RFK Jr. Was A Prosecutor Hiding This For Years

 

In this powerful live episode of I Love Being Sober, Tim Westbrook sits down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Camelback Recovery for a deeply personal and thought-provoking conversation on addiction, recovery, and the future of mental health care in America. Known globally for his work in law, public health, and policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also brings decades of personal experience in recovery. In this candid discussion, he shares his journey through addiction, what it took to get sober, and the daily practices that have helped him maintain long-term recovery.

Together, Tim and Robert explore what real recovery looks like beyond abstinence, the role of community and purpose, and why addiction must be treated as a chronic condition—not a short-term crisis. They also dive into critical issues facing the current system, including where treatment is falling short, the need for long-term, outcomes-driven care, and how aligning incentives could transform recovery outcomes across the country.

Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery, this episode concludes with an open and honest Q&A, offering insight, connection, and hope for anyone on the path to recovery.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal recovery journey
• What it really takes to get and stay sober
• The role of community, service, and purpose in long-term recovery
• Why the current addiction treatment system is broken
• What real, lasting recovery should look like
• The future of addiction and mental health care in America

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

RFK Jr. Was A Prosecutor Hiding This For Years

A Powerful Conversation On Recovery, Resilience, And What It Takes To Build A System That Truly Supports Long-Term Healing

This is a really special episode. We are here recording live at our residential treatment center with our patients and with our team. I am grateful, and I am honored to be joined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thank you for being here. We are going to talk about his journey. We’re going to talk about what it took for him to get sober.

Looking Back To RFK Jr.’s Recovery Journey

We are going to talk about what helped him stay sober. We are going to talk about what real recovery looks like. We are going to talk about where the system needs to change. We are going to open it up to questions from the group. Let us dig in. For people here who may not know your full story, can you walk us through your journey through recovery and what it took for you to get here, and what your recovery looks like?

I was raised in a big Irish Catholic family, 11 brothers and sisters, and 29 cousins all lived in the same town. About half the people in that town were Irish Catholic. I went to parochial schools. I took the pledge. The parochial schools would give out pledge pins as a tradition that comes from Ireland because people understood that our race is particularly susceptible to this disease. We call it the Irish flu. People would take a pledge when they were young, and they would get a pledge pin. You would never take a drink.

I took that seriously, but by the time I was fifteen years old, I never even drank coffee. My dad was killed the previous summer. There was a lot of chaos in my home. It affected all the children. My mom was left alone. I went to a party that summer, the elder brother of a friend of mine who had just been drafted to go to Vietnam.

During the party, there was a melee, and the guy who was drafted actually hit a cop, and he ended up going to jail instead of Vietnam. I was hitchhiking home from that party, and an older boy picked me up, who I knew but not that well. He offered me a tab of LSD. LSD had just come to Cape Cod, where I lived that day.

A lot of people in the town ended up taking it that day. I would not have taken it, but there was a newspaper shop and a candy shop in my town. The comic books came every Tuesday, and all of us kids would buy comic books. My favorite comic was Turok, Son of Stone. It is about these two Indians. A couple of weeks before, they had an episode where they had taken mescaline or peyote, and they had been transported back in time, and they had seen dinosaurs. I had an intense interest in paleontology.

I said to the guy, “If I take that, will I see dinosaurs?” He said, “You might.” I ended up taking a very intense acid trip, in which I had a lot of fun. We ended up stealing a car and going into the nearby town. In the morning, I started crashing, and I was walking home about three miles. I was getting increasingly morose and remorseful.

I was saying to myself, “I had promised never to do this, never to take mood changers.” Here I had done it, and I was telling myself, “I am going to get back on the horse and never do it again.” I was getting darker and darker, and I had to go home and face my mom, who invented Tough Love. I had violated my curfew, and I was going to be in a lot of trouble.

Just before I hit my home, I saw some boys in the woods. I went in there to see what they were doing, and I told them that I was crashing on the acid. They said, “Try some of this.” It was a line of crystal meth. I took it and felt great. I tell that story because that was the template for my addiction over the next fourteen years. My progression was very fast. By the end of summer, I was shooting heroin, which was my drug of choice.

I was always trying to quit. I did not want to be an addict. I did not want to be using drugs. For me, the most demoralizing feature of this disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. I would tell myself at 9:00 in the morning, “I am never going to do that again.” I would mean it, onestly, sincerely, earnestly, and by 4:00 I would be doing it.

I had no capacity to bind that person who I was going to be at 4:00. It was like a different person. I forgot all of the lessons and all of my promises to myself. I had an iron willpower in other parts of my life. I gave up candy for Lent when I was thirteen, and I never ate it again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the next year, and I never had another dessert until I was a freshman in college and trying to bulk up for sports.

