That is a question that families don’t really want to ask themselves. It’s usually a question asked out of frustration and after a long time of battling family addiction. Followed by: “I’ve done everything I know to do.”
Lately I have been thinking about this question and it is very troubling. For a fixer like me what does that really mean, I failed? I’m not one to accept defeat. There is a fix, I just haven’t gotten the right formula. That was always my answer. I always seemed to disregard the real answer because I never really accepted the premise of the question. My failure to accept reality that some never do get better causes me much heartache. I bring this up because of the many families that have been struggling for years with their love ones addiction.
I’ve asked this difficult question to a few family members. Only because they are completely overwhelmed, stressed out and at the end of their ropes. These family members are dealing with physical and mental breakdowns and need to release their love ones addiction back to them, instead of carrying it around on their shoulders. It’s a hard question for me to ask because I know by the time someone contacts me, there is a desperation and hopelessness that I do understand very well and they aren’t looking to hear someone to tell them to let go, they are looking for ‘the answer’.
I’m not talking about giving up on our love one or not helping them when they really need it. I’m talking about taking your life back and loving yourself again.
Put aside the anger, hurt, disappointment, guilt and past. Not for them, but for your well being. Negative emotions are hard to let go, but we need to find it ourselves to do so because it damages us more than anyone else. Don’t try to analyze addiction (or your love one). But try to understand ideas like we are powerless over our loved one’s addiction, that we can’t fix or change them. The truth is they can only do it themselves and the sooner we can see that the better our families will be.
Take time through this hard journey to take care of yourself. To Love yourself. This will make for a heather family, so when your love one does get better, the family will be in a better place and please remember even if they don’t get better, you can and do deserve a life of your own.
That’s what I constantly hear myself saying these days.
In this political climate of the world today, it’s SO easy to find yourself in a sudden moment of anger, shock, and surprise at any and every new development.
It’s hard not to react and retort with a knee- jerk response. It’s hard to remember that you are no doubt going to waste your energy AND Not likely to change ANY minds.
Those of us in the business of momma hood find ourself in this predictament quite often.
“Pick your battles”
Is our war cry.
Those of us with a very loved one in active addiction live with this fear & panic daily.
It’s amazing what happens when another human being ever so conveniently decides to cross your way in a not so positive manner.
Even if it’s one of your own ….
One minute everything’s fine, the next, you’re at the top of the highest roller coaster heading down to the depths of who knows where.
We find ourselves plunged head- first into a world that we were only vaguely aware of before.
What to do?
Most people, especially the “anon” groups tell you to detach with love. Unfortunately alot of their stories that I hear, feel more like detach with coldness and aloofness.
It goes against every mother- cell of survival and caretaking imaginable. That’s why we hang on for so long.
Sometimes too long. Until we are deficient & lacking energy, focus and hope. The very things people look toward us for.
We are the healers, the lovers, the make-it-all better-ers. We stay up all night just to make sure our babies don’t choke if they have breathing problems.
Over the years we fervently buy creams, vitamins, educational toys to make sure they develop normally. We worry if they are lacking anything that might cause their stuff esteem to plummet.
Now our babies are out there doing all sorts of self harm and damage to their precious bodies. We can’t think about it without cringing and feeling a deep sense of .. Failure? Or is it just sadness?
Yet we are told over and over again, “Let go” “Give it to God”. “Live your life.”
So we resort to…..
Appearing to”let go..
Appealing to God to take it…
And Attempting to live our life.
Because if we do anything other than that, we are punished for caring.
Twenty or thirty years ago we would be punished for not caring, for not giving our family everything they need and providing for their safety and comfort. But the minute they turn 18, OR the minute they are labeled “an addict”; we are judged as co-dependant.
Robert Weiss, in his Book Prodependance, squelches that diagnosis saying that it’s not abnormal to care about someone when your family is in crisis, whether that crisis be cancer or addiction.
