Turning the Page

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: In the work that I've done, there's no greater pay it forward group than those in recovery. Making a difference is what drives our guest today. Jake Jansen is the Executive Director and Douglas Darby the Marketing Director, and both of them are co founders for Turning the Page.

Mike: Turning the Page was created by these two men. To bring different educational programs into communities through connections, speaking, and media resources, in which the focus is on mental health, substance use disorders, connections, behavioral change, and hope. Both Jake and Douglas have a story that got them where they are today.

Mike: And we're going to discuss that and their current mission through turning the page. Welcome guys.

Jake: Hey, thanks for having us, Mike.

Douglas: Pleasure.

Mike: Well, I'm so glad, this is like speaking to a brotherhood. We do the same thing. But let's go backwards first. You don't just start turning the page without a story.

Mike: So let's start there. Jake give us the short version, I suppose, of your recovery story.

Jake: Sure. Yeah. When Doug usually do this, we have about an hour just to tell know. So we're going to do the abbreviated version. I grew up in New Berlin, like, you know, my parents, I came from a really good middle class family.

Jake: I was raised correctly. My parents still have bottles of alcohol in their cabinets from their wedding 44 years ago. And, you know, for me I grew up, I was a scholar athlete. And I always felt like I was bullied and picked on a lot and being bullied and picked on led me to this group of individuals that were using drugs and alcohol.

Jake: And I started using I was very smart, so I really had that ability to live that double life. I'd go out and use after school marijuana, alcohol, and then I would come back, do my homework and do just fine. As I got a little bit older, I became a hedge fund manager in Milwaukee, trading about a billion dollars a week through my hands.

Jake: I got addicted to Oxycontin. I thought doctors prescribed pharmaceuticals. They were very safe. Eventually all of that kind of fell apart. I got addicted to IV heroin for four and a half years and eventually was facing 57 and a half years in prison. I ended up going to a place called Nova in Oshkosh.

Jake: That really saved my life. They told me that I had to get clean and stay clean. And that had to be my first priority. So I started building businesses around it. And the first business that I built was something called My Recovery Project. It was really about doing interventions and then life coaching individuals and getting as much education.

Jake: I could help myself as well. I took a coaching class and it really changed my perspective on life from being a victim to the creator of my own circumstance. From there, I built addiction recovery environment homes, sober living homes for women. From there, I built the Ladders Recovery Community in Oconomowoc.

Jake: It was a 30 bed licensed treatment facility, hired all 17 employees. And then shortly after that, we formed Rise Together. I'm sorry, we formed Turning the Page Doug's old company was Rise Together, and we saw a gap and a need and decided we wanted to do prevention because for a while, you know, I was saving kids that had fallen into the river, right?

Jake: People were falling in, they were drowning, and we're helping them downstream, and we really realized that we could make a much bigger impact in prevention. So as some of those backend services, I started selling away, I was able to start focusing a lot more on prevention services. And that's really where Doug and I have excelled and found a passion for what we do.

Mike: Wow. How long have you been in recovery, Jake?

Jake: July 19th, 2010 from IV heroin addiction.

Mike: Wow.

Jake: So a little over 14 years now.

Mike: Wow. How about you, Douglas?

Douglas: September 10th of 2010. So that's one of the great things about Jake and I is we really... we were passing in the night on so many of our big, you know celebratory dates also our active use.

Douglas: It was really exciting to be able to work with Jake. And really see those stories come to life. I mean, when Jake and I started, it was one of those things where I knew that I wanted to work with this individual, I knew from everything that I'd seen from the way that he treated people in addiction, to the help that he provided, this was the guy, you know, this is someone that I chose to work with.

Douglas: And it was because of not only those great ideas, but just how that natural connection happened on stage. I mean, it was one of those Aha moments, I guess you would say, where, and we still have them completely, but I think that's what the beauty of it is, is really identifying with someone that complimented maybe even a lot of your weaknesses, or I complimented his weaknesses, and we saw it, we hit the ground running, and I think it really entered like that confidence building era of our adulthood.

