Tag: addict

JUDGING YESTERDAY’S ACTION WITH TODAY’S INFORMATION

Written by Josh Azevedo, LISAC – used with permission (italics and bold text added by myself)

Looking for a surefire way to ruin your day, month, year, even all your golden years?

Try this… let’s judge yesterday’s actions with today’s information.

Take what you know today, with all your experience and knowledge; then look back over your life, make sure to focus directly on your parenting and sort through each detail. The next step is taking what you know now, with today’s information, and judge all your past decisions. Notice all your mistakes and say things to yourself like, I should have, I could have, and I would have.

See how that works?

Instant misery.

Now that you are good and depressed, let’s talk about judging yesterday’s actions with today’s information.

As absurd as it may seem laid out in the above way, it is one of the primary ways that parents stay stuck, sick, and unhappy.

Many parents of substance users do this to themselves for years, always with negative results. This mentality of judging past decisions with new information fosters low self-esteem, depression, guilt, poor relationships, and even poor health.

The regret and guilt created by doing this can keep a parent engaged in a dynamic with their adult children that allows the child to avoid the natural consequences of their addiction.

Sometimes parents might judge others’ (spouse, schools, law enforcement, friends, etc.) past actions in relation to their child and blame them for their child’s problems and addiction.

This mindset succeeds in keeping the addict in the victim role rather than allowing the addict to take ownership over what he/she must change in order to recover.

This mindset is also often used by parents to avoid that persistent and scary (FALSE) belief that it is their fault that their child was given the curse of addiction.

If you can see the insanity in judging yesterday’s actions with today’s information, what can you do to change this mentality?

First and foremost, know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. This is where parent meetings are critical. Discussion with others who have walked this path will help tremendously; a burden shared is halved. There is a difference between knowing there are other parents out there who have dealt with addicted kids and actually spending time talking with them. There is enormous relief from shared experience and identification with others.

Educate yourself about addiction; anyone who understands addiction, knows it is almost never the parent’s fault and that the only way for addicts to recover is for them to take responsibility for their own lives. It is really challenging for them to do this and nearly impossible if the parents won’t let go, stop fixing everything, and begin to recover themselves.

Focus on today’s actions, dwelling on the past is never useful. Take todays new information you are learning from other parents and only apply it to today. When we apply a solution to the here and now it can really help effect change instead of keeping us stuck in the past. So, let’s try this again…. Looking for a great way to help you enjoy your day, month, year, or even the rest of your golden years? Try the above positive suggestions and remember that you are powerless over the choices of others but have the power to feel good about yourself as a parent right now!

With Love,
Josh Azevedo, LISAC

Josh Azeverdo is a guest blogger for PAL and is the Executive Director at The Pathway Program, https://thepathwayprogram.com

BaNaNaS

Taken by me, this morning, in my kitchen

What an odd thing to write about, right? But every single time my bananas start to look like this, it takes me back 20 years.

I had this thing with bananas. They were touted as soooo nutritious, which led me to buy them a̲l̲l̲ t̲h̲e̲ t̲i̲m̲e̲. I mean ALL THE TIME.

Even though……

They always ended up looking like this….or worse

Banana past it’s time

I know, I don’t understand it. I think they were liked ok by my family.

I mean it’s not like anyone ever said, “I hate bananas.”

So I just kept buying them.

Vacations were the worst. I’d pack the car with treats, never forgetting bananas. I would see them every time we stopped and I would ask one of my kidlets..

“Do you want a banana?”

“No Mom”

“Why not?”

“Because i just don’t”

“Don’t you like them?”

“Yes, I do, I just don’t want one.”

And that conversation was repeated over and over for some 20 years.

And I’m still buying bananas…..

However, after posting this insanity quote, I realized the correlation to “bananas” & “crazy.”

As an advocate for mentally illness as it relates to drug use; I thought..I can’t be posting this…..

I decided to look it up.

Here’s what I found on the site The Real Dope- no less🙀

It’s crazy! I mean……it’s very interesting.

The story of bananas is a lot shorter and more mysterious than one would think.. Here the Oxford English dictionary can reliably get us back only to 1968, when a University of South Dakota publication called Current Slang reported that Kentucky college students (of “both sexes”) were using bananas to mean “excited and upset; ‘wild.’

In addition, (orange you glad I didn’t say addiction?) a 1935 glossary of criminals’ patois called The Underworld Speaks, “He’s bananas” is said to mean “He’s sexually perverted; a degenerate.” Here the connection to “crazy” is all too plausible, considering that at the time homosexuality was still widely understood to be a mental disorder.

Meanwhile, in what may have been an unrelated trend, by the 1850s or so another slang meaning for nut was “a person’s head” (no real stretch there), and “off one’s nut” meant “crazy.”

How the times change to upgrade on slang words to better fit sociatial standards. . There’s even a new dictionary on the block for slang words. The Urban Dictionary.

The old comedies were the best to depict slang words

But all joking aside, we were watching a preview of Eddie Murphy’s “Norbit” from 2007 and realized that movie would NEVER be allowed nowadays. As with many others like Archie Bunker.

The kids can say these slang words for 2020 such as periodt, boomer, slay, shook & yeet; but we can’t make fun of adults in a movie anymore, or someone will be offended.

I mean I get it. I don’t think he should have called Edith a dingbat. Or Rob Reiner “Meathead” but at the time, I laughed. My parents laughed. Did they know that was emotional abuse? Probably not. There was no internet to tell them. 😜🤪

Including me. For my cause, I hate the word “junkie” or “addict.” The correct term is person with a substance use disorder.

Same thing when mentally retarded became politically incorrect. The Federal registry, a journal of the federal government changed it to “Intellectual Disability.”

Anyway…. That’s my banana post for the day. 🍌.