It’s a comforting book full of validation for us suffering Mom’s.
But just because it’s not abnormal to care, doesn’t mean it’s healthy either. If you find yourself lost, feeling powerless, depressed and struggling to relate to anything and anyone, then you have a problem OTHER than your addicted loved one.
That’s when you need to decide: “Is this vile creature that has hijacked your beautiful child, going to have two victims or just one?”
That’s the question of the day for this mom of a person with a substance use disorder……
The little girl with the shy smile, came over to me, as I was leaning against the counter in the kitchen. Her sticky fingers grabbed my hands and led me to the dining room table where the family was singing Happy Birthday to her new little sister.
She placed herself in the tall wooden chair and put my hands on top of it, then told me to stay there behind her. She Grandma for support. My heart melted.
The birthday girl’s Mom brought the My Little Pony cake in, as the familiar song rang out with happy smiles all around. 🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶
As I watched the plume of smoke rise up from the candles, I felt the tears stinging my eyes.
This was my little 6 year old granddaughter; who I managed to see a few times a year, despite living only a couple hours away.
The people in attendance were mostly her new family, my youngest son’s tribe as he forged into a new relationship and new life.
The previous life had held my eldest son, the family business, and all my other happy kids and grandkids.
As the grey smoke disappeared into the abyss, my eyes clouded in tears as I thought of the irony of that smoke.
The sweetness of life swirled up in the yummy pink fluffy frosting. The colored candles of adventure dripping with melted wax. The lightness of the flame flickering, taunting. The flame is what separates the light from the darkness. When the flame extinguishes, the smoke does its dance….
And oh, did our smoke dance. Our family had now joined one of millions ripped apart with addiction, specifically opiods which not so quickly, dominoed into heroin.
We can argue all day long about who’s fault that was, but it’s clear that anyone who was remotely vulnerable to addiction had some intense marketing help.
Over 200,000 thousand Americans have been lost to the opiod epidemic crisis. The recent Sackler family lawsuit has brought to light some factors of this.
But this isn’t what this story is about. This story is about a little girl and her grandma.
This Grandma, who tries to go to work, be a wife and a Grandma. Who tries to not let others see her pain. She plans Christmas parties and goes on outings with her other kids without mentioning him.
A grandma who spends her days trying to maintain some normalcy, not knowing if she’ll get “the call” that day. The dreaded call is known amoung mothers of addicts groups on Facebook. Hundreds, thousands of them. Almost daily, the scene repeats itself: wake up, click on Facebook, see a post saying “I got the call today”. You feel your body freeze in horror. Maybe this day, no facebook groups. Too depressing.
But today she didn’t. Today she made the mistake of mentioning him.
It was to the younger son- and he didn’t like it.
She mentioned that “He”, would probably be going to jail soon and she wondered if the younger son had any old work trucks that wasn’t being used just so he could get around until then. He said no, he got rid of them all.
Case closed. Then in saying our goodbyes, this Grandma mentioned to not say anything about the ‘jail thing’ to anyone. (Ya know, we have to keep the secrecy and shame of addiction rampant).
I thought.
He proceeded to tell his mom, me. His mom that he once revered as a young teen, that she needs to quit coming around and always talking about “him”. He went on to say that he doesn’t want to hear anything about how I’m helping the addict, because “HE” doesn’t want to be helped. As I started to explain, that’s the nature of the disease, it tells them they don’t need help; he rejected any explanation. He was not to be ‘educated’, not this day or any day.
My therapist would be so disappointed. I crossed so many boundaries. Boundaries of not letting people feel however they want to feel. Educating people who didn’t ask to be educated. Telling people what they should do. At that moment though, I didn’t care what my therapist thought. I had already fired him anyway, for not understanding and agreeing with harm reduction in addiction.
All I cared about in that moment, was that I had now lost another son to this monster.