Jake: We are so different, but on stage we intertwine so well. We feed off of each other. We back each other up. And one of the really cool things is I've always been looking for a connection all my life. A lot of my addiction started from being bullied and not fitting in, in school. And when Doug met me at the sober houses, he said, I want a business partner, not a friend.

Jake: Last night he stayed over at my house, so (laugh) it's...

Douglas: But even that, that was the gaining and support, you know, nobody gets into recovery and then just has these perfect lives, right? We call it turning the page. If you look at our logo, it is a sad face turning the page into a happy face. But if you look at that bottom corner, that page is turning again.

Douglas: And we just wanted to show people that life is tough. Life has soul crushing moments to it, but it doesn't ever take away that beauty and that understanding that you really have to take a look at the entire process, the entire ups and downs that go with it and find appreciation in that. I appreciate Jake because I've had some lousy friends in the past.

Douglas: I've had some lousy business partners and today I know how to honor them.

Mike: You know, somebody called me last night. And or texted me and said, Hey, I just saw a report that opiate use is down. And I'm like, and my cynical part answered back and said, well, yeah, that's because those who have used are dead.

Mike: And that sounds really harsh, but are you both got into recovery in 2010. Fortunate that you weren't using when fentanyl was everywhere?

Jake: Absolutely. Yeah. When, when we were using and if we used fentanyl, we were looking for it in the suckers, [inaudible] available to us 10 years, it wasn't put in everything.

Jake: And, you know, that's one of the scary realities right now is fentanyl is being, you know, cut into a lot of different substances.

Douglas: Yeah, and the fentanyl that we were looking for, it was the actual prescribed method of fentanyl when you have this you know, bathtub cutting that you see going on and just people taking chemistry into their own hands, it's terrifying.

Mike: Yeah, it is. You know, I want to continue with your recovery for a minute. You talked about bad friends, we've all had them, but how many relationships were you able to repair in recovery, and how many did you just lose, and that's the cost of doing business when you get addicted?

Jake: Yeah, I I had some of my friends that said, Jake, I hope I never see you again.

Jake: And, you know, they meant it in the nicest forms and fashion, because if, if I wasn't going to get clean or that they certainly weren't going to get clean. So if I was going to do it, I had to separate. I pushed a lot of people out of my life, some intentionally, some unintentionally. But I think, you know, the people that always stayed by me were my parents.

Jake: And when I ended up getting clean I ended up spending a lot more time with my family, my parents, you know, these were these individuals that were completely non judgmental. You know, they, they weren't constantly bringing it up or anything like that. So for me, it gave me you know, a space to recover.

Jake: Additionally, I've been with my wife now 22 years, 23 years. So we went through that together and we each went to our own treatment facilities and luckily we're able to, you know, come back and find out that our recovery supported each other instead of enabled it.

Douglas: And for me really, it was about setting boundaries with myself.

Douglas: I'm a firm believer. If you don't respect boundaries, you set with yourself, you can't expect anyone else to set them. Or to, you know even go along with what you're asking. My biggest thing was I had to understand that when I got out, I had 12 years over my head, so I was terrified to go back to prison for one.

Douglas: But also it was just taking a look at the people that were showing up in my life. I didn't have the ability to manufacture or even keep afloat all these really fake friendships or fake relationships that I had in life. And I was the one failing people that were good in my life.

Douglas: And it really just went back to that gut instinct and being genuine and true to yourself on what you wanted in making that stand.

Jake: You start to realize who your friends are when you get locked up and who comes to visit you and who writes you letters.

Mike: I've said that for a long time, right? Oh my buds, they'll hang with me.

Mike: It's like, go to jail. Let's see how many you have, right?

Douglas: But they're right there when you get out, you know, I think that's the biggest eye opening thing is, it's lonely to be incarcerated. It's lonely to be in addiction. And when you do have those people, because there were people on the other side of it too.

Douglas: People that I didn't expect to show up for me or to write me a letter. People from my past, people that were just concerned, and I think those are the moments that get you through the hardest part of prison, which is, which is loneliness.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. You know, they're there, they're there when you get out, but they're there with a blunt in their hand or or a drink or a vial, right?