I was completely baffled about this compulsion. It was completely impervious to my will. I had no power over it. I ended up getting arrested in September of 1983. I was 28 years old. I was working as the DA at that time, so it was really bad. I went to a rehab. It was not a twelve-step rehab. It was a rehab at that time that taught you to do abstinence for one year and then control drinking afterwards. It is closed today. I did not get exposed to the twelve-step program.

I knew in there that I needed to have some spiritual awakening because I needed to change myself fundamentally. The person I was would try all these years to stop doing this. If I went out, I was that same person. I was going to do it again. The last thing I wanted was to be out on the street white-knuckling it and just fighting the impulse all the time. Even if I succeeded, it would have just been a miserable life.

I knew I wanted to be just a normal person, a person who woke up in the morning and was not thinking about drugs all day, somebody who could just go about the business of the day and focus on the important things. The person I was was incapable of that. I lost two of my brothers to this disease after I got sober. One of them had a very close friend who took drugs the same way I did. He shot heroin, did cocaine, and all of this stuff. He became a Moonie. He joined the Unification Church and became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

He would still hang out with us, but he did not want the drugs anymore. We could do drugs right in front of him, and he had no desire. He would chatter about his newfound life, but he did not want to take drugs. I used to think about this guy when I was in rehab. I thought, “I would rather be dead than be a Moonie.” This is what I was thinking back then. I wish somehow there was a way for me to distill that imperviousness to the compulsion that he had without turning into a religious nuisance.

When I was in that rehab, I picked up a book that somebody had just left on a table. It was a book called Synchronicity by Carl Jung. Jung was a contemporary of Freud. Freud was his mentor. They were very close for most of their careers, but then they broke up. Unlike Freud, who was an avowed atheist, Jung was a deeply spiritual man. He had authentic spiritualism. His father had been a preacher. He himself had authentic spiritual experiences from when he was three years old.

Jung ended up helping to craft the spiritual dimension of the twelve-step program. He was treating an alcoholic millionaire from Rhode Island named Rowland Hazard, who was a friend of Bill Wilson. He told Rowland Hazard, after repeated relapses, “Give it to me straight. Is there any hope for somebody who has my level of addiction?” Jung said, “I will give it to you straight. No, there is no hope. Unless you lock yourself somewhere, like in the Antarctic, there is no way that you are ever not going to do this.”

Hazard pressed him on it. He said, “Is there anybody who has my level of addiction who has ever recovered?” Jung said, “Yes, people who have a profound spiritual realignment. Those are the only people who recover.” Hazard related to that story to Bill Wilson. Bill Wilson began this very consequential correspondence with Jung, which fed into his approach to the twelve-step program. Jung was both a very faithful scientist and a deeply spiritual man. His life was filled with these weird coincidences that he began documenting when he was almost 3 or 4 years old.

 

In this book, he talks about one instance where he is sitting with a female patient. He ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe. His back is to the window, and she is talking to him about a dream that she had. The fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle, which is a creature that is a very common symbol in the iconography and hieroglyphics on the tombs of Egypt. It is a creature that does not really exist in Northern Europe.

While he is speaking to her, he is hearing this “Bing, bing, bing” on the window behind him. It is exacerbating him, but he does not want to turn around because he does not want to take his attention off the patient. Eventually, he just gets irritated. He turns around, and he throws open the window. A scarab beetle flies in and lands in his palm. He turned to the woman and said, “Is this what you were dreaming about?”

That thing happened to him all the time. He felt that those instances, which he called synchronicity, were instances where God reaches through, breaks all of his own rules, the rules of probability, chance, biology, and physics, to tap us on the shoulder and say, “I am here.” He tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting. He would put one guy in one room and another in the other room, and they would flip cards and try to guess what the other guy had flipped.

He believed that if he could beat the laws of probability, he would have proven the existence of a supernatural law that could not be explained by conventional science. In the book, he admits that he never succeeded in doing it. He said, “You cannot use empirical tools and scientific tools to prove the existence of a God.”

Having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his hospital, he said, “I can prove that people who believe in God get better faster and that their recovery is more durable.” That had a much bigger influence than if he had said that he had proved the existence of a God, which I would not have believed.

What he was saying is that it is irrelevant if there is a God up there or not. If you believe in one, your chances and the ease of your recovery are going to be much better. After reading that, I just made a conscious decision that I am going to start believing in God because I had pledged myself that I would do anything that would improve my chance of recovery by even one percent.

I came from a very pious Roman Catholic background. I had a strong belief in God when I was a kid. When you live against conscience for a long period of time, any notion of God is pushed to the periphery of your horizons. For me, God at that point was a theoretical construct, not something that was part of my daily life.