I immediately felt my emotions elevating to freak out proportions. I was already jet lagged with fatigue due to a previous day and night full of anxiety and stress of a different subject and nature, so I was primed for a major meltdown.
And I obliged.
As my husband pulled away from my son’s house, I screamed in a fit of rage. I screamed at him to LET ME DIE!!! That I’m not doing this anymore! I’m not losing another child and going through another 2 or more years of not seeing this grandchild like I already had done with the addict’s children. My husband had to pull over and fight me in the snow for 2 hours as I let out the tears and pain and frustrations of trying to maintain normalcy the last few months. Of trying to find a reason to live, as I screamed:
“I can’t watch this play out anymore!!!! I can’t bear to see my family fall apart, my son go to prison, and me left with the strict instructions to NOT CARE or DO ANYTHING about it all”.
If this is screaming of unstableness, co-dependancy, and enmeshment; all are probly correct.
The anguish, the disappointment, the sheer agony of the ripple effect of addiction, is not something that you can describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it anyway.
So, here we are. The dead of winter. The dark, coldness enveloping my shoes and my heart as I stood in the middle of a dirt road in rural America, begging my husband to just let me die. I mean, he had a gun.
That’s right.
Concealed carry gun owner. Perfect. I thought. It’s not as if I hadn’t thought about it before.
Suicide is a darkness that’s hard to explain. It also doesn’t just happen (usually) as a knee jerk coping skill to a bad fight such as this. But this moment might be an exception.
The person in a full fledged emotional turbine such as this, just wants the pain to end. And in that tunnel of darkness, the distraught brain can’t see another way out.
But my husband wasn’t in agreement.
He took me home. Worn out. Defeated. Hopeless.
My son later sent texts that solidified that I “needed mental help” & he didn’t want “negative people around his daughters” and “when I decided to quit helping the ‘tweaker’ I could be in his life”. So there’s that……
Love, with strict conditions attached, from my very own flesh and blood.
Oh…. the ripple effects of addiction.
When everyone has their answer to a problem- that in and of itself – is actually an unhealthy solution to a bigger problem.
The problem is, there is no perfect solution. And if left untreated in family recovery- the ripple effects of addiction will go on and on.
To me, this house represents success. It’s represents hope. It represents forward motion. It gives hope to a sense of normalcy again. It screams “Please validate me even while I’m in this darkness!”
Specifically, I’m talking about the driveway made of brand new cement. This represents the seemingly long lost talent and grit of my entrepreneur son who did a downhill slide into addiction in 2019. And I don’t just mean bunny hill slide. I mean Matterhorn, Revelstoke, and Whistler- Blackcomb kind of slide.
The kind of slide that takes everything you own away. New house, huge business, over 20 vehicles, 2 campers, and last but certainly not least, a 12 year marraige and 2 precious kids.
Why?” You ask? “ Why would anyone ‘choose’ to lose everything?
Of course they don’t.
They only chose the first part. The part about having a drink to take the edge off the day. Ya- know? Like you and I can.
They only chose to lessen some back pain from working 60 hours a week.
They chose to take a pill to finally be able to sleep the whole night through. It was slowly, gradually, until they realized they became sick without it. Until they realized that they were spending more time trying to not be sick than living life. They were telling more lies than they’d ever told in their life, just to avoid being sick.
By the time they started having the negative consequences of their substance use, their brain was so hijacked to get more and more that they couldn’t care. Not didn’t care- Couldn’t care.
As Gabor Mate stated in this article: …The addicted person
“ suffers negative consequences as a result of, and yet has difficulty giving up”.
Dr. Gabor Matè
He won’t even argue the disease versus choice because he believes
“Addiction is neither a choice nor a disease, but originates in a human being’s desperate attempt to solve a problem: the problem of emotional pain, of overwhelming stress, of lost connection, of loss of control, of a deep discomfort with the self”.
