Interview with Dan Chalykoff

Trained as an Architect, Dan Chalykoff returned to university years later with the goal of being qualified as a therapist. "Love your fate." Dan's website is understandings.ca

Watch: https://youtu.be/UevQjp7b7uQ

Unedited transcript

Jim Allan: I'm with Dan Chalykoff. Welcome, Dan.

Dan Chalykoff: Thank you, Jim.

Jim Allan: So, this is how I know you. I remember we're dads in the same neighborhood. And I'd say 15 years ago or so when we moved to Oakville, we used to pass each other all the time because we took our kids to the same daycare which was in the basement of a synagogue. What did you do professionally back then?

Dan Chalykoff: When we first crossed paths, I was... I could either have been doing straight architecture which is designing buildings and modifying them which is usually what I did and usually with heritage buildings, or by that time I may have segued into heritage consulting. I was possibly doing both.

Jim Allan: I probably googled you somewhere through that time. I Google everybody.

Dan Chalykoff: I don't feel offended.

Jim Allan: I think everyone does that. So, you got involved in... you were doing assessments and... didn't you go to court for people?

Dan Chalykoff: I was an expert witness. I still am.

Jim Allan: People hire you to go to court to argue one side of a case or another because in where we live is Oakville. There's a lot of heritage homes, correct?

Dan Chalykoff: Yes.

Jim Allan: Was that interesting to you going to court?

Dan Chalykoff: To be honest with you, the less interesting part was being in court because if you've ever been there, there is a quite learned person across from you who wants to tear your guts out intellectually and tear your argument to shreds. So, you're there presenting a case. The person who's opposing you, which is the opposite lawyer, doesn't know architecture and the jurist who's hearing this, although they've probably got a background, something related to architecture or planning, they're neither a planner nor an architect. So, you're explaining things to people who are making decisions and they're political appointees. What I really enjoyed was the research into the heritage and going through the buildings, understanding the period, the craftsmanship, the construction.

Jim Allan: I remember somewhere along the line, running into you on the street or maybe seeing you socially somewhere and I became aware that you had gone back to university. I didn't see you a lot but suddenly you'd been in university for a couple years, which takes, I have to say, a lot of chutzpah and that's why you're the perfect person for what I want to do here. I want to meet people that are making big decisions, making big changes, mid-career, mid-life, whatever you want to call it, and you're one of the prototype kind of guys in the sense or people in the sense that you had the chutzpah to actually do it. So, you've got a young family, a spouse, et cetera. But what brought you to that point that you wanted to just kind of, I guess drop everything or risk a lot and go back to school? Were you bored?

Dan Chalykoff: No, I wasn't bored in the least. In fact, I could probably have done heritage research and writing quite happily for the rest of my days but what the unseen intervention was, was that I grew up in a family with addiction and mental health issues as a kid and I had to come to terms of those and part of coming to terms with those was for probably 10 years I would attend open narcotics anonymous, alcoholics anonymous, and then the program for the families of those people which is Al-Anon or Narconon and I would attend those. During that time, I was asked to sponsor people in the programs and I felt like I had some sort of aptitude and the satisfaction I got from doing that so quickly outweighed the lack of satisfaction from the definitely from the expert witness gig that I thought, you know, I mean, I'm not a young man. So I thought, what do I want? What is more important for the last years of my life? And I thought, go back and try and become a therapist. And that's that's the goal.

Jim Allan: On one of your websites use you actually this is a quote, I trained as a carpenter, general contractor, and architect and perform one of one or more of those functions until the joy disappeared. So what did you mean by that?

Dan Chalykoff: Pretty much what I've said. I mean, the you still like doing it, but well, there's a there's a difference more you were looking for more. Yeah, and I think I think I could see that not then but in retrospect, when I look back, I always was going up a level I did. I was a contract like I was a builder. I was literally on the tools, which I actually loved. But I had to learn to design. Then once I'd learned to design and run big projects, and I was doing big projects in the city for the foremost heritage firm in the country. But again, there's there's stuff that happens that I just thought, I don't want to spend the rest of my life. And so the heritage consulting happened almost by accident. I had left that job and started getting calls. We have a property, we need someone to assess it. And I was qualified. So I said, Okay, I'll take a look at it. And then the expert witness gig, because I was usually hired by cities or by the province or people like that, because they're the ones that can afford to do the study and have you present it. I, Jim, the way I feel, and the way I felt was, I'm the rabbi or the priest administering last rights to properties, if I'm on your property, it's going to be in the ground in two years. On an intellectual and on an aesthetic level, it's highly discouraging. And at the same time this was happening, I was dealing with people at meetings with addiction and thinking, you know, I'm actually making a difference in someone's life here. And I thought, well, so there's a Jewish concept, I don't know what you know about Judaism, but to Kuno lamb, which means to heal a torn world or the fabric of the world. And that applies to heritage, but it also applies to therapeutic pursuits. And so I just thought there's not much question in my mind about which one if I didn't suck as a therapist, which one would have greater benefit. So I, you know, they were doing this sort of hopefully to the towards the tail end of the pandemic.

