Jim Balmer of Dawn Farms Interview

This is a transcription of the podcast interview with Jim Balmer.

Here is Jim's Bio:

Derek Mehraban  0:30  
Good morning. Good morning everyone. This is Derek, the recovering CEO happy to be here. And today I am here with James Balmer, the retired president of Dawn Inc, which operates the dawn farm treatment center and support facilities for individuals with drug and alcohol problems. Mr. Balmer was in the human services field for more than 48 years and is considered an international expert in the field of addictions. Mr. Balmer's visionary work at dawn farm has been cited by experts in the professional addiction treatment and medical community. He's currently writing a book on the history of Dawn farm, and the importance of mission in nonprofit work. Jim resides in Ypsilanti with his beautiful wife, Martha has four grown children and five grandchildren. Good morning, Jim. Good morning. Alright, so tell us tell our listeners how long you've been sober.

Jim Balmer  1:22  
Oh, I've been sober. 50 years. Last August. So, so dry. I couldn't burst into flames.

Derek Mehraban  1:31  
That's awesome. And that's a long time. 50 years? What's the secret? What's the secret to such long term sobriety?

Jim Balmer  1:38  
Well, don't drink and don't die. Those are those are key. I mean, and after we give up. I mean, I told somebody just this week that I went to my first a meeting sometime July 12, staff meeting in July 1971. And I was sitting in a parking lot outside of a Presbyterian Church, smoking a cigarette sitting on the hood of my car waiting for some friends under the influence. And a guy came up to me. And he said, I said I don't know what's wrong with you. But you're I won't tell. I won't say what he said. But he said you're you're not you're not well, and, and he said, I'm going into this meeting. Would you like to come with me? And I'd never 1971 Recovering community in the United States in 1971 was about 300,000 people. And I said, okay, and I went into this room with people who were old, you know, compared to me, they were really old. And, and they went around, they said, People announced themselves as being alcoholics. And at the time, I didn't realize that I was both an alcoholic and an addict. And so I said, I'm a drug addict. And I say I barely remember anything that day. But I walked out that night. And I remember thinking to myself, if I do what these people tell me, I might survive. Wow. And, and that was really my sort of turning point. I was well aware that I was unable to quit on my own. And I had tried. And I've had a couple of bad hospitalizations and committed to a network in all sorts of shares. But something I saw among those people got my attention, and I came back when we came back, and then I came back and eventually a naturally funny story. I was about a year sober. And my sponsor came to me and said, I think you're coming up on a year. So we want to celebrate once give me a cake and and gave me it gave me this. I don't know if I can give put it in there yeah. Time token. And they said, When was your day of your last drink and drug?

Jim Balmer  4:22  
It's really hot. Because because I was so very damaged. And so they had to, they had to figure out well, When did he start looking better? And they decided that sometime around mid July, I started looking like I was paying attention and they added a month and so my anniversary day so I guess we'll see. I'm the only person I've ever met who had their anniversary date set by the group. So you're clean and sober. I was hardly prepared to face life but you know, took me a while. I really damaged myself. By the time I was gotten to covering community,

Derek Mehraban  5:04  
well, you've been sober. You got sober one year before I was born. So that's pretty much that's a comfort. Yeah. And we're kind of birthday buddies, because my sobriety date is August 13. So I knew that actually, yeah, yeah. I only have 25 years now. So you're 25 ahead of me,

Jim Balmer  5:20  
I can't get away. I have attempted to tell people that I got sober when I was like, six, but no one believes me. So, right. When I, when I had more hair, that's when I could pull it off, but not anymore.

Derek Mehraban  5:36  
Now, that's amazing. Congrats. And that's a perfect example of serendipity. Or when the student is ready, the teacher will appear you seemed ready to come in, in a way, right.

Jim Balmer  5:45  
You know, I had very low expectations when I first got sober. I really I I find it's not funny, but it's fun. I had, I hoped that I could get to the point where I could drive down the freeway and not want to drive into bridge abutments every day. I was. Yeah, I wanted to kill myself every day. For a long time, a long time in a row.

Derek Mehraban  6:17  
So but that feeling obviously went away. Correct?

Jim Balmer  6:21  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I tell you know, people say, wow, you know, 50 years. So Well, yeah. You know, why do I am? Why am I still here, and a desire to drink or use drugs in a long, long time. But I remember what it's like to never not be afraid. I remember that. But that's sort of seared in my memory. And, and, yeah, the day is young, but I'm not afraid today. And I wasn't afraid yesterday. You know, I have problems just like anybody else. But But I don't live in a state of fear. You know, I don't live in a state of fear. I have, I have hope for all sorts of stuff. I will say I know over the over the years, it's been nice to be a part of this. Brian know how many millions of recovering people there are now. But everyone who was there when I got sober, clean and sober. They're all dead. Yeah. I think the closest in terms of a peer, someone who I met early in recovery is about six years. After I got some stuff, okay. All right. But I'm, I'm having a good time. I'm getting along. I'm getting old, creaky, you know. And I'm now retired after 50 plus years in the field. But I'm still having a good time.