All I know is the devastating effects of this ‘condition’ because my family has experienced them daily. The deep pain, anger and confusion permeats everyone around the addicted loved one. So any, I mean- any -progress, to get back into being a functional member of society, is celebrated with a big sigh of relief.
This driveway and the work involved in prepping it, forming it, pouring and leveling it, is an amazing accomplishment.
Today, I choose to be extremely grateful for this picture of this simple driveway.
It represents HOPE.
Hope for more driveways. More work. More contracts. Less court, less drugs, less shady friends.
Hope to climb out of the darkness of addiction and back to the amazing dad, husband, sun, brother, uncle and friend my son IS!
As this Christmas Day comes to a close, I’m now filled with my usual sense of melancholy and sadness.
I’m so happy my son is alive today. I did NOT want to lose him on Christmas. Yes, there was an empty chair at our parties as I wrote in my blog this week. All in all, it’s another day in the life of a Mother of an Addicted Loved One.
Sunday: I’m at work, passing medications– the irony. The very thing that started this nightmare into hell.
10:15 text- “Hey mom, is there any way you could help me out? I don’t get paid until tomorrow and I borrowed $100 from a friend to cover rent.
10:16 “Hi son, nice to hear from you. I could buy you some food.
10:18 “I need to pay him back. Please, I haven’t asked for anything for a long time.
10:19 “I could possibly pay some on your rent.
11:20 missed call 11:22 missed call 10:39 “I’m at work I can’t talk. 10:39.5 “Sorry mom
12:30 “Mom this guy is wanting his money back faster than I can get it.
12:40 “Mom I promise I’ll pay you back tomorrow
2:30. “Mom I’m working my ass off. I just cant’ get ahead. Please? I only need $60 now. $40 for him $20 for food.
4 pm. Get home, start dinner, laundry. 6 pm relax in front of tv 8 pm get ready for bed 9 pm lie in bed grateful for no text, wondering if he’s beaten up.
10:30 text: “Mom I only need $40 now. Forget the food. I don’t need to eat. I’m begging you.
Sigh. Look over to make sure my husband is asleep.
Breathe…..
Detach, “they” say. Don’t enable. Block him. Live your life He has to hit “Rock bottom”
Rock Bottom? The kid has lost everything. His Business, his livelihood, brand new house, all his equipment, over 20 cars, his family. His 2 precious kids. He’s practically homeless with only the clothes on his back. He’s also lost over 100 lbs. 😥 Rock bottom?
God help me I pick up my phone, I proceed to do exactly the opposite of what my daughter and I had decided in regards to texting. My son is severe ADD and admitted he only reads the first few words of any message.
Our Motto had become
sʜᴏʀᴛ ᴀɴᴅ sᴡᴇᴇᴛ
I proceeded to write out a Nar- anon friendly message about how I would love to help but I can’t, how I know he can have a better life & I’m willing to do anything to make that happen EXCEPT keeping him in that cycle of desperation. I said today’s $40 or $60 will be needed tomorrow and again and again and that he has the capability to support himself like before and as soon as he’s ready to make a change I will help him all I can….
Then I put his messages on ignore and put my phone away.
VƗØŁΔ!
2am. I SLEPT! That long!. Looked at phone. No messages in the ignore file. Good..he didn’t even try to beg.
6 am. I SLEPT! Looked at phone. No missed calls. No new message in ignore file.
7 am. Coffee. Check Social media. Do pow wow aroebics warm up.
9 am order more addiction books off Amazon. Noon. Clean. Laundry. Rake leaves.
2 pm watch Netflix, write article for my new blog about how to deal with an addict child- ya know? Since I had this all down pat…
No messages in ignore file.
6 pm dinner. Visit with youngest child, tv, write, read. No messages in ignore file
9 pm bed. Wow this is really working. Just tell them how it is and they mind! Maybe he’ll choose recovery! Tomorrow even!
11 pm. No messages in ignore file. Realize it’s been 24 hrs since he’s been on online.
