Host Dr. Flowers, co-host Robin French, and VIP Guest Heather Hayes discuss addiction as being the biggest terrorist we face. Listen as they discuss how as a nation, we are at a crisis state and if not addressed, we could potentially lose an entire generation to addiction.
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Our Youth Taken Hostage With Heather Hayes, M.ED. [Episode 6]
Addiction
I’m so excited to have Heather Hayes.
Our VIP guest. I’d start by introducing her. Heather is the Founder and CEO of Heather R. Hayes & Associates. She is a master-level licensed counselor, and board board-registered interventionist. A veteran of the behavioral health field, she has over 30 years of experience working with addictions and other disorders and specializes in the treatment of adolescents, young adults, trauma, brain disorders, complex mental health issues, and a full spectrum of addictive disorders.
Known as one of the country’s most prominent authorities on these topics, Heather is a coveted speaker and has been published in numerous journals and books in industry publications. Heather serves as an on-air expert and consultant for CNN, Dr. Oz, and has been featured on all the major networks as a featured interventionist on A&E’s high-profile show Intervention.
Outside of her practice, Heather uses her expertise to give back to her community as a volunteer psychological profiler with the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department hostage negotiation and SWAT team. Heather is writing a book, Our Youth Taken Hostage. I thought we could dive right in and talk about that because I watched a clip of you speaking with Clay Weaver. It was on your website.
There were some staggering statistics on there that you mentioned that 2,5000 teenagers a day try a prescription pill for the first time to get high. One in seven have done so in the last year, and 60% of them are 15 years or younger. Our children are more likely to die from an overdose than anything else that we prepare them for in schools. We teach fire prevention, and how to prepare for a shooter or a terrorist attack, and yet we aren’t teaching our families and children about this. Thanks for bringing it to everyone’s attention.
It’s something I feel very passionate about. Part of it too is I sat through negotiator training. I was approached by my county sheriff’s department in 2001 and they asked me if I wanted to become part of the team. Back then, they started incorporating mental health professionals onto the team for when they have hostage callouts.
I sat through the negotiations training with the FBI and with some of NYPD’s finest. As I sat there hearing them talk about all the principles of negotiation and terrorism, everything connected with how we deal with addiction, how the brain is taken hostage, how individuals are taken hostage, how families are taken hostage, and almost developed Stockholm syndrome.
I began to wonder and think about what we are doing as a society to look out for what we propagate and what the messaging that we are giving was stigma and it struck me one day. We come in and teach our children. We have tornado drills and fire drills, and we have active shooter drills, and yet our children are more likely to be killed by a drug overdose than a fire, tornado, or terror attack. Not to say we don’t need that training. We do, but what is it in our society that’s keeping us from talking about how one of the biggest terrorists we have is addiction?
We teach our children how to have tornado drills, yet our children are more likely to be killed by a drug overdose.
It’s like we have these little sleeper cells all in our homes, and yet if we truly had a sleeper cell in our neighborhood, we would be all over it. The media would take over and we would handle it in the way that we have handled COVID-19. There is a huge threat amongst us and yet we have close to 200 people a day dying from opiate overdose.
Our teenagers and our children are exposed at a young age to drugs and alcohol for the first time. We know who’s at risk. We know our statistics for reports to the Department of Child and Family Services. No trauma is involved. We know the genetic component, and yet we are not doing a good job of coming in and educating our parents and our families on how you begin talking to our children about this at the dinner table. It’s where it begins.
Is that the intent of the new book, Heather, to get this in the hands of every parent and school in the country?
Every parent, every school, and every professional. To look at the human condition. What are our goals for young adults? What do our children need? What are the developmental milestones like connection socialization, being able to master things to help build their self-esteem, creativity, interaction with the outdoors, healthy diet, and sleep? What are the things that we need to help our teenagers grow as children, become healthy teenagers, and be able to launch into adulthood so that they come into adulthood knowing how to make meaning out of life, what their passion is, and define, “What’s my purpose?”
I got sober when I was 21. What that means is the majority of my addiction was that of a teenager or young adult. The only way I can describe adolescents for me, and a lot of other teenagers out there, is it was like existential angst. I was so sensitive in trying to sort out why is the world like it was. Why is there so much pain and hurt? Why are people bad and mean? Why is there bullying? Why am I bullied? Why do I see it? All of those issues coupled with, how there can be so much beauty in the world, love, and joy. I was a competitive writer. I always had my horses. I had that love in there too, but trying to sort it all out was near impossible.