Jim Allan: I saw you were posting on LinkedIn, right? And you're posting the papers or little essays that you've written. And at a certain point, I'm going, what's going on with Dan? Because, you know, I read very carefully, is he talking about himself here? So the obvious question was, you know, when people get into therapy or, you know, addiction or research or, or were you, did you have addiction issues yourself that you're comfortable talking about?

Dan Chalykoff: I'm completely comfortable talking about them. I guess I did. It only occurred to me as I was running these meetings I run, which I suspect you're going to ask me about. But I use nicotine as a teenager. Like for 10 years, I used it. So I did have an addictive here that I didn't classify as that until I learned what an addictive behavior is. But I've never, fortunately, I have never had a problem with psychoactive drugs, which is alcohol, LSD, bot, etc.

Jim Allan: So somewhere along the line, you start, how would you describe it? Auditing, Al-Anon meetings. You list a few in another thing that I found. Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, and Smart Recovery, which we'll talk about. But so you start just out of your own interests before you even go back to school. You're kind of auditing these things.

Dan Chalykoff: Well, very much, because what I'm trying to do is figure out the nature of the family into which I was born and how much that nature affected my behavior and my responses to the world.

Jim Allan: So there were family issues in your background that just came to light later in life kind of thing.

Dan Chalykoff: No, no.

Jim Allan: You knew all along.

Dan Chalykoff: We knew all along. When we were growing up in the 70s, my siblings and I, we knew we could name it. And I don't want to because there's still anonymity issues, but we could name what was going on. But we didn't know what to do with it. And there actually weren't that many avenues to pursue anyway at that time.

Jim Allan: So you're calling yourself a smart recovery facilitator. What does that mean?

Dan Chalykoff: Smart stands for self-management and recovery training. It's an acronym for that. But the way to understand it quickly is it is a science-based equivalent to the 12-step, 12-steps. The 12-steps are a faith-based solution to addictive behaviors. Smart is a science-based solution to addictive behavior. A solution means to leaving addictive behaviors behind for both families and those using. I mean, there are 3,000 meetings right now across the world of smart recovery. I'm a volunteer. I've been doing this for four years. And it's basically, I send out an invitation right now. It's by Zoom to a group of people and it's always being added to. You can just send me an email, which is available online, and you can join the meeting. And I have 25 people usually on the Monday night meeting who have addictive behaviors of various kinds and they're trying to deal with that. I will use smart tools. So it's, if it's therapy, it's a sort of group therapy. But it's more an interaction between ideas, other members, and the facilitator.

Jim Allan: What's a typical meeting like? What would I, if I went to one, what would it be like?

Dan Chalykoff: Okay, it's there, I try and keep them to 75 minutes long. I'm failing on Monday nights and succeeding on Thursday nights. Smart recommends that a meeting is 12 to 14 attendees, minor 25 and growing. Not all meetings, but the Monday night meeting. You would come in, I would ask you to do a check-in. So I would say, welcome to the meeting, Jim. What brings you here? So all 25 people say a little? They don't have to. I say in the introduction to the meeting, if you're uncomfortable speaking or telling your story, just say I'd like to pass and you're welcome to stay and listen and come back every week. But they have already pre-qualified themselves with me that they do have an addictive behavior and I have a sense of what it is. But they don't have to talk about it until they're completely comfortable talking about it.

Jim Allan: How much of their story do you need to hear before you can help them?

