Dhru Purohit Show
Break Free of People Pleasing, Sugar Addiction, and Limiting Beliefs that are Holding You Back From Living the Life You Desire with Dr. Adi Jaffe
Wed, 16 Apr 2025
This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Cozy Earth, and Levels. In today’s world, addiction takes many forms—whether it’s alcohol, drugs, social media, or people-pleasing. Certain key factors drive these behaviors and make breaking the cycle incredibly challenging. Today’s guest offers powerful insights into brain health and psychology, explaining why these patterns emerge and how we can begin to unhook from them. On this episode of The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with psychologist and addiction expert Dr. Adi Jaffe. Dr. Jaffe breaks down the “hook” that keeps us stuck in addictive behaviors and explores the root causes that draw us back to them. He takes a deep dive into shame—the true fuel behind addiction—and explains why people-pleasing is one of the hardest patterns to break. He also shares his own powerful journey of overcoming addiction and highlights the importance of holding onto beliefs that serve us—and letting go of those that don’t. Dr. Adi Jaffe is a UCLA-trained psychologist and a leading expert on mental health, addiction, and relationships. Once a meth addict and drug dealer, his life changed after a SWAT arrest and jail sentence. Now the author of The Abstinence Myth and Unhooked, Dr. Jaffe challenges traditional addiction treatment and leads IGNTD, an organization helping former inmates find support for addiction and mental health. His work has been featured on CNN, Fox, NBC, and Psychology Today. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Jaffe dive into: The hook beneath addiction (00:00) What you gain by holding onto your addiction (5:47) The deeper roots of people-pleasing (7:15) Dhru and Dr. Jaffe's personal stories with people-pleasing (11:58) The SPARO Method explained (19:38) Dr. Jaffe's personal addiction story and how Unhooked was created (24:40) Why shame is the true fuel behind addiction (36:02) The hooks and stimulants that fueled Dr. Jaffe's past addictions (41:22) Fixed mindset vs. growth mindset (50:21) The capacity for change: being reactive vs. proactive (55:01) How Dr. Jaffe overcame his addiction (58:30) Common habits that unknowingly lead to addiction (1:07:34) Understanding the addiction of self-criticism (1:22:21) Letting go of limiting beliefs and embracing self-evaluation (1:29:15) The power of celebrating small wins (1:37:30) Where to follow Dr. Jaffe’s work (1:44:08) Also mentioned in this episode: Unhooked: Free Yourself from Addiction Forever How to Heal Your Body and Manifest Reality with Bruce Lipton For more on Dr.Jaffe, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Apple Podcast, LinkedIn, his Website, and other platforms, such as IGNTD™. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Cozy Earth, and Levels, Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the hook beneath addiction?
Dr. Adi Jaffe, welcome to the podcast. Addiction in all its forms can quietly or sometimes loudly ruin our lives. And today you're here to talk about this conversation, but most importantly, help people break free. Whether somebody listening today is struggling with sugar addiction or
people pleasing, which is an addiction as well, or something more severe like porn, gambling, or even drugs, you have an important reminder for them. And the core reminder that you're here to present to us today is the problem is not the behavior. It's the hook underneath. Expand on this and give us an example of what you mean.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on, Drew. And I think sugar is a great example, actually, to start with, which you used, because I think of sugar as almost one of the first drugs that we have, purified sugar, if you will. And here's the point, right? We all have access to purified sugar in society at large.
And yet a subset of people find themselves having a hard time controlling their intake. And the question becomes, and people might come to me, the reason I call the book Unhooked is people come and say, I'm hooked on sugar. I'm hooked on alcohol. I'm hooked on porn. I'm hooked on the show, whatever. They use the thing that they're hooked on as the explanation for the behavior.
And when I said, hold on, that is the symptom. The reality is that the reason you are using the sugar, the reason you're stuck people pleasing, the reason you're drinking too much when you get home at night is because those things were used to mask underlying behaviors, struggles, early life experiences, traumas that you've had probably for a long time, like 10, 15 years at the least.
