Dr. Samantha Harte on Addiction Recovery, Trauma Healing & Purpose Driven Life

Today we're sitting down with Dr. Samantha Hart. She is a bestselling author. She is a top podcaster. She is also a founder and CEO and this is a woman on a mission. Please welcome Dr. Samantha Hart. Welcome to another episode of coffees. It's so good to be here. Thank you. Thanks for coming and it's been so great just to meet you and know you and get to know your vibrant personality and you know you have a mission and you're a woman of service and a woman who's just really just destined to do great things so I just wanted to have you on the show share what you're doing with our folks and help you in any capacity that I can. So I like to start my show the same way I start the show with every guest and what is your morning routine? Mmm. I wish I could tell you that I had an elevated God consciousness first thing in the morning but right now my morning routine is very very basic. I have my cup of coffee and if my children are not awake I try really hard to not touch my phone for everything I know about dopamine and what our phones are doing to the depletion of dopamine in our brain so if I can delay that gratification even by 15 minutes and just sit in silence which is of course when I get downloads from God that's the ideal way to start my morning. It doesn't always go that way because my kids might beat up the sun and tap me on the nose before I get a chance to do that but I do many spiritual things all through the day if I don't get it done in the morning. I mean that's powerful Samantha like you're the first person I heard that really just hit the nail on the head with the you know the delayed gratification mitigating the dopamine hit immediately. I never even heard that and I ask everybody that question so I don't take a conscious effort to delay looking at my phone because it's the only place I have my clock. Yeah I mean this is the world we live in I don't have a clock either but it's a new practice for me and I can't tell you how many times I've promised myself to look at my phone less if it is near me it will not happen. They are so highly addictive and that is now a new practice to say you can wait there is nothing that is that urgent for the first 15 minutes of your day where you have to touch your phone first knowing on a neuroscience level what it is doing to dopamine which is just giving us these super quick hits just like drugs where we are then going to crave it and probably check the phone hundreds of times more than if we waited same thing if I want to be more conscious with my children if that phone is in the same room as me there's no way that I'm not going to check it. Even though I'm consciously telling myself please don't please be present with your children so this is a level of mindfulness that I'm practicing right now. Now why don't you give the audience just a quick 10,000 foot overview of what is it that you actually do. Today I coach people and when I say that the fullest expression of coaching somebody is helping people build pain free bodies and purpose driven lives. I have a doctorate in physical therapy and so for many many years I ran a private practice that was all about whole person whole body and it's very hard in our healthcare system to see a patient for 60 minutes at a time. There's almost no practitioner whose time you will get in an undivided way for that long and I loved it but something I noticed clinically over the 10 years I ran the practice was what I came to call the soul sickness in the patient. These underlying emotional cycles of dysfunction or addiction that were not just enhancing the inflammatory process and making their pain worse but sometimes just getting in the way of them doing the prescribed thing they paid me all this money for that was going to make their pain go away and it bothered me but it wasn't something that they paid me to treat. I wasn't yet a personal growth coach. I was just Sam the doctor of physical therapy who could make your body move really efficiently and get you out of pain. And all the while I'm today 16 years sober from drugs and alcohol I was living this spiritual life and navigating life on life's terms and finding myself in pits of despair over and over with a new life circumstance that I would be faced with and having to elevate my consciousness again and again and again out from that suffering and into a state of resiliency and hope and joy. And it really wasn't until I lost my sister three years ago to a drug overdose that I felt the absolute calling to take the spiritual side of wellness and put it at the epicenter of everything that I do. So today when I coach somebody I can coach their body out of pain and into preventative movement patterns with my eyes shut but I am equally if not more interested in coaching their spirit out of a place of suffering and the way that I do that is by using the 12 steps of recovery that are old and a bit antiquated and taking them as a fresh approach a modern and trauma informed approach which is ultimately in recovery what saved my life and whatever the pain point is in the person's life whether it's chronic people pleasing perfectionism being obsessed with the beauty and body standard whatever is killing their spirit we do the 12 steps around that thing and they have massive amounts of breakthroughs they have pattern recognition they have strategies that fit into the picture of their life that they can take with them forever so at the end of 12 weeks somebody who coaches with me literally has the tools they need to not get hurt and to feel joyful even in the face of suffering and I just can't think of more important work than that. That sounds like very very powerful work that you're doing you're making massive moves and changing Peter people's behaviors their lives what's one story that really has resonated with you besides what happened to your sister that you can share with the audience. When