Mike: It's not like they're supporting your recovery.

Douglas: No, I think so much of it too was just the lack of understanding where we live in Wisconsin. So a lot of times I would hear, well, you can still drink, right?

Mike: Yeah. Oh God.

Douglas: Just having to explain why I can't, or it's, you know, it was frustrating because it'd be like, no, I'm going to go back.

Douglas: So even at the simplest, like, maybe you won't understand that this will kill me. But you can understand that I'm not willing to go back for a joint.

Jake: But I have seen it getting better though, too. I think, you know, 14 years ago when we got clean, there was a, you know, a less of an understanding about recovery.

Jake: You know, I've seen things over the last few years that, you know, more people are starting to identify in recovery than an act of addiction. It's becoming more popular where, you know, when we were growing up, sobriety was never popular.

Douglas: Well, he talks about it, you know I was ostracized even by the news stations, you know, they labeled me as the Oxycontin kid or the Walgreens bandit.

Douglas: And, you know, I look at it where, I mean, I was guilty don't get me wrong. But they definitely put me up there in a light where, you know, I wasn't a violent person. I wasn't a bad kid. I made some horrible mistakes, but they really stigmatized, I believe, what the main issue was. I've got a really interesting story [inaudible].

Mike: Well that sounds like Home Alone, you know, the wet bandits, you know, that's just...

Douglas: Yeah, 100%.

Mike: You know Jake, you, you were involved previously in building facilities.

Jake: Yeah.

Mike: Not that you want to go back to that, but they're still sorely needed today.

Jake: Absolutely. Building resources in the community is incredibly difficult on many different levels and things that I didn't really expect.

Jake: As you know, the job of an interventionist, coach, a therapist, is incredibly difficult as itself. Take an example, when I started building sober living homes in Waukesha, we got letters, cease and desist from the city attorneys to try and shut our sober homes down. We got letters from the neighbors saying, Kids are [inaudible] at 9:30 at night. This has to be shut down. You know just neighbors that never, you know, we ran for seven years and I had neighbors that said hi to me when we put the for sale signs up. You know, seven years never came over until we put the for sale signs up. You know, building a treatment facility. That took me two years of my life in Oconomowoc, 50 to 60 hour weeks.

Jake: I absolutely loved it. I built the whole thing. We turned it from an industrial shell of a building to a fully licensed CBRF commercial with reasonable accommodation for housing under DHS 83. I hired all 17 of my employees, I had 650 colleagues come to the open house and eight days after open the board of directors asked me to come in and fired me without pause and basically said an addict shouldn't run a treatment facility.

Jake: We want you to sit on the board and teach us how to run this thing. And it was devastating for me. You know, it's, that was one of those things that I'm running some of the best sober homes in the state for five years, you know build this amazing treatment facility that everybody's absolutely raving about.

Jake: And then to lose it. I didn't understand why, you know,

Douglas: They told you weren't good enough.

Jake: Yeah. And when I was in treatment, they told me, Jake, if you don't put your recovery first, everything else will fall apart. So I, you know, had a mission to start building resources around this. Now, when I lost that.

Jake: I didn't know why, right? I was devastated, but I had mentors and people in my life that said, Jake, you have a beautiful home, you have other successful businesses, you became a CBRF administrator, you have kids, you know, you have a lot of positive things in your life right now. And for me, that was enough to, say you're right.

Jake: I don't want to blow everything up because that would have been the opportunity to blow everything up, go back to addiction and show them that, you know, I was just an addict. But I said, I got all of these good things. I don't want to do that. And you know, a couple months later, I reached out to Doug and we formed Turning the Page.

Jake: And it's been a wonderful couple of years with that.

Douglas: You know, sometimes, you know, if you can get through that, that hurt and that, that just that, that black cloud of not understanding, you get to find out the reasons why things happen. You know, and I've been seeing it all my life. I, I do know that the work that Jake and I do is a purpose driven mission.