Derek Mehraban  7:41  
Oh, yeah. So tell us a little bit about Dawn farm, the treatment center, you helped to found sort of how it began and where is it at today? Now, you know, the retired?

Jim Balmer  7:50  
Well, it's awfully it's in the same place. It's, it's, there were four of us. There were four of us. All in recovery, all in relatively new recovery. Gary, Archie, who was the sort of the guy with the original idea has been sober, 56 years, something like that. 57. And, and we were part of the fledgling young people in recovery. It was it's hard to imagine the community I live in. When I got when I moved here, a year sober. I probably have heard that somewhere. The entire meeting guide and phone list was typewritten on a half sheet of paper. Right? Wow, all of the meetings in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. And all of the support calls for 12 Step calls and stuff like that half sheet of paper. I still I do have it. But it's hard to convey how small I mean, Ann Arbor is a large community. And there were, I think, 612 step meetings in Arbor, Fernando two, and two and Ypsilanti. And so it's hard to it's hard to convey how small it was, you know, we'd have an annual meet annual gathering of people in the recovering community, and 200 people show up. And now there's, you know, they're gathering their international gathering, so recovering community that helped bring in 75,000 people into an arena. And it's it's hard to convey how different that is, you know? I mean, it's great. It's great. You know, you can go anywhere and encounter recovery, encountered recovering people. I've been all over the world. You know, I think I told you I had the opportunity about 20 Some years ago, to go to Kazakhstan, where there was precisely 112 Step meeting that had about 15 started by a German Catholic priests And the priest was so excited, took six guys. And he started teaching them 12 step recovery, and they all got sober. And he was so excited that he decided to do a Bible study with them. And they all got drunk. I got this message from this missionary society saying, what what did he do wrong? I said, Give these guys the the 12 step book, and leave him alone. And thankfully, he did. And they all got sober again. And I had the opportunity to walk into that meeting and Karaganda Kazakhstan, which is kind of having trouble, right. And the idea of being in a place where, you know, the ninth largest country on Earth, right. And a couple of guys got a hold of this book. And the next and now, you know, there's quite a number of meetings across this large Eurasian tundra but the idea of going to a place where no, you know, 20 guys in a room, was it. That's amazing. Now where I live, there's hundreds of meetings and hundreds of gathering So everywhere you go, so Right.

Derek Mehraban  11:18  
Did you meet I have to ask, Did you meet Borat?

Jim Balmer  11:22  
No, and interesting commentary, I met lots of lots of Kazakhs. I'm still in touch with people in Kazakhstan. I I'm Facebook friends with a number of my translators and some other folks. And you know, I spent I say, I went for a trip there for almost a month and it was the longest three and a half weeks of my life because it it pretty third world country. What lovely people, but by and bad half Russians and half cosmics by bar app has no conflicts. And there are there are no ethnic Kazakhs in the movie. In that there's a picture of a Kazakh guy in the in the the what you call the credits at the end of the board, that first movie, but no others, none in the actual they're all Russian Russians or something, you know, but there are no ethnic Kazakhs and

Derek Mehraban  12:22  
Okay, I did not know that. Well, so tell me, is an alcoholic from 1971 different than an alcoholic from 2021? What's the difference?

