Ep 4 Redefining Being a Peacemaker W/ Danny Deaton

Jeni: Welcome to healing in Christ Light. Today I'm rethinking what it is to be a peacemaker, and I'm looking forward to learning more about that with you. First, I want to mention that I have a book coming out in January of 2024 that is called Healing in Christ Light from Patterns of Sexual Betrayal as a covenant keeping. Daughter of God. I really appreciate Cedar Fort Publishing for believing in me. For any that might relate to such a book, I hope that you'll look forward to its publication with me. I want to jump into this episode full force today by telling you about a daydream of sorts that I had this morning. Have you seen movies or read books where one scenario plays out and has one ending and then later on they sort of rewind the movie or the book to one critical decision, and a character makes a completely different decision? The story then plays out with the new scenario and the ending is totally different, usually much less tragic than the previous scenario. My daydream is similar to this, only the scenario is my own. I imagine myself 20 to 23 years ago equipped with greater knowledge about my circumstances, but also with immensely greater knowledge about how to handle some challenging situations. When I rewind my own story, I go back in time to our first years of marriage when I first discovered my husband's pornography use. Instead of treating it lightly and like, it will just go away, which is what I did in real life in my daydream. I fight for my family in new and different ways. I make some hard decisions to not accept my husband's destructive patterns and set firm and loving boundaries. I do not chase him and I allow him to make his own decisions. Because it's a dream, it concludes with my husband making a completely different set of choices and as a result, his patterns of addiction are interrupted and do not feed his mental illness, which greatly affects our family in today's real-life setting. If I'm dreaming, I might as well create a happy ending, right? Obviously, I cannot go back in time and re-live my real-life scenario. However, what I hope to do today is to give some listeners out there a head start. I am inviting you to stand on my shoulders and the shoulders of my guest, Danny Deaton whom I look forward to speaking to in a few minutes. I'm hopeful that some listening will have opportunities to see ahead and to make different choices than I did because maybe you'll have a different understanding earlier on than me. I think it's important to note good intentions and misunderstandings because others listening will certainly relate to this. And I feel that self-compassion is a critical element here. I was doing my very best to be a peacemaker. I was trying so hard. I noticed, for instance, that when I addressed hard things, my husband could become explosive. So in an effort to keep the peace, I tried all sorts of things, including making life as comfortable as I knew how for him. Over time, this backfired and he became too comfortable with destructive behavior and so did I. I misunderstood what a peacemaker is. I have come to see that Captain Moroni, who was a great war general in the Book of Mormon, was a peacemaker. Christ, as he cleansed the temple, was a peacemaker. And you and I, who fight for our families by saying, “This behavior is not okay and I will do something about it if it is repeated,” are also being peacemakers. I love this quote from the book Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. “How many marriages could have been saved if one spouse had followed through with the threat of ‘If you don't stop drinking or coming home at midnight or hitting me or yelling at the kids, I will leave until you get some treatment?’ Or how many young-adults lives would have been turned around if their parents had followed through with their threat of, ‘No more money if you quit another job without having further employment or no bed if you continue to smoke marijuana in my house?’” I think that it's time to redefine what a peacemaker is. And when a loved one's behavior becomes destructive, it's time to fight for our loved ones and our families in new and different ways. As I was struggling to fully embrace this concept recently, a friend of mine recommended that I listen to a podcast called Your Living Proof with Danny and Emily Deaton. After hearing Danny’s story and how the tools that he has created have blessed his clients, I decided to give some of the things that he taught a try. In my own situation, details of my experience are still fresh, so I'm keeping them kind of close to my heart for now, but I can tell you this much: I wish that my younger self could have understood how to have firmer boundaries from a place of love because what I experienced by implementing some of Danny's ideas have been a life-changing gift in my own life. Danny's story will tell you more about who he is and why he has a passion for helping families of those struggling with addiction. Danny Deaton, I'm so grateful to have you here today. Welcome. Danny: Wow. Thank you. That's quite the introduction. I really appreciate that. Jeni: Yeah, I appreciate that you have been really instrumental in my own life, so thank you. I'm hoping to begin by inviting you to maybe take a few minutes and tell your story about addiction and redemption. And I would like to invite my audience to pay special attention to your dad