Douglas: I do know that I had to lose some best friends to understand what that best friend really looked like. And again, I mean, thank God these things happen. I couldn't imagine where my life would be without some of those really valuable life lessons in it. And then to be able to get through it, turn that page, if you will.

Douglas: Stand strong in solidarity with people that have been through things like you. Regardless if we're talking addiction or not, life is tough. And you just get to really see some of those silver linings. And honestly, It should put some sort of, you know, fortitude in you to knowing, you know, calm sea never made a skilled sailor.

Douglas: So I think the storms or the seas for the stormy weather, you know.

Mike: Well, Douglas, I got to see you when you were with Rise Together, which was really powerful, but the difference between that and what you're doing now is the prep and the follow up.

Douglas: Yeah. And even the understanding of every town that we go into is different.

Douglas: Every school has different needs and we try to take that fluid approach to it, where we want to pivot. We want to understand what's going on. Not only in schools and communities, but how can we be the cheerleaders for it? There are so many good programs that we know across the state, so many good resources.

Douglas: So how can we go in and how can we just help navigate that system a little bit easier. I mean, you go in to try to get someone treatment.

Jake: It's tough.

Douglas: It's amazing to [inaudible] right? So really identifying those resources and taking some of the leg work out for the parents, school administrator, kids themselves saying what are those individual needs that we can really highlight for you?

Jake: I absolutely love building treatment facilities. And for the first five years, it was an amazing amount of fun. And then the world changed in 2020 and it made something that we were really good at connecting people to resources, to jobs, to support systems, to treatment. It made it really, really, really difficult.

Jake: And COVID gave individuals a reason to isolate and disconnect from the groups. And, you know, I started looking at it and saying for so long, I'm catching people that are already drowning. That are sliding down these rivers of addiction. They're drowning in the rivers. And I said, we need to do something else.

Jake: And that's really what kind of led me to prevention. Saying, we can make a far bigger impact on the front end, by going into schools, doing very effective presentations. And making sure that they have those back end resources that you talk about on the back. So not only do we go into the schools and start the conversations we keep them going with what we call our Small Talks with Jake and Doug video series and then we continue to follow that up with our Virtual Care Navigation Center, VCNC which is really about, it's a support center for mental health and substance use.

Mike: Well, how low do you go? What ages do you speak to? Right? And what's the goal when you do a presentation?

Jake: So, we do something called Our Truth presentation. It's we call it teaching resiliency using trust and honesty. And actually we're speaking at the school resource officer meeting this December and we applied next year to do the nationwide conference as a keynote.

Jake: So we really believe that it can be truth and dare. And where D. A. R. E. hits about the fifth grade students and really starts educating them around these things. We bring in the truth more in middle school. So we kind of that seventh to ninth grade is really the target area that we like to hit. Because by that point, seventh grade, you know, kids are curious.

Jake: They do have computers in their pocket. You know, these aren't smart individuals and we want to give them real and accurate information, truthful information.

Douglas: I think one of the best things about Jake and I teaming up together is we also looked at it as a community approach where we knew that if we could get in and we could work with the counties themselves, we could take off so much of that pressure and stress financially.

Douglas: Or even just going out and saying, what do we want to bring into our schools this year? The County has taken the initiative to say, you know what, we're going to bring you in, we're going to flip that bill, and then we're going to allow you to go and offer these services for free in our community.

Jake: So rather than trying to build resources ourselves, we get to use our networking ability and our virtual care navigation to say, what are the best resources in your community?

Jake: I'm going to the schools and talk to the social workers and therapists and say, what are you currently using? Because after the kids that hear the truth presentation, now they're coming up to us and saying, I didn't realize the importance of talking about my problems earlier in life. I didn't understand the importance of finding, you know, healthy people.

Jake: How to find healthy people.

Douglas: The ability to identify what is a resource. We see that really a big, big leap in our numbers. And I really think the biggest thing that it does is it keeps us in the schools. It's not this one and done, flash in the pan where it allows us to come back and allows us to follow up, whether that's small groups, one on one or what, what are we missing now?

