Years ago, a client sat across from me and said something I still carry: “I have a problem, I relapsed.”

I told him what I tell every person who sits in that chair.

“Really? That’s a great opportunity.”

Not because what happened was good. Because the word he’d been handed — relapse — was doing something to him that had nothing to do with getting better. It was telling him he was back at zero. That word alone was enough to make some people stop showing up.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

Read More

I spent close to a decade inside Hawaiʻi’s substance use treatment system — volunteering my way up to running one of the state’s programs — and separately, more than 20 years coaching people across Hawaiʻi, the mainland, and Canada.

What I learned in the treatment world wasn’t mainly about drugs. It was about language, and how the words a whole system hands someone can decide whether they ever come back for a second appointment.

The numbers behind this are not slowing down. Hawaiʻi recorded 374 overdose deaths statewide in 2025, up from 352 the year before. Meth-involved deaths rose 8% in that same window, with Oʻahu and the Big Island seeing the sharpest increases. Every one of those numbers is a person, a family, an ʻohana rearranging itself around an empty chair at the table.

Here’s what almost nobody says out loud: the system built to help people carries language that quietly works against them.

“I tested dirty.” “I’ve been clean for a year.” “Hello, I’m an alcoholic.”

No one describes a high blood pressure reading this way. No one opens a support group for diabetes by having each person announce their disease before their name. But addiction inherited a vocabulary that treats every person in it as permanently incomplete — relapsing, remitting, never quite arriving. I watched that vocabulary do damage that had nothing to do with the substance itself.

Long before I worked in this field, a psychology professor of mine said something in passing that ended up shaping the rest of my life. He was teaching a class on psychopathology, and he said: “Embrace it.” Not fight it. Not carry shame about it. Embrace it — because staying close enough to see a problem clearly is what lets you finally do something about it

Fighting something blind just keeps your focus locked on the damage. It’s the same logic behind the old line about keeping your enemies close. You don’t get control by turning your back on what’s heavy. You get control by facing it directly, and choosing where your energy goes next.

That idea is easier said than done, which is exactly why I built Talk It Up Live It Up! — a self-directed program born out of years sitting across from people in crisis, watching what actually moved them forward versus what kept them stuck.

It didn’t start as a theory. It started as a pattern I couldn’t stop noticing: the people who found their footing weren’t the ones who fought hardest against what happened to them. They were the ones who stopped waiting for a system, a diagnosis, or a waiting room to tell them when they were allowed to call themselves whole.

Hawaiʻi doesn’t need another program that waits for the next grant cycle or the next task force to decide what people in crisis are allowed to hear about themselves. We need to look honestly at the words already living inside our clinics, our courtrooms, and our own conversations — and ask whether those words are opening a door or quietly holding it shut.

I don’t have a tidy statistic to end on. What I have is a decade of watching one word — opportunity, offered at exactly the right moment — do more than a diagnosis ever could.

Hawaiʻi is a small state. Word travels fast here, for better and worse. Let’s make sure the words traveling through our treatment system are ones that bring people closer, not language that quietly convinces them to stay away.