Tyler: If this episode encourages you, be sure to follow the show, leave a five-star rating, and write a review. It really helps more people to discover the podcast. Now, before you go, take a moment and pause to reflect on this. What attachment has quietly gained too much influence over your life? And what is one small step you can take this week toward greater freedom? Remember, as Ian reminded us today, our greatest attachments Welcome to Typish, an Ennegram podcast where we explore how your personality shows up in all of life. I'm your host, Tyler Zach and in each episode I connect you with leading experts on how your personality impacts your relationships, mental health, spirituality, and everything in between. Over the past eight weeks, in episodes 13 through 20, I've been unlocking some exclusive interviews for you from my Typish summits over the past few years. You've got to hear from an Enneagram pioneer. An Enneagram godmother, an interpersonal neurobiologist, a magazine editor-in-chief, a Hollywood actress, even one of the bachelors himself, and today you get to hear from a famous Episcopal priest. What could all of these guests possibly have in common? Well, each of them have been profoundly transformed by this tool called the Enneagram. often begin as attempts to soothe our deepest pain. Real freedom begins when we have the courage to face that pain with honesty instead of running from it. In today's episode, I'm joined by best-selling author, psychotherapist, and The Road Back to You co-author Ian Morgan Cron. While Ian has helped millions of people understand the Enneagram through his teaching, this conversation is much more personal. Ian shares his own journey through addiction and recovery, why he believes every one of us is somewhere on the addiction continuum, and how our deepest attachments to things like work, success, relationships, control, or even our own pain.
Ian Cron: Tyler, it's a delight to be with you again.
Tyler Zach: Well, this is the first session on the summit and you and I were talking about just the idea of mental health and how hard it is to define, like what is mental health? So let's just start there. You know, in your words or in your mind, what is mental health? What are we talking about this week?
Ian Cron: You know, that's it. It's a really great question. And I've thought a lot about this because when you invited me, I started to really think to myself, what precisely do people mean when they talk about mental health? Like, ⁓ it's sort of like, ⁓ you know, everybody says they know what mental health means until you ask them to define it. Right. It's like, you know, they just sort of assume they know. So it's worth even stepping back for a moment. So now.
Tyler: Can quietly shape our mental health. This was one of the most talked-about sessions on my Mental Health Summit, and I think it will change the way that you think about addiction. You can find Ian, his best-selling books, his Enneagram courses, and his new Enneagram assessment at IanMorgancron.com. Now, without further ado, let's jump into the conversation.
Ian Cron: I'm, ⁓ as you mentioned in introduction, I always approach these questions through a spiritual and through a psychological lens. As a therapist and a priest, know, it's very hard for me to compartmentalize those two pieces of my person. And I think just batting this around, right, I don't have a pithy two sentence answer as to what good mental health is, but I could say that. I think that good mental health is the lived experience of being rooted in our identity as children of God, as beloved offspring of the divine, right? And ⁓ who are free, big word, free and able to love and be loved, to... ⁓ be in a stable relationship with God, self and others ⁓ in a way that brings fulfillment and purpose and usefulness in the world. think good mental health is the ability to ⁓ accept life on life's terms, to be able to maintain emotional and spiritual balance in the face of whatever life throws at us. ⁓ And living from a posture of presence, again, freedom, big word, ⁓ and compassion. And we could even talk about... Desire which is a very big idea, but we'll talk about that in a minute. But but because desire having rightly ordered desires In our life is a sign of good mental health now granted People will have all kinds of answers to this question So I don't want to say that that is but I think those are hallmark features of good mental health what I what I just said and I know that when we get off this call, I'll think of 20 others
Tyler Zach: you
Ian Cron: But ⁓ I think it's a good place to start. What exactly is it we're talking about?
Tyler Zach: We'll find out. I mean, those are brilliant, by the way. But we'll soon find out that mental health is not just mental. That health is mind, body, spirit. We're going to be talking a lot about somatics this week and the body. It's all connected. And I love how you mentioned that there's sort of a thriving or a shalom or a peace that you have to experience, that you were designed to experience with self, others, and God.
Ian Cron: Yeah.
Tyler Zach: And anything that can affect that peace, that shalom, is affecting your mental health. And we're going to talk about it this week. So I think that was a great start,
Ian Cron: Well, it's a start anyway to get us going. again, it's very, very complicated because we could talk about the absence of pathology, of disease, can, know, of so many things. But ⁓ I do believe for me personally that so much of mental health is rooted in identity ⁓ and this felt experience of connection. with God's self and others. And the capacity to, and again, that idea of freedom, that there's nothing that is constraining love, right? ⁓ Or misdirecting it.
Tyler Zach: So you wrote a book called The Fix on addiction and recovery. Now, before people tune out because they don't think the topic of addiction applies to them or the topic of addiction is affecting their mental health right now, I love for you to make the case that all of us, all of us, and we'll get to the enneagram in just a moment, I love for you to make the case that all of us are somewhere on what you call the addiction continuum. And I'd love for you to explain why denying that reality can actually affect our mental health.
Ian Cron: It's true that when you ⁓ use the word addiction that people ⁓ begin to think about people sleeping under bridges or people that need to go to rehab for drug and alcohol problems. So we other this group, right? We say this is a subset of the population that's really, really got some serious problems and, you know, need help. So. Through the lens of my own spiritual tradition and of my own experience, it's pretty clear to me ⁓ that we all suffer from self-defeating addictions. There was a great ⁓ psychiatrist, his name was Gerald May. He was a person of faith ⁓ and he wrote a book in the 1980s titled Addiction and Grace. That was a very important book for me. And in it, here's a direct quote, he says, to be human is to be addicted. And to be human and addicted is to stand in need of grace.
Tyler Zach: Wow.
Ian Cron: So he was saying that addiction is the universal human experience, right? So it's not a those people problem, it's an us problem. ⁓ Brene Brown famously said that we live in the most addicted cohort in US history. So addiction is part of what it means to be human. ⁓ And now granted, There is a continuum in psychology of addiction, right? From mild to moderate to severe, right? So yes, there are some addictions that are less, ⁓ you know, severe or life threatening than others, but all addictions interfere with our freedom to love God, self and others, right? They diminish our lives. So by way of, definition. Let me give you two. One is more clinical. The other one has what I think is a little bit more accurate, but it has a slightly spiritual component to it. The clinical definition of an addiction is an addiction is a compulsive, uncontrollable relationship with a substance, a behavior, or a person that has mood altering effects and negative consequences. That's a simple sort of Maybe not complete, but pretty good definition. But a more spiritual definition, and the one that I like and that I have wrestled with to find, is this one. That an addiction is what arises when the unquenchable desire for union with God misdirects and pathologically bonds with a substance, a behavior, or a person. Okay, so that is a much deeper idea and it tips its hat to Carl Jung, Bill the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous all of those people who said that essentially all addicts are just human beings who are looking for wholeness or union with God and that desire has become ⁓ Rather than attaching to God, it has attached to some behavior, some substance, or to a person. Think about codependency, relationships like that. And I think that's beautiful, a beautiful description, because to me, ⁓ though addictions are very, very complicated, when we talk about the psychology of addiction, it's very, very complicated. ⁓ But I do think at its core, has a spiritual component to it.
Tyler Zach: Yeah, so I'm, you know, I've pastored for a number of years too, so it's hard for me not to think about my own Christian scriptures. And I think this idea of idolatry will resonate with people of all faiths, but I love the Old Testament passage where it says, hey, you have these idols, and back in the day, they'd have these carved wooden idols that they had in their homes. And one of the prophets pushed back and said, hey, these idols... have mouths but don't speak, they have ears ⁓ but can't hear, and he's saying, you you're devoting your life to these things, looking for a sense of identity, purpose, ⁓ meaning, but they can't do anything for you. And then as you get to the New Testament, it sort of evolves into what the terminology is like heart idols. And so maybe they're not wooden idols in your home, but they're idols of the heart. They're in here. And the spiritual leaders say, whatever has mastered you, that is your idol. So if, to put it in modern day language, your work or a relationship has mastered you, if that's the thing you're looking for, transcendent meaning, purpose, a sense of identity, that's an addiction. ⁓ attachment, and you talk about that in your book, that the fourth century Christian desert mothers spoke about addiction in that way. So do you want to elaborate on what they meant by attachments and respond to anything I said?
