Achieving Real Recovery Through Faith

 

In this powerful live conversation recorded at Camelback Recovery, Tim Westbrook sits down with Dr. Don Middleton to explore the intersection of faith, addiction medicine, and lasting transformation.

Dr. Middleton is a board-certified physician with more than 30 years in family medicine and currently practices addiction medicine at the internationally renowned Meadows Behavioral Health in Wickenburg, Arizona. He also serves as medical director at Vital 4 Men and was named Arizona Physician of the Year at the state medical convention.

In this episode, we dive into his book The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power Is Jesus and discuss what happens when Christian faith becomes the foundation of 12-step recovery.

This conversation covers:

• Christian 12-step recovery and the meaning of “Dunamis”
• The role of Jesus as a Higher Power in addiction recovery
• Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and faith-based recovery
• The balance between science, scripture, and sobriety
• Rebuilding identity after addiction
• Overcoming shame after relapse
• The future of Christian recovery ministries

Dr. Middleton also shares his perspective on the controversy surrounding medications in recovery and how medical science and spiritual transformation can work together — not against each other.

Whether you’re early in recovery, a treatment professional, part of a Christian recovery ministry, or simply curious about the role of faith in sobriety, this episode offers practical insight and hope.

Learn more about Dr. Middleton’s work:

📘 The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power Is Jesus (Available on Amazon)

🌐 https://dunamisinitiative.com

📱 Follow “Dunamis Initiative” on Facebook and YouTube

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Achieving Real Recovery Through Faith

Dr. Don Middleton On Christian 12-Step Recovery, Medication, And Lasting Transformation

In this episode, we’re honored to have Dr. Don Middleton with us. Dr. Don Middleton is board-certified in family medicine and has practiced for more than 30 years. He now works in addiction medicine at the internationally renowned Meadows Behavioral Health in Wickenburg and serves as the medical director for Vital for Men here in Arizona.

He’s also served as an assistant professor at Midwestern University, sits on the Arizona Board of Medical Trustees and serves on the board of Crossroads Rehabilitation of Arizona. In 2025, he was named Arizona Physician of the Year at the State Medical Convention. He’s authored five books including The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power is Jesus, a Christian 12-Step recovery book and workbook. He also leads the non-profit organization behind that work, The Dunamis Initiative. Dr. Don, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here.

Thank you. It’s always strange to hear an introduction like that to my ears because I go to a lot of other meetings where I have to introduce myself and I usually say, “Hi, I’m Don and I’m an alcoholic.” many years ago, my behavior got to a place where my beautiful bride said something’s got to change or something’s got to change and my illusion of being manageable was ripped open and I had to turn myself in to the State Board of Medical Examiners as an impaired physician.

I’d like to pretend that that was real courageous, but it was pretty much the last house on the block. I had quit and relapsed just 100 times. I knew that they would definitely put accountability teeth into my program and they did. It was a five-year monitoring thing. Wake up every day, pee in a cup if they say yes, today’s your day, and turn in logs for AA meetings and things like that.

It was a lot of stuff I was resistant against, but turned out to be really great for me. It’s like when you bowl with little kids that have like the bumpers up. That first year you do this, you still knock over some pins and then pretty soon you’re just getting to where you just go right down the middle and you don’t care that the bumpers are there anymore. Monitoring isn’t such a bad thing. It’s just seems very intrusive at first until it just becomes part of the flow of your life.

Was alcohol your drug of choice?

Yeah, that was my thing. Food too. Sugar for me is like alcohol. It’s like I’m fine with none, but if I have a little bit, I don’t know how many I’m going to have. I’m good with no Oreos, but I don’t understand people who can eat one. How do you do that? It’s like when I sit and watch someone leave a half a margarita at their dinner, I’m like, “How do you do that?”

Wounded soldiers. My girlfriend bought Girl Scout cookies and like you, I had one and then next thing I’m back to the cupboard and I’m like, “A couple more.”

There’s a reason why they come in sleeves. That’s a serving size.

Now, any mental health?

Other than just depression from life and stuff like that, but as I’ve gotten the poison out of my system and learned a new life of self-care and going to the gym and meditation and prayer and all those things, all the things you know you’re supposed to do, but somehow you push them to the back burner. Once I do them, my life’s as good as I could possibly imagine now. I’ve been blessed that I don’t have ongoing secondary diagnosis, but definitely when I was in the middle of my bottle, it was pretty depressing because I was just by myself alone, living that life.

What does your morning routine look like?

For me, it has to be very regimented or I won’t get a start on the day right. I try to wake up at the same time every day, hit the lights, get it real bright in my face, get hydrated right away, and then some coffee with the Lord, spend some time in prayer and meditation. If it’s not too cold, I’ll get up and do just a little quick mile walk, but sometimes, 4 or 5 days a week, I ride my bike down to the gym and get a workout in. That’s like my morning and depending on meetings I might have or if I have to go into work. I’m working part-time now at The Meadows, so I go out about seven days a month. This other thing is 30 days a month.

Humility and honesty are the two things you need to create a pathway out of your addiction. Share on X

How important is it to take that time to yourself every morning?

It’s everything. It’s my medicine. People used to say to me, “You’ve got a problem with alcohol,” I didn’t really have the language to tell them back then, but now I would say, “Alcohol’s not my problem. Alcohol’s my really crummy answer to my problem.” My problem’s this thing, and my medicine is alcohol. I’m not sure what this is, but I know if I pour vodka on it, it goes away for a few hours.

Good on me if I don’t drink, I don’t get a DUI or yell at the dog or whatever, but if I don’t figure out what that is and figure out what this is and get a healthy toolbox for it, I’m going to scratch with something else, food or gambling or porn or buying too much garbage off Amazon. It won’t go un-scratched until you find out what’s healthy for it. For me, prayer and meditation, self-care, and serving others, that’s where my medicine is now.