12 pm. Realize that he didn’t even read my long message! He’s been offline now for 25 hours,! Omg. What if that guy came RIGHT AFTER he sent that last pleading message & threatened him to pay $$ or pay with his life!
Suddenly I get the impression to call the hospital. I’ve never actually done that before. This must be a revelation that he’s there! I call the hospital and ask if they have anyone in there without ID who’s beaten up or overdosed. Secretary says “We have 2 without ID. Let me transfer you to the Emergency room answering machine”.
2? A fight? He got In a fight with the dealer/ friend/ rent borrower! I give my description of him to the ER answering machine. I turn my phone volume all the way up. Roll over.
1 pm: Check phone. Nothing. Roll over.
1:15 :Check phone.
1:30: check phone. Missed Call!!! I check my voicemail. A nice asian lady reports that no one fitting that description is there- goodbye.
My heart sinks. It’s been 26 1/2 hours since he’s been online. I break down and check the booking reports. No arrest.
2:30 am.Roll over. Try to sleep. Hear a sound. Get up. it’s my daughter going to work. Back to bed.
3:30 Hear another sound. Omg. What if they dropped his body off here since my address is listed as his and they wanted to show me a lesson.
6 pm awake! I slept! But with actual visions of him in a room in a chair with his hands tied behind his back.
8:30 am send text to son: I’m so sorry – I didn’t know your life was in danger.
Please! please! Someone😭 save my son! Followed by 5 texts begging him to be ok.
9:30 am Him: “Omg I don’t have a phone off of wifi and that message u sent did it. Try starting from nothing with no help. I should have known better than to ask anyone for help as far as everything else. I’m not going to be reachable anymore because they have now waved my right to a trial so with an attorney I would have no fellonyz now I’m a 6 time convicted felon on the run with a mandatory 5 years- I’m screwed”
Me : Thank God you’re alive.
Him. Omg that’s absolutely crazy why would I not be alive? Stop watching so many movies”
9:38 am: I collapse on the couch feeling the fullness of my tears well up behind my eyeballs in a raging flurry of sadness mixed with relief that today isn’t MY DAY for THE phone call. I hear a deep exhausting gutterall cry coming from a body that thought it knew how to handle this stress by now. The realization that I just spent another night in worry and fear ( for nothing! Which I’m,? Glad buttt….and it sounds like there’s more ahead.
Knowing that today will now be a wash with my emotions completing thrashed, the tears spill out over my flustered angry relieved face. I cover myself with my weighted blanket, feeling not only the tiny beads of lead on me, but the entire weight of the world.
I realize I have to go to work for 8 hrs tonight. I immediately send out a text to 18 people to see if they’ll cover me so I can drown in my own misery of torture.
One by one the refusals came pouring in. They need to car pool kids, their husbands are working. I want to scream: “GO AHEAD live your normal lives! My son was just dead, for 30 hours, tortured in a room or laying in a hospital bed as a John Doe, in jail on one of his warrants. But it’s ok. I’ll go to work and pretend that I have a normal life with normal problems and a son who’s happy and healthy taking care of his obligations making me proud again.
Damn heroin,
Damn addiction.
Damn Purdue…
Damn whoever else I can blame.
Yes my son too Damn you. Come back. Bring my real son back 😭💔😭
Time to make the best of my ‘new’ title and find the hidden rainbow- right?
I was at work yesterday and had just ran to the cafeteria to grab lunch. I had the privilege of being able to eat alone in my office at this job. However, in my haste to get through lunch while doing some work on the computer, my plate had tipped, sending white rice all over the floor.
I fervently scanned the scattered pieces to find any glimpse of color. There didn’t seem to be ANY rainbows.
I stared at it.
How ironic. I had just told the housekeepers to stop straightening my desk in my office because they never actually cleaned it, they just shuffled all my papers together so I couldn’t find anything.