in this story. So take it away. Danny: He played an integral part, and it's interesting. In that intro, you mentioned the ability to set firm boundaries. A lot of people correlate that with tough love. And when it comes to addiction, there's a lot of misunderstanding around that subject. So what experience I have with that is from the last, I don't know, 45 years of life. But, yeah, a little bit about me starting in the beginning, before things did get bad, I always like to remind people that the end of the story, while the middle of the story was pretty ugly and it got really dark and scary. Thankfully, today life's much different, but before all of that happened, I loved life. I was a normal young man. I grew up in Sandy, Utah, near the mountains. Was out on my four-wheeler playing with my friends. Those were the good old days, right? Before we had cell phones. So, like, I actually had to go put my hands in dirt and throw footballs. 1.3s Ride around on our motorcycles and four-wheelers because we didn't have anything else to entertain us. But it was a fun time in life. I had a very good relationship with my parents. I loved my friends, I loved school. I mean, I didn't love school as much as I liked being there for the girls and socializing, but I played lots of sports and I was just thriving in life. To kind of encapsulate this story, I got to that weird stage in life that we all do as young people, where you're curious, right? Your friends have a big influence on you. Your parents are no longer cool, and at that point in my life, I made some poor choices with some friends, and it was all for fun, like light-hearted. We started dabbling in things like marijuana, occasionally drinking, and maybe smoking. Back then it was cigarettes. Nowadays it's vaping. It was an interesting situation because I was doing things that I knew I was taught were wrong. I felt like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this, but also, simultaneously, I felt these incredible feelings, and that's something that was never explained to me as a young man. So here's something that's so bad, but yet it feels so incredible. And so it was that time in life which I called the tug of war. I was being tugged one way, wanting these awesome feelings and to have these experiences, but I was being tugged back to my roots and the principles I was taught, what was right or wrong. After high school, I didn't know what I quite wanted to do. I was still more interested in having fun with my friends. So. We got one-way tickets to Hawaii and went. Me and three other friends moved to Hawaii after high school. We thought we were going to become surfers and life would be happily ever after. I was there for about a year, living every young man's dream, right? We're out of mom and dad's house. We're surfing. We're working at a jet ski company. We're meeting girls from all over the world. Jeni: Life is great. Danny: Yeah, life's great. And I actually had a very incredible experience one time on the island of Maui. We were down camping on a place called Hana. I was laying on the beach underneath the moon. I laid there and looked up at that full moon, felt I could feel the light of the moon go through me as though I was hollow, like I had no nothing. I was just hollow. And it was a really transformative moment because here I was living the exact life that I thought would bring me the most joy, and I just felt empty. So I came home, got my life back together. It was like, what am I going to do with myself? You're at that age where you got to do something. I was like, okay, I was going to maybe go into the army. And what I did was prepared myself. And I went on an LDS mission, with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Jeni: Where did you serve? Danny: Brazil. Jeni: Wow, okay, cool. Danny: Yeah. So the place was called Hiba Alberto, (sp?) which is actually in the interstate of Sao Paulo. So no one's heard the word Hiba Alberto (sp?), but it's like the size of Los Angeles. It's crazy. I went there. I didn't leave till I was 22, and I had an incredible experience. Although it was hard and was not nearly as fun as surfing and being in Hawaii with my friends, I didn't feel that hollow, empty feeling. I felt purpose, I felt passion. I felt all the good things. So I come home, get back to life, go to college, try to do that, trying to start a business. I got married. I had an injury. I have an accident, and I was introduced to a thing called OxyContin. Many people are aware that when this happened to me, this was, goodness gracious, I don't know, 20 something years ago. And this is when the opioid epidemic, like, really started, when people were being prescribed and given medication that they didn't need. Jeni: And before eyes are opened as to how dangerous they really were, right? Danny: So here is the kicker: I was at a time in life that was hard. I was now experiencing the pressures of life, right? Like marriage and work. What am I going to do with my life? How am I going to measure up to what the world wants me to be? What I learned is that medication was used to address physical pain, but I never needed it for that. I could have probably gotten by with Tylenol and Ibuprofen. What that medication did was numb out all of the unwanted feelings I was having, even the ones I was unaware of. Maybe it was like the pressures of not mounting up to be good enough. Maybe it was my insecurities. Everything