How important is it to be of service in your opinion?

It’s everything. My sponsees hate when they call me because they know if they’re a little sideways, I’m going to say, “Who’d you serve today? Who’d you help outside your own brain?” that’s the medicine. It’s a dangerous, lonely place up in here. If you’re feeling sideways, get out of there. It’s like if you’re down a dark alley and it feels uncomfortable, you should leave. I’m in this alley a lot sometimes, and I just get out and go, “Who can I talk to? Who haven’t I talked to on my contacts list for a while?” Call them up and encourage them, see how they’re doing. Just something simple like that. It’s everything.

I’ve got to think about somebody other than me. I remember when I was about five years sober and I’m a guy who called my sponsor every single day and I took all the suggestions. I remember when I was about five years sober, I was calling my sponsor and he wasn’t calling me back. I’m like he’s out serving all these newcomers, and I’m like, “What about me?” that was really when I realized that I needed to pick up sponsees because if I’m sponsoring somebody, if I’m taking somebody through the steps, if I’m being of service, I’m not thinking about myself.

It’s just the whole idea is like, no fair hogging the blessings. This is a big blessing to be able to walk away from addiction. It’s not an automatic light switch. You don’t just walk out of here and say, “Okay, now I can run a rehab.” eventually, you need to turn around and grab someone else who’s in the dumpster fire and yank them out and say, “We got this,” be there with them because even if they relapse, it serves you as well too. It’s good medicine.

When is it too soon or when should someone start being of service and helping another person?

They made us serve immediately. Sponsoring someone, at least you’ve got to go through all the twelve steps yourself. I think, you know what, most people are comfortable with waiting at least 9 or 12 months before you’re sponsoring people. Get some wisdom behind you and get some distance so that you have some cred to the person that you’re talking to. It’s not really cool if you relapse and then that just throws them into a spiral too.

I went to a not nice place. I went to Calvary down the street over here, and I thought, “It’s got a Christian thing,” it was dumpy. The very first day they go, “You’re mopping the floors.” I’m like, “Wait, I’m a 50-year-old doctor. What are you talking about?” they’re like, “No, you’re mopping the floors three times a day after every meal.” I did that in 30 days, 90 times I mopped the floors. It was just about breaking down my ego and building humility. Humility is everything in approaching sobriety, humility and honesty. If you can get those two things out of you, you’re likely to see the pathway out. That’s my opinion.

Your Journey Into Addiction Recovery

How did you find your way into addiction recovery or addiction treatment specifically?

That was interesting because I spent about twenty-something years being a family doctor up in Arrowhead area and just taking care of little kids, giving them their shots and doing physicals for people and all that cholesterol management and stuff. After I got sober for a year or two, I was just like, “What was that all about? What was the lesson there other than don’t do that anymore? Was there something I’m supposed to have gathered from it?”

I’m a big believer in talking to God and I was just saying, “Was there something more I’m supposed to know about?” Honestly, within like two days, I got an email saying The Meadows is looking for a primary care doctor. I was like, “I think that might be what it is.” I called and they hired me immediately and I just changed gears and went out there. I didn’t know a lot about the medical side of addiction, but they’ve got a lot of really brainiac people out there like Pia Melody and Claudia Black and Bessel van der Kolk, those guys. It was like, “Wow, I shouldn’t be in this room.” They taught me a lot and I’ve really morphed into a different career completely that I am so grateful for. Such a blessing.

When did you realize that this was your calling?

Just almost immediately when I started walking out there and I realized this is one of the very few jobs where you can proudly say, “Yes, I’m in recovery,” check that box. Is almost everybody else working there from the CEO down to the janitor. They know that if you haven’t been there and done that, you can have sympathy for people, but if you’ve got that phd from the school of hard knocks, you can have true empathy, which is what people want.

When I’m bringing a new person into The Meadows and interviewing them and I can tell them, “I got my ten-year chip in my pocket,” you can just see the muscles in their forehead relax like, “Finally, someone who gets it.” It makes a big difference in trusting that person when they say, “You need to do this. I know it’s hard, but you need to do this.” They can go, “He did it and look at him, he’s ten years now, so that matters.”

I was in a different business before starting Camelback Recovery and it was just a business and I wasn’t in the business of helping people. Once I got into treatment and I started Camelback Recovery, I just realized the fulfillment that came from helping other people. Not to mention the accountability that it provided because I have to walk the walk. I’m in recovery, I’ve got to walk the walk. I’ve got a whole group of people that are looking at me.

You switch to where like your whole life is a 12-step now. It’s a fascinating thing to do. I’m so blessed to do it.

What are you seeing right now in addiction medicine that concerns you the most?

Two things, I think, is the most because I work at several houses out at The Meadows, including the young adults, which is the Claudia Black Center, that’s 18 to 25ish. The fact that weed has gotten so powerful. We used to, in the ’70s, smoke a whole bag of weed and you barely got high. Now, a couple of hits and you can be on the moon. If you have an underlying psychiatric problem, sometimes it can really shove you over the edge of the cliff and we get some people with really harsh psychotic breaks out there that need a lot of tender loving care.

The other thing is that everything has fentanyl in it. Everything. We’ve had a guy run away, went out, scored some weed, died. Apparently, they are taking really crummy weed now. Instead of going through the hassle of making good weed, they just have a spray bottle with fentanyl and spray it on there so you get a little higher when you smoke it.

There’s obviously no control over the dose and this guy got a lethal dose of pot off the street. People think that they’re doing an Oxy and it’s like, “No, bro, you didn’t get Percocet. You’re pissing positive for fentanyl.” It’s a really rough detox. For those of you that have not been through it, I don’t recommend it. It’s an ugly detox, worse than heroin, I think.