Douglas: What, what are those next steps?

Mike: You know, I do a lot of these. You know that. The listeners know that. And kids love the stories, so I'm sure they really enjoy that. But, they really connect with the hope.

Douglas: Hope's probably the biggest thing. I mean, I think hope has kept me alive more times than anything else in my life.

Jake: When we do our stories, yes, we talk a little bit about, you know, the past, what got us to those things, what the underlying causes of our addictions. We don't talk about the horror stories that we went through. We talk about, this is what we wish we would have done earlier in life. This is what helped us later on in life and why we should have done it earlier.

Jake: And the kids really can connect to that, you know, where Doug and I yes, we're both white males, but we have very, very different backgrounds, you know, in growing up in our school, in education and just, you know, how we do life.

Douglas: I say this quite a bit. The number one reason why people use, simplest of all reasons is because they work, drugs work.

Douglas: And that's a tough thing to try to get across, and what I try to draw the lines to showing is, it wasn't weed that led to pills that led to heroin. It wasn't that gateway like that. It was trauma that I was trying to escape. And because I didn't know how to reach out to those, those resources because I couldn't humanize authority figures in my life.

Douglas: I thought they were teachers. I thought they had these perfect lives and I was embarrassed and I was brought up with pride and, you know, I'm a man. I got this. It was hard for me to understand that not every kid went through trauma the way I went through trauma. Again, it didn't mean that my life was bad.

Douglas: It was just once I became mature enough to understand really what was going on in my life. I felt defeated and I had fears in my life that I was going to continue to lose people and funerals were just going to always be a part of my life. And that bled out into other areas where I didn't even understand that my lack of talking with someone was affecting my sleep patterns, which was making me search out substances to try to cope with you know, those effects of trauma.

Mike: Well, and you also, you don't just end it with the substance use. It's holistic. You talk about mental health. There's a family component, right?

Jake: Suicide, bullying we talk about, and the neat thing about it, Doug and I are so well versed on so many topics, a lot of times we can come into the school and say, you know, what are you guys really having a problem with?

Jake: Is it vaping? Is it suicide? Is it bullying? Is it you know, alcohol use and we can focus just a little bit more on those and you bring up that family component as a an interventionist, I would work with families and get their loved ones to treatment. I've done about 115 interventions, 110 of them were successful.

Jake: And afterwards I would start working with the individual when they come back for treatment as a coach to help them find sober housing, to find treatment, to jobs, to really start rebuilding areas of their lives. And I get a lot of parents who would say, can you help me do this too? You know, and I said, well, I'd love to, I was getting so busy.

Jake: So I went out, I found some of the best family coaches in the United States, their family recovery resource. So they do a program called the B.A.L.M., which is Be A Loving Mirror. And as much as I wanted to work with the families, I said, let's find. One of the best professionals in the country that can do this.

Jake: And the really nice thing about this program is once you purchase it, it's a year long, it's all online web or phone calls. So it's done completely anonymous from your own home. If you miss calls, they're recorded. There's hundreds of pages of workbooks for it, and it's all really done like an online college course, so as you complete the different lessons and courses, you can move at your own pace as you want to, and if you miss them, you can always listen to them later.

Jake: And for families, it'll really link them up with other individuals that are going through a lot of the same things in different phases. So you'll get individuals that are just starting and saying, my kids are going through active addiction. Well, some of them are saying my kid's been clean for over a year and this is what's working.

Jake: So it was all really founded off some of the Al Anon principles, but Beverly Buncher, the owner said, we can do better than, you know we can create a full program and continuum of care and curriculum for these families. And she did that. And the families that purchase it have had absolutely amazing results with it.

Jake: I remember I did an intervention for an individual and he was leaving treatment and he called his mom and instead of his mom freaking out on him and yelling and everything, she was like, well, these are your choices. And she was [inaudible]. And he ended up calling me up and said, what'd you do to my mom?

Jake: He was so engaged in this program and teaching her, you know, amping things up again with an addict usually doesn't work. She just remained calm.

