recovery themselves. I wanted to plant the seed. Trust, respect, and family. No matter what, my kids came first. There have been situations now where I had to go, “Wait a minute. I have to go do this and then I’ll be right back.” I’m not friends with my kids. I’m their mother. It’s the highest level of honor that I can have. When my daughter says, “Are you my best friend?” I go, “No, I’m not. You have to have friends.”
When you spend a lot of individual time with them, drunk or not, I never let anybody babysit, not because I didn’t trust them, but because I didn’t want to get caught. My kids are very aware of my issue. My daughter is a detox nurse and neither one of my kids at this point in their lives is addicted to anything other than work, helping people, and bringing joy with music.
It is one of my greatest accomplishments but they are the people they are because I let them fly. I let them soar. When they were eighteen, I said, “Get the hell out of Los Angeles.” Being raised in a rock and roll world is not a reality. My son went to Vermont Academy to private boarding school because I wasn’t going to have him end up getting into trouble. That’s what these little rich kids did. They’re the worst. The brats.
You went to Beverly Hills High School and you didn’t want him to walk through your footsteps, right?
Advice On Raising Children And Family Life
I went there as a drug and alcohol counselor, so I got very aware. I had a sober program there for eight years. I am very aware of what they were doing behind their parent’s backs. I wasn’t going to have it. I wasn’t going to have them have to fall prey to the environment instead of being able to be their own best person. Bridget went to KU and she went to LA and of course, she thought it was insane. She goes, “Why aren’t these people leave locking their doors? They leave their keys in the car.” I said, “You get used to it.” That is not what we grew up here. Shut the gate, lock the door. The family comes first as you well know because you’re part of my family.
Candy, I love you so much.
I’m so proud of everything you’ve accomplished and we are full circle. We started doing an evaluation program and now we have the Flowers Institute, the J. Flowers Institute and it’s getting bigger and better and I hope in the next couple of years, we’ll be able to have a treatment or a wellness center where we can treat all these wonderful people, and that will be long and lasting so that we can treat the whole person.
Thank you so much. I love you. Candy, one final question. How do people reach you? Give us your website.
Closing Words And Contact Information
It’s CandyFinnigan.com or FinnigansIntervention.com. Either one of those.
Our website is JFlowersHealth.com. Go to both of those websites and find both of us. Candy, I’ll tell you, will pick up the phone at 2:00 in the morning because she hasn’t gone to bed yet.
I’m the wife of a night owl.
She’s the wife of a rock star. She’ll answer the phone day and night. Thank you for your passion. Thanks for your love and friendship to me. I’ll talk to you and hopefully see you in California soon.
Thank you, guys. Good luck with this. This is important for people to hear because this is how we’re communicating now in social media. There are a million podcasts, but there aren’t a million J. Flowers.
Thank you so much.
Have a great week.
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