I was talking with an interventionist about a client that had cannabis-induced psychosis. It’s pretty gnarly.

Yeah, it can mess you up for years.

I’m grateful I’ve been sober for fifteen years on March 8th, 2026. I’m so grateful that I got sober before everything got like the Wild West out there. People are spraying fentanyl on cannabis to make it more potent. I just feel really lucky.

There’s those other things like I’ll be walking through the grocery store and going, “When did they start putting pomegranate juice in vodka? How come they waited until I was sober to do that?” “But wait, why am I thinking that?” “There you go again.”

The Dunamis Effect & Faith-Based Recovery

Let’s talk about The Dunamis Effect and faith-based recovery. What does Dunamis mean?

Dunamis is a Greek word that means potential power. Think of like dynamite, it’s the root word to like dynamite and dynamos and stuff. It’s used a lot in Greek to represent potential miraculous power in healing. It’s used a lot in the New Testament whenever Jesus heals somebody. It’s used a couple of hundred times in the Bible. I’ll tell you a funny story about my book originally. I come from a Christian background and that’s my higher power is Jesus.

My book originally was from this quote in Matthew where of God and love your neighbor. I thought, “That’s just the way out,” is first three steps are learning to reconnect to God and then there’s that part about cleaning up the wreckage of your past. I thought, “Love God, Love Your Neighbor.” I thought I was being real clever and called it Him and Them. That was good until pronouns got to be an odd thing. My twenty-year-old boy looks at it and goes, “Your book sounds like a dude in transition.” I’m like, “How did that happen all of a sudden?” We had to rebrand it. Dunamis is a great word for it and no one’s using it for anything so I can own that word.

It’s been an interesting thing to be part of it because what I try to do is I’m cool with people having whatever faith walk they have, but I think the churches need to be way more involved in coming to the discussion on recovery than they are. They like to just outsource it and go, “Go to NA or go to AA until you’re clean, then come back.” That’s not cool. I don’t let them get away with saying that without getting in their face a little bit and saying, “Look, if you’re saying that, you’re telling them that Jesus isn’t necessary and neither is their church community, and I don’t think that’s your messaging.” You need to come to the table.

 

Now, to their side, they always say, “We know this is complicated and there’s biology and neurology and medicine involved and we just it’s big and we don’t know how to get our arms wrapped around that.” It’s like, “Yeah, but the model we use is bio-psycho-social-spiritual model.” That’s the model we use in medicine nowadays. Doctors got the bio down, they can detox you or give you Sub or whatever works for your path. Counselors are really great at the psycho, helping uncovering trauma or helping you work your way through whatever difficulties emotionally or whatever we have. The social-spiritual, they don’t have time for that stuff. Churches are perfectly positioned to do that.

I’m trying to just bring all three to the table and say, “Look, we need docs, we need counselors, we need rehabs, and we need faith communities to wrap their arms around these people and say, ‘We got you until you can learn to love yourself again.’“ I did not want to write a book. I am really not good at that and I type with two fingers, so writing a whole book is a lot of work, okay? Writing 60,000 words is a lot when you’re like this. It’s funny, but I mean sometimes I’ll get real flying and use my thumb on the spacebar. It makes me slow down and think about what I want to write.

When COVID came, all the AA meetings in the valley just evaporated overnight. There was 1,600 meetings a week in the valley of just AA and 95% of them just disappeared. There’s some Zooms and stuff like that and some people defiantly met up, like we had one that met in a park and everybody could say, “Yeah, we’re spaced,” stuff. It was right when people were losing their jobs and their kids were having to come home and stay there and they couldn’t go to the gym and they couldn’t go to their churches, but Circle K and the dispensaries were open. It was like this relapse tsunami happening.

I went to a big church called CCV and I knew they didn’t have a recovery program so I secret shopped them and said, “I got an alcohol problem, what do you got?” I already had five-year chip in my pocket and they’re like, “We’re sending people to AA.” I went in to that pastor and went, “Good job on the soccer league. You guys are crushing that. That’s not an answer right now.” They went, “Well, it’s big and we don’t get it. Why don’t you fix it?” I was like, “No, I’m here to bitch about it. I’ll put money in the plate, you guys fix it.”

They just went, “No, it don’t work that way. It’s your vision, so now it’s your mission.” It’s turned into like my off-ramp towards retirement. I can find something of meaning and value to do that drags me out of bed every day. You know what, probably good for our brains if we’re always trying to figure out new stuff and think new ways and challenge our brains. It’s probably helping me out more than I thought.

It is good for our brains to figure out new stuff and challenge our thinking. Share on X

I was just telling you, we’re forced now in this world to do like social media stuff and things like that. I know to a lot of you that just comes natural. When you were born in the ’60s, that does not come natural. I didn’t even have a Facebook page and this gal in one of our groups came up to me and she goes, “You need me.” I was like, “What?” She’s like, “You need me. I used to do social media for Sleep Number bed and I went to your website and it’s a train wreck, so hire me.”

I went, “Okay, I don’t have much money.” She goes, “I’ll help you raise money. Just let’s work on this.” I go, “I don’t even have a Facebook page” she’s like, “Okay, you do now.” She’s just forced me into things that are very outside my comfort zone. Youtube videos? I didn’t even want to admit to myself I was an alcoholic, but put a book on Amazon and a youtube video? Talk about blowing your anonymity out of the water there. It’s an interesting new life for me and I’m not sure where it’s going but it’s better than what I had planned.

Our one of our core values here at Camelback recovery is always learning and always growing. Times are changing, times are going to keep changing. To your point, we’ve got social media, we’ve got youtube, we’ve got Instagram, we’ve got tiktok. We’ve got all these platforms, people are on them. It’s nice to see how many more people are public about their substance use and about their addiction and about their mental health. For me it makes me feel more comfortable and I have a platform and I think it’s for other people to see like, “Okay, I’m not the only one.” there was such a stigma. There’s still a stigma, but the stigma is it’s getting better.