Ian Cron: Yeah, so again, like what you're highlighting is something really important, right? ⁓ That the earliest church mothers and fathers would not have used the term addiction. I don't know when that came into common parlance. They would have talked about attachments and they're synonymous, right? ⁓ And I like that language a lot. So according to these masters, right? ⁓ It is a, how would I define this? that an attachment is a physical, emotional, or psychological dependence, that's a big word, on some real or illusory object that eventually robs a person of their freedom. And we can know that we are in the grip of an attachment when we use it in excess of our needs for purposes other than that for which they were intended. as ends rather than as means to a legitimate end. Okay, so that's an attachment, right? So let's say you're a workaholic, right? Work is a good thing. This is a process addiction, right? So we talk about process addictions are behavioral. So that could be sex, love, pornography, you know, these are food, these are process addictions, okay? Versus chemical addictions or substance addictions. So with work, when you use it in excess of its needs, for purposes other than for which it was intended, i.e. ⁓ bolstering your self-esteem. ⁓ When you start to use it to globally make your life have meaning and prestige and value, whatever it is, or for purposes of security and safety. When you then begin to use it as an ends rather than as a means to a legitimate end, now you're starting to be sitting somewhere on the addiction continuum with it or attachment continuum with it. ⁓ Ultimately, like attachments are spiritual workarounds, right? They are self-designed strategies for making our life more tolerable apart from reliance on the love, power and grace of God. So when that happens, they consume our attention. They drain our desire, right? They siphon desire for God away to something else, ⁓ leaving us with not only less life, but with less love for other people, ourselves, and God, do you see? And so when we lose our freedom in such that way, in that way, it begins to become potentially catastrophic, right? And. Your attachments will eventually start to demand sacrifices or compromises of your values that you may not be prepared to make, but do.
Tyler Zach: This is so fascinating. Now, let's take it little bit further. So you said addiction's not just about alcohol, drugs or gambling. overlooking of the more subtler unconscious attachments that can be just as powerful. ⁓ And you mentioned work. So can you help us to understand maybe a few more attachments that fall outside the traditional addiction category but still shape our mental health in significant ways?
Ian Cron: yes, are obvious addictions that we can call out, There's alcohol, there's drugs, there's sex, there are love addictions, there are porn addictions. Codependency we think of as a kind of relationship addiction. ⁓ Food, sugar, technology, shopping and spending, ⁓ gaming, sports betting, ⁓ gambling, social media. Those are addictions that are fairly well recognized as being seriously life diminishing behaviors. But there are countless other. kinds of attachments. ⁓ Off the top of my head, controlling behavior, being a controller is ⁓ an attachment, right? Like ⁓ the need to be right, right? ⁓ Success. ⁓ There are people who are addicted to the suffering of their past. They just can't let go. They don't know who they would be without it. They've organized their identity around it. ⁓ Shopping is a big one. Anger, people I know who are addicted to their anger. ⁓ Fantasy, worry, exercise, ⁓ overthinking, knowledge. The list goes on and on. These are ways of dealing with interior. These are external solutions to an internal problem. The internal problem is a feeling of inquietude, restlessness, feeling like you are, ⁓ you know, afflictive emotions that come up, right? These are fixes, right? Human beings go looking for fixes for emotional and psychological distress or spiritual distress. And they find these behaviors, these substances or these people, and they apply those as a solution to this internal problem. Now. Here's where it goes sideways. When your external solution to your internal problem becomes a bigger problem than the problem it was trying to solve. Now you got two problems. You've got the original big ache. That's what I call it in the book. All of us suffer from the big ache, capital B, capital A. It's called being human, anxiety, depression, ennui, loneliness, ⁓ what you name it, all these different kinds of internal distresses, distressers. And so we look for fixes, right? But those fixes eventually become a bigger problem than what they're trying to fix. And now you've got multiples of problems, right? ⁓ And what's hard in some instances, like with workaholism or success, there are certain behaviors that the culture and the society at large actually ⁓ lauds, right? Praises people for. ⁓ You know, so that's why You know, it's ⁓ something that requires a great deal of discernment in our lives to figure out what's like, are these things becoming ultimate ends to me? Like, like you've got to have relationships with other people. It's OK to to reasonably depend, to have a reasonable dependency on other people. Right. Or as the case may be, the question is, are they moving into the realm of ultimate dependency? Right. ⁓ Are they displacing God at the center of our identity and replacing him in that place? And then you've got a whole different animal on your hands.
Tyler Zach: you do a really good job sort of creating some signposts for us ⁓ of defining ⁓ how do we into this? Like, ⁓ yeah, I'm workaholic. why am I a workaholic? What is going on? What led me to this attachment? a five-step cycle, have five steps in your book, sort of outline how we got into the situation we're in. Can you ⁓ just briefly share those five steps are?
Ian Cron: Yeah, by the way, not original to me, but they are a helpful, simple, non-clinical lens, right, on how addictions get rolling. So we begin with pain. Human beings have pain. I love how the Buddhists talk about this, right? they use the, know, the Buddhists are famous, right? Like for saying, you know, life is suffering. But when they use the word suffering there, the word they use is Dukkah, D-U-K-K-A-H, and that could best be maybe translated as the feeling of not at home. That's a very amazing statement. The feeling that you're not at home. So this feeling, interior feeling that something's off, again, in quietude, restlessness, listlessness, anxiety, these different kinds of emotions that stir up in us, right? ⁓ and they cause distress, right, pain. And of course there's trauma and there's just the pain of living in a riven world, right? So we start with pain. In fact, Gabor Maté often, ⁓ you've probably read some of Gabor Maté's work. ⁓ Gabor Maté wrote a great book on addiction called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And he says the question isn't why the addiction? The question is why the pain? the, like, okay. So people say to all the time, I'll use you as an example. I'll use you. This isn't true, but I'll use you. Okay. Someone might say, Tyler has a drinking problem. And I'll say, okay, I understand why you're saying that, but actually Tyler doesn't have a drinking problem. Tyler has a drinking solution.
Tyler Zach: Mmm. Mmm, wow.
Ian Cron: Tyler has a drinking solution. It's not a drinking problem. Alcohol is not Tyler's problem. Heroin is not your problem. Overeating is not your problem. Those are solutions to a problem. And the journey of healing is toward turning your attention obsessively and compulsively away from the solution to the problem to focusing on the cause, the why, the pain. So we start with pain, right? All right. Here we are in the addiction cycle. We then turn to a person, a substance or a behavior. Right? That's our fix. We start, we discover a fix to the problem. When I feel distress of any kind, I now have discovered that that first drink begins to evaporate it. That sleeve of donuts at one o'clock in the morning when I, you know what I'm saying? Or that feeling of meaninglessness that goes away when I do X, Y or Z, right? Or when I use porn because the pain there is probably loneliness and depression. Porn isn't the problem, it's a solution to a problem. this recovery involves focusing on the problem and addressing it so that it renders unnecessary your need for a pathological relationship with a behavior or substance or a person. Make sense? So, yeah.
Tyler Zach: My goodness. All the pastors and then all the therapists watching and the enneagram coaches are stealing that right now. You have a drinking solution. And so let's get to the root of that's so helpful.
Ian Cron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So good. Well, okay, so we start with pain, step one. Step two, we find a substance of behavior of a person that ameliorates or soothes that pain. And by the way, we could have a good conversation about the relationship between addiction through the lens of attachment theory or through internal family systems, because I have a lot of thoughts about that. Third, we get a dopamine hit. Dopamine is powerful, right? We have a reward system in our brain. So we get temporary relief from those afflictive, difficult emotions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, right? ⁓ That's the thing with addictions that make them a little bit really kind of nefarious, right? Like in the beginning, they work. Right? Like, honestly, they work. Like, okay, so I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Go back to 1987. Well, let's go back to 1985. ⁓ Let me tell you something. I had a lot of fun drinking. It worked. I felt at home in my own skin. I felt oddly connected to God, actually, when I drank. was kind of a feeling of transcendence, a feeling of connectedness to myself and to other people. It worked, and then it didn't. All right, so you get temporary relief from whatever it is that's ailing you. Then comes consequences. That's step four. So all of a sudden, you're getting a DUI. All of a sudden, your wife says to you, ⁓ you have a problem and I'm gonna leave unless you address it, right? ⁓ You lose a job. Now, these are more severe consequences for those listening who have sort of less severe addictions. The consequences will be less, but still you're experiencing negative consequences as the result of these attachments or addictions. Right. So let's take an example. Let's say you have an addiction to control and to, ⁓ you know, let's just do it through the lens of an Enneagram One improver. Right. Like it's like You have an addiction to control, to being right, to being good, and it has become ⁓ a dependence. You get a mood altering effect from it. And the negative consequences is you're not a lot of fun to be around. People experience you as being judgmental, as being ⁓ critical, as being morally superior, or, know, again, in its most unhealthy expression. So you're... you're beginning to suffer consequences repeatedly, right? And then ⁓ the last thing is you experience shame and guilt as a result, right? So you, you you, the result of some addictive behavior makes you do something that either externally or internally that makes you feel shame and guilt, which then leads to more pain, which then starts the cycle over again, right? And now you're caught in an uninterrupted kind of circuit of, you know, lather, rinse and repeat. You're just you're not now you're you're locked inside the circle. Something has to happen to interrupt the circle of addiction. And ⁓ so it's, know. It's fairly predictable how this goes, you know, like, I've I've I've yet to hear a new and original addiction. story and I hear 50 a week probably. So you know they all kind of like are variants of the same story.