that I didn't want to feel was immediately removed. That medication carried on much longer than it should have, and I became addicted to one of the most deadly, potent things out there. So here was these two polarizing times in life. Like, I was playing around with things, messing around, partying with friends. Earlier, when it was all fun and games, I learned my lesson, went on a mission, had this transformative experience, and now here I am in a different situation, because no longer was this fun and games. No longer was this light-hearted and carefree. Jeni: It was destroying your life. Right? Like marriage, everything. Danny: It was scary. And for anyone out there who has not dealt with an addiction themselves, we all know someone close to us that has, there are a few facts that are true 100% of the time. One of those facts is every addiction is progressive. Yes, it is progressive. It doesn't even matter if it's to food, porn, alcohol, or prescription drugs. That progression is different for everyone. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, and sometimes it's accelerated by the trauma in life. Different types of things can help throw fuel on the fire, but they're all progressive. So, as you mentioned, this substance that was actually the solution for me at that time, like, it was making me a better person. I felt better. I was happier. I didn't have all these unwanted feelings. I wasn't hurting. I was a better person, it took hold of me in a way that I slowly became a rag doll. And yes, it affected the business I was trying to start. My marriage was completely destroyed. My health was in jeopardy, and everyone who loved me basically separated themselves because I became a monster. It was really hard in the moment to see it. I think that's what's really hard for parents or spouses. Like, if your spouse is addicted or your child's addicted to something and you're watching their life unravel to this pathetic, horrible, terrible, gut-wrenching place, and you're pulling your hair out, wondering what is really going on? Jeni: Totally. Danny: Why can't you see the wreckage that's piling up around you? How come you don't want more for your life? And it's the power of addiction where this person you once knew before their addiction, you're expecting them to just wake up, to finally recognize that it's time to change. And so people are waiting for this magical day that will never come. Addiction is the only thing that has removed what God gave all of us. He gave every single one of us agency to choose. And when you become addicted, especially to certain substances, you lose your agency. People will argue that. They'll say, no, you always have agency. That's the disease aspect of the brain, where people, whether it's content like pornography or certain substances, over time re-wires the way your brain actually thinks and processes. So you do lose your agency. You are no longer in charge of yourself. Which is why there's tens of millions of people suffering from this. So mine progressed and, just to finish the story, it progressed pretty badly. So I was a returned missionary, I was an Eagle Scout, I was a pianist, I lettered in a few sports in school. I was that boy. And I came from a successful, awesome family. I mean, anincredible family. And here I was, living in my car. A friend of mine crashed my car when we were trying to rob the drug dealers because we had no money left and we were so sick. Jeni: Wow. Danny: And threw me through the windshield of my car. We drove home, I don't know how, without a windshield, in a crushed car, back to a place. He carried me into the basement of this home. And I basically was brought there to die. I had broken legs. I weighed less than 100 pounds. All the veins in my body were black. I was as sick as a person can get. If you want to see the image of what a homeless drug addict looked like, that was me. I was placed in this basement, and he left. And I was there for a few days, probably longer than you're supposed to go without water. I don't even know the last time I had eaten, but I vividly remember multiple times my spirit and my body trying to disconnect. And there was this pivotal moment in my life, which was nothing other than divine intervention. And I was laying in this dark basement, and for the first time in days, I saw light as this door opened. And I remember that I was so sick and broken. My face was on the ground, like my face was on the cement. And I was looking. I could see this light as this door opened. And there were two men that walked in that door, and it was my brother and my dad. And they had actually had dreams or impressions that something was wrong. And they had actually both dreamed they were speaking at my funeral, which led them on this massive hunt to find me and they did. I remember that I was in the most pathetic state a human could be. And here comes my dad. My brother. And my dad just looks down, and of course, this is after years of them trying to help, right? But he looks down at me and says, Are you ready? And I was so broken knowing that I was going to die at any minute, that I just turned my head. And he was so prepared, because he had done the work necessary, prepared himself spiritually, that he turned and walked away, was prepared to let me die. And so my brother turns to follow him, and for some reason, I just mustered up enough courage to yell, please help. And my brother turned