So now I had to sheepishly go ask them to please vacuum up my mess. I contemplated if I could possibly pick up every little piece of rice myself to avoid that.
It’s such a simple problem right?
No one will be the wiser!
Then no-one needs to cry over spilled milk. Or Rice.
My son was in full active addiction after a couple years of tragic downslide from having it all. Business, new house, family, money. All gone, of course. He now faced many charges of possession to feed his addiction, a few being felonies. His disease was telling him there was no way out, despite many options for recovery.
Basically just getting help would solve half his problems.
But as in true addiction- He couldn’t see a way out except to keep trying to work a few little jobs to save for a lawyer.
Which never happens. Keep in mind that’s been his story from the beginning of time. He just needs a little bit more money and everything will be alright.
So how, staring down at that rice imbedded into the doctor’s office- type old carpet; I became an addict. I became an overwhelmed hijacked brain.
I saw every one of those teeny tiny rice pellets as a HUGE problem. There was my failed business. That one is my ex-wife. There’s my kids I haven’t saw or supported in months/ years. There’s my IRS debt over there. Each one of my felonies stared back at me with such white rice starkness, I could hardly keep my gaze.
Trauma specialists say that when a traumatic event hits us at whatever age, it gets stored in the cells of our nervous system and time becomes frozen at the age we are. We shut down emotionally, in a sense, to stay at that place for self preservation. We refuse to listen to solutions or to people who remind us of that place that hurt us. There is virtually no way for the brain to move out of that place until it ғᴇᴇʟs sᴀғᴇ enough to.
That’s why jail, shame, threats, people telling them how ineffective they are or what a mess of their life they’ve made- DOESN’T work in FIXING it.
Furthermore, when people lose their pride, their sense of purpose, their identity (if their identity was wrapped up in their job or their relationship) they feel like they need justice from that first and foremost. Before a resolution.
So basically, everything is just too overwhelming for their frozen-in-time brain.
That rice was too overwhelming to clean up.
I snapped out of it and my healthy brain scooted each piece of rice together until I got a pile to throw away. Again and again until all the rice was gone.
My son, however, in his very hijacked brain keeps staring ( or avoiding) his pile of rice. He wants to run. He wants to hide. He says, Mom there’s no use, they (the cops) aren’t going to stop until I’m put away for good.
My tears flow on days like this.
My strong smart entrepreneur son is going to jail for satisfying his cravings like a smoker buying his ciggerettes, like me buying my chocolate chip cookies. He has a disease that sent him down this dark path of destruction and chaos and there’s not a damn broom or vacuum thing I can do about it.
As I left work and headed to run errands amid the Covid pandemic, I slowly put my mask back on that I had been wearing all day as a nurse. Usually I resist putting it back on, because of breathing, claustrophobic & dizziness issues. This time however, I welcomed it. Because today was another highly emotional day in the life of a mom of an addict.
My son is an adult, but the devastation on our family the last two years has been palpable. His two little kids abandoned from their daddy, his ex-wife forced to sell their beautiful new home, and his business that most of the family worked at- was gone. He had one attempt at rehab and it seemed to make it worse in the sense that it gave him the impression that all rehabs were scammy like that one.
Today, though was another rough one for this mama. He had sent pictures of himself to me after not seeing him for 5 months. To say I was shocked is an understatement. My once buff, stocky, six foot 240 lb. son looked like a little old man who hadn’t eaten in a month. I, of course, had to torture myself all the more by pulling up his old pictures and making a split screen to show the drastic difference that the toll of drugs has had on his body.
As I walked into the grocery store, the images of these pictures pierced my mama heart so deeply, my eyes stung with tears. I felt my face scrunch up and my body become weak. But I still was able to push my cart around with my mask pulled up to under my eyes, and no one knew the difference. I can mourn my son while he is still alive, amidst other shoppers who wouldn’t have a clue what I am dealing with. I can walk around and grab the milk and eggs and wonder if my son is eating today. I can basically buy anything I want while he struggles to get a few dollars. I can feel guilty for not paying his phone bill this month, even though it seems to not do any good because he doesn’t call in for his court hearings anyway.
