What does recovery really mean beyond putting down drugs and alcohol? In this episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour, Jake White of Vive18 sits down with musician and author Dan Fulop-Furlano to discuss his recovery journey and his book, Sincerely Delusional.
Dan shares his experience entering recovery at age 46, learning about emotional sobriety, and understanding how unhealthy coping mechanisms can affect our lives. He also discusses the importance of genuine connections, teaching young people social skills, and helping them develop healthy ways to manage stress and difficult emotions.
Key Takeaways
- Understand emotional sobriety and addiction recovery.
- Recognize unhealthy coping mechanisms.
- Encourage open conversations about emotions.
- Teach healthy coping and social skills.
- Model positive behaviors for young people.
- Remember that recovery is a process, not an event.
Introduction to Pat Fish and Circle Values
Jake White: Welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White from Vive18. Today we’re hanging out with a new friend, a fellow musician. His name is Dan Fulop Ferlano. Now, Dan is an author. I’m super excited to hear about his book and he’s just a good dude, right? He’s a musician just like me. So we got lots of stuff to talk about. Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
Jake White: Yeah. Hey, give us your quick intro. Who are you? Where do you live? That kind of stuff.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah, it’s funny. Quick intros are the hardest questions to answer on every podcast. So I’ll I will do my best. so I live in Santa Cruz, California. I grew up in the Midwest. and spent about twenty-five years in Milwaukee and Minnesota and then you too? Brookfield. So okay. I I know right
Jake White: I’ma Oshkosh, I’m a Oshkosh, Wisconsin boy. Yeah.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: This has changed the whole interview. Okay, I got it now. So I did used to say I I did twenty served twenty-five years, twenty-five winters, and then finally I was like, okay, no more. I need to I need to go west and get to get to California, and I’ve been out here ever since. so once in Santa Cruz, I I was trying to play music and you know, taking my shot at being a professional musician. eventually we were my wife and I were about to have our first child.
And I was in sh she encouraged me lovingly but but forcefully to get get a real job. And thankfully I there is a company in Santa Cruz called Universal Audio that makes some of the best recording gear in the world. And so I’ve I’ve been there the last twenty years, getting to still work in audio if even if the the rock star dreams didn’t come true.
Jake White: Okay, that’s cool. That’s cool that you can still work in the industry you love, but take a different role that maybe pays better and has some benefits and stuff.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Absolutely. And also it has given me you know, an inside view into, you know, the good and the bad of the audio industry. and getting to like meet some of my heroes, which has been cool. but you know, also kind of seeing how it works and how different it is from maybe you imagine it as you’re you’re growing up and and hoping to break into that world.
Jake White: Yeah. Well, and to dive right into the subject at hand, right, is recovery and sobriety, which is the our show is all about is, you know, people are listening and they they do prevention work in their communities to try to help students not even start down that path, or sometimes helping if they have started, how do we start to turn our life around? And that’s kind of part of your passion and your story. But I’m gonna I’m gonna let you.
Basically, please just tell us about your book and then we can go backwards and learn more about you and and what happened.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Sure. So my book is called Sincerely Delusional and it’s about my my first year in recovery. And so I entered recovery at age forty six, so just about two and a half years ago. And I had really hit kind of the bottom for me.
I was definitely what you’d consider a functional alcoholic, functional, you know, drug abuser. I was you know, had a family, kids, a house, all those things, the job, working as an executive in in this audio industry. but on the inside, dealing with all kinds of turmoil that I had been running from for I I would say, you know, the last 30 years. And so I finally got to a point where I realized
I couldn’t talk my way out of it. I couldn’t rationalize or fix it. And I I definitely couldn’t fix it on my own. And so at that point, I checked into a 30-day residential recovery retreat called Divided Sky that’s in Vermont. And what I discovered there, I mean I discovered a lot of things there, but one of the main things I talk about in the book is emotional sobriety. So the the idea there is it’s a framework for learning to deal with life on life’s terms. So a big part of getting sober and entering recovery is stopping the physical addiction, you know, putting down the drink or the drug or whatever you’ve been struggling with.
But once you do, your life is still there, you’re still you and you know, really that addiction is a symptom of a greater problem. And so,
Sometimes I think in recovery communities we focus maybe solely on putting down the addiction and not really not as much of what was the root cause, what got me there in the first place, and now how do I deal with life and how do I deal with same pressures and anxiety and difficulties now that I’m sober, now that I’ve given up what I was using as a tool to deal with these feelings that I didn’t really have the emotional maturity to handle.