I was crying at thirteen when I had my first drink for my dopamine system to go ding. Relaxed, sense of well-being, and I went, “I’m not shy anymore. I don’t feel awkward.” It’s off to the races. How do we help our teenagers with that? It’s hard being a teenager. It’s hard living in the world. For example, when I was a teenager, I turned on the TV and the news was some guy reporting. There is even the exposure that our kids live with, having to turn on the TV and see terror attacks live, getting on the internet, and the availability of the dark web where you can watch horrific acts happen. That’s traumatizing. It was a different world. I have often said, “Never in my day did I think that someone was going to walk into the school where I went with a gun and shoot somebody.”
We have active shooter drills for them because it’s reality. The human condition is hard. To me, the human condition means how do I make sense of this world in which I live? How do I find meaning and how do I do it at every level and step of my life? How do I as a young adult make sense of it and still not be able to think clearly or have the wisdom? How do I trust the adults that are telling me and teaching me? It’s hard for kids to sometimes find safe people that they trust, Now with this phase of my life, there comes a point where I was always looking forward. What’s my next career? What am I going to do? There comes this time now where I am looking forward to going, “How many more years?”
Finding safe people that they trust is hard for kids.
You are not going anywhere.
Not anytime, but there’s also that phase that Erik Erikson talked about where you stop and you go, “Here I am. Now I’m looking back at what I have done in my career.” What would I have done differently? What do I wish I hadn’t done? How do I resolve that in myself? How do I take what I have now and pass that on? We are always looking in some direction while taking it a day at a time to make meaning and make sense of it all.
Book Release
You have certainly exemplified that and our country in the addiction world as a role model, as a person in long-term recovery, and as an interventionist. You exude that all day long every day, and so thank you for what you are doing out there. I saw a number one New York Times Bestseller about to come out. When is your book going to come out?
I had hoped that I would have it to press now. I had this whole thought process. The first manuscript is done. I’m type A, so it’s never going to be as good as I wanted it to be. They will come to a point where I have to say put writing on it. A little bit of that OCD, a little bit of perfection. My father wrote over 300 books. It’s in my blood. During COVID, I thought it’d be great. Not that we are still in COVID. We have a big lockdown. I thought I was going to work on the book, but I found that locked down exhausting.
I hope to have it out. I would venture to say hopefully the beginning of next year. One other thing that I was trying to do is to put out a new blog. There are pieces of the blog that I put out. That would be a test where I have taken a piece of my book, written about it a little bit more, and put it out on the blog. Every Sunday, there’s a new blog coming out. You talk about giving meaning. There was a time maybe about 10, 15, or 20 years ago when all of a sudden I realized I was the age of the people that I looked up to in my career when I first started. I was studying psychology when I went to treatment and got into recovery, so I kept going.
I remember there were many people that I looked up to and suddenly I went, “I’m that age now and I couldn’t do it for a long time.” It also brought upon me under the guise of making meaning of my life. A drive to also pass on what I have learned over the years. I’m doing it through blogs and speaking. A big part of that is in my book.
How can the audience find your blogs every Sunday?
I put them out on social media, and then I attached them to my website. I have a Facebook page, Heather R. Hayes & Associates. I have an Instagram page. That’s also @HeatherRHayesAndAssociates. I have a Twitter and LinkedIn page. Every week on Sundays, they will go out there. I linked them to my website so that people can come and look at them if they want to look things up. I also put together a packet for communities to answer a lot of different questions.
Over the years, I have been blessed to have worked with some amazing families who have been my teachers and helped me become who I am. I had some mothers reach out to me and say, “Will you help us put together answers to questions?” Why do we tell our kids they can’t submit to marijuana or why is it bad for a teenager to put alcohol and drugs on top of an immature undeveloped brain?” Why are grandparents smoking pot? I put together a community packet too that people can take to their communities they have, to their places of worship, or whatever that answer a lot of these questions that parents will often ask.
Community Awareness Efforts
I saw that Forsyth County lit the County Town Square in purple for overdose awareness month. Can you talk a little bit about that? I’m sure you had something to do with that.
This is the fourth year where I went to the county commissioners and asked them to declare the proclamation of August 31st being International Overdose Awareness Day. I have done that in conjunction. There are some mothers here. I think that the changes that we are seeing now in government and legislation, and ending stigma are coming from the mothers and family members who’ve lost children to addiction or have children who are addicted. Those are our warriors. We have a group of mothers here who’ve also lost their children to addiction.
Our county is incredible. We do a lot of education but we have a mother that puts together for the last four years a teacup vigils. There are tea cups that have candles in them and they are attached to family members from all over the country who can write to her. She will have a teacup with their name on it, their birth date, the day they left this world, and then pictures of them. It’s so moving. As part of that, our commissioners agreed to light up our downtown in purple.