It’s way less. Now I understand anonymity, especially when they first started like AA back in the ’30s. Their model was, “This is morality, you’re bad, stop being bad.” That just doesn’t help anybody. It’s time to just say like we either believe in this disease model or we don’t. If it’s a disease, why are we hiding? We don’t hide people that are diabetic or have lung cancer. We treat them. We support them and say, “Let’s see some fun runs for alcoholics.”

We need to start doing stuff like that and raising awareness and saying, “Look, we know this is hard. Is treating lung cancer, so is treating diabetes. Okay, so stop doing that. Let’s make your life better. Let’s treat it and let’s get you out of this hole.” Anonymity allows people to come to recovery a lot of times with a lot of shame and a lot of feeling down on themselves. It allows a lot of people to slide into the seats. After a while we need to start saying, “Right here. You got a problem, let me know, I’ll help you out.”

Yeah, one of the most comforting things for me, I when I especially when I first got sober, I went to 1 or 2 meetings a day for my first couple years. What that meant is that I connected with a lot of people that were in the 12-step rooms. That meant that when I was outside of the 12-step rooms in the community, whether it’s at a coffee shop, at a restaurant, at a baseball game at a football game, I always see people that are in recovery, it’s very comforting. I can see someone and just give each other the nod. It’s like these are my people. It’s just been very comforting for me to be that connected. How does your book and workbook differ from traditional 12-step material?

I guess just a couple of ways. First of all, I have nothing against AA and NA. God used good people in AA to save my life and I’ll never ever say anything bad about them. It’s just it started out as a Christian program using the New Testament to build that book. They used the 1 Corinthians love chapter and the Sermon on the Mount and the book of James. That was their first text.

As a matter of fact, they almost called the group the James Group. When their book came out and they had trouble naming it because they wanted to call it The Way, but when they looked in the Library of Congress, there was already 12 books called The Way and they didn’t want to be the 13th way. They were really superstitious. They just came up with Alcoholics Anonymous and then that stuck as the name of the group.

That being said, over time, society has become much more a lot of faith walks out there and they’re all acceptable. Sometimes, if you say Jesus in a meeting, you get the sideways eyes. A church, as I found, wasn’t going to be cool with just any old higher power will do. In my book, in The Dunamis Effect, we say Jesus is our higher power. Also, that book was written in like 1939. Science has progressed a little bit since then. We actually know some things.

Back then, they called it an allergy and stuff like that and they didn’t really understand medications that would be helpful. They didn’t have antidepressants and they didn’t have effective rehab. They would just put people in asylums for alcoholism and even just tie them down to the bed while they had seizures and stuff and then just release them. It’s come a long way. We pay homage to that and respect it and just use modern language because you’ve got an eighteen-year-old reading the AA book and they’re like, “What’s an iron lung?” We can use modern language and still say the same thing. That’s where it came from.

You embrace Christ as your higher power. What happens when someone truly embraces a higher power, whether it’s Christ or just another higher power?

A lot of people will say, “I don’t believe in God,” that’s really not true. They don’t believe in the God of the Bible is what they’re saying. Everybody’s got a God and often it’s yourself, especially when we’re in the middle of our addiction. Everybody’s got a God. When you turn your life over to a higher power, at least your life’s not in the hands of a fool, meaning myself anymore because what I was doing was clearly not working.

If I hadn’t have gotten sober when I did, I’m sure I wouldn’t be sitting here now. I’m sure I’d be dead by now. I, for sure, wouldn’t have a marriage and respect to my children and things like that that I enjoy now. None of those things were going to happen if I hadn’t have gotten sober. My daughter got married and we were doing that daddy-daughter dance that you do, and we were both crying. Everybody thought it was just because we were overwhelmed by the beauty of the marriage and all that, and we were both just saying, “This was not going to happen ten years ago.” That was just a really amazing moment.

I’ve seen so many families come back together once a person gets sober and they’re all on the path to recovery. It might not happen right away. For me, it didn’t happen right away. For me, it took years.

We want to be measured by our intentions. I know I’m good. They’ve seen that before and they’ve heard that line before and they’ve been burned by it, so they can only measure us by our actions. That takes a lot longer. Whatever you think is the amount of time that they should come around, 10x that, okay? It’s going to take a lot longer than you want or you wish or you even think is reasonable.

The thing is, is that there is really just this almost infinite amount of grace out there with most people and they’re willing to give it to you if you just keep walking the walk and putting the next step forward and the next right thing and do the next right thing and all of a sudden you look back and you go, “Wow, I’ve got several years put together and look at me, I’m on vacation with my family.”

I’ve heard so many people say, “Man, I’m sober.” they’re 30 days sober, 15 days sober “Man, I’m sober and I don’t understand why my family is still has feelings against me or I’m still not welcome,” or whatever. It’s like to your point, it’s the living amends. You said something what’s the line, I don’t remember who this line came from, we judge ourselves by our intentions, we judge others by their actions. That’s the bottom line. You’ve got to keep on showing up and doing the next right thing day after day.

When I had 10 months sobriety, I was so proud because I hadn’t been 10 months sober since I was like 13. I was 52. It’d been decades. I said to my wife, “I got ten months of sobriety,” she still went, “Yeah, well your 13-year-old hasn’t drunk in 13 years. Let me know when you get there.” I’m like, “Shit. That is a big bar to jump over. That is really a tough standard.” She was still angry that I had wasted so much time of our marriage.

You’ve got to meet them where they’re at.