around, picked me up, scooped me up off the ground like a child in his arms, because I was so frail and light and weak. And he carried me up, and put me in my dad's car. Kissed my mom and went to medical detox. Jeni: When I heard on your website, you've got, I think it's like an about me page or something. And there's a video there. I remember being so shocked by your dad turning away. And at first I thought, how could you turn away from your child like that? And then the spirit spoke to me and said, “You need to get to that point.” And it's a pretty life-changing point to get to. It is the ultimate surrender, and it's also an awful lot of peace. So I want you to know I really appreciate you sharing your story. And I really appreciate too what your dad did and your family did to do all of that work. I have a question for you, because you now minister to and your business is focused on family members and how to help family members. And what I have found is, like, for me, I love to minister and connect with family members because I am a family member affected. And I found it interesting that here you are recovering from addiction and ministering to family members. So I have a theory about this and I kind of wanted to run it past you and see what you think. My theory is that in reality, you're actually ministering to the addicted because family members can be key in their recovery. I don't know, do you have anything to expound on that or is that right or wrong? What do you think? Danny: Well, I love you because you're one of the handful of people on this planet that sees things the way that I do. My business is solely based on a single fact that I learned through the most horrendous experience. After that story I told you, I went to treatment, I had to go face some charges. I got locked up for a long time, sat in a jail cell, got out of there, worked on the chain gang. Like, you see those guys on the sideway, side of the highway picking up garbage in their jumpsuit. I've done it all. But I've also over the last 16 years, built the most beautiful life that I love. I have important callings in my church, in my community, and I've created a business that is exactly targeted to what you just said. Jeni: That's awesome. Danny: Because my belief is that the greatest threat to addiction on the planet is a family who effectively learns how to intervene. Now, does that mean you get a chance at recovery every time? No. But my business is centered around coaching families through a process. This is a process of individual one on one coaching through online courses, and exercises to do the impossible, which is doing everything in your power to prepare yourself so that you can have that moment and have that moment, like my father did, because no one is going to walk away and turn their back on someone they love. No one. It's impossible. I've worked with hundreds of mothers and wives who just cannot get themselves to do that. So, here's the goal on a high level, is you help this person walk through the entire process to understand what their loved ones are going through, understand how it's affected them, understand how it's created unhealthy relationships, understand what it's going to take for them to actually get healthy, not just a quick little oh, send them to this place and they'll be there for 30 days. No. To understand the entire process of: Here's the big picture. Are you ready? It's going to be a year of rigorous support. I mean, not only are they going to have to get help and accept that help, but you're going to have to support them through it. If they actually go to get help, your life is going to get worse because you're going to have to carry more of the load, do more of the work, more of the support. But when you help someone and understand this process and commit to all the sacrifices they're willing to make to support that person, that is what empowers someone to do the impossible. We use the term tough love. Tough love is baloney. It's garbage. Because it's all great. When you're prepared, though, and say, “no, I know what it's going to take to get you healthy. I've done the research, I found a place, and I have made the commitments to support you through that process.” Now, you're ready, right? Are you ready? That's when you get to put the block up and be like, no. Until you're willing to participate in that, I can't allow this to affect me anymore. Because that's the thing I hate about addiction, is Satan. It's Satan's greatest tool. It is the greatest tool that Satan, the opposition of all things, has created on this earth. Why? Because if your loved one was dying from heart disease or cancer, as terrible as that is, or got into a car accident, was paralyzed, no one in your family would be arguing about whether or not they needed help. Not as single person. No one would argue with the doctor saying, oh, we don't need a twelve month plan. We're the Johnsons. We only need like a one month plan. You would do everything that was required. And here's the kicker of all kickers. The person who's sick, if it was a person in an accident or with heart disease, as painful as it would be, they would show up, suit up, and do the work necessary to recover. But guess what? With addiction, the person who's sick that you're trying to help, they will fight you tooth and nail to stay sick. Jeni: Absolutely Because you're taking away my coping mechanism. And so there's a panic involved almost