Nothing with addiction makes sense. You’re either tough loving them or your enabling them. They’re either going to die, or they’re going to recover. You feel powerless for the outcome, paralyzed in fear and confused as to what is the right thing to do. Most of all, you have deep sense of sadness for your child that you once knew, is gone.
My struggle with my son’s addiction is mostly a secret anyway except to family so I literally wear a mask a 24/7. But now, with the current covid precautions and the masks, I can still have my complete daily or weekly meltdown while doing errands and no one is the wiser. I arrive home with my tears dried, my eyes just a little red and my mood lifted just enough to get on with my nightly tasks. This is a day in the life of an addict’s mom. – Samantha Waters
Zero. What an awful number. Especially if you’re staring at it, in blaring red neon on the heart machine. I was sitting next to my 86 pound dad in the hospital, listening to the slowed beeping of the machine. His gaunt, pale, sunken face haunted me, but it still didn’t stop me from climbing into his bed with him, knowing I would never get the chance again. The COPD he had battled for years had finally overtaken his lungs, causing him to go into unconsciousness when they wheeled him into the emergency room from the ambulance, a few days prior. The nurse had said, it was only a matter of time, until he would slip away. She soon came in the room and said it was time, he was ‘ready’. She left my mom and I to be with him. My sweet mama, stricken with her second bout of lung cancer, sat on the chair with her colored scarf covering her chemo ridden scalp, seemed nervous; scared. She didn’t know quite what to do. I laid my head on his chest and watched his lifeless body slip away as I stared at the machines. I told my mom to come over and say goodbye. Suddenly, I heard his heart beating again with my ear that was on his chest! I said, “He’s alive! Go get the nurse!” My dad raised up his right arm, as if it was once last flailed attempt to beat this disease, then dropped it to the bed. He was gone. Years of smoking would take his life and then my moms just 4 months later.
So why then, 12 years later, were my oldest daughter and I, standing in a convenience store, on an Indian reservation, in the middle of December, waiting in a long line of people who were all there for the same reason? To get a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes for half the price. It was for my son, of course-isn’t everything? He was in his first rehab-out of state. Remember, life with an addict has you doing things you never thought you would. Your standards drop bigtime as you celebrate small victories that are unexplainable to regular people with regular problems that don’t involve substance use. As it was, we were actually thrilled to have found these cigarettes for him because we had searched online on how to send some directly to him. Apparently that’s not an option, it’s illegal or something. So that kids can’t buy them online.
Turns out that even though both your parents died of lung related diseases-directly as a result of smoking all their life-the shock of finding out that your kids smoke, has completely worn off when you realized your son is a heavy IV drug user. To ‘Only Smoke” is HUGE compared to THAT dark world. We were thrilled to be able to do that for him, as long as he was in rehab, and they were allowing cigarettes to help with the absence of the drugs.
My son finished that rehab for a total of 72 days clean. Almost a miracle in the world of addicts. But as naively “first-timers to rehab” we were, we were shocked when it didn’t “cure” him. Our healthy brains could not wrap around this non-linear course of addiction and recovery. With any other mistake or unfortunate event such as a fire or earthquake, you process the shock, clean up the damage, and rebuild. What we didn’t know then, is that fire and and inanimate objects don’t have ingrained trauma or other mental health issues that continually fight against the rebuilding. Habits are engrained in humans to create safety and order. In the ADD, addicted brain it is no different. The path of least resistance, even after a break, and a few good counseling sessions, is to go right back into the fire. That evil, disintegrating , rabid fast burning fire that has shattered so many people and families’ lives. Do you run into it to save them? Or stand there in utter horror, hoping and praying that they walk out with most of their faculties intact…..