Jake White: Okay, that’s big. And so that’s emotional sobriety. I saw it on the cover of your book. and so thank you for explaining that. That was like a new term for me. I I hadn’t heard
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah, it’s interesting ca it’s a it’s a new term for most people, but it it actually is pretty old and back to the like the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, the founder there, he wrote a letter about it a long time ago because what he found was once he got sober, he was dealing with like incredible depression and and wondering like, okay, I you know, I did the thing, my life’s supposed to be better, what w what what is the reason? And so he was looking for what’s that next step. So emotional sobriety is often considered the next step in recovery.
Another good way I I’ve heard it stated is that it’s moving from moving kind of from an idea of I’ll be okay if you know XYZ happens to I’ll be okay even if. So it’s taking like your well-being instead of putting it externally and in the world around you and in other people and events and hoping everything goes right, it’s pulling it internally and knowing that you’re gonna be okay no matter what because you have the tool to be able to deal with anything that happens in life.
Jake White: And that’s cool ’cause then you’re in control of your life and your freedom instead of it being hijacked by anything else.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah, and that’s really the only thing you can control. we we we live in just in in general, without even talking about how out of control things might be in our world right now, everything outside of you is out of out of your control. There’s you can have an illusion of control. You can try to plan and do things and set things your life up in a certain way. But really that that’s always just hanging by a string. What you can can what you absolutely can control is how you react to the things that happen around you.
And some of so like I said, it’s a f emotional sobriety is a framework of dealing with like it’s with life. It’s not like I learned about it. Now I’m emotionally sober and everything’s great. no, no, that’s not that’s that’s not works. but there’s a lot of tools in there in learning to like not take things personally. That’s a big one. And you know, before keeping your emotional center of gravity within yourself and not instead of handing it out to other people and relying on them to to hopefully make you feel okay.
Jake White: Well, yeah. I can imagine too, like that there’s first a realization that, I am falling for this. Right. Like I’m just relying on my circumstances. If this happens, I have a bad day. If this happens, I’m having a good one. it re it reminds me of this piece of advice I got when I was I was younger. one of my mentors, he said, Jake, life isn’t made by chance. It’s made by choice. And yes. Chance happens to you.
You don’t have control over where you were born, how people treat you, but you always have control over your choices. And if you focus on them, you can continue creating this life that you love. And I share this at our, our presentations when we speak at schools about having fun without drugs and alcohol, because it’s it’s the one controllable that you have. But what I love about this new thing you’re teaching me, emotional sobriety, is it goes. It goes before your choice. It goes into your mind.
And I’m wondering what are some examples or things that have hit home for you or are the readers of your book that they’re able to identify, like, man, I’ve I’ve fallen for that before. Or, yeah, now I do this. Like, here’s a better alternative. Does anything come to your mind?
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Right. Well, absolutely. But before I give an example, I should say, my my book, my story is about like my my story of recovery.
But it’s really more than that. It’s about like how I woke up from an unexamined life. And even though my story deals with drugs and alcohol, that’s universal. Like a lot of us are living unexamined lives, are are reacting based on our kind of like rote programming. And the best actually the most like meaningful responses I’ve gotten to the book so far are from people that don’t struggle with alcohol or with drugs and really
Saw that they still saw themselves in the story. Yeah, yeah. So that’s been really cool. and that’s actually one of the reasons I should say this. I didn’t mean to write a book. I was I got to a year out in my experience and I went back to this place Divided Sky. they were having a sober festival. So it was like two days of music, all sober at the the ski lodge across the mountain from where this place is located. And going back, I thought for me I’m like it would be triumphant and I was gonna see old friends.
And see the people there. And I was going back with a year of sobriety and I was really excited. And I got there and I did feel all those things, but I felt all these other emotions that I couldn’t really process or describe. And you know, it was awe. It was it was old guilt. It was all these things coming back in a flood. And what I realized at that time was I didn’t need to explain them. That’s kind of what I learned the first time I was there. I I actually had to feel those. And so the weekend was a really heavy experience.
When I got back on the plane, I decided to lean on something I’d learned while I was in treatment. And I I wrote a letter, like an open letter to anyone like that I that is still struggling. And in the I so I wrote this letter and I ended up signing it sincerely delusional, which is the the title of the book. And then I shared that letter with my wife and she was like, This is great. You should share it with other people. So I shared it with the program director at divided sky and she was like can we share this with other people and I was like sure and so I got home and I was like maybe there’s something to this and I decided to go back to the beginning of you know when I was on the plane the first time going there in much, much worse shape and write that story of i in between those two plane rides. And so with a month later I had 15 chapters in what turned out to be the book
And I shared it with some people that, like I was saying, are not struggling with alcohol. And the response was incredible. And at that point I was like, Okay, maybe maybe this is a story I should I should share with the world. As terr as story in a book and share it with the world, it seemed worthwhile.