Tyler Zach: So to kind of summarize what you said the process. So it all starts with pain, right? ⁓ Then it turns to a substance behavior ⁓ for the solution. We get temporary relief. Then there's consequences. Then there's shame and guilt. And then... ⁓
Ian Cron: Mm-hmm.
Tyler Zach: maybe perhaps negative consequences with the relationships with the people around us because our individual attachments always have broader consequences with the people around us. That's really, really good. And you started talking about your story a little bit and you're one of the best... authors that I know and speakers who are so vulnerable with their story and that's why I love you and love all Fours out there who lead with vulnerability. So I just want to create some space. Do you want to talk a little bit more about your story and some of the fixes that to as solutions along the way just
Ian Cron: Yeah, sure. So my recovery journey begins in 1987 when I first entered the rooms of recovery for alcoholism. You know, I had grown up in an alcoholic family. My father died from alcoholism at 62 years old. Never saw a day of sobriety in his life, sadly, or recovery. And, you know... We often say in our family that we hail from an alcoholic dynasty. Two of my aunts died of alcoholism, two of my father's sisters. ⁓ I have a sibling in recovery as well. I have a cousin who died from addiction. So, mean, it's like, just, it doesn't run in our family, it gallops. ⁓ And so, ⁓ I just, hail from a loss. So again, I think addiction has, All to say, more than just, yes, it is principally a spiritual malady, but it has genetic, trauma-based, psychological, sociological elements. It's a very multi-pronged kind of psychological, spiritual condition. So yeah, I came into recovery in 1987, spent decades, and I went to a 12-step program for a couple of years, but I oftentimes say that I... For my first time in, I was more auditing the course than taking it for credit. And I don't want to paint myself in too negative a light here on that because there were really reasons beyond my control as to why that was the case, which I won't bore you with. ⁓ But I did stop drinking. The need to drink was expelled in those rooms, and I went on with my life. And then for multiple decades, I became a psychotherapist, I became an Episcopal priest, I ran a church, I wrote books, I wrote songs, I had a very productive, wonderful life. In ⁓ 2019, I had a relapse that I think was, in the book, for purposes of being sort of humorous, I paint myself in a more, as I look back, in a more negative light than I should have. The relapse came in the form of prescription medications, Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin. ⁓ And, you know, it's not like I really very consciously thought, you know, I'm going out. I'm, you know, I'm going out. At the time, and this is, you know, just how addictions are, I actually didn't make the connection in my head between my using those substances and relapsing. Like, because it wasn't alcohol.
Tyler Zach: Mm-hmm.
Ian Cron: Right, was just like, until I woke up and I had a real problem with them, did I go, ⁓ wait a minute, this is just a cross addiction. And this addiction that has been sleeping in my psyche for the last 25 years has just awakened. So, ⁓ and so I've spent 30 days in treatment. And then this again, this is now coming up on six years ago. So I decided to write about it in the fix because I spent those five or six years immersed in the literature of addiction, but also just trying to make sense of what addictions are from a psychological and spiritual perspective. And then, trying to figure out how can I communicate this to people who would not classically identify as addicts so they can deal with similar attachments in their own lives. What I would say though, looking through the lens of addiction as we've defined it, one thing that has always been true of addictive behaviors in my life is that they were a misguided search for God, for the divine. And I think this is, it's interesting, Carl Jung, the great Carl Jung, ⁓ He has this interaction with ⁓ Bill W, the founder ⁓ of Alcoholics Anonymous. And what people don't realize is that ⁓ Carl Jung is often credited with being the anonymous founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. ⁓ So they had a mutual friend and his name was Roland Hazard. And... ⁓ Roland went to see Carl Jung. He was ⁓ an alcoholic that was completely out of control. He went to Switzerland to spend a year with him, right? And ⁓ he spends the year, he thinks he's healed, and then he leaves and he's drunk by the time he gets to Paris, okay? He just falls right off the wagon after spending a year with the most renowned psychiatrist in the world. And he goes back to Jung and he says, is there any hope for me? Carl Jung goes, Actually, there isn't. It's most amazing thing that a psychiatrist, it was so brilliant. He goes, there's no hope for you. And he goes, there's none? And he goes, no. He said, although I have met some people who have had a vital spiritual experience and have found freedom from their addictions. And Roland Hazzard hears that, he goes back to New York, gets involved with a Christian organization called the Oxford Group, finds faith and. finds a solution to his problem, right? Then later this gets shared with Bill W and hence Bill W has a similar experience. And by the way, remember back in that era, if you were an alcoholic, the diagnosis was death. There was no solution. There was no medical, psychological solution to the problem. People just died. ⁓ And all of a sudden rises this society called Alcoholics Anonymous that has a solution. you know, Bill W. ends up on the cover of Time Magazine. It's an amazing story. But listen to what Carl Jung says to Bill W. in this letter about Roland Hazzard. ⁓ He says, his craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness expressed in medieval language, the union with God.
Tyler Zach: Well, I wanna bring the 12 steps ⁓ your neighborhood for those of you who are listening. ⁓ And Ian does this great in the book and shows how the 12 steps are for all of us. ⁓ And right in that first step, this struck me when I was reading your book. that first step that says we admitted we were powerless over blank that our lives had become unmanageable. And I think a lot of people when they look at the 12 steps or look at that first statement there, you know, what what's what are we powerless over? Well, we think of things like alcohol, drugs, food, like you've mentioned, but the enneagram is so helpful. because it can give ⁓ us a vocabulary for naming the deeper sort of unconscious attachments that quietly run our lives. And so I'd love for you ⁓ to go around Enneagram ⁓ and maybe start to fill in the blank a little bit for each Enneagram type. to show maybe what are some of the, what are some patterns, what are some unconscious things that each Enneagram type might get attached to? Like you already mentioned type ones, maybe getting attached to the idea of needing to be ⁓ right, or maybe control being an attachment for them. And so could you go around the Enneagram and talk about this with me?
Ian Cron: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, well, would, yeah, and I would actually say that you could make a case that each type's passion or fixation is an attachment, right? It is ⁓ a pathological relationship with a feeling or a thought pattern, right, that drives unskillful, unhelpful behavior that... interferes with our ability to love God, self and others. So and by the way, powerlessness is a word that some people just the packles go up on the back of their neck. But I'm always like, you can I just find it ridiculous that people are like want to protect the idea, the fantasy, the illusion of the power that they actually have. Right. Like most people can't sneeze and not wet themselves. I cannot figure out how they think they have power over large swaths of their life when they can't even control their bladder half the time. And what's ironic in the spiritual life is the moment you admit powerlessness, then a new kind of power comes in that frees you to become the person you want to be. So in the case of ones, you just mentioned it, right? There's a kind of powerlessness over their attachment to being good. That's a big idea for them, to anger in the form of resentment.
Tyler Zach: Ha ha ha ha.
Ian Cron: ⁓ to being right. For twos, there's powerless over their need to be needed by others, right? Powerless over their addiction to appreciation, to being seen and loved, right? For threes, know, addiction to ⁓ admiration versus twos, if it's appreciation, threes would be admiration. To success, right? to this reflexive behavior of projecting false ⁓ masks to others in order to win their admiration. Fours, I mentioned this earlier, like there are a lot of fours that are just have a powerful attachment or addiction to the suffering of their past, their unique story of suffering and pain, right? ⁓ And this pattern of reflexively and compulsively needing to be special and unique. Fives, this attachment to information, to knowledge, to self-sufficiency, to autonomy. ⁓ Sixes, lust, it's a lust really for safety, certainty, security, and... ⁓ I guess reassurance ⁓ or support, might be a better term. ⁓ Sevens, ⁓ powerless over this ⁓ passion of gluttony, this feeling of deprivation that can only be satisfied. They're looking for satisfaction, right? They're looking for... ⁓ to avoid pain and this commitment to just being free and satisfied. ⁓ For eights, this addiction or ⁓ attachment to control and power. And nines to being comfortable, to being unaffected by life, ⁓ to sloth. So you could go through all the enneagram types and reframe. these as addictions or attachments, which if you were to apply the 12 steps to them, would help ⁓ free them from them.