That's kind of the average we get. And what happens to a lot of people is that finally explains to them why stopping the behavior has been so tough. Because everybody's tried, right? If you feel like you're hooked on sugar and you've tried to cut down your sugar intake, and you've been unsuccessful, you end up beating yourself up. You go, well, what's wrong with me?
Why can't I control my behavior? And for a lot of people, once they understand that there's actually a whole sea of underlying issues, it gives them a different frame and something else to start attacking in order to actually change their behavior.
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Chapter 2: How can we understand the deeper roots of people-pleasing?
Let's talk about that C. For example, what are the common things that you see for somebody in that situation who might be hooked on sugar? What are the underlining behaviors that could be potentially present?
Yeah. So I kind of named them quickly, but let's just break them down. Number one is actually early developmental modeling and behavioral development. So the environment you were born into taught you a lot about the world. A lot. but you were zero to eight, nine, 10 years old. Most of it you don't remember in terms of an explicit memory.
And the vast majority of it, you would never actually understand the depths to which it predicts your future behavior. But your brain is conditioned to do the most of its learning definitely before you hit age 12. And after that kind of just become more and more efficient in repeating that same model.
So if you grew up in a household where, and I'm actually just thinking in my head, this is just off the top of my head, but let me just show this is us.
Yeah.
There was a scene where the daughter kind of feels really alienated from the mom. And the dad would always take her to ice cream when she was young. That was their bonding moment. That's how they would bond. Every single time he wanted to bond with his daughter, he would take her to ice cream.
Everybody else was watching that show and thinking to themselves, man, that's really nice that he's got this moment with her. And I'm thinking to myself... He's developing a pattern where she connects connecting to dad, love, et cetera, to ice cream. Because that's the only time that they showed them connecting.
And so implicitly, without somebody actually being able to call it out, the connection between love, intimacy, appreciation, connection, and sugar and ice cream can be created. So these little tiny patterns, that's one piece.
next are traumas actual difficult big t little t traumas but difficult life experiences that create anxieties fears negative self-impression etc in a person and again we're talking normally pretty early although for these i've definitely had clients where during college or later on in life that a substantial trauma think losing someone almost dying in a car accident right being assaulted sexually physically emotionally
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Chapter 3: What is the SPARO Method?
And so if any of those three categories of things that I just mentioned are happening to you regularly in your life, what you can end up finding is You can find yourself in anxiety, fear, depression, loneliness, isolation at different points.
And what you learn to do is you learn to deal with those negative feelings because we don't live in a society where saying that to people around you is actually really easy and simple. So you learn to cover them up, but they're not easy to cover up. So you cover them up with anxiety.
behaviors, substances, et cetera, that allow you to at least pretend like you feel normal, or maybe even numb the pain to an extent where you become unaware of it.
Is part of what you're saying that no matter how destructive our patterns or behaviors are, there's always something that we're getting in return. And so part of the work, or a huge part of the work in this instance that you talk about in your book, which is fantastic, is trying to figure out what do you get for keeping this thing alive?
I think that's probably one of the best short ways to explain the underlying message. Joseph Campbell has a quote that I quote in the book that I love. The cave you fear the most is the one that holds your treasure. It's from a hero of a thousand faces.
And essentially what he's saying is it's a colloquial way to say what you just said right now, right, Drew, which is you've been running away from something. That thing is going to keep chasing you. It's not going to let you go. There is no way to run away from it.
You will take on whatever behavior, whatever habits, whatever relationships in your life, whatever ways of understanding the world to excuse running away from the discomfort. But the only thing to do is to stop, face it, deal with it, and resolve it. And once you do that, you find yourself not having to run anymore.
Well, you're not just an expert in this space. You've actually lived this experience in your life. We're gonna be talking about your story in a second, a few things to cover, but just a little preview for people who are listening. Part of your story includes waking up one day to a shotgun in your face. We're gonna get to that in a second. But first, we talked about sugar.
I wanna go a little bit further. We mentioned it. Let's talk about people pleasing, for example. Sure. What would be some of the underlining aspects
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Chapter 4: Why is shame the true fuel behind addiction?
