April 7, 2025 • 25 mins
Hi everyone! Today’s episode is going to be an informative one. I’m joined by licensed marriage and family therapist Joe Girillo and he’s telling us all about how alcohol impacts our minds and bodies. He has a ton of experience treating people with chemical-use disorders and he’s also had his own challenges with alcohol – which he shares with us.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, guys. I hope you all had a really great
weekend and are starting your week off strong. Today, I
want to talk about a topic I've been thinking about
for a long time, and that's reducing the amount of
alcohol I consume. Because we all know alcohol isn't the
greatest for us. I'm bringing on an expert to talk
about the effects of alcohol and about addiction. In no
(00:24):
way am I addicted to alcohol, but I think it's
an important topic for us to discuss because so many
of us are affected by it. Even if you're not addicted,
the chances of you knowing someone who abuses alcohol is
pretty high. According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism, almost thirty million Americans had an alcohol abuse
(00:44):
disorder in twenty twenty three. Anyway, let's bring on my guest.
His name is Joe Jurillo. He's a marriage and family
therapist and he also has over twenty years of experience
treating people with chemical use disorders. Hello, Joe, Welcome, Welcome
to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hi, nice to see you, Nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Likewise, how are you today.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I'm great, Thanks, good, good.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm so happy to have you because I have been
wanting to drink less. I have been drinking less, but
I want to stop completely. And we'll get into that later.
But why don't we start off with you telling us
a little bit about yourself and your experience with helping
people with addiction.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Sure, I'll try and make this brief, even though it's
a very long story. I grew up in a house
where there was no alcohol at all, and as a kid,
we never had alcohol at the table for dinner anything like.
I grew up in a Catholic Italian family, and when
I was fourteen, I had an older brother who passed
away from cancer. It was a very traumatic experience for
(01:48):
our whole family. I started falling in with friends that
were drinking and smoking weed, and so my life took
off on a trajectory where I normalized getting high to
manage my emotions and stuff like that, getting drunk just
about every day, drinking probably most days of my life
until the age of forty two, when I stopped. From
(02:09):
the time I was fourteen, oh wow, other little things
that between there, but alcohol was always the constant. I
found out when I was about twenty five that my
grandfather had been a horrible alcoholic up until we grandchildren
were born, but I had no consciousness of that beforehand.
Suffice to say, I got jobs in career I was
(02:30):
not interested in after college and sales and marketing and
stuff like that. And around the age of thirty six,
I decided to go back to school to become a
therapist because when I had come home from college, included
with my heavy drinking and stuff, I had pretty much
what you would call a nervous breakdown and became very suicidal.
Got into therapy with MFT, who helped me tremendously to
(02:53):
be able to kind of back away from the ledge
and find a way to value myself and my experience
in life. I kept drinking, though, and then I went
back to do my master's Marriage and Family therapy. Took
like a one unit course in alcoholism that they were
teaching as part of the curriculum, which I think is horrible,
but that's pretty much the standard these days. You don't
(03:15):
get a lot of training in it unless you work
in the field with it, so that happened. I got
married for the first time at the age of forty two,
to a girl I had a mad crush on in
high school, and we were very happy and we drank
together a lot. I have to say that before that
part even I got a career for God, like about
(03:36):
seven years where my life was about selling wine and
spirits to retail, which allowed me to become a professionalized
drunk because I was able to drink every day and
it worked really good for me, and I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the vast majority of it. Got married at
forty two. Two years later. My wife and I, who
(03:59):
drank together for fun all the time, my wife was
getting sick and we couldn't figure out what it was,
and it turned out that she was. What was happening
was she was literally dying of alcohol poisoning because she
was drinking so much, and she had developed a syndrome
where she couldn't hold any food down, so she would vomit.
You know, when she woke up in the morning, she
(04:19):
would drink wine or commerr stomach down. Anything she ate
during the day she'd throw back up. And after about
a month of not being able to hold anything down
except alcohol, she was really really messed up. Now, it's
not unfamiliar for alcoholics to vomit in the morning when
they've gone long enough without alcohol that they start to
go into withdrawal symptoms. We got her into treatment over
(04:41):
at Los Andinas in Pasadena. I As far as I'm concerned,
they pretty much saved her life and our marriage. But
she did the hard work by staying sober. But I
quit with her at the same time and realized just
a couple of days later how far down the path
I had gone without even realizing it, because we just
kept normalizing it over and over again, getting drunk, being
(05:03):
hung over all that stuff. It's only wine, all the
stuff that goes on in your head, because the nature
of alcoholism is to kind of minimize and justify and
rationalize all the consequences and behavior that you're going through.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
In my household, there wasn't necessarily alcohol at the table
when we were having dinner, but it was very normal.
Tequila has been a part of our life and our work,
and I didn't really drink much like a few years ago,
(05:39):
and as I started going on stage it became part.
It's very much part of the culture, the type of
music that I sing, and your job is to get
everyone drunk, and I'm pretty good at that, so of
course I'm drinking. But I never liked how I felt.
I've never liked it. I'm like, I'm poisoning my body.
My brain feels different, I'm sluggish, I have a lot
(06:01):
of brain fog. But I would ignore it just for
the sake of I'm drinking because it's a way to socialize,
and you know, I'm not going to be any fun
or can I have fun without alcohol? And right now
that you said wine, I just recently stopped drinking hard alcohol.
