HeyJaredThe Real Dope Podcast
The Real Dope How Did You Get Here?Real Stories, Real Solutions, Real Hope. A show for anyone who loves, supports and suffers from and with loving an addict.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 7
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- Sep 8, 2026
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- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
What Not to Say to Someone Struggling With Addiction (opens the original)
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You've asked the questions before. "If you loved me, you'd quit." "Couldn't you have done something?" "Haven't you suffered enough?" They feel logical. They come from fear and love. And they do not work. In this episode of The Real Dope, sisters Meridith Elliott Powell and Beth Brand get honest about the well-meaning words that make everything worse. Drawing on decades of loving addicts, including their own father, Meridith's ex-husband, and Beth's ex-husband, they break down why questions built
The Truth About Alcohol: Separating Science From the Stories We Tell Ourselves (opens the original)
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Meridith and Beth take on the question everyone has an opinion about: is alcohol actually good for you, or have we just been telling ourselves that for decades? They dig into how the moderate-drinking-is-healthy myth got started in the first place, what those early studies actually left out, and why an addiction specialist's blunt answer, that there is no amount of alcohol that is good for you, changed how Beth thinks about it entirely. This episode covers what recent research says about the rea
Is Trauma the Real Gateway Drug? (opens the original)
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Meridith and Beth get honest about the connection nobody talks about: trauma, hopelessness, and addiction. They break down the difference between single-event trauma and the complex trauma that builds slowly, from growing up in a home with alcoholism to living through war. The truth is uncomfortable. Most of us never connect our coping behaviors, drinking, overeating, overworking, controlling, back to the trauma that started them. This episode gets into why some people carry trauma without ever
What's a Secret and What's Not a Secret (opens the original)
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Privacy feels like protection. In an addicted family, it is usually the opposite. In this episode, Meridith and Beth unpack the line between healthy privacy and dangerous secrecy, and why so many enablers never learn where that line is. They share the moments they lied to cover for an addict, the safety risks that secrecy created for the people they loved, and the relief that came the first time they told the truth out loud. This is a clear-eyed look at why keeping the secret does not protect th
The Unwritten Rules of Enabling (opens the original)
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No one hands you a rulebook when addiction moves into your house. You just learn to live by it. In this episode, Meridith and Beth name the unwritten rules that took over their childhood home and, later, their own marriages: the addict comes first, the family's resources go to the addiction before anything else, you handle everything and feel nothing, and you never, ever talk about it. They trace these rules back three generations and show how easily they get passed down without a single convers
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