Jake White: Well, I I love the fact that it was validated. I think sometimes we create something and we don’t know why we’re doing it or and maybe it’s just for us, right? it’s this something for myself. But we have these giant dreams of being a bestseller or whatever. It’s like, well, we didn’t validate it. What’s fun is you just saw a need. People are hey, this is cool. Can I share it? Can I share it? And it it showed you the value. And you’re like, maybe I should. Maybe I should try this.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Exactly. And that the validation is a tricky one though. So like that felt really good to have my story validated and my writing and to you know, and then eventually you know, I shared this with someone who ended up being one of my mentors and is a a leading expert on emotional sobriety, Dr. Alan Berger.
I shared it with him because I quote him in the book. And I thought, okay, I’m quoting you in this book. I should let you know about it. And he and I didn’t hear from him for a few weeks, which was terrifying. I was like, Am I gonna get a cease and desist or what’s what’s coming next? And he wrote me two weeks later later and said, This is great. We should I’d like to publish it. And so like there was more validation. but the the flip side of that is you know, I I put this out because I want to help people.
And so I really gotta keep that addict side of me in check to make sure I’m like it’s not just about me being validated. I I really do want to help people. Cause otherwise I will get in that pattern of like, it’s not a bestseller and it’s not that. And that’s really not what I I gotta remember why I did it and it like that wasn’t why it was to get it out and help people. So yes, it feels amazing. Like I wanna I’ll be totally honest about that. I it always feels good to be validated. But again,
So I I think a lot of our validation needs to be in internal and not external, or else we’re into that place again where our well being is being placed in the hands of others.
Jake White: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s what’s so interesting, even about the word. when I said validate, I was thinking like how you validate a business. Does anybody want this? Because if you made it for doesn’t matter if anybody else wants it. And sometimes when like a lot of people ask me about starting a business that does good in the world. And I have to ask, like, well, why are you doing this? Why do you want to start a business? Can’t you just do good in the world?
And there’s a trade-off. I remember for me, I also stumbled upon throwing these sober house parties and they becoming wildly successful. I really thought, like, if this could be my job, that’d be super cool. But it wasn’t until students were asking me how to do it and that I could help them that I was like, the idea is now validated. Someone finds value in it. So now I just have to find a way.
To grow it. And at some point in our journey, what’s nice for you right now is you’re still crushing it as an executive. You have your job. you’re, if you have an idea that you want to run with, there’s a point potentially where you say, I can’t actually work a nine to five and then change the world from five to nine. I need to change the world during my job and then have a life.
Afterwards. and that was like a hard moment for me actually was justifying like, wait, I’m gonna charge people for doing good in the world and like I have to ask for money and it’s gonna be part of a business. and so the validation was what allowed me to like get over my fear in a way and say, No, that’s that’s I’m like a doctor, right? but I’m prevention, you know.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah, it’s it’s providing a service and if people are people are coming to you asking for it, you’re putting your energy and your time into it and like y that there should be an exchange. So that totally makes sense.
Jake White: Yeah. I’m curious, Dan, do you that letter you mentioned that was circulating around, how long was that letter? It was like a page or was it like a like it’s like a page and maybe I can back up a little bit to to a story about when I was when I was at Divided Sky and where the title of the book comes from. So it was like maybe my first week in treatment, and I was still pretty broken down. you know, it’d been 30 years of of drug and alcohol abuse. and I, you know, I I had gotten to the point where I had no defense left.
I was not trying to run. I was too tired, and I really wanted to understand why I kept doing the same things over and over. And I was in so you know in in treatment, you do all there’s a lot of class work, and I was in an emotional sobriety class and the the the subject of of sincere delusion came up. And so sincere delusion is is basically a sincere belief in something that’s provably untrue and usually as a defense mechanism. And so hearing that, all these alarm bells that like I went off. I felt like I got struck by lightning. Because for me, my in my in my addiction, I never felt like I was lying. I never felt like I wasn’t telling the truth. I never felt that way at all, even though that was totally delusional. I had built this construct around me so everything I did makes made sense.