And now I'm like, oh, but wine, it comes from grapes,
and it's it's natural, it's natural, it's better. So I've
(06:25):
been I was in New York a few days ago
and I hadn't drink in a while, and I'm like,
I'm just gonna have a glass of wine. And I
told myself just one. But I felt it right away,
and I didn't feel as bad as I do with
Thiki Lab. But still i can see it in my
eyes and in my energy level, and I'm like, okay,
I need to just cut this, just nip it in
(06:45):
the bud. Which is why it's so perfect that you're
on the podcast. But you've been sober now for how
long I've.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Been sober now for twenty two years?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And have you still had a lot of fun after
the alcohol.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have had so much fun. In fact, I've had
more fun because I don't have to worry about the
things I used to worry about. It's interesting because when
I worked at Los Antinas, I worked with doctor Drew Pinsky.
I don't know if you're familiar with sober celebrity rehab
and all that stuff that was going on in MTV
fifteen years ago, reality television having to do with rehab
(07:18):
and so forth. So we're living and all that, and
Drew was a brilliant doctor understands addiction like nobody I've
ever worked with before. But there was a team of
us that worked there for that time. I was there
in there for like seven years, and I learned so
much about addiction on the daily basis because I worked
in the rehab section, which was called the Briar Unit,
(07:41):
where we had people come in. We would help them
detox medically, you know, because Okay, there's only two types
of chemicals that you really need to detox in a
hospital for one is alcohol and the other is benzodiazepines
like adavan, xanax, klonip and stuff like that. Because both
of those you try and do it on your own
(08:01):
you run a high risk of seizures, blood pressure spikes, strokes, death.
I've seen people die detoxing at home. Okay, it's yeah,
And most people don't know this. Mostly people think it's
like heroin and meth or the bugaboos and stuff like that.
Those don't kill people by themselves, but you mix any
(08:22):
of that with alcohol, it will. And if you don't
detox in the hospital when you're an alcoholic, if you've
been drinking daily, you really need to be under nurse's
care and on a medical protocol to survive it, because
it's serious stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, And how do you know, Joe when you're addicted? Like,
what are some signs? I mean, because I have a
friend that I think, okay, she's definitely an alcoholic in
my mind, but she's like, no, it's the only thing
that takes my stress away. And she's like, even if
I have two or three I'm like, well, you're drinking
every day. But anyway, you tell me, what are the signs?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Really good question. There's two ways to look at this.
One is the signs of the things happening, and then
the other is the signs of the things not happening.
When you stop in terms of the signs of what's
happening well, our definition over at loss and seen as
for addiction period is the intense desire to use even
in the face of negative consequences. You know you're going
(09:20):
to lose your job if you show up to work drunk.
You know that your husband's going to leave you, or
your wife's going to leave you because they've had it
with you already, and you've made ultimate promises. You know
for weeks, months, and years that you're not going to
drink anymore. You're starting to get sick, you're starting to
feel ill, you're starting to not feel yourself, and yet
you still continue to drink. Any number of different things
(09:42):
that are consequences. You get your driver's license taken away,
or you get two DUIs, three DUIs, and you still
drink and drive, of course, because the idea of not
driving yourself to your drink is ridiculous. But those are
literally the types of things when you start to recognize
that you choose to drink no matter what the danger is,
(10:02):
or what the threat is, or what the thing is
that could you could lose your career. Everybody could turn
against you. We've seen it in the media a million times. Yeah,
as long as somebody is partying and they're holding it together,
everybody thinks they're so cool, And as soon as something
bad happens to them, everybody thinks they're a total loser.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's so true.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, that kind of impact itself is a negative consequence. Now,
the other way to look at it, how do you
know what you know? What is addiction? What is alcoholism?
How do you know whether it's a problem or not?
It's a problem when it's a problem. In other words,
if you can't not drink, you're probably an alcoholic. I mean,
if you can't not drink that you are an alcoholic.
(10:41):
That means that you've got a condition. It's a physical condition,
and it's a mental condition, and it's even a spiritual
condition as well. A lot of people get nervous about
talking about that, but I'm quite used to talking about it.
And it's a physical problem because your body, your brain,
all your organs become a customed to a chemical that's
(11:02):
actually killing it over time, and then it can't function
without it. That's why in later stage alcoholism, you can't
get started for the day unless you've had a drink
or two. You can't function calmly without a couple of
belts in you, And it just goes on and on
like that, and you're convinced this is the way you survive.
(11:22):
The other way to look at it is what are
the things that stop happening when you stop drinking? As
proof that alcoholism is what's going on. I used to
change jobs every two to three years all through my
thirties and early forties, even my twenties as well, and
it was amazing because I would always either have to
(11:43):
quit a job because my boss was an ass, or
I would get fired because, well, my boss was an ass.
And I had probably the world's record of getting hired
by asses beyond anybody else's comprehension. When I got so
for some reason, I wasn't getting fired anymore from any jobs.