Jim Balmer  12:34  
Oh, boy. Well, people don't think we're fiends. I mean, honestly, I am to is, again, it's one of those. It's it's hard to convey. People say, Well, did you go to treatment? And I said, Well, no, because there wasn't any truth. There was a program near me in Detroit called Sacred Heart that didn't take IV drug addicts, and I'm recovering IV drug. And, and there was a place called sin Anon, which she got to look in history books, because it's no longer around. But it was a cult. So it was a prescribed marriages and shaved heads and all sorts of stuff. And the other option was, I could have gone to the federal narcotics farm in Lexington, Kentucky. And the problem was, is that it was an adjunct to the federal prison system. So you could go in, but you couldn't leave at will. And I thought I was in deranged was my addiction, but I thought that would be a bad deal, to go some scary, and I'd heard about it and there were lots of great, there were things going on there. There were great jazz bands, because some of the great jazz players were also heroin addicts, and they ended up in Lexington, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan all these guys, really, really great jazz players, and they had apparently house fans that were the real deal. But you couldn't leave without, you know, you got committed. And then, yeah, so and so. I didn't think going to treatment was an option. You know, of course, now, there's this, there's less than there was 30 years ago, which is a whole other story. But but you can get you know, you can get treatment. And because of the ensuing years and science and research and, and growth of treatment, there's considerably less stigma. You know, the, the culture, the center and culture has changed dramatically. You know, and, you know, part of it is also part of an access to drugs and just culture changes and everything. It's very rare now to find a family that doesn't have an addict or an alcoholic in their family, extended family, you know, and, and, you know, people There was a lot of addiction in the family beforehand. But nobody ever talked about it. And now people talk about it. And so that sort of the pursuit of reducing stigma is one thing. And the sort of natural evolution of talking about it is changed. I, I remember 40 Some years ago, and Martha and I got married. And we we went to visit her, her family, her extended family on the west side of the state. And we're talking to people and everything. And I had the opportunity to sit down with her, her maternal grandfather, right. And I loved him, he was a wonderful alcoholic, right? And I said to her driving back, I said, You didn't tell me your grandfather was an alcoholic? And she looked at me like I said, she's great, but he's alcoholic. She was kind of dumbfounded, because you didn't know. Now, did she know? It's a good question in families where people don't talk about that? Does everybody know? Well, probably, but Right. And of course, now, it's much more, you know, if people find out who I am, and what I've done for living and everything, my recovery, and they say, I had a, I got a cousin or I got cancelled. So So, so in that respect, stigma has diminished, there's still tons of it, right. And there's still a tremendous amount of judgment, you know, and proof positive. I tell people all the time, 30, I've mentioned 30 years ago, 30 years ago, roughly, you can open up the Yellow Pages, and go go to alcohol and drug treatment, and flip it open, and go through page after page after page for treatment centers that you could call up and say I'm selling, so I have an alcohol and drug problem. And they would say, Come on in. And we'll build your insurance. And if your insurance doesn't cover, we'll build local public funding, and you'll get 28 days of quality treatment. Some of them were better than others, but there were a lot of them.

Jim Balmer  17:14  
At one point, more than 30 years ago, every community hospital in the United States had an alcohol and drug treatment center in Washtenaw County, every hospital in Washington County into the two large hospitals. But there was a hospital in Ypsilanti that was so small that it's no longer a hospital, and it had a 20 bed treatment saying that you could and literally, if they couldn't bill insurance for you, it was they were all 20. So you may have seen the movie with Sandra Bullock 28 days. Yeah, you know, I was 28 days. Why wasn't because it was a clinical model was because it was four weeks of BlueCross BlueShield or Connecticut general. The length of stay were crafted around what insurance would cover back then. And of course, then managed care hit and burn it to the ground 90% of the fields that existed back in those days of 28 days. They're all gone. So it's actually another commentary. Why the heck is done farm still around, you know, because we were the poor relations, you know, in the farmstead, we rented a farmhouse dump. There was a marijuana plant grown by the back door. And it you know, it had been a dope house. You know, when when Gary got wrangled Jack and I to come out to that house, we walked in and looked at each other that looked at him and said, Excuse me, why are you and and they actually were mad at me for a while because they wanted me to move in among the original staff, Jack and Gary and beanie Archie moved in. And I got a job at CMH Community Mental Health that paid money. You know, and I had been, I've been in the crisis center movement in the late 60s. So I had some, some some cred from the bad era. I was part of the one of the first crisis centers and certainly in Michigan. It's still still around. And I just I I wanted to go someplace where I could be where I wouldn't be guessing about whether or not I had anything going for in the field. And so I took this job at CMH instead, and went on bond farms board in 73. And then came back as the clinical director in 1983 10 years later, okay.

Derek Mehraban  19:43  
And the rest is history. Yeah. So, would you say there's no difference between an addict and an alcoholic?

Jim Balmer  19:58  
Or they blend alcohol An alcoholic will steal your wallet. And addicts will steal your wallet and help you look for it. Okay.

Derek Mehraban  20:09  
Remember that?