Tyler Zach: Yeah, so I want to really highlight how big of a deal this is and how useful it is for individuals watching, for coaches watching, for therapists watching. if you just double click on each of those those words, because I know Ian just mentioned briefly. the need for me as a type 3 to be outstanding, to be admired. If someone a therapy room, were to say, hey Tyler, let's talk about you and admiration ⁓ or you and workaholism. I need do a tremendous amount work because that is causing a significant amount of problems or and has ⁓ in my life. And so these words, what I'm trying to say, are very potent ⁓ and will take a lifetime to tease out and to work through. And that's why the Enneagram is so powerful.
Ian Cron: Yeah. Well first, thank you for using your own life as ⁓ an example. But can I ask you a few questions about it?
Tyler Zach: Please.
Ian Cron: Have you tried on your own unaided willpower to overcome the passion of vanity or deceit and workaholism and all the derivative behaviors that flow out of that, have you on your own unaided willpower been able to overcome those things?
Tyler Zach: No. ⁓ tell you about a where I had intervention. So whatever I jump into as three, want to be super competent. It's different from a five because I don't like listening to a lot of different podcasts on a lot of different topics. ⁓ I usually pick the topic that I to be ⁓ productive in and. ⁓
Ian Cron: Okay, so there's your powerlessness.
Tyler Zach: Seek and get validation from and when I was pastoring it was theology and so I would be reading books on theology i'd be listening to podcasts on theological while I was doing the dishes and my wife got so upset ⁓ At that I was I was not accessible That I ended up in the pastor's office with her ⁓ Back we were young ⁓ and was just a member of a church And I didn't see it as a problem. I was like Hey, I'm multitasking. I'm listening while I'm doing the dishes. And she's like, well, no, I literally cannot say anything to you because you have those things in your ear or you're too involved in a book. And I needed an intervention. And so which led me to a year of having to go on a book podcast blog fast of withdrawing from those those things because. Yeah.
Ian Cron: Yes. You went into the desert. See, this is what the desert mothers, this is why they went there was to overcome attachments and addictions in part, right? So you had to go into the desert. By the way, you're the second person I know. The other one was a five, whose spiritual director said to them ⁓ that they had to fast from books. You could do this with every single enneagram type. And by the way, it's interesting that you mentioned identity again, as being at the core, like so much of this good mental health is about identity. It's a lived experience of one's identity in the divine, right? And here you have developed a relationship with work and knowledge, right? and it became a psychological and emotional dependency that robbed you of your freedom, damaged relationships, right? ⁓ That was you were using work in excess of your needs for purposes other than that for which that information theology would never was intended and as an ends rather than as a means to a legitimate ends. Right? So you, again, this is again, very subtle. And people may say, well, look, you don't go to rehab for an addiction to theology. ⁓ But the fact of the matter is it diminished you. could have damaged your relationship with your wife. It started to rob you of your freedom. And what's interesting is in your story is you were the last one to see the problem. In other words, that's the thing about all addictions. Addiction is a disease that will constantly tell you you don't have a disease. It's the only disease that will tell you you don't have a disease. Everyone else will see it except you.
Tyler Zach: for those who... are listening today and are coming to with, yeah, I think I might be on the addiction continuum. ⁓ I think there might be unhealthy attachments here. What would your advice be, or just encouragement be, for those people who are right now, are kind of cut to the heart of like, yeah, there's some things I wanna to work on ⁓ in community. Where do I go next?
Ian Cron: Yeah. All right, a couple of things. One is you will definitely because of the sheer numbers of people that are coming, there will for sure be people listening that are in life threatening situations. You have people that are addicted to drugs, alcohol, could just be smoking too much weed. It could be, know, again, drugs, alcohol, porn, love them. They may have some serious addictions, more on the severe end of the spectrum. In which case I just. I just want them to know there's a solution. And the solution isn't the one they're using currently, ⁓ but it is could be found in the 12 steps, right? And for them, it might mean that they have to go spend some time in residential treatment or go start attending 12 step meetings if that's not possible. ⁓ so that's one group. But then you have this other group of people who now you got to you got to, you know, a two on here who just compulsively and codependently is meeting everybody's needs while disavowing their own, right? And they're like, I can't stop. It's just like a reflexive crazy thing. We just begin by being honest. That's what step one is. We admit that we're powerless over our compulsive need to meet other people's needs in order to bolster our own self-esteem. ⁓ I can't stop flattering people. can't stop, you know, I just, you know, it's like a compulsion. We just begin by saying, you know what, God, I'm licked. Like I got nothing, I'm out of ammo here. I've tried therapy, I've tried yoga retreats, I've tried this, I've tried that, and I still can't seem to break out of this pattern of codependency. So we just begin by being ruthlessly honest. This is just steps one to three. We didn't talk much about the steps, which is strange, because my whole book is about the steps. here's the deal. Steps one to three are about mending your relationship with God. So it's like recognizing your own powerlessness. coming to believe that there's a power greater than you that could help you out. And three, it's turning your will and your life over to the care of that higher power as you understand it, right? So it's just really about owning up to the fact that there are patterns and addictions in our lives we can't do anything about. Like we're just, they're bigger than we are. Our unaided willpower can't stop them. because we just, they're just out of our control and it's making our life unmanageable. You actually gave your own story as a perfect example of that. So step one is I can't. Step two is he can. Step three is I think I'll let him. So those first three steps are just about mend your relationship, your ruptured relationship with God. Four through seven is gonna be mending your relationship with yourself. Again, through honest self-reflection and owning those parts of your person that are unskillful and unhelpful. It's not a, it's not a. It's not a shaming, beating yourself up type of operation. If it is, then you're not doing it right. Then ⁓ eight and nine is about mending your relationship with God, making amends to others that you've hurt as a result of your addictive kind of patterns and character defects. And then 10 through 12 are just really about how do I create a lifestyle that supports the ongoing journey toward wholeness in my relationship with God, self and others moving forward. And there's just nobody who can't use this, man. It's like it just kind of gets at the core of what's broken and gives us a way out.
Tyler Zach: We sort of oriented this whole conversation around chapters one through three of the fix and I because we really wanted to make the case that this topic is for everyone this idea of attachments and addictions and if you are intrigued and want to learn more you have to go get Ian's book the fix I have it on Kindle and have found it very very useful so make sure to go and grab that book Ian I want to sort of land the plane here and
Ian Cron: ⁓ yeah.
Tyler Zach: you know, let people know where they can continue to learn from you. And so where do you want to point us to?
Ian Cron: Yeah, so ⁓ gee, a couple of places. One is IanMorganCron.com, I-A-N-M-O-R-G-A-N-C-R-O-N.com ⁓ is ⁓ my website and there's all kinds of courses. I have three really courses I'm really quite proud of. One is ⁓ called Discovering You, which is an eight hour introduction to the Enneagram. Then there's another one called ⁓ True U, is really kind of Enneagram 2.0. It starts to go into working with arrows, with subtypes, et cetera, that kind of stuff. ⁓ And then there's a really great course ⁓ called Enneagram in the Workplace. ⁓ And all three of those are just, I think, super helpful. They're loaded with content. I'm quite proud of them because they We worked hard to really create a very content rich experience for people. ⁓ Then of course the fix, but of course the road back to you, the story of you, which is a narrative approach, sort of a narrative therapy approach to the Enneagram, ⁓ among other things. And of course I have an assessment. Now let me just say something about my assessment. The Enneagram assessment that we created, is something that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating, and here's why. ⁓ As a therapist, I know that there are assessments out there that are ⁓ a great disservice to other people because they are poorly constructed, they're not scientifically validated, they were not put together by research psychologists and psychometricians whose only job in life is constructing tests that are accurate. So we wanted to put something together that was an actual psychological instrument. So we hired a research psychologist, a guy who's a fellow at Harvard, and this is what he does. And it has a very high, I'm happy to say, validity and reliability score, and it's great. it also brings out your it also reveals wing and subtype. So it's not just type, it's wing subtype and and about each type is about 22 to 25 pages of report.
Tyler Zach: Thank you for spending lots of resources and time on that. That's gonna be a tremendous gift to the Enneagram community.
Ian Cron: Yeah, and of course people can get a hold of me for corporate workshops, for individual coaching, all that can be done through my website.
Tyler Zach: Well, Ian, this has been another, I would say, sacred conversation with you. I'll be forever grateful for you for writing the road back to you and putting the Enneagram on the map. You really paved the way for many Enneagram teachers and therapists to use the Enneagram by giving it credibility on a large scale. So thank you, thank you, thank you for your incredible work. It has just been an honor to be with you today and I so appreciate you being here with us.
Ian Cron: Thanks, Tyler, it was really fun to riff for an hour with you about ideas ⁓ that lead to better mental health.
Ian Cron: Tyler, it's a delight to be with you again.
Tyler Zach: Well, this is the first session on the summit and you and I were talking about just the idea of mental health and how hard it is to define, like what is mental health? So let's just start there. You know, in your words or in your mind, what is mental health? What are we talking about this week?
Ian Cron: You know, that's it. It's a really great question. And I've thought a lot about this because when you invited me, I started to really think to myself, what precisely do people mean when they talk about mental health? Like, ⁓ it's sort of like, ⁓ you know, everybody says they know what mental health means until you ask them to define it. Right. It's like, you know, they just sort of assume they know. So it's worth even stepping back for a moment. So now.
Tyler: Can quietly shape our mental health. This was one of the most talked-about sessions on my Mental Health Summit, and I think it will change the way that you think about addiction. You can find Ian, his best-selling books, his Enneagram courses, and his new Enneagram assessment at IanMorgancron.com. Now, without further ado, let's jump into the conversation.
Ian Cron: I'm, ⁓ as you mentioned in introduction, I always approach these questions through a spiritual and through a psychological lens. As a therapist and a priest, know, it's very hard for me to compartmentalize those two pieces of my person. And I think just batting this around, right, I don't have a pithy two sentence answer as to what good mental health is, but I could say that. I think that good mental health is the lived experience of being rooted in our identity as children of God, as beloved offspring of the divine, right? And ⁓ who are free, big word, free and able to love and be loved, to... ⁓ be in a stable relationship with God, self and others ⁓ in a way that brings fulfillment and purpose and usefulness in the world. think good mental health is the ability to ⁓ accept life on life's terms, to be able to maintain emotional and spiritual balance in the face of whatever life throws at us. ⁓ And living from a posture of presence, again, freedom, big word, ⁓ and compassion. And we could even talk about... Desire which is a very big idea, but we'll talk about that in a minute. But but because desire having rightly ordered desires In our life is a sign of good mental health now granted People will have all kinds of answers to this question So I don't want to say that that is but I think those are hallmark features of good mental health what I what I just said and I know that when we get off this call, I'll think of 20 others
Tyler Zach: you
Ian Cron: But ⁓ I think it's a good place to start. What exactly is it we're talking about?
Tyler Zach: We'll find out. I mean, those are brilliant, by the way. But we'll soon find out that mental health is not just mental. That health is mind, body, spirit. We're going to be talking a lot about somatics this week and the body. It's all connected. And I love how you mentioned that there's sort of a thriving or a shalom or a peace that you have to experience, that you were designed to experience with self, others, and God.
Ian Cron: Yeah.
Tyler Zach: And anything that can affect that peace, that shalom, is affecting your mental health. And we're going to talk about it this week. So I think that was a great start,
Ian Cron: Well, it's a start anyway to get us going. again, it's very, very complicated because we could talk about the absence of pathology, of disease, can, know, of so many things. But ⁓ I do believe for me personally that so much of mental health is rooted in identity ⁓ and this felt experience of connection. with God's self and others. And the capacity to, and again, that idea of freedom, that there's nothing that is constraining love, right? ⁓ Or misdirecting it.
Tyler Zach: So you wrote a book called The Fix on addiction and recovery. Now, before people tune out because they don't think the topic of addiction applies to them or the topic of addiction is affecting their mental health right now, I love for you to make the case that all of us, all of us, and we'll get to the enneagram in just a moment, I love for you to make the case that all of us are somewhere on what you call the addiction continuum. And I'd love for you to explain why denying that reality can actually affect our mental health.
Ian Cron: It's true that when you ⁓ use the word addiction that people ⁓ begin to think about people sleeping under bridges or people that need to go to rehab for drug and alcohol problems. So we other this group, right? We say this is a subset of the population that's really, really got some serious problems and, you know, need help. So. Through the lens of my own spiritual tradition and of my own experience, it's pretty clear to me ⁓ that we all suffer from self-defeating addictions. There was a great ⁓ psychiatrist, his name was Gerald May. He was a person of faith ⁓ and he wrote a book in the 1980s titled Addiction and Grace. That was a very important book for me. And in it, here's a direct quote, he says, to be human is to be addicted. And to be human and addicted is to stand in need of grace.
Tyler Zach: Wow.
Ian Cron: So he was saying that addiction is the universal human experience, right? So it's not a those people problem, it's an us problem. ⁓ Brene Brown famously said that we live in the most addicted cohort in US history. So addiction is part of what it means to be human. ⁓ And now granted, There is a continuum in psychology of addiction, right? From mild to moderate to severe, right? So yes, there are some addictions that are less, ⁓ you know, severe or life threatening than others, but all addictions interfere with our freedom to love God, self and others, right? They diminish our lives. So by way of, definition. Let me give you two. One is more clinical. The other one has what I think is a little bit more accurate, but it has a slightly spiritual component to it. The clinical definition of an addiction is an addiction is a compulsive, uncontrollable relationship with a substance, a behavior, or a person that has mood altering effects and negative consequences. That's a simple sort of Maybe not complete, but pretty good definition. But a more spiritual definition, and the one that I like and that I have wrestled with to find, is this one. That an addiction is what arises when the unquenchable desire for union with God misdirects and pathologically bonds with a substance, a behavior, or a person. Okay, so that is a much deeper idea and it tips its hat to Carl Jung, Bill the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous all of those people who said that essentially all addicts are just human beings who are looking for wholeness or union with God and that desire has become ⁓ Rather than attaching to God, it has attached to some behavior, some substance, or to a person. Think about codependency, relationships like that. And I think that's beautiful, a beautiful description, because to me, ⁓ though addictions are very, very complicated, when we talk about the psychology of addiction, it's very, very complicated. ⁓ But I do think at its core, has a spiritual component to it.
Tyler Zach: Yeah, so I'm, you know, I've pastored for a number of years too, so it's hard for me not to think about my own Christian scriptures. And I think this idea of idolatry will resonate with people of all faiths, but I love the Old Testament passage where it says, hey, you have these idols, and back in the day, they'd have these carved wooden idols that they had in their homes. And one of the prophets pushed back and said, hey, these idols... have mouths but don't speak, they have ears ⁓ but can't hear, and he's saying, you you're devoting your life to these things, looking for a sense of identity, purpose, ⁓ meaning, but they can't do anything for you. And then as you get to the New Testament, it sort of evolves into what the terminology is like heart idols. And so maybe they're not wooden idols in your home, but they're idols of the heart. They're in here. And the spiritual leaders say, whatever has mastered you, that is your idol. So if, to put it in modern day language, your work or a relationship has mastered you, if that's the thing you're looking for, transcendent meaning, purpose, a sense of identity, that's an addiction. ⁓ attachment, and you talk about that in your book, that the fourth century Christian desert mothers spoke about addiction in that way. So do you want to elaborate on what they meant by attachments and respond to anything I said?
Ian Cron: Yeah, so again, like what you're highlighting is something really important, right? ⁓ That the earliest church mothers and fathers would not have used the term addiction. I don't know when that came into common parlance. They would have talked about attachments and they're synonymous, right? ⁓ And I like that language a lot. So according to these masters, right? ⁓ It is a, how would I define this? that an attachment is a physical, emotional, or psychological dependence, that's a big word, on some real or illusory object that eventually robs a person of their freedom. And we can know that we are in the grip of an attachment when we use it in excess of our needs for purposes other than that for which they were intended. as ends rather than as means to a legitimate end. Okay, so that's an attachment, right? So let's say you're a workaholic, right? Work is a good thing. This is a process addiction, right? So we talk about process addictions are behavioral. So that could be sex, love, pornography, you know, these are food, these are process addictions, okay? Versus chemical addictions or substance addictions. So with work, when you use it in excess of its needs, for purposes other than for which it was intended, i.e. ⁓ bolstering your self-esteem. ⁓ When you start to use it to globally make your life have meaning and prestige and value, whatever it is, or for purposes of security and safety. When you then begin to use it as an ends rather than as a means to a legitimate end, now you're starting to be sitting somewhere on the addiction continuum with it or attachment continuum with it. ⁓ Ultimately, like attachments are spiritual workarounds, right? They are self-designed strategies for making our life more tolerable apart from reliance on the love, power and grace of God. So when that happens, they consume our attention. They drain our desire, right? They siphon desire for God away to something else, ⁓ leaving us with not only less life, but with less love for other people, ourselves, and God, do you see? And so when we lose our freedom in such that way, in that way, it begins to become potentially catastrophic, right? And. Your attachments will eventually start to demand sacrifices or compromises of your values that you may not be prepared to make, but do.
Tyler Zach: This is so fascinating. Now, let's take it little bit further. So you said addiction's not just about alcohol, drugs or gambling. overlooking of the more subtler unconscious attachments that can be just as powerful. ⁓ And you mentioned work. So can you help us to understand maybe a few more attachments that fall outside the traditional addiction category but still shape our mental health in significant ways?
Ian Cron: yes, are obvious addictions that we can call out, There's alcohol, there's drugs, there's sex, there are love addictions, there are porn addictions. Codependency we think of as a kind of relationship addiction. ⁓ Food, sugar, technology, shopping and spending, ⁓ gaming, sports betting, ⁓ gambling, social media. Those are addictions that are fairly well recognized as being seriously life diminishing behaviors. But there are countless other. kinds of attachments. ⁓ Off the top of my head, controlling behavior, being a controller is ⁓ an attachment, right? Like ⁓ the need to be right, right? ⁓ Success. ⁓ There are people who are addicted to the suffering of their past. They just can't let go. They don't know who they would be without it. They've organized their identity around it. ⁓ Shopping is a big one. Anger, people I know who are addicted to their anger. ⁓ Fantasy, worry, exercise, ⁓ overthinking, knowledge. The list goes on and on. These are ways of dealing with interior. These are external solutions to an internal problem. The internal problem is a feeling of inquietude, restlessness, feeling like you are, ⁓ you know, afflictive emotions that come up, right? These are fixes, right? Human beings go looking for fixes for emotional and psychological distress or spiritual distress. And they find these behaviors, these substances or these people, and they apply those as a solution to this internal problem. Now. Here's where it goes sideways. When your external solution to your internal problem becomes a bigger problem than the problem it was trying to solve. Now you got two problems. You've got the original big ache. That's what I call it in the book. All of us suffer from the big ache, capital B, capital A. It's called being human, anxiety, depression, ennui, loneliness, ⁓ what you name it, all these different kinds of internal distresses, distressers. And so we look for fixes, right? But those fixes eventually become a bigger problem than what they're trying to fix. And now you've got multiples of problems, right? ⁓ And what's hard in some instances, like with workaholism or success, there are certain behaviors that the culture and the society at large actually ⁓ lauds, right? Praises people for. ⁓ You know, so that's why You know, it's ⁓ something that requires a great deal of discernment in our lives to figure out what's like, are these things becoming ultimate ends to me? Like, like you've got to have relationships with other people. It's OK to to reasonably depend, to have a reasonable dependency on other people. Right. Or as the case may be, the question is, are they moving into the realm of ultimate dependency? Right. ⁓ Are they displacing God at the center of our identity and replacing him in that place? And then you've got a whole different animal on your hands.
Tyler Zach: you do a really good job sort of creating some signposts for us ⁓ of defining ⁓ how do we into this? Like, ⁓ yeah, I'm workaholic. why am I a workaholic? What is going on? What led me to this attachment? a five-step cycle, have five steps in your book, sort of outline how we got into the situation we're in. Can you ⁓ just briefly share those five steps are?
Ian Cron: Yeah, by the way, not original to me, but they are a helpful, simple, non-clinical lens, right, on how addictions get rolling. So we begin with pain. Human beings have pain. I love how the Buddhists talk about this, right? they use the, know, the Buddhists are famous, right? Like for saying, you know, life is suffering. But when they use the word suffering there, the word they use is Dukkah, D-U-K-K-A-H, and that could best be maybe translated as the feeling of not at home. That's a very amazing statement. The feeling that you're not at home. So this feeling, interior feeling that something's off, again, in quietude, restlessness, listlessness, anxiety, these different kinds of emotions that stir up in us, right? ⁓ and they cause distress, right, pain. And of course there's trauma and there's just the pain of living in a riven world, right? So we start with pain. In fact, Gabor Maté often, ⁓ you've probably read some of Gabor Maté's work. ⁓ Gabor Maté wrote a great book on addiction called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. And he says the question isn't why the addiction? The question is why the pain? the, like, okay. So people say to all the time, I'll use you as an example. I'll use you. This isn't true, but I'll use you. Okay. Someone might say, Tyler has a drinking problem. And I'll say, okay, I understand why you're saying that, but actually Tyler doesn't have a drinking problem. Tyler has a drinking solution.
Tyler Zach: Mmm. Mmm, wow.
Ian Cron: Tyler has a drinking solution. It's not a drinking problem. Alcohol is not Tyler's problem. Heroin is not your problem. Overeating is not your problem. Those are solutions to a problem. And the journey of healing is toward turning your attention obsessively and compulsively away from the solution to the problem to focusing on the cause, the why, the pain. So we start with pain, right? All right. Here we are in the addiction cycle. We then turn to a person, a substance or a behavior. Right? That's our fix. We start, we discover a fix to the problem. When I feel distress of any kind, I now have discovered that that first drink begins to evaporate it. That sleeve of donuts at one o'clock in the morning when I, you know what I'm saying? Or that feeling of meaninglessness that goes away when I do X, Y or Z, right? Or when I use porn because the pain there is probably loneliness and depression. Porn isn't the problem, it's a solution to a problem. this recovery involves focusing on the problem and addressing it so that it renders unnecessary your need for a pathological relationship with a behavior or substance or a person. Make sense? So, yeah.
Tyler Zach: My goodness. All the pastors and then all the therapists watching and the enneagram coaches are stealing that right now. You have a drinking solution. And so let's get to the root of that's so helpful.
Ian Cron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So good. Well, okay, so we start with pain, step one. Step two, we find a substance of behavior of a person that ameliorates or soothes that pain. And by the way, we could have a good conversation about the relationship between addiction through the lens of attachment theory or through internal family systems, because I have a lot of thoughts about that. Third, we get a dopamine hit. Dopamine is powerful, right? We have a reward system in our brain. So we get temporary relief from those afflictive, difficult emotions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, right? ⁓ That's the thing with addictions that make them a little bit really kind of nefarious, right? Like in the beginning, they work. Right? Like, honestly, they work. Like, okay, so I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Go back to 1987. Well, let's go back to 1985. ⁓ Let me tell you something. I had a lot of fun drinking. It worked. I felt at home in my own skin. I felt oddly connected to God, actually, when I drank. was kind of a feeling of transcendence, a feeling of connectedness to myself and to other people. It worked, and then it didn't. All right, so you get temporary relief from whatever it is that's ailing you. Then comes consequences. That's step four. So all of a sudden, you're getting a DUI. All of a sudden, your wife says to you, ⁓ you have a problem and I'm gonna leave unless you address it, right? ⁓ You lose a job. Now, these are more severe consequences for those listening who have sort of less severe addictions. The consequences will be less, but still you're experiencing negative consequences as the result of these attachments or addictions. Right. So let's take an example. Let's say you have an addiction to control and to, ⁓ you know, let's just do it through the lens of an Enneagram One improver. Right. Like it's like You have an addiction to control, to being right, to being good, and it has become ⁓ a dependence. You get a mood altering effect from it. And the negative consequences is you're not a lot of fun to be around. People experience you as being judgmental, as being ⁓ critical, as being morally superior, or, know, again, in its most unhealthy expression. So you're... you're beginning to suffer consequences repeatedly, right? And then ⁓ the last thing is you experience shame and guilt as a result, right? So you, you you, the result of some addictive behavior makes you do something that either externally or internally that makes you feel shame and guilt, which then leads to more pain, which then starts the cycle over again, right? And now you're caught in an uninterrupted kind of circuit of, you know, lather, rinse and repeat. You're just you're not now you're you're locked inside the circle. Something has to happen to interrupt the circle of addiction. And ⁓ so it's, know. It's fairly predictable how this goes, you know, like, I've I've I've yet to hear a new and original addiction. story and I hear 50 a week probably. So you know they all kind of like are variants of the same story.
Tyler Zach: So to kind of summarize what you said the process. So it all starts with pain, right? ⁓ Then it turns to a substance behavior ⁓ for the solution. We get temporary relief. Then there's consequences. Then there's shame and guilt. And then... ⁓
Ian Cron: Mm-hmm.
Tyler Zach: maybe perhaps negative consequences with the relationships with the people around us because our individual attachments always have broader consequences with the people around us. That's really, really good. And you started talking about your story a little bit and you're one of the best... authors that I know and speakers who are so vulnerable with their story and that's why I love you and love all Fours out there who lead with vulnerability. So I just want to create some space. Do you want to talk a little bit more about your story and some of the fixes that to as solutions along the way just
Ian Cron: Yeah, sure. So my recovery journey begins in 1987 when I first entered the rooms of recovery for alcoholism. You know, I had grown up in an alcoholic family. My father died from alcoholism at 62 years old. Never saw a day of sobriety in his life, sadly, or recovery. And, you know... We often say in our family that we hail from an alcoholic dynasty. Two of my aunts died of alcoholism, two of my father's sisters. ⁓ I have a sibling in recovery as well. I have a cousin who died from addiction. So, mean, it's like, just, it doesn't run in our family, it gallops. ⁓ And so, ⁓ I just, hail from a loss. So again, I think addiction has, All to say, more than just, yes, it is principally a spiritual malady, but it has genetic, trauma-based, psychological, sociological elements. It's a very multi-pronged kind of psychological, spiritual condition. So yeah, I came into recovery in 1987, spent decades, and I went to a 12-step program for a couple of years, but I oftentimes say that I... For my first time in, I was more auditing the course than taking it for credit. And I don't want to paint myself in too negative a light here on that because there were really reasons beyond my control as to why that was the case, which I won't bore you with. ⁓ But I did stop drinking. The need to drink was expelled in those rooms, and I went on with my life. And then for multiple decades, I became a psychotherapist, I became an Episcopal priest, I ran a church, I wrote books, I wrote songs, I had a very productive, wonderful life. In ⁓ 2019, I had a relapse that I think was, in the book, for purposes of being sort of humorous, I paint myself in a more, as I look back, in a more negative light than I should have. The relapse came in the form of prescription medications, Adderall, Xanax, Klonopin. ⁓ And, you know, it's not like I really very consciously thought, you know, I'm going out. I'm, you know, I'm going out. At the time, and this is, you know, just how addictions are, I actually didn't make the connection in my head between my using those substances and relapsing. Like, because it wasn't alcohol.
Tyler Zach: Mm-hmm.
Ian Cron: Right, was just like, until I woke up and I had a real problem with them, did I go, ⁓ wait a minute, this is just a cross addiction. And this addiction that has been sleeping in my psyche for the last 25 years has just awakened. So, ⁓ and so I've spent 30 days in treatment. And then this again, this is now coming up on six years ago. So I decided to write about it in the fix because I spent those five or six years immersed in the literature of addiction, but also just trying to make sense of what addictions are from a psychological and spiritual perspective. And then, trying to figure out how can I communicate this to people who would not classically identify as addicts so they can deal with similar attachments in their own lives. What I would say though, looking through the lens of addiction as we've defined it, one thing that has always been true of addictive behaviors in my life is that they were a misguided search for God, for the divine. And I think this is, it's interesting, Carl Jung, the great Carl Jung, ⁓ He has this interaction with ⁓ Bill W, the founder ⁓ of Alcoholics Anonymous. And what people don't realize is that ⁓ Carl Jung is often credited with being the anonymous founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. ⁓ So they had a mutual friend and his name was Roland Hazard. And... ⁓ Roland went to see Carl Jung. He was ⁓ an alcoholic that was completely out of control. He went to Switzerland to spend a year with him, right? And ⁓ he spends the year, he thinks he's healed, and then he leaves and he's drunk by the time he gets to Paris, okay? He just falls right off the wagon after spending a year with the most renowned psychiatrist in the world. And he goes back to Jung and he says, is there any hope for me? Carl Jung goes, Actually, there isn't. It's most amazing thing that a psychiatrist, it was so brilliant. He goes, there's no hope for you. And he goes, there's none? And he goes, no. He said, although I have met some people who have had a vital spiritual experience and have found freedom from their addictions. And Roland Hazzard hears that, he goes back to New York, gets involved with a Christian organization called the Oxford Group, finds faith and. finds a solution to his problem, right? Then later this gets shared with Bill W and hence Bill W has a similar experience. And by the way, remember back in that era, if you were an alcoholic, the diagnosis was death. There was no solution. There was no medical, psychological solution to the problem. People just died. ⁓ And all of a sudden rises this society called Alcoholics Anonymous that has a solution. you know, Bill W. ends up on the cover of Time Magazine. It's an amazing story. But listen to what Carl Jung says to Bill W. in this letter about Roland Hazzard. ⁓ He says, his craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness expressed in medieval language, the union with God.
Tyler Zach: Well, I wanna bring the 12 steps ⁓ your neighborhood for those of you who are listening. ⁓ And Ian does this great in the book and shows how the 12 steps are for all of us. ⁓ And right in that first step, this struck me when I was reading your book. that first step that says we admitted we were powerless over blank that our lives had become unmanageable. And I think a lot of people when they look at the 12 steps or look at that first statement there, you know, what what's what are we powerless over? Well, we think of things like alcohol, drugs, food, like you've mentioned, but the enneagram is so helpful. because it can give ⁓ us a vocabulary for naming the deeper sort of unconscious attachments that quietly run our lives. And so I'd love for you ⁓ to go around Enneagram ⁓ and maybe start to fill in the blank a little bit for each Enneagram type. to show maybe what are some of the, what are some patterns, what are some unconscious things that each Enneagram type might get attached to? Like you already mentioned type ones, maybe getting attached to the idea of needing to be ⁓ right, or maybe control being an attachment for them. And so could you go around the Enneagram and talk about this with me?
Ian Cron: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, well, would, yeah, and I would actually say that you could make a case that each type's passion or fixation is an attachment, right? It is ⁓ a pathological relationship with a feeling or a thought pattern, right, that drives unskillful, unhelpful behavior that... interferes with our ability to love God, self and others. So and by the way, powerlessness is a word that some people just the packles go up on the back of their neck. But I'm always like, you can I just find it ridiculous that people are like want to protect the idea, the fantasy, the illusion of the power that they actually have. Right. Like most people can't sneeze and not wet themselves. I cannot figure out how they think they have power over large swaths of their life when they can't even control their bladder half the time. And what's ironic in the spiritual life is the moment you admit powerlessness, then a new kind of power comes in that frees you to become the person you want to be. So in the case of ones, you just mentioned it, right? There's a kind of powerlessness over their attachment to being good. That's a big idea for them, to anger in the form of resentment.
Tyler Zach: Ha ha ha ha.
Ian Cron: ⁓ to being right. For twos, there's powerless over their need to be needed by others, right? Powerless over their addiction to appreciation, to being seen and loved, right? For threes, know, addiction to ⁓ admiration versus twos, if it's appreciation, threes would be admiration. To success, right? to this reflexive behavior of projecting false ⁓ masks to others in order to win their admiration. Fours, I mentioned this earlier, like there are a lot of fours that are just have a powerful attachment or addiction to the suffering of their past, their unique story of suffering and pain, right? ⁓ And this pattern of reflexively and compulsively needing to be special and unique. Fives, this attachment to information, to knowledge, to self-sufficiency, to autonomy. ⁓ Sixes, lust, it's a lust really for safety, certainty, security, and... ⁓ I guess reassurance ⁓ or support, might be a better term. ⁓ Sevens, ⁓ powerless over this ⁓ passion of gluttony, this feeling of deprivation that can only be satisfied. They're looking for satisfaction, right? They're looking for... ⁓ to avoid pain and this commitment to just being free and satisfied. ⁓ For eights, this addiction or ⁓ attachment to control and power. And nines to being comfortable, to being unaffected by life, ⁓ to sloth. So you could go through all the enneagram types and reframe. these as addictions or attachments, which if you were to apply the 12 steps to them, would help ⁓ free them from them.