Medicine, Medication & Controversy

There’s an ongoing debate about medication, assisted treatment. How do you approach that as both a physician and as a man of faith?

Personally, I don’t have any problem with it at all. Once again, like I said, I am always dealing with these young people out of the meadows. I’m always having to talk to parents about beeping orphan and putting their kid on sub and they’re like, “She’s just trading one addiction for another.” I’m like, “Let’s say that’s true. It’s not really but let’s just say it’s true. Would you want addiction that the doctor prescribes, and is legal and what’s in it or do you want them to have to rob houses and hang hold people up to get heroin that might not be heroin kill him?”

At least start there. We had these studies. When it first came out as a treatment for opioid addiction, there was that the study in England where they had like a couple of thousand young people on it and a couple of thousand people on placebo and they had to stop the study because so many of the placebo group kids were dying and relapsed.

They just said, “This is not ethical for us to keep doing this study. We have to stop this and give them all sub.” It saves lives. Same thing with alcohol and drugs, check someone or whatever. They’re not magic, but I looked at them as like a crutch. If I break my ankle, I want to crutch for a little while. I don’t need a crutch for the rest of my life or something’s really drastically wrong here, but get some physical therapy get some exercise, get it strengthened up and then you get ready to crutch after a while. If it keeps people alive and lets them build a sober community around them and then you can wean down off of it, why not? If it helps people string together a few extra days before they might relapse, it’s worth trying because the alternative can be fatal.

How important is physical health, hormones, sleep, nutrition in long-term recovery?

If you ignore your whole human self, you’re going to have, at the very best, a lopsided abstinence. Not even sobriety. Not drinking or not using isn’t the point. As I just said before, your drug of choice is not your problem. It’s your misguided medicine. Take it away because it’s good to not poison yourself and interact with maybe illegal activities and stuff.

The whole point is to be sober in mind and body and spirit and have emotional and spiritual and physical health. The whole point isn’t just to be abstinent, it’s to enjoy life. You can’t enjoy life if you’re still not firing on all your cylinders physically. If you still think that you don’t need a higher power and all you’re going to do is white knuckle it and I’m just not going to drink, that’s a horrible life.

 

Taking care of yourself physically and going to see the doctor, it also makes you feel like, “I used to not do that stuff because I thought I was just a piece of shit and I didn’t deserve it.” When I got to rehab, I wouldn’t ask for help and what I would say out loud was, “I don’t want to bother anybody.” The honest truth right in here was I didn’t feel worthy of asking for help.

Finally, people just kept letting me know, “You know what, you’re worthy. You just don’t agree with it yet. We’re telling you, you are.” After a while you start going, “Yeah, you know what, I am. I’ve been lying to myself.” It’s just this stupid lie we love to tell ourselves that we’re somehow uniquely unworthy of love and respect, especially from ourselves. The world is more than willing to agree with you.

If you tell the world, “Yeah, I’m pretty much a piece of crap,” they’re going to go, “Yeah, yeah you are.” If you tell the world, “I’m a child of God totally worthy of love and respect,” they’re going to go, “Yeah, you are. That’s great.” The world wants to agree with you. If you don’t believe it, they’re not going to buy into it.

It’s also what you tell your subconscious mind. We have 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts every single day and 90% of them are subconscious. If you’re saying that to yourself, then of course you’re going to believe it. The thoughts that are in your mind. We have 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts every day, 90% of them are subconscious, if I’m continually telling myself that I’m not worthy and that I’m a piece of shit and that I don’t deserve a better life, then of course I’m not going to get a better life.

We think two major things. We think about the past and either resentments or regrets of the past, or we think about trying to control the future and what bad thing is going to happen to me next and if she says this then I’ll say this then if she says that I’ll say this other thing. We try to have this crystal ball about what’s going to happen, and neither one of those are any good. What they do is they keep us from being present now and present here right this moment.

That’s why meditation’s such a beautiful thing because it’s like you take all that stuff and you take all this stuff and you just be here now in this little sliver of time now. I don’t know, I even see that as biblical. Jesus said, “I am the narrow gate,” and there’s no narrower sliver of time than now. He said “Your past is forgiven and God’s got your future. Be here now in the Kingdom of Heaven right now, it’s at hand, here now.”

I love that idea that I can at least, even for just a few minutes in the morning, not be resentful over stuff that I think was an injustice to me or regretful over the things that I didn’t do or things I did do that I wish I hadn’t. Trying to control the future, that’s a fool’s game. You can’t control. You’re barely even yourself let alone other people, you can’t control anybody.

Trying to control the future is a fool’s game. Share on X

It took me a minute to realize that I wasn’t in control. Once I turned it over to a higher power, which I call God, call it the universe, call it whatever you want to call it, there’s somebody else in control than it’s not me. Just turning it over and realizing I don’t need to be in control. Everything has always worked out the way that it’s supposed to, so let’s just let things play out.

When I’m trying to control the outcome, it’s overwhelming, it’s stressful, and things never work out the way that I wanted them to, so why not just turn it over and let things play out? It’s more exciting, it’s more fun, it’s less stressful, it’s much easier because I don’t have to spend time up here thinking about what I think I want to have happen.

You also blow the opportunity to be present in the moment. That’s the thing. Right now is just a beautiful time. I know you guys are sitting here in like a recovery place, you know what, do you know how many people on this earth would trade their problems with yours right now? It’s like 99% of the people would. We’re blessed to even be here and breathing and having clothes and food and shelter. We need to be thankful for that and live in this moment and be thankful that we can learn to be a better person next moment.

For This Room (Live Outpatient Audience)

Many people here are early in recovery. What would you say to someone who feels spiritually disconnected?