I was faced with the dilemma that anybody faces who wants to suddenly start believing in God. How do you start believing in something that you cannot see, smell, touch, taste, or acquire with your senses? Jung solves that problem. He said, “You fake it till you make it. You behave as if there is a guy up there watching you all the time. Life is a series of tests.” I started to live my life that way and to break every day into a series of decisions. Each one of those now, for me, had a moral dimension.

Do I get out of bed as soon as the alarm rings, or do I stay in bed for an extra twenty minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I hang up the towels when I take a shower? Do I make the bed in the morning? I make my bed every day. I slept in a hotel for two years every day, and I made my bed every day. It makes no sense because the maid is going to come in there and tear it up. We are here to build character.

We are building character, and that is a commitment I made. I am able, because of this program, to keep commitments now. Do I put the water in the ice tray before I put it in the freezer? I had to start behaving myself even when I did not have an audience. When I reach into the closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans, and all those wire hangers fall on the floor, do I do what I used to do, which is to say, “I am too busy, I am too much of a big shot to do that, that is somebody else’s job”?

Do I clean up my own mess? Do I put the shopping cart where it is supposed to go in the parking lot? Do I leave it in the middle of the parking lot because I am too busy and too important? I started living my life that way. Very quickly, I had a spiritual awakening, and my compulsion that I had lived with for fourteen years just disappeared. To me, that was as big a miracle as if I had been able to walk on water, because I had been trying for all of that time, and nothing had worked. I will tell you just one more story from the day that I finished that book.

I went out on a volleyball court to play with some of the other people in this rehab. Somebody hit a ball up, a very powerful hit, and it came down and hit the top of the net post. As it was bouncing up, I said out loud so everybody heard me, “That ball is going to get hit by a Mack truck.” I do not know why I said that. It just came out of my mouth.

The ball went up, and it landed on a chain-link fence on the top and then fell over the other side. It rolled down a driveway about 50 feet into the main thoroughfare, and an eighteen-wheel diesel with a bulldog on the hood came by and popped it with this resounding pop. Everybody there just looked at me for a second like, “How did you do that?”

The moment passed, but for me, I had just finished that book twenty minutes before it came out. I had a choice of do you dismiss this as an interesting coincidence, or do you say, “I am going to try to see God in that, and I am going to try to feel that there is a reassurance that he is tapping me on the shoulder and saying I am with you?”

It is easier to stay sober than to get sober. Share on X

Nowadays, I rely on those things to happen. I have a pipeline of miracles. I have a big job, and I have crises every day. My job is to stay in that posture of surrender. My life got very big. It had been very small from addiction, and it got big very fast. Three or four months into sobriety, I was running through National Airport in Washington, DC, to catch a flight that I was already going to miss. It was mission-critical that I make that flight. The apocalypse was going to happen if I missed it. As I was running, I had a stick of Dentyne.

I put it in my mouth, and I balled up the wrapper, and I threw it into a trash can. It made a perfect arc and swished into the middle of the trash can. As I was running, I saw out of the corner of my eye that it must have hit something in there because it jumped back out. I was like, “That is God’s fault because I made the shot.” I got about 40 feet down that terminal, and it just started eating at me. I put on the brakes and went back and put it in.

I did make my plane. The most important thing I did that day was that little act because it kept me in that posture of surrender. My inclination, like for most of us, is that we come in here on our knees, we are broken, and we surrender, and we turn it over. The cash and prizes start flowing in, and I incline to say, “Thank you, God, I got it from here. Take the wheel of the car and drive it off the cliff again.”

The trick is, how do you stay in that posture of surrender even when things are starting to go well in your life? One of the ways that I do that is that I go to a meeting every day. At one of my first meetings, I asked the guy, “How long do I have to keep coming to this?” He said, “Just keep coming till you like it.” I have been coming for 43 years, and I still do not like going to meetings. I do it every day because when I do that, the rest of my life works. I do not walk around with that bit of anxiety that I was born with, and that only heroin took away from me, like the only thing that could quiet it.

When I go to a lot of meetings, my luck seems to change. The parking place is open, the lights turn green, and people answer the phone and return my phone calls. The projects that I am involved with get over the finish line. As long as I stay in that posture of surrender, I am fine. When I take my will back, my life starts to fall apart.

I go to meetings every day the same way I brush my teeth. I do not like brushing my teeth. I do not enjoy the sensation. It is a pain, and I have to do it. I do not want to live with the consequences of what happens when you stop. My life today is beyond my wildest dreams. I rely on that pipeline of miracles to make it work. Those happen to me reliably day after day as long as I stay in that posture of surrender.

I was just thinking about synchronicities. When I first got clean and sober, very quickly, like you, I realized that I am not in control. Call it God, call it the universe, call it somebody else. Life is just so much easier if somebody else is in control. You talked about synchronicities. A couple of weekends ago, we were in San Francisco, walking through Golden Gate Park.