Douglas: And having the understanding to explain to parents that their child is their addiction. And that's something that they need to be healthy with boundaries.

Douglas: And you know, just the way that they live their life is so important. When I got out of prison. I should say, when I went to prison, my mom sort of put herself in a prison too. Stopped talking to friends, she dove into work. Three years later I get out and she didn't know how to allow herself to come out of prison.

Douglas: One, I was out for the first time and she was scared to death. Two, she had every worst thought. You know, if I go back, am I going to survive? You know, my mom always says that Doug has another high in him, but he doesn't have another recovery.

Mike: Ohh!

Douglas: And yeah, right. That's, that's really a deep seed that I still hold in my heart.

Douglas: It's not a fear. It's just remembering those ripple effect moments that you're [inaudible] cause. I think it goes a long way with understanding or supporting all avenues of recovery. Why Jake and I used, two different reasons. Why we got clean, two different reasons. The recoveries that we work are different. You know, a lot of overlapping similarities, but what works today doesn't always work tomorrow.

Douglas: When I ended up losing my company, I was experiencing rage for the first time in my life. And I remember going back to treatment and sitting down and really saying, you know, like, I'm not here to talk about my dad's suicide. I'm not here to talk about prison. I'm here to talk about these emotions that I'm dealing with as a sober adult now.

Douglas: That my old coping mechanisms aren't addressing.

Jake: One of the really interesting things about jail is I learned this whole set of coping mechanisms through treatment, right? And, you know, be able to exercise and hug family and reach out and call people, you know, eat good food when you need to. And then all of a sudden you're thrown into jail.

Jake: All those things are removed from your life. And all of the sudden I had to find a whole other, you know, set of coping skills.

Jake: Eight and a half months into my recovery, because that's actually when I was sent out. Eight and a half months plain when I was sentenced.

Mike: A lot of things will test your recovery along the way, right?

Mike: I'll let you guys go with this, because I'm sure this centers you, but while you talk, I'm sure, well, I know it's great. I can just tell from the energy. I know, from listening to you guys, that what you enjoy best is the aftertalks.

Jake: Absolutely.

Douglas: We live for those.

Jake: Yeah. To be able to speak and have lines of kids come up to you afterwards and either say, you know, I've learned a lot from this.

Jake: I I have these issues that I now want to talk about. My friends have these issues and they want to talk about them with me. You know, that's what we do this for. Doug would always say, you know, if we're doing this for one person, we're doing it wrong, you know? You know, we, we're trying to hit a lot of people, but we're trying to cast a really wide net and make our program relatable to just about every student.

Douglas: It's also about being very honest. There is nothing that I say up on stage that is going to change a kid's life. I don't have some magic words, I don't get to change their home environment, but what I can do is let them know that there are people out there that will sit in a mess with you. Whether you have to cry, or scream, or just sit there in silence, you're not going to do it alone.

Douglas: That's not only giving someone you know support to move forward in their problems, it's allowing others to say, this is how you help others. This is how you actively listen. This is how you go out and it's about kindness. It's about small, random acts of hope. When I talk about changing the world, I'm not talking about the world.

Douglas: I'm talking to three minutes to take some kid to walk from math class to science class, right? That's the world that I'm trying to change. And if you take it a step further, this isn't about saving lives. This is about changing a system of care that is broken. And I use broken loosely because it had to work in the first place to be broken.

Mike: (laugh)

Douglas: But again, that's nobody's fault. This this epic failure at war on drugs. I don't care who's to blame. I don't care why it happened. I care that we don't continue to live this way for the next 30 years, knowing that it's broken and being so afraid to call somebody out or to take a look at it. That we're not going to change our systems of care.

Mike: The program is called, and the company is called, Turning the Page. And those of you listening, you know that there's links to it at the blurb of the podcast. Thanks to the two of you for not only spending time with us, but for your work today.

Douglas: Thanks.

Mike: Yeah, it's great. I'm sure we'll run into each other a number of times.

Mike: For those of you listening, we invite you to listen next time. Until next time, stay safe, stay informed, and stay involved.