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Yeah, I love that example. So let's break down for a second, at least so we have common language around what people pleasing is, right? People pleasing is behaving in ways that outwardly display personality, habits, likes and dislikes.
you believe will make other people like you more get along with you more want you around more right it's kind of like projecting this outward mask saying yes to things that you really want to say no to or at least you know not a vehement kind of like hell yes to um pretending that you like things food events whatever because other people that you want to associate with yourself now
A lot of people might not even consider that in the realm of addiction or compulsive behavior. So let me, I want to explain what I talk about in the book. To me, addiction's compulsive behaviors are behaviors you engage in regularly. Whether you take a substance or not is almost meaningless in this, to my opinion.
You engage in them regularly over a long period of time, and they cause you a disservice in disrupting your ability to live a full life that keeps you happy, joyful, purposeful, etc. So if your people pleasing is done to an extent where you're literally, I'm just going to make this metaphor up, right?
But you're literally putting yourself in situations where you're hanging out with people you don't really like because you think it's the right thing to do for your social status, whatever. You're eating food you don't like because the people that you want to spend time with are eating that food.
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Chapter 5: How did Dr. Jaffe overcome his addiction?
And one of the things that I learned very quickly is one of the ways to get over being the new kid and be liked is do things for other people. If you could be the resource guy, if you could do stuff, if you could pull strings or whatever, then people would like you. And if people would like you, you wouldn't be left alone. And if you weren't left alone, then you were okay.
If you were alone, you didn't fit in. You're more likely to get picked on. You're more likely to have issues. So very quickly, I got into that habit, not sitting down one day at a table and saying, I'm going to be a people pleaser because people are going to like me. It's actually this fear of, Oh my gosh, if I'm at this new school and I'm not liked, what's going to happen to me?
What an example. I love that. First of all, congratulations for figuring that out. Because when I was put in those situations as a young kid, I felt so lost, right? 14, 15 years old. I didn't know. I mean, I knew why I wasn't accepted or liked. I was new. I didn't speak the language well, et cetera. But the reason I love the example you gave so well is exactly how you started us today.
Being a people pleaser served you. It worked for you. That's why it became a thing. And that's what a lot of people miss is that chart in the book where I say, a lot of people look at somebody's endpoint and they say, this makes no sense. And I promise you, if you follow the story to the beginning and you understand how this behavior began, I guarantee I'll put everything on this.
It makes all the sense in the world. You developed a behavior of giving to others, even to potentially sometimes at a cost to yourself because the cost otherwise was isolation, loneliness, shame in a way, right? Because what is shame but separating us from others? And so it was a brilliant method. And you came up with it on your own.
That's what I love about addictive compulsive tendencies is they worked so well for a while that we actually over relied on them because they served a purpose. And then I assume, I don't know if this is true because you didn't tell me this before, but I assume what ended up happening is at some point later in life, you're like, I'm surrounded by people. Everybody likes me.
Everything looks good on the outside. Why am I not happy? And you're like, oh, because I'm actually not reserving enough of the resources, enough of the time, enough of what I have for myself. I'm giving it even when I don't necessarily want to.
Yeah, and the sublayer underneath that is that because I was very ambitious and I wanted to help people, I would overcommit to things. And I would create a little bit of a small trail of devastation of saying yes to something. Yes to a nonprofit that I'd help out with a project. Yes to a teacher who needed help with an additional thing. Yes to a friend who needed help building a website.
And because I was completely overwhelmed and no one person could do all these things, I would crash and burn every few months. And I would ghost people and I would end up in a situation where it's like, why do I keep on running this pattern and not having an insight? And so as much as somebody from the outside would say, okay, what's the problem with a little bit of people policing?
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Chapter 6: What common habits lead to addiction?
Well, the problem can manifest in many different ways. And we'll talk about your own journey and how this showed up for you.
But the problem for me in that situation is that I was more committed to being liked out of the fear of being alone than I was out of having integrity to give somebody the truth, which would have saved everybody a lot of pain and heartache, myself first and foremost, later on.