Advice For Families With Addicted Children
My sister died of a drug overdose. She fell the night she overdosed off of an eight-story building. I wish that my mother had someone like you to reach out and find help. What advice would you give moms and dads and families when they have a child with addiction and they are seeking treatment? You and I have worked together as an interventionist and a provider before, but I want the audience to hear about Heather R. Hayes & Associates and what you offer the world in seeking treatment and how to talk to their loved ones about either an intervention or what you do with parents.
We live in a world where it’s so much more dangerous. There are so many family members whose children didn’t even have an addiction. They reach out and they take Xanax that’s got fentanyl in it, or they do cocaine for the first time and it’s got fentanyl in it. It’s so painful to see how many kids that were lost. I don’t think that there’s room to guess.
There was a time when we might have given the advice or I might have advised to gather more information. Let’s see what’s happening, but I believe in this climate with all the overdoses that if you suspect there’s a problem with your child, if you think that they are using, if you find drugs, you need to act and act quickly and seriously. Part of that begins with learning how to talk to your children so that they understand that this is a disease and that there’s no disgrace in having this illness.
If you suspect there’s a problem with your child and think that they’re using drugs, you need to act quickly and seriously.
Parents have to educate themselves. They have to get beyond the whole, “Not my kid. It’s somebody else’s kid,” and realize that it happens and it can be your kid. We need to help educate the communities on what to look for, but when parents begin to suspect, don’t guess. Don’t say, “I don’t think it’s that bad. I have only seen it one time.” Get to a professional. Get a good evaluation. Hair testing and drug testing are ways that we can look and see how advanced things are.
When someone calls us, there are a lot of different ways that will work together. I feel like at this part of my career, I’m at a place where I’m offering the families I work with the best of everything that I can pull together in all my years of knowledge of what we need to help support a family with mental health or addiction issues.
Some families do us and they are ready to do an intervention. We talked about the different styles of intervention. We talk about my philosophy that it’s not an ambush. It’s not a dirty laundry list of everything wrong. We want to come and speak to everything right about that person. Why are they valuable family members? Why do we as an entire family need to do our work to help support? That’s the message. Our identified patient is not just a person with a mental health issue or an addiction. Our identified patient is the entire family system and everyone has work to do and learning to do.
Some families will come in and do the intervention first. We work with families for a minimum of six months. I have marriage and family therapists on my staff who do nothing but work with the family during this time while supporting them, while they are also getting the family program and other things that are offered by treatment.
We have some families that come in and they are not quite ready. We begin that family work ahead of time and get them more empowered, get them to make different decisions, and handle the family dynamics differently. Sometimes we end up coming in and doing an intervention and sometimes the family changing and shifting their loved one ends up going and getting help. It’s beautiful.
We also offer a lot of other services to help families. I developed a model of adolescent transport that’s very trauma-informed. It was important for me working with adolescents through the majority of my career to not come in and to have adolescents snatched out of bed in the middle of the night and sent off and their parents are not at home.
We are going to come in and say the whole family system needs to do its work. You don’t want to begin that by having parents like, “They take my kid,” and go fix them. We sit down and have the family talk about everything they love about their loved one. Safety measures are still in place so they can’t run but here’s why we made this decision. It’s so they get to treatment in a way that’s safe, respectful, and can be as non-traumatic as possible.
Heather’s Personal Journey
You know and I both know so many families that have had someone coming in the middle of the night, take their child, put them in a van, and take them off to treatment. As you were speaking, thinking back, I can think of 8, 10, or 12 families that I have worked with, but unfortunately, that’s the way they did it. I have never seen it work successfully. I never have. I’m so glad that you developed this technique they have been using and share that. I hope part of that is in your book too. Why don’t you talk a little bit if you don’t mind about your journey? When you said you got sober when you were 21, how did that happen? What was the impetus for that and what was that journey like for you?
The ground was set for me before I even was born. I was born in a family where I had a father who had grown up on Tobacco Road and a mother who grew up in the aristocratic South, so they got married. My father is hardworking, a Fulbright scholar in Scotland, Princeton graduate, but his roots and his work were also where he came from. I had a lot of mixed messages growing up. My parents divorced and remarried three times. It was a little bit chaotic and I had rheumatic fever as a child.