I was five years sober I had my doctorate and I was working for somebody else in a PT practice there was a dream to maybe have my own practice one day but I couldn't see my way forward through that and this guy that I was married to had been with me on the front end of my addiction and we survived we did not go to therapy we did not do the healing that was really required but I thought oh my god this man stayed with me and then he started pulling away and pulling away meant we don't share our finances we don't share intimacy in fact when you try to initiate intimacy I'm going to turn away from you and reject you I'm going to be out of town all the time I'm going to leave my ring on the nightstand and in early recovery the 12 steps are infused with the word God and I came from a house where God is for the weak and God is for the fool and if you believe in God you're an absolute idiot and the only person you can count on is yourself so I was physically sober when this was going on in my marriage but I was spiritually bankrupt and what happened to me was I basically went to the brink of insanity in sobriety why because as this man's love was leaving and his love for me was my higher power that was God to me and if it wasn't there then who was I I was nothing and I was no one and what I was doing was doubling down on childhood patterns that kept me safe I was trying to control this man at all costs I will make you love me I will make you forgive me and then once you do I will be okay well I'm sure you know how this story turns out that doesn't work and for me I had accumulated enough time in sobriety to go this is rock bottom because rock bottom is where you don't want to die but you can no longer go on living the way you've been living and I remember a sober girlfriend said if you're going to stay in this marriage right now you can't live like this you need to find a place and sign a lease and start to heal and when that happened a woman who was in multiple 12-step programs came into my life and she said what if we do the steps on your marriage and I was open right because pain is a circuit breaker and what I mean by that is you're living a certain way most of the ways we behave are automatic right there they're just because the brain would have to use way too much energy if we were conscious about everything we did until that automatic behavior or pattern stops working completely and is causing you pain or misery and then you wake up so that feedback loop is interrupted it's like a circuit that literally fries out and I was in that space where there was this window of opportunity for change and I was very lucky that this woman was in my life and she had the approach that she did because I said what do you mean do the steps on my marriage well step one is I'm powerless over alcohol whatever the substances and my life has become unmanageable great I was pretty clear that substances were not a thing that I should toy around with I was pretty clear that they would kill me so then what do we do with that step well I'm powerless over my marriage okay that's become pretty clear tell me more I'm powerless over what happened between us before we got married that I cheated in my active addiction again and again and again and that he's really angry that we didn't stop and heal and do the work first I'm powerless over whether he is cheating on me or not I'm powerless over the future of the relationship and that I was so sure he was going to be the father of my children one day and it's all collapsing and when I try to exert power over him and by the way any other person place thing or situation my life becomes unmanageable in the following ways I'm obsessed with what he is or isn't doing my happiness is literally contingent on someone else's behavior someone else's perception of me which means I have no worthiness that's birthed from inside of me very dangerous way to live right and if all of that is true then what do I have the power to change so all of a sudden the steps if they were once an accordion packed with information but it all sounded religious and patriarchal this woman took the edges of the accordion and just expanded it so I could see myself inside of them and the most amazing thing that happened to me this is when my healing began is when we got to the ninth step which is making an amends and I was five years sober and so I had made tons of amends to people I had made tons of amends to my husband who I had cheated on before we got married and she said have you ever made an amends to yourself and I hadn't and we hear this kind of thing all the time in the world of self-help you know forgive yourself love yourself forgive yourself I was run by a voice in my head that said do better try harder you're not smart enough you're not pretty enough you're not fit enough and that voice helped me accomplish great things in my house when I was young that kept me safe in the world culturally that gave me a ton of accolades and dismantling all of that and being able to have someone give me permission to say not just when you were little but in this marriage what would it mean if you forgave yourself if you actually believed that you were a person who didn't deserve to be punished for something that happened between your husband and you five years ago if you were a person that deserved love and fulfillment and forgiveness what would you say to yourself instead well I hadn't even considered it I didn't even know I was allowed to consider it as I started to do that kind of work which meant that for days and weeks and months I was consciously listening to the way I was speaking to myself and when it was not nice which was all the time I stopped and said what would somebody who loves themselves say instead and then I had to think of that and practice saying it in that work I heard the whisper of God the whisper of my intuition and that has been the love of my life that has been the thing that nudged me to wrap my arms around myself in those lonely days in that apartment when we were separated because no one else was there and I would just cry myself to sleep that was the one that said oh I know you picked purple flowers for your wedding but you also didn't know who you were when you did that your favorite color is actually blue so you should make your business cards blue my book is blue now my furniture was accented with blue it makes me feel a certain way oh and by the way this woman you're working for in the clinic she doesn't see your value and there's a whole need in the healthcare market that isn't being met which is all these patients who are 60% better that insurance is like yeah we're done paying for this but they want to be a hundred percent better you're gonna fill that need you're more than qualified you don't need to be a doctor making $33 an hour anymore go get what's yours go help people in a meaningful way and so strong our fitness was born every good thing in my life has been been from the whisper of my intuition so that marital crisis literally saved my life and sometimes it's those wake-up calls for people that really is what they need you know marital whatever crisis people are in now you manage to rewire your brain now let's be real like a lot of people don't buy into rewiring their brain what part of your brain when you rewired it really refused to be healed well let's address the first thing that you said which is not buying into it I mean there's so much science about the neuroplasticity of the brain right that the brain is malleable it gets harder as we get older the longer we practice certain thoughts actions and behaviors the harder it is to change them but science has proven to us that we can yeah I'm actually gonna bring on a doctor called doctor rewire to this oh I know him yeah yeah he's amazing yeah he's coming on first off I'm doing his test and then he's gonna come on after yes I want to do his test to DNA test yeah it's pretty wild yeah what's out now and what we can unpack you know it's so funny that you're asking this question right I recently sat down with David Guillaume do you know who that is no he's he's an unbelievable businessman but I think beyond that spiritual advisor and I paid a small fortune to sit down with him and do a coaching session and I remember we were unpacking some parts of my story and he looked at me and he said what are you getting out of suffering and it was so startling because consciously I'm like what I don't I don't want to suffer I've had so much suffering in my life and my whole life's work is to overcome my suffering and to help others do the same and I've been thinking about it for weeks because one of the things that was coming up was my relationship with money and I grew up in a house where there was never any and when there was money you spent it because you never knew when it was coming back right and in the wake of losing my sister I did the most healing work I've ever done in terms of leaning into my pain but still I was running a little because if you're an addict the thing you're avoiding is feeling pain and uncertainty and lack and fear it just feels like too much and there's no question when she died that I was like this pain could literally kill me it could lead me to a relapse which would kill me it could kill my spirit from wanting to just be here on earth in any kind of joyful way and so in the pockets of time where it felt too hard what did I do I spent money and I didn't think a lot about it you know my husband makes a lot of money he was supporting me while I closed my clinic down to write my book and do this whole rebrand and and it became an issue and only in the last few months have I gotten to this belief system which is haven't I suffered enough why can't I just fucking spend the money right why not you try losing your sister to a drug overdose you try having your husband cheat on you for five years with the same woman and gaslight you for two until you he's not you try losing your dad in a state of anger with him and then running and feeling regret and shame you have miscarriages you have postpartum depression you you and this business of self-entitlement and self-pity that's baked underneath that and how dangerous that can be because yes I've suffered we all have suffering to contend with but what am I gonna do with it now what am I gonna do with it so I think you know interestingly back to the beginning of this conversation about the cell phone and the instant gratification even in sobriety everywhere you turn there's instant gratification there is a quick way out of your suffering and it really comes down to choosing your heart because there's almost nothing as an adult that if you have a choice to make that's either easy or hard it's two hearts and you have to choose which one are you gonna choose the one where in the short term it's easy but in the long run it will create suffering or lack or unhappiness or are you gonna do the opposite are you gonna do what's harder in the short term for the sake of long-term happiness just like the phone and my work from now until the end of time which I don't think is unique to the addict but it is especially true for me is that even when something as horrible as losing my sister happened can I turn toward what is the hardest in the short term which is feeling it all in exchange for long-term contentment and when you say feeling it all you're talking about not embracing any sort of addiction not running from your pain for immediate gratification and just sitting there in doing the hard work which is all the feelings of everything you know but okay and after you feel it all then what steps do you take you know the thing about feeling it all is that it's the most natural thing in the world you know emotions are just energy inside of us right and so when we run from that not only does it not go away and it just goes somewhere else and manifests differently if we feel it it runs through us it discharges and we literally go from a sympathetic state in our nervous system to a parasympathetic which is where we have more access to god consciousness so the very nature of letting yourself scream cry rage whatever it is and getting to the other side is not only do you now have evidence that you survived that very painful thing that you didn't want to feel but you have clarity of mind which is going to be the thing that births the new idea the next right thing it's where everything is born not running is where everything good is born but it's so scary for so many of us we're also not taught to do any of this right we're taught to push and grind and get the thing outside of ourselves get the money get the house I mean everything we're conditioned to believe is the opposite of that and then life has its way with us and we're going I don't understand I did everything I was told to do why am I miserable right and so this work in the in the world that I'm trying to bring to people is a way to return people back to themselves again and again and again so that if and when everything is taken away they are still whole yeah now we're now in this like world where people are buried with self-help noise it's like everywhere you turn there's like I'm coaching you for this or yeah I'm doing this and even you and I had this discussion like how does your platform of improvement self-help improvement inner seeking improvement how does it differ from all the other noise that everyone hears all day long on social media yeah I mean besides yours is really hard I think though if if we numb the dark we numb the light so for for as hard as someone's willing to work as deep as someone's willing to go that's as good on the other side as their life is going to get right so that's what I'll say to challenge what you just said and believe me Joseph walking away from just branding myself as doctor heart you know expert at body mechanics and injury prevention which was really after a while an easy sell because my sessions looked a lot like a personal training session right so don't train with your trainer train with your doctor oh yeah I want to do that and now I'm entering the land of life coaches right talk about an identity collapse an ego collapse and a very saturated market and all I can say is I have had to ask myself one of my great core wounds is codependency and in the work I'm doing today I'm like oh so is this your latest way to fix and save everybody else to validate your experience here on earth Samantha is this now the way you're doing it and the truth is I don't think so because I was a living breathing embodiment of working the 12 steps in a new way and how it changed and saved my life and it didn't save my sister right and I don't have regret or guilt about that I can only speak to what changed and saved my own life and when I work those steps in that modern way around my marital crisis and I have been working the steps again and again around every other really hard thing that's happened and it's given me a pathway through my pain I can speak to that right that is my experience so there are millions of coaches there are not millions of coaches who have a doctorate in physical therapy who have a best-selling book and who have 16 years sober and there's not one other coach that has my story and my story can help at least somebody else and I know that because I've experienced it and it makes my pain worth something my story is my differentiator and that's what I want to ask now it's like you you turned your story into your brand which you then turned into a business you know what do you think the hardest truth is about monetizing trauma that's a fascinating question the hardest truth about monetizing trauma because not a lot of people could just turn their hardships into a business and you you did that you walked away from a successful business and now you're you know coaching people on the most traumatic problems in their lives I think if I'm understanding your question correctly one of one of the hardest spiritual concepts that I've been wrapping my head around is did my sister die so that I could be this dialed in to my purpose did the fact that her soul's correction and that it was unable to happen here on earth become the very thing that gave my soul the path to its destiny and making sense of that loss in a way that doesn't feel like I springboarded off of the back of her death to have my name known around the world and being able to coexist with the loss and say I'm gonna do everything I can to learn everything I can about how to navigate a loss of this magnitude and many others to help as many lives as I can without necessarily going she died so that I could live right so sometimes there's this strange relationship around how good I feel with who I've become how sure I feel about the mission that I'm on because it would not have happened and at least I can't see how without her dying and so did one have to happen for the other to happen it's it's strange it's a very deep big question right and and god's timing though you know right we can't can't change that god has a series of traumas happen to us to just really refine us yep yeah and unfortunately you you had one major trauma that really molded who you are now the flip side of that is that is that what a gift of the dying that we can learn how to fully live right fully living to me is is never ever ignoring the whisper of our intuition and my intuition leading up to her death had been saying these patients you're treating are soul sick and you should be doing something about that too but I didn't know what that meant I didn't know what that looked like and her dying just put the nail well now you don't know you definitely don't know the way forward but you know you can't ignore this anymore right and so there's an urgency to my message there's an urgency to my life every single day who am I going to help today who am I meant to serve how can I become more like the creator whoever that is I love that now a couple last questions I have for you there's a three prong question and it's about goals what's a personal goal that you have for yourself a goal that you have for your family and then a goal that you have for your business hmm a goal I have for myself is is elevating my god consciousness every day and I'm doubling down on it which means that the prayers and mantras I'm saying are very specific to the things that I know I need to work through and I'm saying them out loud repetitively until my body complies and my mind and heart and spirit are in alignment and that has been shifting everything because now I'm not coming from lack at all when I'm in that space yeah I'm just attracting what I want to attract and that's very very powerful so basically having certainty beyond I love that my logical mind and that's the goal everybody should have elevate your God consciousness yep and you do that by identifying your mantras saying them out loud how many times you say them out until I believe them until I believe them I can you know when you feel resistance to something a lot of people hate saying their goals out loud because they're like they don't believe them so when you just speak them into existence you're like I'm not believing them now when you keep saying them and keep saying them and keep saying them then you eventually convince yourself I myself don't do that I'd like to do that well here's here's another layer to that when you say something and you don't believe it you need to talk to the part that doesn't believe it and pray for the certainty that you can overcome that limiting belief I love that because now you're tackling the problem yeah you're not pretending that you're fine with something that you're not although that might eventually work if you if you double down and say it enough times you might be like okay okay okay I believe this but I'd rather speak to the part of me that doesn't believe it right so God please prepare my vessel for all of the blessings it's meant to receive instead of I know I'm meant to receive all this where is it where is it please it means I'm not prepared yet I'm not ready please prepare my vessel for all of the blessings that I am meant to receive because I know I am meant to receive them right and now the work's on me okay how do I show up how do I become more prepared in this conversation in this interaction in the way that I view money am I thanking the money that I have or am I going thousand dollars it's not gonna move the needle prepared or not prepared which one right in my family I try to be a mindful mother you know my kids have a sober mom which is such a huge blessing and even still like back to the phone right I can sit with my children but be checking my phone because my business has run off of my phone right and I think the goal there is the kids are getting to an age where we can start to travel with them we can start to have real experiences we have more secure finances as a family and to not just set those up I have you know Jesse Itzler's big-ass calendar on my wall so I could really see the whole year and plan trips out which has been super helpful in a tactical way but then when I'm on those trips am I really there with them because those are the moments of our life and I'm saying that as a mother you don't have to be a parent but if you are a parent you know you understand what I'm saying right despite all the stress the craziness of being a parent we will always talk about triggers and self-help trigger trigger trigger I'm gonna say the opposite glimmers glimmers glimmers and even in the worst day there's gonna be one moment and it's probably gonna be with your kid that is such a glimmer of hope a radical shot of joy and love like you just want to burst open it was so good am I there for that am I paying attention to those moments every single day on the trip or not on the trip that is the goal looking for the glimmers in my family and in my business I mean Joseph I want to sell out stadiums one day I mean I I want to become with the greatest desire being to impact lives not the money of female Tony Robbins I want to speak on stages about what I've lived through and what I've learned and give people a blueprint for how to get through their hardest things so everything I do is heading toward that goal and I visualize that goal you know we talk about manifestation we've heard this before I feel it in my bones actually you speaking that just reminds me to you need to collaborate with Forbes Riley who is technically the female Tony Robbins she was at the masterminds and she she did you meet her I think I did meet her you guys have similar stories not like her she's went through some crazy stuff but she's does she have that that husband that's very buff no no yeah yeah that's her yeah yes okay we did we totally connected I need to follow up with her thank you for saying that I'll put you guys on a thread yeah she's you guys would sell us stadiums together and that'll help catapult the I love that to doing that just because she has that kind of same aura and she is doing it now amazing I love your story I love what your goals are last question when you're in front of the pearly gates what do you think God's gonna tell you I'm so proud of you Samantha Hart how do people find you if they want to connect with you social media and my website are both Dr. Samantha Hart and that's hart and my favorite thing for people to do is book a discovery call because there's nothing like unless I can meet you in person which is the dream but the second best thing is to actually look you in the face and and speak to you speak straight to your heart love it and you know you know it's so fitting for your last name I know I know it's amazing so I worked out God has a big plan for you I hope you hit all your goals God bless you your family and keep winning people need you you