I was always the victim. everyone else was didn’t understand. but it’s kinda that’s what I had to believe to keep going and like but understanding that or get getting that laid out in front of me that this was actually a delusion I was operating from within, not just me being insincere, or not telling the truth, it allowed me to separate from it for a minute and look at where I’d gotten and how I’d gotten there with compassion instead of instead of shame. And I re then I was able to start breaking it down and and looking at like you know all the way back to where I was five years old is where I s I went with it.
And and so yeah, yeah, it was really impactful. So we left that class and went up to the cafeteria and we were all talking about how great the class was and and wow, we were all pretty sincerely delusional. And we were talking about, when when you’re in treatment, one thing you do is you write letters to the people that you still have back home. And I I made a joke, I was like, I should start signing mine sincerely delusional, because it fits me so well. Then later that day I went and I was trying this exercise of writing a letter from my true self or my false self, which would kind of be like where I ended up to my true self.
Which is who I was in the beginning, maybe at age five. And I wrote this letter sort of apologizing and saying, like, hey, I want to get to know you. I don’t even remember you. And that that letter is in the book word for word. And I signed that one sincerely delusional. So there’s two letters in the book, one right in the beginning and then one right in the end, that really relate to each other. And like hopefully you can see, you know, from going from one to the next, the amount of growth that came just in those 30 days. but actually, no, that was a year. Sorry. It’s hard to have a lot of growth in 30 days. I mean, it was a good start
Dan Fulop-Furlano: but like wake waking up is a is a process, not an event. So it really was kind of like getting, you know, going through all the different milestones, getting back into life, experiencing things again, and then trying to remember, the emotional sobriety, to put that little bit of space in between whatever stimulus was around me and my reaction, which is something I had none of before. It was just an instant reaction based on old wounds, without really any thought involved at all. And what I realized when I was in treatment, I was like, I don’t want to be that way anymore. Like I wanna I want to I want my my reactions to be genuine.
And I I and I want my life to be genuine and authentic. I don’t want to just be running on some old program that that I d I don’t even remember when it started.
Jake White: Yeah. That’s powerful. I wanna highlight something too you just said that it just hit me hard. I was like, I think you said waking up was a process, not an event. And I think a lot of the best things we experience in life are a process, not necessarily an event. So I just wanna keep that in my mind now. Highlight for the for me for the show, you know?
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah, and it I I I heard that first in terms of recovery is a process, not an event. And it you can apply it to a lot of things ’cause yeah, anything worthwhile it doesn’t doesn’t happen in one go and in one moment. It’s over a a long period of time and there’s changes involved and there’s ups and there’s downs. I think if you’re expecting like sobriety or any of that to just happen and like life to just all of a sudden be better, you’re s really setting yourself up to fail. there’s there’s there’s steps involved, there’s time involved, and there’s there’s you know big leaps forward and there’s setbacks and really like the the whole recovery part is trying to have the tools to to deal with all of it, both the good and the bad.
Jake White: Yeah, that’s so good. Dan, if if you were speaking to your teenage self with now you have the perspective, you’ve wrote the book on it and stuff, is it what would have been helpful for you to teach your teenage self? and I know we’re we’re not gonna go into like, if I could do it over again, but just like advice that a teenager would appreciate, is there anything in there you’re like, dang, that’s that’s pretty good for a teenager?
Dan Fulop-Furlano: So yes, I’m trying to think of specifically for for myself, I had, from a from a really young age, I had learned that it was unsafe to ask questions and it was and bec out of a fear of rejection. So like I I grew up in a in a household that was, you know overall, harmo fairly harmonious and and of pr probably a pretty typical Midwestern upbringing, but we never talked about emotion. We never talked about difficult things. and I think you know, if I could talk to my teenage self, I’d want to say it’s okay to talk about that stuff. And it’s okay to bring it up to other people.
And by the way, every single person around you is thinking the exact same thing. They’re all struggling with the same stuff. And so, It’s much better for you to, try to have I’d say genuine connection with other people rather than to try to project some image you think that they want to see. Because that’s what I ended up doing. And that’s really where I found alcohol as a tool to get over my anxiety, to get over my social awkwardness, and and to do what I thought was connecting with others, even though it really wasn’t. It was amplifying the the worst in in me. I mean I mean it did so the it’s the funny thing about when we talk about like alcohol or drugs as tools, they they did work at one point, which is why they’re so addictive. So like you you it’s a
Jake White: Yeah. Well it was like a temporary escape, right? You’re like, I didn’t solve my issue, but I escaped it, or I felt like I did.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: So it can be so yes, a temporary escape, but like what the last thing you said, it felt like I solved it. so it was really this illusion of, hey, I I was I couldn’t communicate with other people and now I can. And, you know, for a moment around, you know, two drinks, maybe I could, and then at three, probably not, and then it gets worse.