In December, we went to a Cancun Joe Dispenza retreat. We had an amazing time at this retreat. We are in San Francisco, walking through Golden Gate Park, and I see a guy on a bike riding towards me. He stops, and he says, “I know you.” I am like, “No, I am from Arizona.” Jennifer says, “It is Nick from Joe Dispenza.” This was a guy who was in our small group at the Joe Dispenza retreat.

How do things like that happen? They are synchronicities. I do not know what it means, but God is definitely in control. I have heard you talk a lot about doing the next right thing. If I am doing the right thing, then I feel good about my behavior.  What I take from what you talked about was just the alcoholic behavior, the lying, and the stealing. It is not making your bed. It is not picking up your trash. It is not doing the next right thing. I love that you said that. Now, I have heard you say a few times that you have been in recovery for 43 years. Is relapse part of your story?

Yes. I had 25 years of sobriety. I had a bad couple of years that took me away from the program. I was still going to meetings, but I was not working a program. I had hepatitis C from heroin use. At that time, the treatment was a combination of interferon and ribavirin, which, for me, was like taking bad acid every day for fourteen months. I would go to meetings, and anything anybody said would make me angry. I knew it was a chemical response, but I would not be thinking about spiritual things.

I thought, “If I punch this guy in the throat, I could kill him with one punch.” I had really twisted thoughts. I knew it was from the drug, but it was not rewarding at all. I was getting nothing from coming in. I had two surgeries, and I had a lot of problems at home, which ended with my wife’s suicide. At one point, after one of these surgeries, I took more pills than I was supposed to.

I ended up restarting my day. I came back in about a year, and I just recommitted myself to the program. The first time, I got it for free. It was a gift. I was on a pink cloud for 25 years. It was effortless. I just had to go to the meetings. I had no compulsion. The second time it was much harder. The message I would say is, “It is always easier to stay sober than to get sober.” The second time I went to meetings for two years and got nothing from them, but I knew that it would eventually start working again. In Christian literature, there is a concept called the Dark Night of the Soul.

There is a saint called Anthony of Egypt who spent 43 years in a cave. For about 10 or 12 of those years, he lost all his faith. He just kept doing the regimen, knowing that eventually it would come back. This is a very common occurrence in people who have faith. St. John of the Cross and others talk about it a lot. There are periods where you lose your faith, and you lose that conscious contact with God. I was praying every day, but it was a dry prayer. I was getting nothing back. I knew this program worked, and I knew that if I just put in the effort, then eventually it would all come back. After maybe a year or a year and a half, it came back to me.

Overcoming The Struggles Of Early Recovery

It is interesting you say that. I have been sober for about fifteen years. I just celebrated fifteen years. I have seen people go out who have 5 years, 8 years, 17 years, and those guys struggle to get back.

Yes, it is much harder coming back than it is coming in the first time.

Why do you think that is?

There are a number of reasons. Everybody is different. For me, it was hard because I had it all. I had all the gifts before. It is like a fish jumping out of the water and seeing the shore and the world and seeing all these vivid colors, and then it goes back under the water and slowly forgets about it. It becomes almost like it was a dream, and it is hard to reclaim it.

God talks to us in a whisper. The world is clamoring at us with all this loud noise and these shiny things all the time. It is much easier to say, “This is the reality, and anything else is an illusion.” It is like the difference between night and day. During the nighttime, you can see the stars, and you see their beauty.

A garish sun comes up, and it drowns it all out. It is screaming at you, and it is hot. The world is a very noisy place. It is much easier to hear those sounds and tune into them. We are a combination of both spiritual beings and biological beings. The biological being wants to acquire things, have sex, eat good food, get ahead in life, and advance ourselves.

There is this very subtle spiritual world. It is actually the reality, but it is easy to go blind to it. It is like waking up from a dream. You forget that dream very, very quickly. It seems like an unreality, but it is actually the reality. We are all walking through a dream, and the dream is taking place in the mind of God. God is not going to intrude on our lives. He is not going to kick down our door. He needs to be invited in. That starts with that act of surrender.

 

Was heroin big in your generation?

It was big for me.

Was the heroin then different than the heroin now?

I do not know. I have not done heroin in 43 years, so I do not know. When I started doing it, it was very cheap and easy to get because there had been a giant bust in New York with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of pure heroin. They made a film about it called The French Connection. That heroin was all stolen by crooked police from the locker and then distributed. They sold it for what they called deuces, which was $2 bags. It was available on every corner in New York for several years, and they happened to be the years when I became active.

What were some of your biggest challenges in early sobriety?

My challenges were always just staying in that place of surrender, learning acceptance, and learning all of the lessons that we learn in this program. We learn through pain. Pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth. My strategy for dealing with pain from when I was fifteen years old was to anesthetize myself.