It’s rough to wonder if you’re alone in the universe. I couldn’t live that way. I tried to. When you’re in science as a profession, I went up to NYU to do a Biology degree and chemistry and they would that those departments were full of people who were at best agnostic, but mostly atheist and that they pounded that into you that there’s no God. It took a long time from you to say, “I don’t feel like that’s true. I don’t understand how all this stuff just randomly did it and how my life just keeps getting unexpected blessings when I clearly don’t deserve them.

That’s just seems to keep happening over and over again. Not just a one and done but over and over. If you really look through your life and all the things that you have to be grateful for. For me, it started with just a gratitude list. When you first walk out of your bottle or your drug, you can’t see anything to be grateful for. It’s like, “How about the fact that you got four limbs that I’ll work. How about saying, ‘I’m grateful for that. I can see the sun rise today.’”

“How about you got air in your lungs? How about just be grateful for those things today and then tomorrow, that’s something else to it like, ‘I’m grateful for the fact that I have since is that can taste delicious food,” or whatever. You just keep building on that and realizing there’s a lot of things in my life that I’m grateful for, and then you say, “Who are you thinking? There’s got to be something bigger than me, thankfully, because if I was in charge of the universe, it would be a total shit show.” I proved that to myself over and over again until I finally gave up and went, “I surrender.”

It is all about surrender. The thing that kept me relapsing over and over again was a difference between the word, surrender and submission. I know those two words sound a lot alike, but submission is more like compliance. It’s about like going along to get along and it’s about doing what they tell me to do. They’ll stop yelling at me or so I can get my bank account back so I can like maybe get a little bit of help.

Submissions says, “I’ll put down my weapon and not fight but I know it’s right there and I’ll pick it up, anytime I damn well please and I’ll fight.” What surrender, though, says, “I am so tired of the pain. Take my weapon, melt it down, into a freaking wind chime. I am done.” That’s when higher power steps in and goes, “That we can work with because that means you’re done trying to control things. You have truly surrendered.”

It’s not just a thing and addiction recovery. It’s the thing. If you can get up every day and do the first half of the first step, “I am powerless over this thing,” you have a damn good shot at being sober that day. All the other rest of the steps, they’ll fall into place if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You got to get up every day for the rest of your life and just go, “Yeah, I’m powerless over alcohol and I’m okay with that because why was I fighting for that thing?”

Surrender seems like such a hard word, though because it sounds in our minds like failure. My oldest boy is in the United States Army and does Special Forces stuff and he’s a badass. He does like jumps into countries we’re not supposed to be in and stuff, but they wore game on these ipads and he goes, “Dad, I’ll be dumping resources into this hill. If I’m not careful, we get flanked and we die. I always have to keep saying, “Why do I want to fight for that hill? Is it because it’s strategically important to me or is this my ego doesn’t want to give up a square inch of dirt?”

Sometimes the answer is throw the white flag on that hill, take a step back and win the whole battle. He says that’s called a strategic surrender. At about 3 or 4 weeks later, I was in one of the AA rooms that had a little Unicorn poster that says, “When I drank, I gave up everything to get one thing and when I got sober, I gave up one thing and gained everything.” I went, “Strategic surrender. That’s a thing.”

My son goes, “Yeah, Dad. It’s not failure. It’s wisdom. It’s smart. You have to surrender this one thing. Not everything but this one thing. If every day you’re going to school and some bully beat you up, takes away lunch money, maybe you should go down a different street. That doesn’t seem like failure. That’s seems smart grid. Quit the losing team and join a winning team. Surrender’s the thing and it’s not failure. It’s wisdom, it’s smart because it’s you finally recognizing that what you were doing is just not going to work.

How does someone new to recovery rebuild their identity?

That’s a really tough question because it seems to just happen. Regardless of your efforts. It seems to just like, “I am a dad. I am a good husband. I am a good friend. I do answer the phone when it rings and people need help. I do go help that guy, buy him a cup of coffee when he’s struggling to stay sober.” It seems to just morph out of out of living. It demands that I stop being in control of the narrative.

I quit saying, “This is who I am,” and just live life in the moment. Stop this stuff and that stuff. Just be here now, and that seems like all sudden, you just realize, “This is who I am.” Our people will tell you and you’ll go, “When did that happen? I used to have people tell me I was an awful person. Now they don’t see that anymore,” so your identity just morphs out of living life, I think.

Doing the next right thing. I remember, I used to be the guy that you’re your mom, your girlfriend, your wife did not want you to hang out with. Now I’m the guy that your mom, your girlfriend, your wife, your parents, they want you to hang out with. It’s like, how did that happen? It’s through recovery and doing the next right thing. Continuing to work on myself.

It’s the miracle of sobriety. You get to live a new life. You get a second chance.

What do you say to someone who relapses and feels overwhelmed by shame?

Relapse is part of every disease. People can go through cancer treatments and be six years without normal PET scans and all that stuff. All sudden you’re seven, it’s positive again. You can have high blood pressure and be going along on it just fine and then all of a sudden, you’re going to the doctor’s office and they go, “Your pressure is high again.” Every disease has relapses and addiction is no different than that. It doesn’t have to be part of your permanent story but it is a part of a lot of people’s story. You just say, “Here I am again.”

Every disease has relapses. Addiction is no different than that. It does not have to be part of your permanent story, but it is part of many people’s stories. Share on X

Let’s learn from that. We do what we call a relapse prevention program and where we try to dissect the last relapse. What was I doing? Who was I hanging out with? What was I thinking? The behaviors and the thoughts and the actions and the emotions that led you up to that. Most people think of relapse is when I take that drink again. That’s not relapse. That’s the end of relapse. That’s the beginning of active use.

Relapse is all the thinking and the emotions and the behaviors that lead up to that first drink. That’s relapse and it can be months long. I’m slowly like, “I can hang out with the guys at the bar and just have a Diet Coke.” You talk about walking and slippery places and praying to not slip. You’re stupid if you keep doing that.