(12:05):
And I found that I was staying places five years,
ten years, twenty years, and leaving for a better opportunity,
not running before everything came crashing down, and not because
you know, I was waiting to get busted, you know,
thoroughly expecting it, because that was my story. So when
you kind of put those things together, you get a
(12:26):
sense that obviously something's not working here, and I maybe
I don't even understand entirely what it is, but I
should probably pay attention to the writing on the wall. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Absolutely, And right now, as I was hearing you speak,
it reminded me of someone that was in my life
and how he said, no, I am not an addict.
And everything that you just said was confirmation for me
because he started making me feel bad like I was
accusing him or keeping him from having fun. But it's
like all these broken promises and it was ruining and
(12:57):
it ruined our relationships. Kind of gave me a little
bit of peace, So thank you for that. I did
want to ask you, do you think that it's okay now?
Knowing what alcohol more than ever, what it does to
the body, what it does to the brain, and I
(13:18):
want to get a little into the brain because that's
like my main concern. But do you think that even
having a glass of wine once a week is okay?
Or do you feel like if you were telling your
daughter or your sister, whoever, that someone that you truly love,
would you tell them no alcohol at all or once
in a while?
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Just wondering, good question. So there's nothing evil or wrong
or dangerous about wine? If it's done in moderation. In
other words, if you're not drinking every day, it shouldn't
be a tremendous problem. If you binge when you drink,
it's a problem if you find that you're working five
days a week and weekends you let yourself have beer
(14:02):
or wine or whatever it is that you're drinking, even
hard liquor. As long as you're not getting really drunk
each time you do and losing track of how much
you're drinking, and as long as you're conscious of any
kind of consequences that are occurring in terms of your
decision to drink, then, like I said, it's not really
a problem unless it's a problem.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And now that you brought that up, I think it's
a perfect way to talk about the effects that alcohol
has on the brain or on the organs. Can we
talk a little bit about that? Right?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
So, let me give you a little show and tell.
I'm not going to do it here, but when you
get home tonight, take a glass of water and take
a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and pour a little bit
of the rubbing alcohol into the water. And what you're
going to find is the rubbing alcohol actually pushes the
water aside. Right when you do anything to disrupt the
(14:56):
balance of water inside the brain, and this goes for
the other organs as well, because humans are mostly water.
When you mess with the ability to your body's availability
to handle the electrostatic charges in your brain, it's going
to cause brain damage. It's going to cause cell destruction,
et cetera, et cetera. Even small amounts of alcohol cause
(15:17):
small amounts of brain damage. If you drink less than
your body is reproducing in terms of brain cells, then
it's not a problem. But if you're drinking every day,
and you're drinking heavily, you're binge drinking, it can take
a big chunk out of it. If you look at
cat scans of an alcoholic sprain at the time of
their autopsy versus someone about the same age there wasn't
(15:38):
an alcoholic, you see tremendous differences in like the cavities
that are supposed to be open and filled with fluids
that the brain produces to regulate itself, and the mass
material of the brain actually has shrunk over time. Quite
often you have what they call water on the brain
because the chambers are actually breaking down inside the brain
over time. Because you've got a very sick brain that
(15:59):
does and work. They call there's a condition called wet
brain that when people who are in late or end
stage alcoholism develop a kind of dementia. Alcoholic dementia. Wet
brain is when you can't think straight, when you are hallucinating,
when you are I mean, you might as well have
Alzheimer's and stage Alzheimer's because it looks very much like that,
(16:23):
which is a direct cause of the alcohol's effect on
the brain. Men usually hit the wall around the age
of fifty or just before that where they really need
to have help if they're going to stop using. Women
hit it closer to the age of forty. Now, that's
completely anecdotal, okay, from my experience working in rehab and
stuff like that. So if you quote me to somebody
(16:45):
who's a statician, they're going to say, I don't know
if that's necessarily accurate, but it was a constant that
I saw the majority, the majority of women were hovering
around forty and the majority of them were right hovering
around fifty when they finally said, I can't get this anymore.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Now that we're talking about the damage that it causes,
and I'm glad you brought up because a lot of
people are like, I'm done twenty, I'm young, and it's
not going to affect me. But is it like long term,
if you continue this behavior, it will, right? Is this
damage irreversible?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It's not just the brain either. I mean the damage
that you do to any of your organs, most of
it is pretty much reversible over time. But most people
I know who quit drinking even in their forties recognize
into their fifties and sixties that they started having problems cognitively,
you know, back in their forties and really just kind
(17:45):
of dismissed it as being the role of alcohol. But
when you take alcohol out of there and you're still
having problems with memory and stuff like that, then you
recognize that this is like something that's left over from
a long time ago that's not going to necessarily clean
itself up completely. Now. On the other hand, the fact
of the matter is that the other organs of the
(18:05):
body outside of the brain are also getting damaged in
the same time. Cardiovascular system, all the veins and arteries
and stuff like that take a real beating when you're
flooded with alcohol. All right, again, don't forget when you're
drinking alcohol is replacing water and being chemical that your
body is trying to produce. Your kidneys will start to
fail after a time. Your liver is basically the oil
(18:30):
filter of the body, right if you can imagine, the
liver is the filter. Which is why I can never
understand why people go to a restaurant and order liver
for dinner because it's a filter. Why would you eat
the filter?