Jim Balmer  20:10  
Yeah. Yeah, there's a degree of sociopathy related to non alcohol addiction. You could even you could be an alcoholic, and I read a lot. And that kind of that's completely untrue with most addictions. So yeah, I mean, I've heard people talk over the years, I've read lots and lots of journal articles about the degree of sociopathy associated with addiction. Make sense? Because you really have to, you really have to subjugate any kind of meaningful value system to be an act of like an IV drug addict. Just because you make, you know, hard and ill and often illegal decisions about your life every day. So yeah, yeah. I mean, have you noticed? are I are drug addicts more sociopathic than alcoholics title? Probably. I mean, you're really talking about a hijack brain, you know, your limbic pathway, your mesolimbic pathway gets hijacked. And it just makes you do you know, there are lots of things that will make a person do stupid stuff. Adolescence does that. You know, so, so, in terms of one being more disturbed than another, I've seen some pretty disturbing alcoholics. Yeah, and of course, you know, I, you know, I, in my career, I've seen some pretty impressive alcoholics have the highest blood alcohol level of anybody I've seen here was in the 70s. And point oh, point. Four Oh, is considered the death threshold. Wow. You know, there's a friend of mine who's in recovery has been sober 27 years, and she was a health professional. And she was she hated to, she hears about this. She and and you know who she is. But she got picked up in a suburb near here. And nobody thought she was drunk. They just thought maybe something was wrong with her, like maybe she had had a stroke or something. Hit her head, cuz she was something was odd. And so they, they came in the cost structure and they put her in an ambulance took her to Botsford hospital. Just to make sure she was okay. And it turned out she was an executive and healthcare system of some consequence. And, and they're trying to figure out what's wrong with her and then and she's there for like, 90 minutes before anybody says, you know, and we consider doing a drug and alcohol, a blood test on this one. And no, no, because she was perfectly lucid, conversational, cada literacy in the field. So she was able to have a functional conversation. And they drew blood and her blood alcohol, more than 90 minutes after they picked her up was point 575. Which is wrong, which explained a lot.

Jim Balmer  23:20  
And boy, they crack out the the Foley catheter and the end the vent line with me, they thought you're going to lose this person. Because she has said so much tissue tolerance, you know, she could no one knew she was drunk. So that's alcohol. As you know, when you people talk about alcoholism as a behavioral disorder, without any biological underpinnings, I have to do is see somebody be able to consume a level of alcohol that would kill a roomful of people. Right? No, that's you can't We can't fake that you can, you know, there are a lot of things like that, where it's like blackouts, normal people don't have like, normal people don't have extended loss of memory. But alcoholics do. So.

Derek Mehraban  24:10  
Interesting. So, Jim, you've seen a lot over your years, have you? You know, the recovering CEO, we're talking a lot to people who are in business, right? And, you know, I'd like to raise their awareness and maybe help them from losing their careers and lives. Have you seen people who were successful in business run into trouble with drinking and drugs? And could you share maybe a story or anything from your experience?

Jim Balmer  24:31  
Oh, well, there's, there's lots of them. I mean, there's lots of great stories. Well, yeah, of course. Yes. There's lots of occasion. I mean, there are a lot of people I know in town, who had who got sober and had fantastic who, who were in the, you know, in some kind of executive position. And an alcohol brought him down and they got sober and started working or a personal recovery program. And they did. Fargo than they had before, because they weren't hampered by drinking. You know, it's a running joke that alcoholics who who get sober are unstoppable. I mean, you know, because they happen to have an enormous amount of willpower. The whole notion that alcoholics lack willpower, it's completely untrue. Alcoholic says they have a problem is, is that they have too much willpower, right? That they really believe self, the Alcoholics Anonymous books refers to self will run riot, they say the alcoholic is a victim of the delusion that they can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world, if only they manage well. Right now, it really is the grand delusion of addicts and alcoholics is that if I were to stay out of my way, I can fix this. And it's almost and the hard part of it is it's almost always true. They're not drunk, their capacity to manage their life and everybody else's life is actually pretty good. It gets him into trouble. But, you know, I, like I say, I know lots of people who had terrible problems with alcohol and got sober. And they say it was the best thing I ever did for my career. Because sober, I'm 10 TIMES as effective as I was drunk. And I was pretty effective when I was drunk. Do you hear these stories about? I have a friend in town who's I guess he's up north now, but and he's been sober? I don't know. 35 years, right. And he was an executive of some consequences before he got sober. You know, and he always says he's, he always says, After I got sober, I figured out how to beat the Japanese in the technical field he was in. He says, sobriety was the ticket for me to beat the Japanese that they're on game. And I like that lots of times, you know,

Derek Mehraban  27:00  
that's a good testimonial.