When I got sober at 28, I was still a 15-year-old kid because there was no spiritual growth during that time. We learn when we are adolescents to endure pain and that it will pass if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing. You go through pain, and it is like dark clouds passing over you. You have to be able to watch them with indifference, knowing that they are going to pass and knowing there is probably something good in that pain, that there is a payoff for you.

That is counterintuitive. People do not understand it through instinct. People want to escape from the pain. For me now, I understand that every difficulty that I have is actually a good thing. The challenges that we face in life, the things that seem worst to us, are actually the things that are best for us, as they are building our character, teaching us important lessons, and they are getting us closer to God.

I realized in recovery that I have to be grateful for everything that happened, whether I think it’s good or bad. Until I am grateful, I am a victim. Once I become grateful, then I can be responsible, I can learn from it, I can reflect on it, and I can move on to the next thing.

After probably ten years of sobriety, I noticed that I was complaining a lot. People would ask me how I was, and I would go through a litany of things that were going wrong. I heard myself doing this, and I decided to give up complaining for Lent and complain about nothing. If somebody asked me how I was, I would say, “Great.” I had read Marcus Aurelius, who is the Stoic philosopher and emperor of Rome.

It is like reading AA literature. He is very big on not complaining about anything and that everything is a gift. When somebody asks me how I am, I always say, “Great.” I do not want to lie, but there is always a reason. I do a gratitude list. I had to tell myself why I am feeling great and why I am great. “I am great because I live in an era where there are antibiotics, where there is orange juice available 365 days a year, and I have a windshield with glass in it so the bugs do not get in my face when I am driving. I can fly across the country in six hours, strap myself to a chair, and fly through the clouds.”

In reality, if you live in this country today, you live like a god compared to 99.9% of the humanity that has ever lived. Whatever seems to be going wrong in your life is really trivial. If you focus on gratitude and try to stay in that place of gratitude all the time, it actually attracts things. There is a rule called the Law of Attraction. When you stay in that place of gratitude, it brings good things into your life. Conversely, when you worry, it is like praying for bad things to happen. Worry and fear actually manifest the things that you are scared of or that you are anxious about.

If you live your life in a way that everything that happens to you is a gift and that God is talking to you all the time and teaching you things that you are supposed to learn, you are fine. Nobody ever got on their deathbed and said, “I should have spent more time worrying.” It is a complete waste of time. When you have that gratitude, it is a choice. You could have two people shoveling manure, and one of them will be laughing and smiling, and the other one will be grumbling and complaining.

It is a choice about how you process your reality. I have half the people in the country who hate me, and then half who kind of like me. I run into people every day who give me the finger or say some insult. I have to say that every one of those instances is a gift for me. Those are all instances of God talking to me.

I have to ask myself, “What does God want me to do with this interaction? Does he want me to be kind and return that anger with kindness and with compassion and with empathy, or does he want me to get into a confrontation?” Doing that is a gift because I feel good about my life all the time, and I do not fall into that place where I am living in negative energy. I try to stay in the high vibrations and the positive vibrations all the time. It attracts good things in my life.

Yes, you can either be a victim or you can be grateful. If I am grateful, I am putting positive energy into my life, and that is what I get back. I agree with you. I have been doing a gratitude list ever since I first got sober. I share it with a bunch of people. It is just the best way for me to start my day.

The punchline is that after Lent, I just never complained again, so I have not complained in 30 years. I had a son who said to me when he was about twelve years old, “How come I never hear you complain?” I told him it is not my natal disposition. My natal disposition is to be complaining nonstop. I told him what I had done, that it was purposeful. After that, I know he did the same thing because I have never heard him complain. This kid is such a fantastic kid, and people love him because he has this Stoicism that just makes him a happy warrior all the time.

What Does Real Recovery Actually Look Like

In your opinion, what does real recovery look like versus just stopping the drinking or stopping the drugs or stopping the behavior?

The key to recovery is service. Bill Wilson, who was the founder of AA, had this revelatory moment. He had been sober. He had gone through the Oxford Group, which had six steps intended to induce a spiritual awakening. He had a spiritual awakening, and he could not imagine that he would ever drink again. It was unthinkable to him. He was a business guy, and he put together this deal that took him a year to buy the vendors for the Firestone and Goodyear Tire Company. It would have made him a millionaire during the Great Depression and set him up for life. He went to Akron, Ohio, to ink the deal.

While he was there, somebody came in and stole the deal from him. He was standing completely bereft in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Akron. He was 20 feet away from the lounge, and he could hear the clinking of the ice and the glass and the laughter of the patrons summoning him to come in. All of a sudden, all of his compulsion came back to him, and he just desperately wanted a drink.