Sometimes it means you need a different crowd to hang out with and different crew to support you as you’re walking through life. Most of my friends, they’re like, “I thought they drank more than they did and it was just me.” Most of them still will have a cocktail but they can have a cocktail and go to bed. I didn’t realize that I was the one that was hanging out to force him to finish the twelve-pack on. I realized when I started going to football games and concerts sober, I realized that, I used to think that everybody was shit-faced like I was. Once I started going sober, I realized, to your point, it’s like people are not wasted. People are having 1 or 2 drinks. That’s not me.

Almost 50% of the American adults right now, don’t drink any alcohol ever. We think everybody does all the time, but whether it be like some religious thing or like they got diabetes, they just don’t drink, or they were in recovery or for whatever reason, between 40% and 50% of the people will never have any but we just assume when we’re in the middle of our disease that everybody does it all the time to excess because that’s the people we hang out with so we don’t look so out of place. We hang out with people that don’t draw attention to us.

Relapse, you can either look at it as, yes, I’m a failure. I’m a flawed human being. Once again, that’s shame. Guilt and shame are different. Guilt says, “I did something wrong. Let’s move forward. Do I need to apologize? Do I need to do it different path or whatever.” Shame says, “At my core, I’m made imperfectly and I’ll never be better.” That’s a lie. You can learn from a relapse, you can say, “There’s another way that doesn’t work for me. I have to take a different path going forward.”

When you ignore it and don’t try to dissect what happened, leading up to your new active use, you’re likely to repeat it again so you have to learn from your relapse and not just kick yourself over and over again. Sometimes you need a few kicks but mostly, it’s like try to learn from your relapse, and dissect them, and take it apart, and then make a plan. If this happens what I’m going to do next time that’s different? I got this guy’s phone number, and I’ve told him I might call you in the middle of night. Please answer. You have a plan, a relapse prevention plan, which I’m sure you guys probably work on here.

I want to open it up to questions.

I’m Luis. Thank you for being here. I grew up playing soccer at CCV my entire life. I know how huge of an impact it has in the whole valley. I heard you mentioned that you talk to them about the creating something. Have they created something for recovery? It’s so rarely I’ve ever heard them talk about us, our alcoholism and recovery.

I thought having a recovery ministry was going to be the easiest cell on Earth, because every church in the valley has about 15% to 20% of the people sitting in their peers that need help. If you think 9% alcohol and other 4% or 5% drugs, at least, 7% or 8% porn and we don’t know how big that is. To say 20% of the people in your congregation could be diagnosed as addicted is probably conservative. I thought this is going to be easy but there’s so much shame on their part and so much resistance that it’s been interesting.

I think we’re about to break open the dam at CCV because the head pastor, Pastor Ashley, actually, someone very important to him got a second DUI and he said, “I want Dr. Middleton, the sponsor you.” I went. “A-ha, of course I will sponsor your best friend,” and it worked out really well. The guy is just flourishing and survived. I think that we’re really maybe cracking the ice open.

Once a big influential Church like CCV agrees to it, then hopefully it’ll open it up to others. I had to pick the right person because I am just terrible at taking no for an answer. I haven’t waited for CCV to come on board. We have about 7 or 8 other churches that have started at. We’re now in seven different states. I just got a call from a church in Virginia, like a little dinky town of Virginia. The internet’s awesome place, I don’t know.

We have like five meetings in Nairobi Now. It’s just an interesting place to me but I think I figured out CCV’s secret sauce and about to crack the ice open and really exploded. I think once they do, would I love to get into Ashley’s Rolodex. I bet his contact list is ginormous. If you go to church there, I’ll never pass up a chance to ask when the pastures, “How come you guys remember recovery program?” Always ask them that.

At your highest peak of your addiction, did you get away from God? Did you separate yourself? If you did, how did you get back with him, get right with him?

I tried so hard to do the God thing. We went to church. I’d go to church with booze on my breath. I read the Bible and pray. People who say, “Give it to God,” I was like, “What the hell is that mean?” I would be on my knees praying, crying, snot bubble coming out of my nose prayers like, “God, take away this thirst.” To me, I realized, “Wait, there I go again, telling God my plan. Asking him to just rubber stamp my plan.” When I finally said, “I give up. Help,” that’s when it happened for me. The whole time, I was wanting to be that guy, but I just had such a hard time surrendering and submitting.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. It’s a good question.

How’s it going?

Awesome. Thanks.

What was your name again?

I’m Don.

My name is John and I don’t really have any questions but I just want to thank you for sharing and for keeping it real. What an amazing story and viewpoint. I guess I do have a question. What is your material called?

It’s called The Dunamis Effect. I should have brought books. Sometimes, if I come to a meeting and I only bring like 20 books, then there’s like 50 people there and I feel like, “I did that.” It’s called The Dunamis Effect. I have a website, YouTube channel and Facebook and all that garbage better. If you look up dunamis, it’s actually become a thing.

One of these guys was starting to meeting and he said, “I’m going to look up where is dunamis in the Bible. It put all these different verses out and then Google AI said and as the reference, they went The Dunamis Effect,” and I went, “I’m a reference now. Google knows me. I’m a real boy, Pinocchio.” Yeah, it was weird but maybe that didn’t help you. If you forget the name, I’ll write it down for you. That means potential power. Think about like when you pull back a bow string. Just before you let it go, it’s full of potential power. It’s not to shoot an arrow forward and so do dunamis is potential power.

That’s awesome.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you saying that.

Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it.

The Movement

If someone reading wants to get involved or go deeper, what should they do?