Speaker 1 (18:40):
That's that's not yeah, no, thank you.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I agree. But the liver has different stage. You've got
three lobes that make up your liver, three lobes of
the liver combined, and the fact of the matter is
they're all affected in different ways. During the course of
a person's drinking. The first thing that they know they find,
and quite often they can diagnose alcoholism if they really
need something physical like a lab to diagnose it, they'll
(19:07):
recognize it by decline of the liver. The first thing
they see is what they call elevated liver enzymes. That
means that enzymes that are usually in a certain kind
of balance in the liver that the liver produces are
suddenly now way out of whack. All of a sudden,
You've got more of these types of enzymes in those
and it's not in balance anymore. The second phase is
(19:29):
called fatty liver. Fatty liver means your body is no
longer breaking fats down because the liver is not capable
of helping with that, and the other organs of the
body that help break down fats that are coming in
and fats that are stored can't do their job anymore,
and it starts to show up. The fat that's not
getting processed jams the liver up, and then it can't
(19:52):
clear them, so your liver does a worse job than ever.
The third is called cirrhosis, and cirrhosis the liver is
is to the liver what emphysema is to the lungs basically,
which is where the baffles that are physical baffles that
catch and collect garbage and get rid of it so
that it doesn't destroy the filter itself start to break down.
(20:14):
That's what happens when people die of enthysema. They have
nothing left to breathe into anymore. They're just like these.
They used to have tons and tons of these little
teeny sacs that would transfer oxygen out of the blood
and stuff, and now the sacks broke and they don't
do their job anymore. The liver does the same thing
in cirrhosis. Everything is reversible up to the point of cirrhosis,
(20:38):
that is, if you stop early enough. Okay, So it's
very serious stuff. And this is the thing when you're younger,
all this stuff sounds so remote, like.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Oh, that's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's not gonna happen. I mean, I'll stop before then
there or I just went to the doctor. I got
a clean bill of health. I'm doing good, you know.
And people don't want to see what the long term
effects are because they're really not available to them until later.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, I mean, I now that I'm getting older, I'm thinking,
I just I want to feel better. I want to
take care of my body. I want, you know. And
sometimes I even I hug myself. I'm like, I am
so sorry that I did not take care of you better.
But I'm going to do my best now. And we
just talked about it on the podcast, about detoxing and
detoxing the liver and how important it is to detox
(21:25):
your organs and the body. I've done a lot of cleanses,
you know. I'm like, Okay, no alcohol for ninety days,
and right now my body's just not wanting it the
way it used to again. Because I'm on this, I
want to be the healthiest version of myself. I'm about
to hit forty. I want to love myself, and part
of that is saying no to alcohol and learning how
(21:48):
to still enjoy a dinner or a party without it.
I want to be on a natural high, and I
think I'm doing pretty damn good at it. To be honest,
I'm like, Okay, it's gonna take some time, but I
like how I'm feeling so good.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
The other thing I wanted to mention is that there's
a there's big money right now being poured into non
alcoholic beverages, non alcoholic cocktails called mocktails. Believe it or not,
They've had for years, they've had non alcoholic wine where
they actually like they do a process that's similar to fermentation,
but it's not fermentation, and so they create wine that
(22:27):
doesn't have alcohol. That stuff usually doesn't taste very good,
but the newer stuff they have a process where they
actually make wine and then they remove the extract the
wine by osmosis. They remove the alcohol from the wine
and some of the stuff is amazing. I would not
recommend it for someone who's trying to stop drinking in
the very beginning. I think it's fine for people who
(22:49):
maybe have a couple of years of sobriety but they
miss the taste of the grape. They can actually get that.
But there are other there's whole shops that are open
up where they make alcohol alternatives, things like like fake vodka.
The mixes with other mixers and gives you kind of
like the bite of vodka or gins or bourbons and
(23:09):
so forth that are not bad replicas of the same
type of thing. All you have to do is just
go online and look at a las full of them.
Highland Park has got a number of them, and Echo Park,
i believe, has a shop. Yeah perfect.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Thank you so much for that. And as you guys know,
everyone that's listening, I'm respectful. I am the type of
person to say live and let live. This is just
an informative podcast. It's something that I'm very interested in,
something that I've been trying to do myself. I've been
very open here with you guys on the podcast, So
just something for you to think about, to see how
(23:46):
you're feeling. To see if this resonates with you guys,
and Joe, You've been great. I enjoy my conversation with you.
I enjoyed it very much. You're very you make me
feel at ease and just very calm, so I love
your energy. So thank you so much, Joe.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I am so glad to hear that you gey and
thank you for having me on the show. This is
as a private practice therapist. I have a home office
in Tahanga and this working with addiction people trying to
stay sober is a big part of my practice. So
if you have you know, any people that you bump
into out there that need help, that want to talk
to somebody that might be able to help them, let
(24:22):
them know about me and this podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
And so forth. Absolutely, do you have a website where
they can find you or any diermation you want to
please share.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It's it is. It is literally my name, Joe Jurillo
LMFT dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Nice, okay, perfect, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
You're very welcome, and thank you for having me on
the show. It's been my pleasure and my privilege. And
if I can come back and help with anything else,
please let me know.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Definitely, I appreciate it. I think I want to send
someone to you, so I'll be contacting you.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Terrific.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Thank you so much. Thank you guys for listening and
for being here. This is a production of iHeartRadio and
the Michael Gurda podcast Network. Follow us on Instagram at
Michael Gourda Podcasts and follow me Cheeky's That's c h
I t U I s. For more podcasts from iHeart,
(25:16):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcast
Hi, guys. I hope you all had a really great
weekend and are starting your week off strong. Today, I
want to talk about a topic I've been thinking about
for a long time, and that's reducing the amount of
alcohol I consume. Because we all know alcohol isn't the
greatest for us. I'm bringing on an expert to talk
about the effects of alcohol and about addiction. In no
(00:24):
way am I addicted to alcohol, but I think it's
an important topic for us to discuss because so many
of us are affected by it. Even if you're not addicted,
the chances of you knowing someone who abuses alcohol is
pretty high. According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism, almost thirty million Americans had an alcohol abuse
(00:44):
disorder in twenty twenty three. Anyway, let's bring on my guest.