There was a whole year of my younger life where I was in bed and there was all this drama around, “Don’t get out of bed or you are going to get heart damage and die.” My mom would come into the room and I’d be jumping on the bed and she freaked out and I go, “You said I couldn’t get out of the bed.” Trying to tame all that energy. Again, adolescence was hard. As soon as I hit adolescence and puberty, I was awkward and shy. The first time I had that drink, I suddenly wasn’t it anymore. I said, “I will do this as much as I possibly can.” It quickly escalated.
I went to one of the best private schools in the South. I was asked not to return. I then transferred to some of the others. There were a lot of red flags along the way. I was a teenager in distress. I ran away from home when I was a kid. I can understand. This is part of that tough love piece, kicked them out of the house. Sometimes it works great and sometimes it doesn’t. I was gone for six months, and they held on. They didn’t kick me out. I’m like, “Goodbye.”
Resilience and I lived on my own, I did what I needed to do. I wasn’t coming back. That didn’t work for me. What got me back is that somehow inside I knew I wanted to go to college. I came back and said I would act right or behave. I went to the University of Georgia, which was a disaster. I went to the wrong class for the first half of the semester. The professor handed out the exam and I went up and corrected him in my helpful way to let him know he had the wrong number on it. He was like, “I know where I’m at. I think you are confused.” I got a D in the class. He had me to an F in the one I didn’t go to. It was a mess. Car wrecks and blackouts.
The biggest thing I believe as a woman in particular was that loss. I didn’t get arrested. I had bad grades. It was internal like the loss of myself and my self-esteem. Somewhere in there, I knew that my life was not to be what it was. It wasn’t to be, “I’m going to fail out of school. I’m going to stay high all the time,” and my tolerance level was unbelievable. My daily dose was I would drink a quart of vodka over the day. I would take 3 or 4 hits to speed in the morning to get going. I smoke pot all day. The day started at about 4:00 in the afternoon. It would take 8 or 10 Quaaludes to 3 or 4 grams of cocaine. This was all in a day.
I had always been super thin. I always had this fast metabolism. In hindsight, I don’t know how I didn’t die, through divine intervention. There were a few times when I asked for help, and it fell on deaf ears. Somehow some grace, my parents had taken me to therapists since I was twelve saying, “What’s wrong with her?” There was this one guy that I liked that I went to see. That was the agreement when I had run away from home and was going to come back. Little did I know he was in recovery. One day, it was my third year of school, I said to my friends as I was getting sick and throwing up drunk. “That’s it. I’m going to rehab tomorrow.” They told me to go to sleep it off. I picked up the phone and called him.
The rest is history. Now we are going to have a New York Times Bestseller next year. How does someone reach you and Heather Hayes & Associates when they need help?
The best way to reach would be to go to the website, which is www.HeatherHayes.com and all the information is on there. We have an 800 number. My team takes turns. For me, my self-care is important. The self-care of my team is important. It’s an easy burnout position being on the front lines, so we try and take turns with who answers on that phone. When you call that 800 number, it will either be answered by one of my team or you will be able to call back right away if they are on the phone with another family.
I have called that number many times and they answer on the first ring always and they return calls right away if they are not able to. I have certainly enjoyed working with you over the years, Heather. I’m so honored to have you on our show. Everyone, reach out to Heather R. Hayes & Associates in Georgia. It’s an amazing opportunity for you guys to hear Heather’s story. Buy her book when it comes and thank you for everything that you do.
Thank you for everything you do too. What you do is so important and helps families get the right appropriate care for their loved ones. It takes a lot for someone to reach out, and go through that process, and then if they end up in the wrong place because they didn’t have the right diagnosis, it’s discouraging for families.
You are exactly right. Thank you, Heather, so much.
Dr. Flowers, how do they reach the J. Flowers Health Institute?
The easiest way, like Heather said, is www.JFlowersHealth.com. Our phone number is 713-783-6655, but that website has lots of information on it. Check out both Heather Hayes and our website. We are both here to answer questions for you guys anytime. Heather, thanks and I hope to see you post-COVID very soon.
Thank you.
Take good care.
Important Links
- Heather R. Hayes & Associates
- Heather R. Hayes & Associates – Facebook
- @HeatherRHayesAndAssociates – Instagram
About Heather Hayes
Heather Hayes is the Founder and CEO of Heather R. Hayes & Associates, Inc. She is a Master’s Level, Licensed Counselor, Board Registered Interventionist (CIP) and Certified ARISE Interventionist. Heather received her B.A. from Emory University and her M.Ed. from Antioch University in Counseling Psychology. A veteran of the behavioral health field, she has over 35 years of experience working with addictions and other disorders and specializes in the treatment of adolescents/ young adults, trauma, brain disorders, complex mental health issues and the full spectrum of addictive disorders.