that it might be taken away. That's how that to looks to me. Danny: The greatest asset for anyone to recover is their family. There is the truth. And for being truth tellers, if you take a million people suffering from addiction, there's a large percentage of them who do come from dysfunctional families that might be having a negative impact on them. But there is also a good percentage of people who have loving, awesome, incredible families that, guess what? They want to help. They just don't know how. They don't know the proper way to navigate this tangled mess. Jeni: And the whole family system is really sick at that point. At least that’s what I've noticed about me, is that. It's like, I'm doing my best, I'm trying my hardest, and I don't always know the right tools or way to intervene or way to help. In fact, I wanted to ask you about something along those lines, because I think something that family members get kind of mixed up is being a peacemaker with the person involved. And I've come to look at peacemakers a little bit differently. Like, Christ turning tables was a peacemaker. Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon was a peacemaker. And so I'm wondering if you might expand on how those struggling with addiction, how somebody might show up as a peacemaker for somebody struggling with addiction or maybe other really destructive behaviors. What kinds of things might we do as family members? Danny: So here's some raw, honest truth that isn't fun to hear with everyone that I work with. It's the most faithful of people with the testimony of Jesus Christ, and His plan that actually struggle the most, right? They do. When it comes to this specific topic, like, I'll work with other moms that maybe aren't religious, or they are, but they don't participate in any specific faith. And they are more like, “Hey, what do we have to do? All right, I'll do this and I'll do that.” When we have so much faith, when we have convictions about our faith, it hinders us often to answer your question as family members with someone in addiction, because your go to is the miraculous healing power of the atonement. So you pray for it. You hope for it. You want your loved one to accept it because you know it's real. If you paint a picture of a mother or spouse that I work with the most, they're trying to navigate this process, and they have literally worn their knees out. I'm not kidding. Praying so many times a day, fasting once a week. They'll go to the temple daily. They are doing everything they can to try and bring peace to this situation and insert love, right. And it's all for the right reasons, the right efforts there. But when it comes to addiction, there's a practical aspect. There's a practical aspect of, yes, we know what the healing power is. But I'll tell you what, in the beginning of my journey, did I think that I was worthy of that or that it was possible? Heavens no. So it was baby steps. I had to go to a place and get support with people who understood me. That wasn't my family. I had to get support from professionals around me. I had to surround myself with like-minded people. It was baby steps. It took me like a year and a half to get back to church. Meanwhile, everyone in my family was trying to do what most people do and to try to be the peacemaker. The problem is, and moms and spouses don't want to hear this, but your attempts to bring peace, although for the right reasons, with the right intent, are doing nothing but trying to bring peace to you. So I recently worked with a mom, and this is a very common story. Her 20 year old son was drinking, vaping, messing around with marijuana. She just kept loving him, loving him. Fast forward, it gets progressive. He gets worse, gets in a couple of accidents, has a DUI, loses his job. He's now 25, 26. Mom just loves him. She's going to set some healthy boundaries. So she moves them out of his basement room, out to the garage. They have, like, a studio in their garage. She's like, okay, well, you can't be doing drugs in my house. Still brings him food, still does his laundry, still loves him, prays for him every night. Now all of a sudden, he's 30 years old. His liver is failing, he's turning green. He stinks, but the stench is familiar. And so she continues to love him, to exhaust herself. And meanwhile, she's neglecting her own well being because she becomes obsessed with getting him better. Jeni: And she's loving him to death. Danny: Loving him to death, 100%. Jeni: Wow, that’s powerful. I really appreciate that. And it's helpful in my own situation to think of it that way, that, wow, boundaries. Looking at this and really looking, saying, no more. This can't go on anymore, is really a gift. Danny: And it's extremely hard to get to. But it's so frustrating to me because the people I do work with, they get to that point. Here's what happens. Does their loved one choose recovery every time? No. But often what we do is we created an opportunity. So more often than not, they do. But even when they don't, that person, which, sorry to say it's typically but not always a woman, when they get to this point of going, I'm prepared, I'm educated. I know what it's going to take. I'm aware of my sacrifices. They've done the work to get ready is what allows them to say, no more. But it's crazy. We'll go hire a trainer to help us get in shape. We do a million things with other people's support who are professionals at what they do. But when it comes to this topic, we all want to handle it in house. We want to kind of figure it out on our own. Jeni: It is crazy. An addiction is a disease that needs treatment. So if we look at it that way, we would absolutely go to a doctor or something like that to get specialized treatment for what we're dealing with. And you're right. There's so much shame around it that we're like, “No, I can do this.” I know for me, for years, 17 and a half years, it was like, I'm going to deal with this on my knees with my God. And it was valuable. I came to know God in amazing ways. Did my husband ever get better? Did he ever recover during that period? No, never. So I hear you along these lines. I keep thinking about Christ with the rich young ruler. And one thing about this that just really amazes me is the rich young ruler, he comes to him, and Christ starts giving him all these things. He's like, “what do I need to gain eternal life?” And Christ gives him all of these things. Here's this checklist of sorts. And in his mind he’s going, “Check, check.” And then he says, I've done all of these things. And then Christ says, well, go sell all that you have and take up your cross and follow me. The fascinating thing to me is this. The young man walks away. Of course, I hope that he's like you, Danny, that he comes back, but he walks away at this point. And what Christ does not do: he does not chase him. He does not beg for him to come back. He doesn't say, “Wait! You don't know that you're giving up these things and I have these beautiful gifts for you. You don't know how amazing life could be!” He lets him walk. And I'm really curious because that to me, is like the ultimate detaching, but with love. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about out how people can get to that point where we don't beg, we just watch. We just come with this humble confidence that they can do what they want. We aren't going to influence that choice because they already have their own agency. They have enough knowledge, I guess, to make good choices. Danny: That's what I'm saying. Well, in that specific story that you brought up, it's crazy because I don't start talking about it because it's such an emotional thing. But that situation where my father found me in that basement is the same. Because for him to do that, people don't realize the amount of suffering and pain and agony he went through for so many years. He was my enabler. My mom was able to set healthy boundaries at some point. But my dad, like, I could call him and use spiritual jargon or tell him I was freezing or starving. I mean, he would even leave money in an envelope under the front mat and tell me that I couldn't come by until they were asleep because my mom would get mad at him. He couldn't let go. So when you say, how do we come to that peaceful place to make these hard decisions? He had a lot of counsel from his dad who just said, you're going to have to let go in order to save him. But my dad also received help from a professional at a treatment facility who he became really close with over the years, who coached him and taught him how to do that. So he understood what it was going to take. He even looked into the resources of getting some help and what that would take and how he would be willing to commit to that. Just did all this process. But what he did is something very intentional. After he did years and years of pleading, begging, praying, he walked into the woods. He actually spoke. I remember him saying one of the few times that he spoke out loud, like basically yelling up to God. And he was so broken. And he just murmured the words, “If you need him more than I do, you can have him.” And what was crazy is that was just something he needed to do. It the peace that he needed to make. But here's the kicker. He didn't even understand it at the time. He was able to do that because he was spiritually prepared, but he also logistically had prepared himself. So it wasn't just seeing me in that basement and walking away without a plan. He walked away going, if he wanted it, I was ready. I wasn't ready just to be like, sure, I'll help. He knew exactly where we were going. He knew the admissions person. He knew the process. He knew what it was going to take. So there's two sides to it. There's being logistically and strategically prepared, and then it's being spiritually prepared. But I hate to say this because it breaks people's heart. Within faith, people of our faith, people of any faith, they struggle with two things. First of all, you talked about the disease aspect. I help people remember that it doesn't always start there. For some people it starts with trauma. Some people it's curiosity. Some people it's peer pressure. And so in the beginning, it is a moral breakdown. In the beginning, you make poor choices, but over time, whatever content you're consuming, substances you're consuming, will rewire your brain and therefore you get to experience what is the disease aspect. So some people argue moral breakdown. It started with a bad choice, but it ends with your agency being removed. The second one is families. These families just feeling like they're going to love and pray them better. Jeni: Yes. Yes. I'm expert at doing that. 2.7s Danny: You are the 99%. That mother I told you about with her son, that progressively got worse. What she learned by going through this program with me is every time that