His name is Joe Jurillo. He's a marriage and family
therapist and he also has over twenty years of experience
treating people with chemical use disorders. Hello, Joe, Welcome, Welcome
to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hi, nice to see you, Nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Likewise, how are you today.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I'm great, Thanks, good, good.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm so happy to have you because I have been
wanting to drink less. I have been drinking less, but
I want to stop completely. And we'll get into that later.
But why don't we start off with you telling us
a little bit about yourself and your experience with helping
people with addiction.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Sure, I'll try and make this brief, even though it's
a very long story. I grew up in a house
where there was no alcohol at all, and as a kid,
we never had alcohol at the table for dinner anything like.
I grew up in a Catholic Italian family, and when
I was fourteen, I had an older brother who passed
away from cancer. It was a very traumatic experience for
(01:48):
our whole family. I started falling in with friends that
were drinking and smoking weed, and so my life took
off on a trajectory where I normalized getting high to
manage my emotions and stuff like that, getting drunk just
about every day, drinking probably most days of my life
until the age of forty two, when I stopped. From
(02:09):
the time I was fourteen, oh wow, other little things
that between there, but alcohol was always the constant. I
found out when I was about twenty five that my
grandfather had been a horrible alcoholic up until we grandchildren
were born, but I had no consciousness of that beforehand.
Suffice to say, I got jobs in career I was
(02:30):
not interested in after college and sales and marketing and
stuff like that. And around the age of thirty six,
I decided to go back to school to become a
therapist because when I had come home from college, included
with my heavy drinking and stuff, I had pretty much
what you would call a nervous breakdown and became very suicidal.
Got into therapy with MFT, who helped me tremendously to
(02:53):
be able to kind of back away from the ledge
and find a way to value myself and my experience
in life. I kept drinking, though, and then I went
back to do my master's Marriage and Family therapy. Took
like a one unit course in alcoholism that they were
teaching as part of the curriculum, which I think is horrible,
but that's pretty much the standard these days. You don't
(03:15):
get a lot of training in it unless you work
in the field with it, so that happened. I got
married for the first time at the age of forty two,
to a girl I had a mad crush on in
high school, and we were very happy and we drank
together a lot. I have to say that before that
part even I got a career for God, like about
(03:36):
seven years where my life was about selling wine and
spirits to retail, which allowed me to become a professionalized
drunk because I was able to drink every day and
it worked really good for me, and I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the vast majority of it. Got married at
forty two. Two years later. My wife and I, who
(03:59):
drank together for fun all the time, my wife was
getting sick and we couldn't figure out what it was,
and it turned out that she was. What was happening
was she was literally dying of alcohol poisoning because she
was drinking so much, and she had developed a syndrome
where she couldn't hold any food down, so she would vomit.
You know, when she woke up in the morning, she
(04:19):
would drink wine or commerr stomach down. Anything she ate
during the day she'd throw back up. And after about
a month of not being able to hold anything down
except alcohol, she was really really messed up. Now, it's
not unfamiliar for alcoholics to vomit in the morning when
they've gone long enough without alcohol that they start to
go into withdrawal symptoms. We got her into treatment over
(04:41):
at Los Andinas in Pasadena. I As far as I'm concerned,
they pretty much saved her life and our marriage. But
she did the hard work by staying sober. But I
quit with her at the same time and realized just
a couple of days later how far down the path
I had gone without even realizing it, because we just
kept normalizing it over and over again, getting drunk, being
(05:03):
hung over all that stuff. It's only wine, all the
stuff that goes on in your head, because the nature
of alcoholism is to kind of minimize and justify and
rationalize all the consequences and behavior that you're going through.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
In my household, there wasn't necessarily alcohol at the table
when we were having dinner, but it was very normal.
Tequila has been a part of our life and our work,
and I didn't really drink much like a few years ago,
(05:39):
and as I started going on stage it became part.
It's very much part of the culture, the type of
music that I sing, and your job is to get
everyone drunk, and I'm pretty good at that, so of
course I'm drinking. But I never liked how I felt.
I've never liked it. I'm like, I'm poisoning my body.
My brain feels different, I'm sluggish, I have a lot
(06:01):
of brain fog. But I would ignore it just for
the sake of I'm drinking because it's a way to socialize,
and you know, I'm not going to be any fun
or can I have fun without alcohol? And right now
that you said wine, I just recently stopped drinking hard alcohol.