Dan Chalykoff: If a person comes to one of the meetings, either I or another group member can help them almost immediately because the amount of pain that these people are in and the amount of courage it takes for them to enter the first meeting, whether online or in a room, is, I mean, it's, I've never actually had a metric for it, but it wouldn't be far from signing up for war. I mean, it's a brutal set of self-realizations that these folks go through. So they basically come to that meeting and they're stripped down. They got so little in their lives and the first, one of the big things about SMART is we tell people, if you're self-talk, and I assume you know that the self-talk is the internal language. It's what we tell ourselves all day about ourselves and the number of messages we send ourselves and the voice in our head is never, it never stops. And it's often and usually negative with most people. So the first thing that I will say to someone is, if you are tearing yourself down verbally, you are building a case for a lapse or a relapse. If you start repeating something positive about yourself and they'll say, you know, they'll say, well, there is very little positive about me. And I'll say, why are you at this meeting? Because I want to stop using. Is that not something very positive? If you can do nothing else this week, I want you to repeat once an hour. I went to the SMART meeting. I'm going to the next SMART meeting. These are good things. That alone will change the vibe in your head. It'll start to change the vibe. And I have many people who say I can't do that. So we have another one. I'll say, okay, say maybe I'm a good person. Maybe I'm starting to change and use that for the rest of the week or for as long as it takes.

Jim Allan: What's the difference between sobriety and recovery?

Dan Chalykoff: Is a great question. And there's a huge difference. There's an expression in 12 steps you may have read in the thesis called white knuckling. It's basically you picture a guy with every ounce of strength he's got holding onto a chin-up bar and just keep, and it's white knuckling because he's squeezing so hard there's no blood left in his hands. And that's the condition of sustained sobriety without recovery. Recovery is coming to a new way of life. It's coming to see, okay, I have an issue. The issue isn't moral. The issue is probably developmental, i.e. the way that person was social, chemical, and behavioral. And you have to learn to deal. And that is not necessarily an exhaustive list. It's my, what I'm thinking of offhand, but you have to learn to deal with those things in a very different way than you have up until the point you stopped using.

Jim Allan: Do people graduate? Or how long do they stay in the program? Or I'm sure people come and go, but if you really want to get the most out of it, how long do you have to stay?

Dan Chalykoff: Well, I can answer that indirectly first and indirectly. Indirectly, there are very few people who attend the SMART meetings, either one who haven't said to the group, why isn't everybody in the world doing this? Okay, because what we discuss and what we learn, I mean, you know, it's so hard because I come from the, so I'm not sure if you're aware, but we have a loneliness crisis, at least in the West, if not in the entire world. And I'm not pointing fingers at any particular issue, but for whatever reason, you know, like you and I, neighbors do not connect like we would have connected 40 years ago and less. And I know this firsthand because of my great age now, because I remember how neighborhoods were as a kid, and they're different now. You can graduate. I haven't had any graduates yet. The people who have been with me, I have had, I have one person who's been with me for four years. She has no desire to leave yet. They tend to love the group. And one of the things we say in the introduction is at this meeting, you will meet people in all stages of recovery. And in my meetings, it's true. That's not that's not a boast. I'm just very fortunate that I've got some people with some sustained recovery, which is a new way of living who can help people coming in saying four years ago, I was exactly where you're at crying, still drinking. So the senior people help the the newer members. And then and the newer members help the senior people because they show them how far they've come because they don't believe me. If I tell them you're a walking success story, they don't necessarily believe me. But if they see the evidence, it's it's pretty apparent.

Jim Allan: Do you have a website?

Dan Chalykoff: Yeah, I have www.understandings.ca And, I write a blog every week about either a philosophical issue, but usually a philosophical psychological issue that has to do with recovery or addiction. I am interested for selfish reasons, but you've you've implied this question. The link between where I am now and where I started professionally is structure. What interests me is how do you build or create a life that works? And that's as much a philosophical question as it is a psychological question. But it's also an architectonic question because it involves structure.

Jim Allan: So if you had not change course, you wouldn't have been a happy person? You would have been you would have you would have had some regrets. Sounds like you weren't you weren't necessarily a happy person?

Dan Chalykoff: I think life comes with regrets regard. I mean, you know, sure, there's always the things you didn't do. But there's a concept if you go back to the block amor fati. It's Latin for love your fate. This was Nietzsche, I think, coined it. And I try very hard to do that to say if I hadn't done yesterday what I'd done I wouldn't be where I am today. And I like very much where I am today. So I try very hard not to regret any of the what could be perceived as missteps. I don't see them that way. I see them as, you know, making me who I am, making you who you are.

Jim Allan: Thanks, Dan.

Dan Chalykoff: Well, it's a privilege. I'm flattered that you asked me actually. So I'm, you know, thank you for taking the time to record this and edit it, etc. I appreciate it.

Jim Allan: Thank you.