But what you were you really just remember that moment where it like it solved your problem for that tiny moment, and that’s enough to keep people coming back and you know over for me it was for thirty years and trying to capture that moment no matter how no matter how devastating the fallout and the consequences are around it, did it didn’t matter. And for a lot of I’d say for all addicts, it doesn’t matter.
It’s that it’s that one moment you’re trying to get back to, that one thing, which really is covering up for, a lack of emotional maturity or something that we didn’t learn to do as children or we were taught it was unsafe to do. And and and so yeah, the tools work. either as an escape or or to fill in w somewhere we’re lacking, but they’re so destructive. And they and the and them working is really just ki kind of an illusion from the start.
Jake White: Yeah. It it reminds me of a scenario. You’re you’re with a new group of people, you feel you feel awkward or you feel anxious and you’re like, this is awkward. This is I feel anxious. And you label it and then you look for the solution. And the funny thing is like growing up, I don’t I don’t know that we learned social skills anywhere. You just were expected to have them on the playground or whatever. But if I think there’s something about teaching somebody, especially a young person, yeah, when you’re around new people, it feels this way because you don’t know them, you don’t trust them yet. It’s like a threat and it’s awkward, and you’re wondering who’s gonna talk first.
Here’s a skill called talking first. And your goal is like to talk to them and introduce yourself and ask about them before this awkwardness grows and like kind of gamifying these little lessons that will keep you from looking for the shortcut down the road instead of developing that skill set that’s gonna help you, for for the rest of your life, but you learn them early, from from either your experience or from people around you. And it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way things work. And we don’t emphasize those social skills, I don’t know, in in academics.
Dan Fulop-Furlano: We don’t and honestly there’s nothing more important that we could be teaching is is how to get along with other humans and how to be okay with yourself. So I mean i if if we did that, if that was part of the curriculum from a very young age, I I can’t even imagine or stress how much greater the world would be. So like you you’re you’re you have it one hundred percent right on. We do not teach children to deal and so there
They have to like for myself and a lot of others, we look externally for ways to deal. And something that is quick and easy is is drugs and alcohol. And for those of us that don’t go that direction, there are a ton of other things. Like like I said, the reason people r you know really relate to this book, even though they don’t have issues with drugs and alcohol, is because they’re using other things in their lives, you know, be it gambling or shopping or whatever it is, whatever kind of addiction it’s it’s prevalent. It’s everywhere.
Everyone’s dealing with it on some level. And so yeah, so once you figure that out and how to introduce that into the curriculum, let me know and I I will shout it from the mountaintops and support you on that because that’s the that’s the best idea that I’ve ever heard. Thank you.
Jake White: I love it. Well, I will keep you in the loop, Dan. One small thing I do and I I ask educators and adults to do all the time is like when you’re feeling stressed, because we all do, like say it out loud in front of your kids or in front of your students and say, man, I can’t wait to go home and go fishing. Today’s been a really tough day, or I I just need a run right now. Like
It’s the only thing that’s gonna make me feel better. just quick moments to to model that stuff, cause it’s one of those things you we don’t realize how much they listen. Like parents think that their kids don’t listen to them, but in reality they’re like paying close attention, right?
Dan Fulop-Furlano: Yeah. And and that’s another thing where we’re I think for most of us we’re taught that saying things like that is a sign of weakness and kind of puts you in danger. And so that, you know, what we’re we’re for myself, at least what I was taught and a lot of others I know is to take those thoughts and those feelings and push them down. push them down, push them out. But the thing is you keep doing that, they will come back and they come back in horrible and destructive ways. So getting that out, letting people know like, hey, I’m having a hard time. It’s not, it’s not you. I’m just I’m I’m having a hard time. It’s not you. and I need a moment. Like I think that’s that’s okay and something we should all all hopefully feel comfortable doing and that we should allow other people to do.
Jake White: Yeah, absolutely. And Dan, this has been I this has been a really cool episode for me just getting to know you. Another Midwest guy moving out west, you know but if people want to check out your book, what you’re up to, where can they go?
Dan Fulop: Yeah, so sincerelydelusional dot com is my website. The book is available on Amazon and on Audible. And then if you want to find out what I’m up to, it’s Daniel Phillip Frlano on Instagram.
Jake White: Perfect. Well, Dan, thank you for being on the show and for everybody listening. This has been another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour, and we’ll see you next Monday for another episode.