Jim Balmer  27:02  
I just, it's funny. Just last week, I was talking to a kid who came through the farm, you know, I run into alumni, you know, at, I don't know, more than 100,000 people go through the farm, it might take probably sizably more than that. And, and I, this, this kid I run into and I see what's going on with it. And I remember, you know, I one of the things I did when I was at the firm is I kept doing intakes, I did admission interviews, because I came out of the clinical background. And when I became the CEO, I didn't want to I loved the idea of being separated from the folks who were helping. And so I probably forgot I admitted IV 90% of everybody who came into residential treatment in the last 30 some years. Just keep my hand in. So I knew a lot I you know, I didn't want people to come to the firemen not know who I am. But this is the I ran this kid. So So what are you doing? Hey, I'm in my second semester at law school. And you wouldn't have known this about untreated person who I saw the day he came in to residential treatment. And let's just say the notion of him ever going to law school was beyond the pale, you know, and, and he wouldn't mind me sharing it. There was a kid who I admitted I guess I didn't admit it. He came into the farm before he got there. But scrawny little guy came in without a high school diploma. So we talked about wanting to get him a GV. And we didn't get him a GED, but it was easy. And then he went, guys finished his actual high school degree. And then you went to undergrad, you got sober before him. He was a funny kid because he he was occasionally run into somebody who's got a particular acumen for chemistry in recovery. And so you got to watch out because they can end up doing drugs that don't exist in the PDR. Right. And he was like that brilliant dies. I don't think because he was so impaired when he first came to the park. Be hard to pick him Is it super smart, but maybe the smartest guy I ever met. But he he went back to school and he got a bachelor's degree and then he thought I want to be a helper. They want to help people. And so I went back to school. At your, your alma mater MSU. I assume he got his MSW there and he went into clinical work. And after a couple of years, a few years of doing clinical work. He said, You know, I think I can be of more service. If I get a if I become a physician, and he became a part of the fledgling medical to grieve, process, he and he ended up getting a deal. And then he went back to school and became a psychiatrist. And eventually he became Dawn farms psychiatrist. Wow. And unfortunately, he became ill and died some years ago. But he had, he was the, arguably the worst drug addict I've ever known. And he ended up being the medical psychiatric medical director at the University of Michigan, and it done farm. And at the local community mental health center, he was at

Derek Mehraban  30:34  
a lot of people,

Jim Balmer  30:35  
and he helped 1000s and 1000s of people. And he was very demure about it, he felt like he was just being of service. Okay. And no one would have ever predicted it, I would say that he worked into treatment. And I had so many stories, I just want to say, you know, I haven't had a desire to drink for years, a long time. i But, boy, go into the recovering community and hang out with recovering people a lot of entertainment for a buck. Yeah. And, and I have seen I just countless miracles, people who, by all rights should not be alive, much less wearing their own clothes and, you know, getting up and going to work and, and being a service being a value to other people. You know, yeah, I consider it a tremendous gift.

Derek Mehraban  31:29  
Well, I you know, I kind of know that feeling. Because, you know, I taught at Michigan State for 12 years, and my students would come up to me, I'd see him all over the country. And they would say, you know, professor, and they tell me their stories. People must come up to you out of the blue and say, Do you remember me and like, tell your stories, right?

Jim Balmer  31:43  
Yeah, I ran into a guy recently. And one of the Home Depot home furnishing stores. He walked up to me, we're both wearing masks. And he said, said Mr. Palmer, said I'm sorry. And he pulled down his mask, so I could see his face. And I remember him. And he described to me, he said, Yeah, I'm at a transitional housing. But I got a place with a couple of guys. And we're doing this bla bla bla bla bla. And he described this this sort of prosaic success story, right. I mean, this guy came into the farm, right, went through 90 days at the farm, did six months of aftercare and spent a year in sober housing. Right? They moved in, he got himself a job, and then he got himself a better job. And he and some guys got an apartment. And they're doing the deal, right. Except that all that happened during a pandemic. He was admitting he was admitted to treatment, under isolation, having gone through our detects in isolation, right. He completed his treatment during the pandemic, so he never physically went to a 12 step meeting or any other outside support until after he left treatment.

Derek Mehraban  32:59  
It's like, Oh, my goodness.

Jim Balmer  33:02  
And I just stood there looking at him. And, and, and I was moved, because I thought, How does this happen? You know, I mean, you know, you think there's a kind of a linear model for how people get better. And this This was there a lot of treatment centers that broke apart during the last couple of years because, and certainly there was tremendous tumult. But this guy, went through detects, went into residential completed residential, went through aftercare, got into transitional completed transitional housing, and is doing the deal going suiting up going to work every morning. Happy to be sober. That's amazing. Don't get old. Yeah. Say you, you got it. You still are involved in the recovering community with 50 years of continuous sobriety. Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? Yeah, that's great. My friend who you know, says it's a lot of luck.

Derek Mehraban  34:02  
It is. It's, it's good entertainment. It's a it's fun to see people, right. I love the community. Everywhere I go. I see people from a cover. It's wonderful. Yeah. So here's a question that I think people have, you know, can people still recover if they don't believe in God? Sure.