We have the DunamisInitiative.com or if you just put DonMiddleton.com, we went ahead and owned that one too, and it’ll take you to the same website. It’s not really about me. I have to be the face of it, but it’s about God and it’s about living your best life because you’re surrendered. I hate making it about me but it’s the way things work nowadays. People don’t care if you know stuff. They don’t care you’ve been there and done that.

Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?

I don’t know. You got me on a few that I wasn’t expecting. It’s not responsibility to surrender and to get sober because we’re leaving this wake of pain and our past. It’s also our responsibility, like I said, to not hog all the blessings and reach back and grab someone out of the dumpster fire and help them. If you are in a position to start a meeting and you’re Christian or not Christian or whatever, start one. Don’t just piggy back off of the efforts of other people in the past, start a meeting, even if it’s just 4 or 5 people for a while.

 

It’s Field of Dreams. You build it and eventually, they come. It’s amazing how God can work with you. I was whining that this wasn’t working out and this other guy that has a bigger ministry called Parents of Addicted Loved Ones, PAL, he’s like, “Don, how many books have you gotten out there?” I was like, “I don’t know, 3,500?” He goes, “Okay, so If 10% of those people that mattered to him, there’s 350, how long would it take you to sponsor with 350 people?”

“I couldn’t possibly do that in my life.” He goes, “See.” It guides you to multiply your efforts and you could do that to every one of you too. He sponsored 1 person and they sponsored 2 people and they sponsor 2 people and there’s this huge ripple behind you of effect that you didn’t even realize you were able to do. Who knows? You help this guy and he helped someone else and then that guy’s not going home and beat his kid that night. This kid won’t grow up in trauma and becoming an addict himself. You just don’t know how God can use you if you just stay loyal and open to the next right thing.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

Where can people learn more about you? How can people connect with you? Anything else you want to promote?

That website has Contact Us. I’m a ministry of one. You contact that email address, you’re going to get me. I’m an open book. If you guys know a place where I can be of effect, I’m open. If you have a pastor that you want to turn me on to, I’m there. I’ll come, I’ll be there. This is the first time in my life when I’ve tried super hard not to control it.

I just keep waking up every day and go, “God, open doors for me because I know if I knock on the door, I’ll probably pick one that serves me. I swear, if you open the door, I will walk through it.” Doors keep opening and I keep walking through them and sometimes, they’re dead ends. A lot of times, I just need new friends or come through this like I didn’t even know this existed. Here I am, and there’s a lot of fun.

Just go to the website if you want to contact me or the books are on Amazon and stuff. We’ve got like 4 or 5 books now. Got one called Dissecting the Prayers and Promises of AA. There’s a lot of praying going on in AA. The joke is it’s like prayer at the beginning, prayer at the end, and 40 F-bombs in the middle. A lot of people just go through the prayers without thinking about them like a little kid saying, “God is great, God is good,” so he can get to his peanut butter sandwich.

I just take the prayers apart one by one, line by line and go, “This is what this means, this is where this might have come from the Bible, and this is what it means to your sobriety.” I did the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer and the Third and Seventh Step Prayer and the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi and then the promises.

I go through all the bumper stickers like “One day at a time” “Easy does it” just like, where does that come from? One day at a time. Probably the best book for addiction recovery is Exodus in the Bible. It’s about leaving slavery in the bondage of those Egyptians and moving into the unknown in the desert for years and years and then finally going to the promised land.

When they were going through that, God said, “I will give you manna one day at a time, I want you just to pick up just what you need that day and not more than that.” Later, Jesus said, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We don’t pray, “Give us all the bread I’ll ever need, God, and then I won’t bother you anymore.” It’s learning to trust God every single day, one day at a time. That’s where they got that bumper sticker from.

Of your five books, what’s the first book, the core?

The core is The Dunamis Effect. That’s the 12-step book that we use in all our meetings and stuff like that.

Perfect. Well, Dr. Don, thank you for being here and thank you for your decades of service in medicine, recovery, and faith leadership. If you’d like to learn more about his work, you can find The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power is Jesus on Amazon and we’re going to get a couple of those books here for the center as well.

You can also visit DunamisInitiative.com and follow the Dunamis Initiative on Facebook and YouTube. To everyone here at Camelback Recovery, thanks for being part of this conversation. Recovery is about more than just abstinence, it’s about transformation and that’s exactly what we talked about. Dr. Don, thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure. Been a lot of fun.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Don Middleton
• The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power is Jesus
• Alcoholics Anonymous
• The Dunamis Initiative on YouTube
• The Dunamis Initiative on Facebook
• Dissecting the Prayers and Promises of AA

 

About Dr. Don Middleton

Dr. Don Middleton is a board-certified physician and addiction medicine specialist with more than 30 years of experience in family medicine and behavioral health. He currently practices addiction medicine at the internationally renowned Meadows Behavioral Health in Wickenburg, Arizona, and serves as Medical Director for Vital 4 Men, a series of men’s health clinics in Arizona.

Recognized for his leadership and clinical excellence, Dr. Middleton was named Arizona Physician of the Year at the state medical convention. He also serves on the Arizona Board of Medical Trustees and on the board of directors for Crossroads Rehabilitation of Arizona, contributing to oversight and advancement in addiction treatment and recovery services.

In addition to his medical career, Dr. Middleton is an accomplished author and Christian recovery advocate. He has written five books, including The Dunamis Effect: When Your Higher Power Is Jesus, a Christian 12-step recovery book and workbook designed to integrate biblical principles with addiction recovery. He is the founder and director of the Dunamis Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing Christ-centered addiction recovery ministries.

Dr. Middleton previously served as an assistant professor at Midwestern University, mentoring the next generation of medical professionals. His work bridges the gap between addiction medicine, faith-based recovery, and long-term spiritual transformation.

He lives in Peoria, Arizona, with his wife, Dr. Tracy Middleton. They have been married for over 35 years and have four children and three grandchildren.