Tyler Zach: Yeah, so I want to really highlight how big of a deal this is and how useful it is for individuals watching, for coaches watching, for therapists watching. if you just double click on each of those those words, because I know Ian just mentioned briefly. the need for me as a type 3 to be outstanding, to be admired. If someone a therapy room, were to say, hey Tyler, let's talk about you and admiration ⁓ or you and workaholism. I need do a tremendous amount work because that is causing a significant amount of problems or and has ⁓ in my life. And so these words, what I'm trying to say, are very potent ⁓ and will take a lifetime to tease out and to work through. And that's why the Enneagram is so powerful.
Ian Cron: Yeah. Well first, thank you for using your own life as ⁓ an example. But can I ask you a few questions about it?
Tyler Zach: Please.
Ian Cron: Have you tried on your own unaided willpower to overcome the passion of vanity or deceit and workaholism and all the derivative behaviors that flow out of that, have you on your own unaided willpower been able to overcome those things?
Tyler Zach: No. ⁓ tell you about a where I had intervention. So whatever I jump into as three, want to be super competent. It's different from a five because I don't like listening to a lot of different podcasts on a lot of different topics. ⁓ I usually pick the topic that I to be ⁓ productive in and. ⁓
Ian Cron: Okay, so there's your powerlessness.
Tyler Zach: Seek and get validation from and when I was pastoring it was theology and so I would be reading books on theology i'd be listening to podcasts on theological while I was doing the dishes and my wife got so upset ⁓ At that I was I was not accessible That I ended up in the pastor's office with her ⁓ Back we were young ⁓ and was just a member of a church And I didn't see it as a problem. I was like Hey, I'm multitasking. I'm listening while I'm doing the dishes. And she's like, well, no, I literally cannot say anything to you because you have those things in your ear or you're too involved in a book. And I needed an intervention. And so which led me to a year of having to go on a book podcast blog fast of withdrawing from those those things because. Yeah.
Ian Cron: Yes. You went into the desert. See, this is what the desert mothers, this is why they went there was to overcome attachments and addictions in part, right? So you had to go into the desert. By the way, you're the second person I know. The other one was a five, whose spiritual director said to them ⁓ that they had to fast from books. You could do this with every single enneagram type. And by the way, it's interesting that you mentioned identity again, as being at the core, like so much of this good mental health is about identity. It's a lived experience of one's identity in the divine, right? And here you have developed a relationship with work and knowledge, right? and it became a psychological and emotional dependency that robbed you of your freedom, damaged relationships, right? ⁓ That was you were using work in excess of your needs for purposes other than that for which that information theology would never was intended and as an ends rather than as a means to a legitimate ends. Right? So you, again, this is again, very subtle. And people may say, well, look, you don't go to rehab for an addiction to theology. ⁓ But the fact of the matter is it diminished you. could have damaged your relationship with your wife. It started to rob you of your freedom. And what's interesting is in your story is you were the last one to see the problem. In other words, that's the thing about all addictions. Addiction is a disease that will constantly tell you you don't have a disease. It's the only disease that will tell you you don't have a disease. Everyone else will see it except you.
Tyler Zach: for those who... are listening today and are coming to with, yeah, I think I might be on the addiction continuum. ⁓ I think there might be unhealthy attachments here. What would your advice be, or just encouragement be, for those people who are right now, are kind of cut to the heart of like, yeah, there's some things I wanna to work on ⁓ in community. Where do I go next?
Ian Cron: Yeah. All right, a couple of things. One is you will definitely because of the sheer numbers of people that are coming, there will for sure be people listening that are in life threatening situations. You have people that are addicted to drugs, alcohol, could just be smoking too much weed. It could be, know, again, drugs, alcohol, porn, love them. They may have some serious addictions, more on the severe end of the spectrum. In which case I just. I just want them to know there's a solution. And the solution isn't the one they're using currently, ⁓ but it is could be found in the 12 steps, right? And for them, it might mean that they have to go spend some time in residential treatment or go start attending 12 step meetings if that's not possible. ⁓ so that's one group. But then you have this other group of people who now you got to you got to, you know, a two on here who just compulsively and codependently is meeting everybody's needs while disavowing their own, right? And they're like, I can't stop. It's just like a reflexive crazy thing. We just begin by being honest. That's what step one is. We admit that we're powerless over our compulsive need to meet other people's needs in order to bolster our own self-esteem. ⁓ I can't stop flattering people. can't stop, you know, I just, you know, it's like a compulsion. We just begin by saying, you know what, God, I'm licked. Like I got nothing, I'm out of ammo here. I've tried therapy, I've tried yoga retreats, I've tried this, I've tried that, and I still can't seem to break out of this pattern of codependency. So we just begin by being ruthlessly honest. This is just steps one to three. We didn't talk much about the steps, which is strange, because my whole book is about the steps. here's the deal. Steps one to three are about mending your relationship with God. So it's like recognizing your own powerlessness. coming to believe that there's a power greater than you that could help you out. And three, it's turning your will and your life over to the care of that higher power as you understand it, right? So it's just really about owning up to the fact that there are patterns and addictions in our lives we can't do anything about. Like we're just, they're bigger than we are. Our unaided willpower can't stop them. because we just, they're just out of our control and it's making our life unmanageable. You actually gave your own story as a perfect example of that. So step one is I can't. Step two is he can. Step three is I think I'll let him. So those first three steps are just about mend your relationship, your ruptured relationship with God. Four through seven is gonna be mending your relationship with yourself. Again, through honest self-reflection and owning those parts of your person that are unskillful and unhelpful. It's not a, it's not a. It's not a shaming, beating yourself up type of operation. If it is, then you're not doing it right. Then ⁓ eight and nine is about mending your relationship with God, making amends to others that you've hurt as a result of your addictive kind of patterns and character defects. And then 10 through 12 are just really about how do I create a lifestyle that supports the ongoing journey toward wholeness in my relationship with God, self and others moving forward. And there's just nobody who can't use this, man. It's like it just kind of gets at the core of what's broken and gives us a way out.
Tyler Zach: We sort of oriented this whole conversation around chapters one through three of the fix and I because we really wanted to make the case that this topic is for everyone this idea of attachments and addictions and if you are intrigued and want to learn more you have to go get Ian's book the fix I have it on Kindle and have found it very very useful so make sure to go and grab that book Ian I want to sort of land the plane here and
Ian Cron: ⁓ yeah.
Tyler Zach: you know, let people know where they can continue to learn from you. And so where do you want to point us to?
Ian Cron: Yeah, so ⁓ gee, a couple of places. One is IanMorganCron.com, I-A-N-M-O-R-G-A-N-C-R-O-N.com ⁓ is ⁓ my website and there's all kinds of courses. I have three really courses I'm really quite proud of. One is ⁓ called Discovering You, which is an eight hour introduction to the Enneagram. Then there's another one called ⁓ True U, is really kind of Enneagram 2.0. It starts to go into working with arrows, with subtypes, et cetera, that kind of stuff. ⁓ And then there's a really great course ⁓ called Enneagram in the Workplace. ⁓ And all three of those are just, I think, super helpful. They're loaded with content. I'm quite proud of them because they We worked hard to really create a very content rich experience for people. ⁓ Then of course the fix, but of course the road back to you, the story of you, which is a narrative approach, sort of a narrative therapy approach to the Enneagram, ⁓ among other things. And of course I have an assessment. Now let me just say something about my assessment. The Enneagram assessment that we created, is something that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating, and here's why. ⁓ As a therapist, I know that there are assessments out there that are ⁓ a great disservice to other people because they are poorly constructed, they're not scientifically validated, they were not put together by research psychologists and psychometricians whose only job in life is constructing tests that are accurate. So we wanted to put something together that was an actual psychological instrument. So we hired a research psychologist, a guy who's a fellow at Harvard, and this is what he does. And it has a very high, I'm happy to say, validity and reliability score, and it's great. it also brings out your it also reveals wing and subtype. So it's not just type, it's wing subtype and and about each type is about 22 to 25 pages of report.
Tyler Zach: Thank you for spending lots of resources and time on that. That's gonna be a tremendous gift to the Enneagram community.
Ian Cron: Yeah, and of course people can get a hold of me for corporate workshops, for individual coaching, all that can be done through my website.
Tyler Zach: Well, Ian, this has been another, I would say, sacred conversation with you. I'll be forever grateful for you for writing the road back to you and putting the Enneagram on the map. You really paved the way for many Enneagram teachers and therapists to use the Enneagram by giving it credibility on a large scale. So thank you, thank you, thank you for your incredible work. It has just been an honor to be with you today and I so appreciate you being here with us.
Ian Cron: Thanks, Tyler, it was really fun to riff for an hour with you about ideas ⁓ that lead to better mental health.