Jim Balmer  34:18  
Sure. I didn't believe in God when I got sober. And I'll tell you my stroke my god story. I was a couple years, probably a year and a half to two years so and it's a funny story, because I won't give the the broad details but I was. Well, I was I was young, I had hair down in my waist 1973 And I was still an atheist. I was the worst kind of atheists because I was in the existential atheist. I was reading Benedicta Spinoza. And and I was trolled stabbing a young lady who had about two months of sobriety, which, by the way, is a mistake, call stepping meaning trying to carry the message, not my job. And my sponsor came up and he said, Cindy, I'd like you to lay like leave the young woman alone until they're, like, sober. And I and I had been professing to her son how she didn't have to believe in God, she could believe in a dark, a doorknob or something. He says, and frankly, you said, you're not really in any position to, to talk about spirituality, with any authority to new people. Recovery. He said, so he said, matter of fact, he said, I would like you to go home tonight, and go to your room, and close the door and get on your knees. And thank God for another day of sobriety. And then tomorrow morning, when you get up, I want you to first thing get on your knees, and ask God to keep you sober for another day. And I looked him in the eye, and I said, I don't believe in God. And he never broke his stare. He said, I don't care. I don't ask you to believe in God.

Jim Balmer  36:17  
Well, you know, one of the things I learned about trust, recovery was that you a lot of it, you have to act on faith, to act like, you're like you're a sober person. Like, you know what you're doing. And eventually you actually know what you're doing. And so I didn't believe in God, but I did believe in my sponsor. You know, and even though he's a little terse about it, I went home, and I went upstairs, and I closed the door, and I got on my knees. And I was, I was like, I was one of those atheists that you didn't like, you know, as I would, you know, I just would, I leaned on people who believe in God, spiritual. And I grew up that way. You know, my father was an atheist. And but I got on my knees. And I thank God for another day, right? Although it sounds kind of ridiculous prayer, because I really didn't know anything about it. And the next morning, I did the same thing. And I didn't believe in God, but I did believe in this guy who would help me. Right. And for a while, that was all that mattered? Was he willing to follow someone else's direction? You know, and it had less to do with particular spirituality as much as it did with learning to listen to somebody else. You know, and people say, Well, how do you say it's everywhere? You know, I'm a pretty egocentric guy. But I learned in recovery, how to listen to another human being. You know, I remember saying years ago, my late sponsor, for I was my sponsor for 38 years. And, and I said, if this guy came to me and said, I think your job is threatening your sobriety. I think you should seriously consider doing something else. I don't know that I would do it in 30 seconds, but I would certainly sit down and take it seriously. Because I learned, I learned in my recovery to become teachable. Right? And to be assured that if all if my sole point of counsel is my, my can, my inner thought my inner head can stray. And so I need to be accountable. Have a sponsor now who's 30 years, less time in recovery than me? Well, you know, well, you know, my, my sponsor who was who had been around longer than me, died, you know, means you get get sober and stay sober, and you don't die. Eventually, you run out of sponsors, so you got to start picking them. And so, but, but it's that it's that surrounding him, but it's not entirely it's about me. How teachable Am I how willing Am I to follow someone else's direction? You know,

Derek Mehraban  39:11  
Jim, let me comment on that. Because you talked about if someone told you to bet your job is danger, your sobriety? So I've given that advice to someone before when they told me how their job involves taking clients out to strip clubs running up huge bar tabs with them, and they just kind of sat there and and they hit the tab and I'm like, that is dangerous. I'm like, you should switch careers, and they didn't listen to me. So no, I'm good. I'm good. So maybe I didn't have no sway.

Jim Balmer  39:38  
Yeah, well, right. And there are lots of different ways to learn. You know, I mean, I you know, not that I have any great answers. I I lucked out. I think I had a moment of clarity. That said, if I follow these, if I do what these people tell me, and it's funny, because at the time, you know when I had so If you were in the recovering community, you were in your 60s or 70s, right? I mean, it was old, when I say they're all gone, they're all gone. And, and, you know, they and it was there, they were very different for me. But I had this what I now believe was a spiritual encounter, where I said, I thought, I if I follow these people and do what they tell me, I can survive. You know, and I had no boy talk about low expectations. I had no expectation that I would end up, you know, I had a great career, you know, I mean, they didn't want me to leave. It's pretty funny that they didn't want to leave. But, you know, I'm almost 70 years old. You know, they actually, my board came to me at one point said, we'd like to get a ballpark from you, on on your expected retirement, zero to five years, five to 10 years, or 10 to 15 years. And I started to laugh. I said, Why do you want me here in my 80s? Are you insane? Like, I mean, I flattered, but come on. Right.

Derek Mehraban  41:12  
So that's awesome.

Jim Balmer  41:14  
And of course, one of the things I said, Well, I'm going to leave before any kind of dementia becomes obvious. And people started talking about this, once they gonna leave. And I don't think they do, but Right, right.

Derek Mehraban  41:30  
Alright, so we got a few more minutes. So can you tell me what is the number one reason people relapse on alcohol? Or drugs?