And now I'm like, oh, but wine, it comes from grapes,
and it's it's natural, it's natural, it's better. So I've
(06:25):
been I was in New York a few days ago
and I hadn't drink in a while, and I'm like,
I'm just gonna have a glass of wine. And I
told myself just one. But I felt it right away,
and I didn't feel as bad as I do with
Thiki Lab. But still i can see it in my
eyes and in my energy level, and I'm like, okay,
I need to just cut this, just nip it in
(06:45):
the bud. Which is why it's so perfect that you're
on the podcast. But you've been sober now for how
long I've.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Been sober now for twenty two years?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And have you still had a lot of fun after
the alcohol.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have had so much fun. In fact, I've had
more fun because I don't have to worry about the
things I used to worry about. It's interesting because when
I worked at Los Antinas, I worked with doctor Drew Pinsky.
I don't know if you're familiar with sober celebrity rehab
and all that stuff that was going on in MTV
fifteen years ago, reality television having to do with rehab
(07:18):
and so forth. So we're living and all that, and
Drew was a brilliant doctor understands addiction like nobody I've
ever worked with before. But there was a team of
us that worked there for that time. I was there
in there for like seven years, and I learned so
much about addiction on the daily basis because I worked
in the rehab section, which was called the Briar Unit,
(07:41):
where we had people come in. We would help them
detox medically, you know, because Okay, there's only two types
of chemicals that you really need to detox in a
hospital for one is alcohol and the other is benzodiazepines
like adavan, xanax, klonip and stuff like that. Because both
of those you try and do it on your own
(08:01):
you run a high risk of seizures, blood pressure spikes, strokes, death.
I've seen people die detoxing at home. Okay, it's yeah,
And most people don't know this. Mostly people think it's
like heroin and meth or the bugaboos and stuff like that.
Those don't kill people by themselves, but you mix any
(08:22):
of that with alcohol, it will. And if you don't
detox in the hospital when you're an alcoholic, if you've
been drinking daily, you really need to be under nurse's
care and on a medical protocol to survive it, because
it's serious stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, And how do you know, Joe when you're addicted? Like,
what are some signs? I mean, because I have a
friend that I think, okay, she's definitely an alcoholic in
my mind, but she's like, no, it's the only thing
that takes my stress away. And she's like, even if
I have two or three I'm like, well, you're drinking
every day. But anyway, you tell me, what are the signs?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Really good question. There's two ways to look at this.
One is the signs of the things happening, and then
the other is the signs of the things not happening.
When you stop in terms of the signs of what's
happening well, our definition over at loss and seen as
for addiction period is the intense desire to use even
in the face of negative consequences. You know you're going
(09:20):
to lose your job if you show up to work drunk.
You know that your husband's going to leave you, or
your wife's going to leave you because they've had it
with you already, and you've made ultimate promises. You know
for weeks, months, and years that you're not going to
drink anymore. You're starting to get sick, you're starting to
feel ill, you're starting to not feel yourself, and yet
you still continue to drink. Any number of different things
(09:42):
that are consequences. You get your driver's license taken away,
or you get two DUIs, three DUIs, and you still
drink and drive, of course, because the idea of not
driving yourself to your drink is ridiculous. But those are
literally the types of things when you start to recognize
that you choose to drink no matter what the danger is,
(10:02):
or what the threat is, or what the thing is
that could you could lose your career. Everybody could turn
against you. We've seen it in the media a million times. Yeah,
as long as somebody is partying and they're holding it together,
everybody thinks they're so cool, And as soon as something
bad happens to them, everybody thinks they're a total loser.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's so true.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, that kind of impact itself is a negative consequence. Now,
the other way to look at it, how do you
know what you know? What is addiction? What is alcoholism?
How do you know whether it's a problem or not?
It's a problem when it's a problem. In other words,
if you can't not drink, you're probably an alcoholic. I mean,
if you can't not drink that you are an alcoholic.
(10:41):
That means that you've got a condition. It's a physical condition,
and it's a mental condition, and it's even a spiritual
condition as well. A lot of people get nervous about
talking about that, but I'm quite used to talking about it.
And it's a physical problem because your body, your brain,
all your organs become a customed to a chemical that's
(11:02):
actually killing it over time, and then it can't function
without it. That's why in later stage alcoholism, you can't
get started for the day unless you've had a drink
or two. You can't function calmly without a couple of
belts in you, And it just goes on and on
like that, and you're convinced this is the way you survive.
(11:22):
The other way to look at it is what are
the things that stop happening when you stop drinking? As
proof that alcoholism is what's going on. I used to
change jobs every two to three years all through my
thirties and early forties, even my twenties as well, and
it was amazing because I would always either have to
(11:43):
quit a job because my boss was an ass, or
I would get fired because, well, my boss was an ass.
And I had probably the world's record of getting hired
by asses beyond anybody else's comprehension. When I got so
for some reason, I wasn't getting fired anymore from any jobs.
(12:05):
And I found that I was staying places five years,
ten years, twenty years, and leaving for a better opportunity,
not running before everything came crashing down, and not because
you know, I was waiting to get busted, you know,
thoroughly expecting it, because that was my story. So when
you kind of put those things together, you get a
(12:26):
sense that obviously something's not working here, and I maybe
I don't even understand entirely what it is, but I
should probably pay attention to the writing on the wall. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Absolutely, And right now, as I was hearing you speak,
it reminded me of someone that was in my life
and how he said, no, I am not an addict.
And everything that you just said was confirmation for me
because he started making me feel bad like I was
accusing him or keeping him from having fun. But it's
like all these broken promises and it was ruining and
(12:57):
it ruined our relationships. Kind of gave me a little
bit of peace, So thank you for that. I did
want to ask you, do you think that it's okay now?
Knowing what alcohol more than ever, what it does to
the body, what it does to the brain, and I
(13:18):
want to get a little into the brain because that's
like my main concern. But do you think that even
having a glass of wine once a week is okay?
Or do you feel like if you were telling your
daughter or your sister, whoever, that someone that you truly love,
would you tell them no alcohol at all or once
in a while?
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Just wondering, good question. So there's nothing evil or wrong
or dangerous about wine? If it's done in moderation. In
other words, if you're not drinking every day, it shouldn't
be a tremendous problem. If you binge when you drink,
it's a problem if you find that you're working five
days a week and weekends you let yourself have beer
(14:02):
or wine or whatever it is that you're drinking, even
hard liquor. As long as you're not getting really drunk
each time you do and losing track of how much
you're drinking, and as long as you're conscious of any
kind of consequences that are occurring in terms of your
decision to drink, then, like I said, it's not really
a problem unless it's a problem.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And now that you brought that up, I think it's
a perfect way to talk about the effects that alcohol
has on the brain or on the organs. Can we
talk a little bit about that? Right?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
So, let me give you a little show and tell.
I'm not going to do it here, but when you
get home tonight, take a glass of water and take
a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and pour a little bit
of the rubbing alcohol into the water. And what you're
going to find is the rubbing alcohol actually pushes the
water aside. Right when you do anything to disrupt the
(14:56):
balance of water inside the brain, and this goes for
the other organs as well, because humans are mostly water.
When you mess with the ability to your body's availability
to handle the electrostatic charges in your brain, it's going
to cause brain damage. It's going to cause cell destruction,
et cetera, et cetera. Even small amounts of alcohol cause
(15:17):
small amounts of brain damage. If you drink less than
your body is reproducing in terms of brain cells, then
it's not a problem. But if you're drinking every day,
and you're drinking heavily, you're binge drinking, it can take
a big chunk out of it. If you look at
cat scans of an alcoholic sprain at the time of
their autopsy versus someone about the same age there wasn't
(15:38):
an alcoholic, you see tremendous differences in like the cavities
that are supposed to be open and filled with fluids
that the brain produces to regulate itself, and the mass
material of the brain actually has shrunk over time. Quite
often you have what they call water on the brain
because the chambers are actually breaking down inside the brain
over time. Because you've got a very sick brain that
(15:59):
does and work. They call there's a condition called wet
brain that when people who are in late or end
stage alcoholism develop a kind of dementia. Alcoholic dementia. Wet
brain is when you can't think straight, when you are hallucinating,
when you are I mean, you might as well have
Alzheimer's and stage Alzheimer's because it looks very much like that,
(16:23):
which is a direct cause of the alcohol's effect on
the brain. Men usually hit the wall around the age
of fifty or just before that where they really need
to have help if they're going to stop using. Women
hit it closer to the age of forty. Now, that's
completely anecdotal, okay, from my experience working in rehab and
stuff like that. So if you quote me to somebody
(16:45):
who's a statician, they're going to say, I don't know
if that's necessarily accurate, but it was a constant that
I saw the majority, the majority of women were hovering
around forty and the majority of them were right hovering
around fifty when they finally said, I can't get this anymore.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Now that we're talking about the damage that it causes,
and I'm glad you brought up because a lot of
people are like, I'm done twenty, I'm young, and it's
not going to affect me. But is it like long term,
if you continue this behavior, it will, right? Is this
damage irreversible?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It's not just the brain either. I mean the damage
that you do to any of your organs, most of
it is pretty much reversible over time. But most people
I know who quit drinking even in their forties recognize
into their fifties and sixties that they started having problems cognitively,
you know, back in their forties and really just kind
(17:45):
of dismissed it as being the role of alcohol. But
when you take alcohol out of there and you're still
having problems with memory and stuff like that, then you
recognize that this is like something that's left over from
a long time ago that's not going to necessarily clean
itself up completely. Now. On the other hand, the fact
of the matter is that the other organs of the
(18:05):
body outside of the brain are also getting damaged in
the same time. Cardiovascular system, all the veins and arteries
and stuff like that take a real beating when you're
flooded with alcohol. All right, again, don't forget when you're
drinking alcohol is replacing water and being chemical that your
body is trying to produce. Your kidneys will start to
fail after a time. Your liver is basically the oil
(18:30):
filter of the body, right if you can imagine, the
liver is the filter. Which is why I can never
understand why people go to a restaurant and order liver
for dinner because it's a filter. Why would you eat
the filter?
Speaker 1 (18:40):
That's that's not yeah, no, thank you.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I agree. But the liver has different stage. You've got
three lobes that make up your liver, three lobes of
the liver combined, and the fact of the matter is
they're all affected in different ways. During the course of
a person's drinking. The first thing that they know they find,
and quite often they can diagnose alcoholism if they really
need something physical like a lab to diagnose it, they'll
(19:07):
recognize it by decline of the liver. The first thing
they see is what they call elevated liver enzymes. That
means that enzymes that are usually in a certain kind
of balance in the liver that the liver produces are
suddenly now way out of whack. All of a sudden,
You've got more of these types of enzymes in those
and it's not in balance anymore. The second phase is
(19:29):
called fatty liver. Fatty liver means your body is no
longer breaking fats down because the liver is not capable
of helping with that, and the other organs of the
body that help break down fats that are coming in
and fats that are stored can't do their job anymore,
and it starts to show up. The fat that's not
getting processed jams the liver up, and then it can't
(19:52):
clear them, so your liver does a worse job than ever.
The third is called cirrhosis, and cirrhosis the liver is
is to the liver what emphysema is to the lungs basically,
which is where the baffles that are physical baffles that
catch and collect garbage and get rid of it so
that it doesn't destroy the filter itself start to break down.
(20:14):
That's what happens when people die of enthysema. They have
nothing left to breathe into anymore. They're just like these.
They used to have tons and tons of these little
teeny sacs that would transfer oxygen out of the blood
and stuff, and now the sacks broke and they don't
do their job anymore. The liver does the same thing
in cirrhosis. Everything is reversible up to the point of cirrhosis,
(20:38):
that is, if you stop early enough. Okay, So it's
very serious stuff. And this is the thing when you're younger,
all this stuff sounds so remote, like.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Oh, that's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That's not gonna happen. I mean, I'll stop before then
there or I just went to the doctor. I got
a clean bill of health. I'm doing good, you know.
And people don't want to see what the long term
effects are because they're really not available to them until later.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, I mean, I now that I'm getting older, I'm thinking,
I just I want to feel better. I want to
take care of my body. I want, you know. And
sometimes I even I hug myself. I'm like, I am
so sorry that I did not take care of you better.
But I'm going to do my best now. And we
just talked about it on the podcast, about detoxing and
detoxing the liver and how important it is to detox
(21:25):
your organs and the body. I've done a lot of cleanses,
you know. I'm like, Okay, no alcohol for ninety days,
and right now my body's just not wanting it the
way it used to again. Because I'm on this, I
want to be the healthiest version of myself. I'm about
to hit forty. I want to love myself, and part
of that is saying no to alcohol and learning how
(21:48):
to still enjoy a dinner or a party without it.
I want to be on a natural high, and I
think I'm doing pretty damn good at it. To be honest,
I'm like, Okay, it's gonna take some time, but I
like how I'm feeling so good.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
The other thing I wanted to mention is that there's
a there's big money right now being poured into non
alcoholic beverages, non alcoholic cocktails called mocktails. Believe it or not,
They've had for years, they've had non alcoholic wine where
they actually like they do a process that's similar to fermentation,
but it's not fermentation, and so they create wine that
(22:27):
doesn't have alcohol. That stuff usually doesn't taste very good,
but the newer stuff they have a process where they
actually make wine and then they remove the extract the
wine by osmosis. They remove the alcohol from the wine
and some of the stuff is amazing. I would not
recommend it for someone who's trying to stop drinking in
the very beginning. I think it's fine for people who
(22:49):
maybe have a couple of years of sobriety but they
miss the taste of the grape. They can actually get that.
But there are other there's whole shops that are open
up where they make alcohol alternatives, things like like fake vodka.
The mixes with other mixers and gives you kind of
like the bite of vodka or gins or bourbons and
(23:09):
so forth that are not bad replicas of the same
type of thing. All you have to do is just
go online and look at a las full of them.
Highland Park has got a number of them, and Echo Park,
i believe, has a shop. Yeah perfect.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Thank you so much for that. And as you guys know,
everyone that's listening, I'm respectful. I am the type of
person to say live and let live. This is just
an informative podcast. It's something that I'm very interested in,
something that I've been trying to do myself. I've been
very open here with you guys on the podcast, So
just something for you to think about, to see how
(23:46):
you're feeling. To see if this resonates with you guys,
and Joe, You've been great. I enjoy my conversation with you.
I enjoyed it very much. You're very you make me
feel at ease and just very calm, so I love
your energy. So thank you so much, Joe.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I am so glad to hear that you gey and
thank you for having me on the show. This is
as a private practice therapist. I have a home office
in Tahanga and this working with addiction people trying to
stay sober is a big part of my practice. So
if you have you know, any people that you bump
into out there that need help, that want to talk
to somebody that might be able to help them, let
(24:22):
them know about me and this podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
And so forth. Absolutely, do you have a website where
they can find you or any diermation you want to
please share.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It's it is. It is literally my name, Joe Jurillo
LMFT dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Nice, okay, perfect, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
You're very welcome, and thank you for having me on
the show. It's been my pleasure and my privilege. And
if I can come back and help with anything else,
please let me know.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Definitely, I appreciate it. I think I want to send
someone to you, so I'll be contacting you.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Terrific.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Thank you so much. Thank you guys for listening and
for being here. This is a production of iHeartRadio and
the Michael Gurda podcast Network. Follow us on Instagram at
Michael Gourda Podcasts and follow me Cheeky's That's c h
I t U I s. For more podcasts from iHeart,
(25:16):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite podcast
Host
Chiquis
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