she found him passed out face down in his own vomit, wondering if he was alive or dead was unfair. That was almost like an abusive situation to be in for a mother. But what it did is she would clean him up. She would feed him. She would love him and pray for him. And guess what it did? It helped her feel better that she was doing something which was being Christlike and loving and caring. But what did it do for him? It kept it kept him stuck. Jeni: Yeah. Your number one reminds me of a trial that I recently watched as a man was being sentenced because he'd been found guilty of killing his wife and son. And the judge looked at him and the man was saying, I didn't do it. I would never hurt them. And the judge looked at him and said, it might not have been you. I've seen people taking a lot of pills and things and it really wasn't them. I like what you're saying, that it is a moral breakdown at first and then it develops into this disease where they lose their ability to make choices. So it's a really powerful example. I would like to know how would I or others contact you? Tell me more about your coaching programs. Would you? U2 Yeah, no. My website yourlivingproof.com and it's Y-O-U-R so yourlivingproof.com and it's the same handle on social media. People use Facebook or Instagram. It's at your livingproof. The program is pretty awesome because it's one of the only programs I'm aware of in the country that is tailored to this family. Right? Like if you were to sit down as a mother or a spouse, how do I help my addicted loved one? How do I help my son with an alcohol problem? How do I help my husband with a pornography problem? There is a myriad of resources for that. There's institutions and facilities bursting at the seams everywhere. There's all sorts of government agencies, literature out there about the disease aspect, about the person that's suffering. What they lack is information for the family, resources for them to heal, to empower themselves, to learn how this is affecting them and how they can change the dynamic. So my program is a series of online courses that a woman or man can consume in the comfort and their home, which is going to take them from A to X. It walks them through this process and then usually afterwards we insert the one on one coaching with me that helps them get all the way to Z, because the very end is always a little hardest. But it is the first time for most people where they're blown away. It’speaking to that person, that poor mother or spouse who's been in agonizing pain trying to hold the entire world together. Meanwhile, someone they love is falling apart. So it's tailored to them and it speaks to them about the process and their process and how to help their loved ones. So it's a combination of both. Something they consume at first through these online courses, which is comfortable. They can do it at their own leisure pace, and then when they're ready, then they come. Because when I start working with them, it's not like, “Hey, we're here to talk about feelings.” We're strategically putting something together that now they feel prepared to do because it's scary. Jeni: I like to ask all of my guests how healing in Christ light has helped you in your healing. Danny: It's given me everything. I mean, from my intellect, from my ability to function, to have health, a healthy body. But most of all, it's given me the ability to to have a family. A wife that is my best friend, three children that even though they know my past, who are so proud. Who hand my business cards out at a grocery store to say, “Hey, if you have a problem, my dad can help.” It's given me the ability to help others that are going through this. It's crazy. In the last couple of years, I've lost count of how many people I've helped. And when I walk in their house, I start to work with them one on one. In these situations, I'm like, “God is so good. He's allowing me. This person who once was in a jail cell in a jumpsuit looking like death, is now here trying to help and guide them.” But most of all, what it did is it removed some of those feelings that Satan had engrained in my soul. Of not being good enough, never being worthy. Somewhat being tainted for the rest of my life. It removed all of that. To feel proud, to feel clean, to feel worthy, to walk into the Lord's house to guide and bless my children, it's crazy. And I watch millions of people throughout the world who go to these recovery groups and are attempting to get better, all these supportive groups out there who are all centered around God. And they teach people that if you don't come to believe in a power greater than yourself, there's no chance. But they're missing just one thing. I watch these people go from death to getting healthy, but to be able to be set free, they're missing the knowledge of the atonement of Jesus Christ, because they all feel better about who they are today, but they can't let go of the past. The atonement of Jesus Christ allows you to not only heal, but to be strengthened because of your past. So I couldn't be more grateful. It's what set me free. I guess I could have just said that in the beginning of short answers. It set me free, but it's given me more than I ever imagined. Closing Jeni: I really appreciate learning from Danny Deaton today and hope that something said was inspiring to you as well. Healing in Christlike can also be found on Instagram. 1 Won't you come learn with me?