Jim Balmer  41:38  
Yeah, pride, pride, but not being accountable. You know, I mean, it's hard to live in the life. It's hard to, it's hard to tell on yourself. You know, and, you know, if it was easy, everybody would do it. Having to tell to share what's really going on, you know, to be honest about your, your, your troubles, you know, and I can I can really, I can totally relate, nobody wants to tell him themselves. Nobody wants to have Yeah, yeah. And no one asked me 20 I became teachable, partly because I was so broken. When I first got sober. You know, I'd been committed to a mental institution in Waterbury, Vermont, has spent a lot of time on the road, I hitchhiked 10s of 1000s of miles around the country. Yeah, I lived in a coma. I, you know, I did the sort of prototypical hippie, but I got really sick I was I was I was had malnutrition, and got a really bad case of hepatitis that I had to treat for more than five years after I got clean and sober. So I was broken. And I think that made me teachable. That's funny, because, oh, 1213 years later, I had a job. I was married, I had a kid. I was like, doing it. Right. I was in the game. And I went, not quite a couple of weeks, but more in 10 days without going to a meeting. And I was, I was living the dream. I was right, right in the middle of it. It's a sad story, because a lot one of the people who had come through the firm, great guy, wonderful guy, and I stood up at his wedding. He started up in Maryland. And I got an ad in him. And anyway. And he eventually came back and worked for the farm, and was a therapist and then became the CEO began that the president and he was about seven and a half years sober. And he he was playing around a golf who's wearing a three piece suit. He just finished a game of golf with some guys at the country club, a Travis point, not far from here. And somebody offered him a glass of white wine. In any thought. Why the hell no. And he drank half a glass of white wine and he said it down and he went on. And a couple of weeks went by, and he thought, Hmm, that was easy. And he walked down to a local bar and he had a Pabst Blue Ribbon shell beer. He went home. No harm, no foul, and it took him about six months before his life burst into flame and they found him drunk and they sent him to Hazleton in Minnesota to town and gown treatment center. And myself and Jack who was one of the cofounders to the farm, and I had another guy went picked him up at the airport a month later. And he got off the plane. And we knew he wasn't. Right, he started talking about all the great stuff he learned in treatment that he could apply at the farm, not realizing that he was never coming back to the farm. And he spent the next 14 years trying unsuccessfully to get severed before he overdosed and died. And when he died, my friend Jack and I were the only phone numbers in his wallet, where everybody else they called, on his behalf, said, I don't want to leave me alone. It burned through everybody who knew except this one guy. And we went to Chelsea hospital, to say goodbye to him before they turned out the machines. This guy was as smart as anybody I've ever know, helped a lot of people. A week before two weeks before he died. I used to send stuff to him in the mail just to mess with your finished just to ruin his day. And he called me up and he said, Listen, you bastard. He said, If I go out to a meeting with you, will you? Will you leave me alone? For I say absolutely sure. And, and we met at a local Chinese restaurant, then we went to a regular Tuesday night meeting. And I had given a heads up to him for people who knew this guy.

Jim Balmer  46:23  
And they came to that meeting. So we had a table that was where he was surrounded by people who really loved it. Really loved it. I loved it. And he shared his sense of despair, that he felt that the opportunity for him to find real sobriety again was had left him. And for a long time I said anybody can get clean and sober. I don't believe that. Right? Cuz this guy, if there was ever an argument for a guy being able to pull together, this was the guy. And he died alone in on the floor and a house and Chelsea. And I, all of us talk up every now and then we run into one another I still miss him. Right? Can I believe it's possible that it could have been beyond his grasp at that point. That his his path, his desire to get sober was not enough to overcome this disease? Which tragic, tragic. So, you know, I think recovery is one of those things that's extraordinary and expansive, and makes people you know, really makes dramatic changes. I've seen so many miracles in my career. It's just astonishing. And I believe you can get to the point where you can lose.

Derek Mehraban  47:42  
So Jim, I got I got two more questions. And I appreciate that last story. It's a little sad. So can you tell me a story about someone that nobody thought could ever get sober and did finally get sober? And what? What was the happy story there? I'm sure you've seen that a few times.