The key to recovery is service. Share on X

He was on his way to the bar, and he passed the phone booth. Instead, he had this revelation, which was the central revelation of the program. “The only way that I am going to stay sober today is if I help another alcoholic.” He took out the yellow pages. He called the Salvation Army. He called the hospitals, and he finally found Dr. Bob Smith, who was a hopeless alcoholic.

Bob Smith came in and said, “You have fifteen minutes,” because he had heard it all. He had seen psychiatrists, and nothing had worked. He had never been approached by another alcoholic. They ended up staying up all night. That was the first meeting. The next day, they decided the only way they were going to stay sober was by helping another alcoholic.

Service is the secret sauce of this program. Bill Wilson understood that you cannot live off the laurels of a spiritual awakening. You have to renew it every day by being of service to somebody else. One of the ways you can be of service is by going to a meeting, because even if you do not talk, your presence there is helping somebody else in the room.

I check that off my list every day. I have to be of service to somebody else every day. One of the ways that I do that is by going to a meeting. You have sponsorship and all these other opportunities for service. You have got to make sure you integrate that into your life because your life now is not for yourself. You have got to wake up every morning and say, “Reporting for duty.” Just keep doing the next right thing. It is always the right thing to call another alcoholic and just say hi.

Where The System Is Falling Short On Addiction And Mental Health

If I am helping somebody else, I am not thinking about myself. That is my MO to be selfish and self-centered. It is all about Tim. Let us shift gears a little bit. Where do you think the current system is falling short when it comes to addiction and mental health?

The system is fragmented. Typically, an addict or an alcoholic, the government intervention they find you on the street through law enforcement. They put you in a detox, you go to a rehab, and then you go to sober housing. If somebody else finds you, you get housing usually through HUD. You then get a job through the Department of Labor. HHS is in charge of the original rehab and the treatment, but they are all fragmented. None of them is really taking responsibility for the addict from cradle to grave, from the street to jobs and recovery.

What we are doing now is integrating that treatment so that we are following the addict. The biggest key is to have outcome-based care, which is what you do here, which is why I wanted to visit this facility. Throughout the medical system, everybody is incentivized to keep the sick people sick, which is why we have the sickest population in the world.

 

Everybody gets paid more for keeping you sick all the time and just ordering tests. It is a volume game. The more tests you order, the more money the doctor makes. With rehabs, the rehab has an incentive for you to go in. The best thing that could happen with that rehab is if you relapse, because then you come back and pay another $30, $40, $50, or $60,000. What you need to do is to give that rehab ownership of that addict for a year.

After a year, their chances of permanent recovery rise exponentially. During that year, they should treat them once. If they come back, they should treat them again for free. That way, they have an incentive to keep the addict from relapsing. They are going to be thinking of every way they can to not bring them in, to give them IOP, to give them psychiatric help, help them find sober housing, and help them find a job.

Their economic incentive is now aligned with the best interests of our society. It is how you treat them, but also how you get them better.

People need different things, but the progression that works the best empirically is for somebody to have the availability of a detox and a rehab for at least 28 days, and then go into sober housing so their lives can be stabilized for a while. Somebody is watching out for them, maybe somebody is drug testing them. Addiction is a compulsion, and everybody has ups and downs in their lives. There are times when you say, “If I just take this one thing, it is not going to hurt,” or “I will get away with it; nobody will know.”

If you know you are being drug tested, you are going to get caught. That certainty of consequences is what keeps the addict sober at those times when they are weakest. There has to be some accountability and some supervision where they have accountability to people outside themselves: to their families, to their boss, etc. They know if they get a bad drug test, their boss is going to be told, or their family is going to know. The consequences allow them the strength to get through that moment of weakness.

The Importance Of Having Ongoing Support

Long-term accountability. I had a friend of yours, Dr. Jason Giles, on my show a few weeks ago. He said one of his biggest gifts was that he was held accountable for five years. Physicians, dentists, and airline pilots are held accountable for five years. What a gift. Can you imagine that? Being drug tested and held accountable and needing to continue with support meetings for that long? You can just go to AA, and that is free. In our program, we focus on longer-term care and staying connected after treatment. How important is that ongoing support after treatment?

For most people, it is critical. People get sober on their own by going to a twelve-step program, and that works. We know that works empirically. There are millions of people going to the program, and you go into meetings and see people with 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years of sobriety. There is just no other place. The most important thing for the individual addict to do is just to commit to going to meetings and let nothing get in the way.

The most important thing for an addict to do is commit to going to meetings and let nothing get in their way. Share on X

You have got to remember that anything that you put in front of that meeting, you are going to lose. I have a job with 70,000 employees, and it is the biggest agency in the history of humanity. I do not really have time to go to meetings, but I go every day. When I was running for president, I went every day. I was in a different city every day. I just told my team, this is my biggest priority. As long as I am doing that, the rest of my life works.

What Does Recovery In America Could Look Like If Done Right

I have got one more question here before I open it up to questions from the audience. If you were to zoom out and look ahead, what does recovery in America look like if we get this right?

It looks like the whole healthcare system that we have is outcome-based care. If somebody gets paid, particularly if they get paid by Medicaid or Medicare, that outfit is now responsible for what happens to you for a year, not just the 28 days that you are locked in that rehab.

Finding Hope In Addiction And Recovery

What gives you hope right now when it comes to addiction and recovery?

I am hopeful that we are going to be able to transition to that model and that we are now bringing together the Department of Health, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing, and law enforcement. We are doing model programs all over the country where they have a coordinated response, and they take responsibility from beginning to end for long-term recovery.

Answering Questions From The Audience

Let us open it up to questions. We have got clients and team members here. If you have a question about something that we said in our conversation that resonates with you, now is your time. Ravi, go ahead.

Thank you so much for that. That was very inspirational. In my experience, professionally and personally, we see substances change. Heroin, fentanyl, and now we are seeing a lot more alcohol. Yet the addiction persists. I have felt it is more about why we feel the need to anesthetize ourselves rather than what the substance is. The drug was the solution to a spiritual problem. Can you speak to your experience with how addressing some of those deeper issues really led to your recovery, the spiritual malady rather than the heroin problem? It was the Bobby problem that was the issue.

Having been to 10,000 meetings, I have heard lots of different people talk about how they believe they were born an addict, and others who believe they became an addict through trauma or culture. It is irrelevant. I believe I was born hardwired to drink and drug myself to death. As you say, it is a spiritual malady. It is physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, and the solution ultimately is the spiritual solution. That is the easiest way to do it.

People have to deal with their trauma, but the main thing that you have to deal with is what you are doing right now, because it is the only thing you have control over. I only have control over this little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes. I cannot change the past. It is okay to look at the past, but you should not stare. It is like a rearview mirror in a car. It occupies a very limited part of your viewscape.

People have to deal with their trauma. But the main thing you have to deal with is what you are doing right now. Share on X

That is an appropriate way of measuring how much we should be dealing with former trauma. The real solution is what are we doing today? Are you taking all of that trauma and trying to turn it into something good? Are you taking all the lessons that you learned, the humiliation and the failures, and trying to use those experiences to help somebody else? That is the real goal that we have. We can help other alcoholics. Psychiatrists cannot do it. People who are most successful at helping alcoholics or addicts are other alcoholics and addicts. The answer to everything is to be of service.

I’m Lisa, a recovering alcoholic. I currently work at a detox center in Scottdale, and I do patient coordinating. One of the biggest things that I see, which is so disheartening, is that we have a lot of repeat offenders who come to detox, do their five to seven days or fifteen days, and then they leave. They do not do any aftercare. It is one of the things that I ask so many of them now. I ask them why they will not go into any aftercare, which is traditionally an IOP or a rehab for a certain amount of time. I never really get a good answer. As just human beings or addicts, why do you think they do not want to take the next step? What is something I could possibly do to help move them in that direction?

This program is not for people who need it. It is for people who want it. If you do not want it, there is not much that you can do for the person. You need to be able to detach with love and with kindness. A lot of people need several encounters with the program before they finally come in, and each of those encounters is meaningful as part of the path to finally getting here. We carry the message, not the drunk.

A lot of times, trying too hard to get somebody to come in who is resistant is a waste of time and energy, and it is demoralizing. You need to be able to let people go. Everybody has their own path. As much as you love them, God loves them more. He has a path for that person, and it may not be an immediate recovery, and they may never make it.

There is nothing that you can do if they do not want it. Trying too hard actually makes them more resistant. In the beginning of AA, they used to tell people, I used to tell people, “If you do not think this is working, you should go out and do an experiment.” It is much more hazardous today than it used to be because of fentanyl. It is easy to die from addiction very quickly. You cannot help somebody who does not want to be helped.

I’m glad I got to ask you a question. It’s funny because I wrote Carl Jung this morning. It’s like synchronicity. I wrote this letter this morning, I promise. You answered my first question about how you came to believe. I like how you spoke about it because for me, getting a connection to God and sobriety is being able to really surrender and feel that.

That is something I try to bring to my patients, not necessarily a faith-based approach, but a connection to God. It is so huge. You talked about not complaining. I was complaining on my walk this morning. I was stuck in my head. I saw some trash, and I picked it up and wondered, “Why do the kids just throw trash in the car?” We live in such a nice neighborhood. I was talking to my wife, and I was just complaining. That poor woman had to listen to it for fifteen minutes.

There was this conscious moment. I thought that was one of those “God shots,” a miracle. God is like, “Just stop complaining.” I like what you said about how you just made a conscious decision to stop complaining. What do you do when you are in a space where you want to find what is wrong? You said you stopped doing it outwardly, but I bet you still have moments where you want to complain. What do you do to control that impulse?

I have all kinds of techniques. I pray for the person who has wronged me. If I perceive a wrong in the relationship, I pray for that person and pray for good things to happen. That is for me, not for them, because it obliterates the resentments. Resentments are like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. The real injury comes from carrying that resentment and letting that person live in your head rent-free and debate with him.

Anytime you have a resentment, it is an obstacle to God’s power flowing into your life. It is an obstacle to you being an effective person. If you want to be effective and peaceful, then you have got to let go of the resentments. I used to do the same, where there’s a hierarchy in the Jewish faith of altruism. The lowest level is doing something for somebody who is related to you and then taking public credit for it.

The highest level of altruism is doing something for somebody that you do not like and not telling anybody about it. I tried to do that every day. One of the ways that I did that was by going hiking every day, and I would clean up the dog crap on the trail. These were people who did not clean up after themselves, so I was cleaning up for them. Somebody asked me, “Are those guys assholes?” I said, “Actually, I like them a lot because they allow me to get this checked off my list every day.” I did something for somebody I did not like. Now I like them, so I guess it does not count.

Thank you so much for sharing your story. I feel like it’s my second meeting because six years ago, I got sober. I’m going to congratulate myself. You mentioned you have a big Irish Catholic family, as I do. When you first got into recovery, how did your family begin to trust you? For me, it has been several years, but I still have a big family that worries.

It just takes time. You have to give it time. It took you 10 or 15 years to walk into the woods, and it takes time to walk back out. Eventually, everybody is going to trust you.

 

You have a big family, and you being in recovery so long, people will come to you. How do you handle family members who are struggling or people in your life?

You are not supposed to twelve-step your family. I learned this the hard way. When I got sober, I was sober for about eight months, and I had a conversation with my little brother. I was telling him, “You should do what I have done. Come into the program.” I was saying it out of love, but I know the way he heard it was that I was judging him. He got angry and hung up the phone. Two days later, he was dead from an overdose. I learned early on that you are not supposed to twelve-step your family.

Your family cannot hear it from you. The only thing they can hear from you is “I love you” and nothing else. You have to trust God that God is going to put somebody else in their life who can twelve-step them. What I was doing was going to meetings. I went home, and everybody knew after dinner time I was going to leave because I was going to a meeting, but I did not tell them, “You should do this.” Within a year of my getting sober, eleven members of my family had come into the program.

That was without me telling them they should do this. They did come to me and ask for help, and then I would help take them to meetings. I had to wait for them to approach. Anytime that you do it, it is just going to harden their resolve not to do it. You can only hurt them by trying to twelve-step them. You are not going to be able to help them. There is too much baggage. Your family is the hardest because they installed your buttons, so they know how to push them.

I never heard that before. You’re not able to twelve-step your family members.

Mr. Kennedy, first of all, thank you so much for being here. My name is Kevin. I’m a meth addict in early recovery. I was just wondering, do you have any tips or advice on when the world is just so stressful, and there is so much anxiety that it feels like a tornado in our heads? What things kept you grounded?

That is just all about acceptance. A lot of those feelings of anxiety, if you just say, “I am not going to feel them,” you do not have to feel them. You just say, “It is a waste of my time to feel that way, and I am just not going to do it. I am going to focus on something good in my life.” Acceptance means the understanding that everything that happens is supposed to happen and that you are supposed to learn something from it.

You do not ask God for help in solving this problem. You ask him for help in solving your own reaction to it. Just say, “Let me be peaceful through this, and let me have faith. Let me learn the lesson that I am supposed to learn from this particular challenge in my life.” It does not come easily, but it comes through practice. You do not have to feel that anxiety. If you do what you are supposed to do and be a good person, your life is going to get good.

Everybody give it up to Robert F. Kennedy.

 

Important Links

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Instagram
• Synchronicity
• Dr. Jason Giles on Instagram

 

About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a nationally recognized attorney, public health advocate, and leader in environmental and healthcare policy. He has spent decades working at the intersection of law, public health, and government reform, earning global recognition for his efforts to challenge systems and advocate for transparency and accountability.

In addition to his professional work, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has over four decades of personal recovery experience. His journey through addiction and long-term sobriety has played a significant role in shaping his perspective on mental health and substance use treatment. He is a strong advocate for recovery-focused solutions that emphasize community, purpose, and long-term support.

Kennedy has been vocal about the need to improve addiction treatment in the United States, including addressing systemic gaps, expanding access to care, and shifting toward outcome-based approaches that support lasting recovery. His work continues to influence national conversations around addiction, mental health, and the future of healthcare in America.