I love that. I love that because it serves... My main point in writing this book is to really broaden the lens. When we talk about compulsive behaviors and addiction, almost everybody talks about drugs and alcohol. You know, that's a third of it, maybe even a quarter. Most compulsive patterns are actually behavioral, in my opinion.
I mean, look, think of all the people that are doom scrolling on their devices all the time. What is that but escapist behavior? But they can say to themselves, I'm not drinking, I'm not using drugs, I'm not doing anything bad. Why is this a problem? And you alluded to it, but I'll talk about it in the book.
I talk about, in the book, about a client of mine who reached out to me after they collapsed on the floor in front of their colleagues, peers, and clients. They thought they were dying. That was the moment. And I won't kill the story for anybody who's going to read the book, but that was the moment they realized that was a problem.
And I would argue just like somebody who's had an alcohol addiction ends up being arrested or somebody who's, you know, addicted to drugs and has an overdose. It's that moment back against the wall where most people change, but you don't have to wait that long, right? The whole point of writing the book is to try to help you do this longer, easier. Yeah.
So many people have that belief that your life has to hit rock bottom for things to change. Just expand on that a little bit further, right? You talked about it a little bit, but just continue that conversation.
Yeah, and I use that example in my own. I'll actually end up where I talk about this in the book. Most people, in order to create real transformational change, at least to decide and then go do all the work for it, need what I call back against the wall moment. This is the come to Jesus, oh my gosh, my life can't continue the way that it's been going, right?
The problem is those are high stress situations. You've been arrested. Your wife says she's going to leave you. You've almost died. You've hurt yourself. You've ruined relationships, you know? really, really difficult sometimes to come out of those. Not only are they high stress, you've lost a lot, which means there's more room to make up.
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Chapter 7: How does self-criticism relate to addiction?
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So the way I opened Sparrow, Sparrow stands for stimulus, perception, activation, response, and outcome. Sparrow. Most people come to me after a negative outcome. That's that back against the wall moment, right? Yeah. fight with the wife, said she's gonna leave them. They lost a job. One of my clients literally fell off a 30-foot retaining wall while drunk in the middle of the night, almost died.
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Chapter 8: What role do limiting beliefs play in our lives?
Bad, bad experiences. And so they come to me at a negative outcome. In their head, so I'll go back to Sparrow, stimulus, perception, activation, response, outcome. Response comes right before outcome. The response is the behavior. What did you do? So they say, I went drinking. I blacked out. I almost killed myself. I need to stop drinking.
Or my wife found out that I watch porn behind her back all the time, or I cheated on her. The response was a cheating or the response with the porn. I need to stop doing the thing. What they miss is a stimulus perception activation piece that come before it. And so they get caught in this cycle. I did something bad. I had a bad outcome. I tried to change the behavior. It doesn't succeed.
I get the negative outcome again and they get caught and they don't understand why they're failing.
I'm bad. The situation is bad. If I just stopped being bad, everything would fix itself.
Yeah. Like in your situation, I'm over committing. I'm saying yes too much to people. I need to say no to people more. Sounds so simple. It's like, oh, duh, thank you. Now you just help. I'm the best psychologist on the face of the planet, right?
I'm eating too much sugar. Stop eating so much sugar.
Stop eating sugar. I mean, you don't even need 12 steps. I got one. This is it, right? It's a one step. Just stop doing the bad thing. People keep failing. They don't understand why. The reason people are failing is that response, that behavior is not standing on its own. It's a response to an activation caused by a frame, caused by a perception.
So the whole point of the book is to say when a negative outcome happens, and this is to me, I've learned this over the last 20 years of my own behavioral change, we'll get to my story, but in the last 23 years, I had to do essentially 180 degree turn in my own life, right?
And so I had to learn very, very quickly in order to save myself, how do I make sure that I do not keep ruining my life by making really, really wrong choices? But what I've learned through literature, through studying psychology, getting my PhD, all this stuff is you actually normally learn through failure. Avoiding failure is a bad idea.
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