Jim Balmer  47:57  
I'd have to pick. It's heavy, hard to pick one. Yeah, but I have seen I've seen so many people show up in, you know, in a jail jumpsuit, where they don't have their clothes, they get the clothes. There are too many to count. You know. I mean, I mean, I sponsor a guy in recovery now, who has 44 years of continuous sobriety. He went through the farm, and he was in such bad withdrawal, that he was unable to shave off his own beard. So another guy, another resident, that the firm shaved off his beard, right? He lives in my neighborhood, four doors down. And, and he's, you know, had a full career and raise kids. I mean, had the whole dream. He's a wonderful guy. I love the fact that I, I get to go down knock on his door, and we, you know, and there are hundreds and hundreds, maybe 1000s of stories like that. You know, I mean, really the answer. People stick around. You get better. I mean, you really do get error. I mean, for the idea that the addiction to some kind of death sentence, you know, absolutely not true. You know, there's lots of tragedies but I have just seen so many people where that doctor and that doctor died sober number of years sober. of a of a respiratory disease, but just see him gets over he was maybe the worst drug addict I've ever known. You know, and not only did he get sober, he became a vessel of service for 10s of 1000s of people. That's great. So that's one once the other.

Derek Mehraban  49:54  
All right, last one. So what's next for Jim Balmer? How are you going to spend the next 30 years sober?

Jim Balmer  50:01  
Ah, well, I'm gonna spend him with my wife and my kids and my grandkids, five grandkids, and my son's getting married. So I may have more grandkids, which is very cool. grandkids are cool so much during the pandemic, but I, I, I was made to be a grandpa. So I'm working, I'm writing a book that I started, when I was still defined, not realizing I took a sabbatical that seven, eight years ago, with the idea of gathering information for this book, and the book is a history of stories about the farm, you've heard a couple of, you know, things. They're wonderful things that have happened during the course of the farm. And I've been there for a good piece of it. So I want to get some of the narrative down before I croak, and nobody has. It started as just that narrative, I traveled around the country. It developed a second piece when I went and talked to people, I bet visited treatment centers all over the United States. And, and in two cases, and I wanted to find out about mission, because contextually the farm. The farm was the poor relation. We started at the farmer was a joke, people are like, here, you want to live there. And it's just really an over the years the farm really was the sort of poor cousin in the you know, in treatment centers rose up, and they were all fill open ferns and funky has done farm was for a long time. And it's just like, you know, like I say that the poor relations. And we watch the field, burst into flame, and for the most part disappeared, and begging the question, why the heck is the farm still there. And you can talk about mission values and the and the empowerment of people. There's, I mean, things to talk about. But I went around and I talked to John shore Sloth from Betty Ford and I visited the midnight mission, and I visited all these firms visited Gould farm in Massachusetts, 100 year old treatment center. The various places to just to see, and how did mission extrapolate? You know, and I know that I know that organizations that have strong values and strong sense of mission and are in are able to engender that mission in positive activities over time, are the ones that are still here, and that I think is true of the farm. You know, there was a time in the farm when we were struggling. And we had a big public meeting, we walked out of that meeting, having lost our fear of making mistake. You know, people often will cover their tracks so that they don't like to show off their their errors. And we lost that we started being more open about our mistakes. And that was one of those things. So So those two things, history of drawn foreign sense of mission, and why are those things important. And then the third piece came after, because two of the places I went on my touring around the country. We got to I got pretty good at asking questions. And I created a narrative. And it's all been transcribed and everything. So I've lost a book just not compiled. But two places said, I said, well, thank you for staying your six, seven hours. He said, Thank you for having me. This was extraordinary expenditure of your time. I gotta go. And they said, One west coast, one on the East Coast. He said, How can we get you to stay another day? They said, We'll rent you a hotel room. And we'll take care of rearranging your flight. But we'd like to stay in. And in both cases, I couldn't. But I was perplexed. And I mean, I thought, Well, I'm a likable guy. But these guys are what like spending willing to spend money to keep me around just to ask them questions. And I was perplexed. And, and over time, my wife had gone with you to those, and we talked about it. And I realized that this was the first time anybody had asked them to share some of their organizational history, and, and, and learn and talk about their mission and why they exist. And, you know, just an episode, huge organizational thing, trying to understand how organizations work.

Jim Balmer  54:36  
And, yeah. And so I realized that I needed to write about that. I mean, I needed to write about the development of a narrative, the ability to tell your story, and that's a farmer has gotten credit. The farmer over the last 25 years has gotten better and better and better at telling the story again, and again and again and again and again. But one of the way I he's hired in the beginning of July. And my last official act was to do a training about the history of the firemen how mission played a role, because I've done it hundreds of times over the years. And that that's a key, you know, as a key being able to define what makes you tick. And so that's what the books gonna be about. And now I have time to work I've been writing but that's awesome. So work oh, what

Derek Mehraban  55:33  
a story it's been Jim and I, you know, I want to say thank you for your service. You are a joy to talk to and thanks for being on the recovering CEO podcast. I think people will listen to this and enjoy it. And hopefully I'll see you around you know, another another day sober

Jim Balmer  55:48  
Aygo. There you go. Yeah, well, stay safe. Stay safe. Call your listeners.

Derek Mehraban  55:53  
Alright, have a great day Jim. Take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai