Moms and Dads tend to deal with a child’s chemical dependency in different ways. Dads often want to fix the problem, dammit, to make the kid better, to solve all the problems he or she created along the way. For fixers, all this hard work gives rise to some serious resentment and tests even the best anger management skills. In contrast, Moms want to soothe the hurt, protect the baby, kiss the problem away, even if that requires them to bear their pain. For us enablers, speed dialing grief counselors or Jack Kevorkian can be the order of the day.
This disconnect in parenting styles didn’t arise with addiction or alcoholism. It probably lay dormant all along, but a child’s chemical dependency throws kerosene on the flames of parental disconnect and discontent. Mars to Venus, we’ve got a problem, illuminated by the flame-out of our struggling children.
In order for the family to get healthy, it is essential to “circle” the wagons, which requires all parties to agree to take the same approach towards chemical dependency. It requires a common understanding of the disease of addiction and a shared commitment to not enabling, not fixing….simply getting out of the way of our children as they try to right their own ships. It requires us to talk with our spouses/partners when we would rather retreat or cast blame or yell or cry. Being the parent of an addict is not for sissies, but it give us a chance to hone our resiliency, character, and commitment, which are silver linings in an otherwise dark cloud.
It’s Halloween, a good time to revisit some of the demons of addiction and possibly vanquish them from my life. Perhaps I could enlist the services of the 12-year old Zombie Hunter who just knocked on my front door. Guilt is one of the tenacious remnants of my son’s addiction. I know, I know: I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, I can’t control it. I understand that intellectually, but still….couldn’t I have done something different along the way to derail it?
Possibly not, according to a Time article that focuses on the teen brain and its quest for risk.
In the article, Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University notes that “Because teens have a different style of information processing…they may get lost in the details about specific risks and overly focused on possible rewards, while ignoring the overall ‘gist’ of the problem — i.e., the ultimate consequences.” Their greater tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown may help them step out into the world, a key task developmentally. That tolerance for the unknown, coupled with their sense of invincibility, also underpins their willingness to try drugs or alcohol.
It’s actually freeing to understand the powerful biology that drove my son’s initial trysts with drugs and alcohol. Being a more demanding/friendlier/better/worse/more disciplined/less controlling mom probably wouldn’t have curtailed his initial experimentation. It all comes down to the decisions he made under the influence of his risk-seeking or risk-adverse brain. I was powerless over his adolescent risk-taking, just as I am powerless over the alcohol that made his and my life unmanageable. Note to self: see Step One and stop being so hard on myself.
I read a powerful commentary on the Huffington Post the other day called “Death by Prescription Drugs: How Dare you Say my Son ‘Deserved It.” Katie Allison Granju who lost her 18-year old son to prescription pill overdoes, gives a voice to the way “the system” fails our chemically dependent children.
While her local media covered the rise of “hillbilly heroin” in her small town, it makes no mention of the 150-200 people from her community who die every year from pills sold to them illegally. “It’s as if these people simply disappeared,” she writes. Where are the stories about the two teens—including her own—who died on the same day? Where is the sorrow? Where is the outrage?
To the police, they are invisible “unattractive victims” because their addiction to pills implies that they “asked for it.” They died at the hands of a weapon as lethal as a gun or knife, yet the police don’t treat the dealers who sold them deadly drugs as murderers. The medical examiner routinely rubber stamps overdose as “accidental,” further erasing any possibility of criminal prosecution.
Mix this official anonymity with personal shame and stigma surrounding a child’s chemical dependency, and we’ve got a disease raging uncontained through our communities. As Katie Granju points out so eloquently, “In the early days of the spread of AIDS, the victims of overdose are far too often treated as disposable and invisible, because so many believe that they have only themselves to blame for their own deaths…It was only after American’s attitudes towards AIDS victims began to shift from blame to compassion that were were finally able to come together in a unified national effort to fight the monster that had already been allowed to devour an entire generation of gay young men.”
The voice of a passionate and articulate mother is a formidable weapon as we fight the monster. Please share Katie’s story with everyone you know.
My best friend is now grappling with setting healthy boundaries with her husband and her family. Chemical dependency isn’t the issue; instead, she has felt herself increasingly pulled into the vortex of their mood disorders and discontent, their traffic violations and other boo-boos, and various other dramas. She doesn’t even need to have an addict in the family to feel the discomfort of their pull. Co-dependency doesn’t require drugs or alcohol—just an unhealthy addiction to curing another’s pain or solving their problems.
It is hard to set healthy boundaries. As a “born fixer,” it has felt almost inhumane to walk away from someone who is struggling. Offering relief, fixing a problem is really core to who I am—it is part of my identity. When facing my co-dependency with my addict son, I had to do some deep digging to figure out who I was, if not a savior and a saint.
When does trying to fix others go too far and cause more harm than good? Clearly, it is important to jump in when life and limb are at stake; at the same time, it is critical to “change the system” so life and limb don’t become chronically at risk. Once we got through our immediate crisis of detox and rehab, we forged an agreement about how we would move forward. Among other things, it required that my son get counseling to help him vanquish the incessant call of drugs and alcohol from his head. I also got counseling to learn how to vanquish my incessant rumination about his addition that played through my head like a broken record.
I’ve made progress on changing my “Fix it” mentality that had portrayed him as broken, and me as the solution. I am much better prepared to face each day, no matter what unfolds. Has my addict son changed? As him, not me. Have I changed? Affirmative.
P.S. Check out Co-Dependent No More by Melody Beattie for help cutting the ties of co-dependency.
This is a guest post from interventionist and family counselor Ricki Townsend. You can send Ricki your questions at via our Ask the Expert tab.
I’d like to share with you the exciting news that our Emmy-award winning documentary, “Collision Course – Teen Addiction Epidemic,” is starting to air nationwide. This powerful documentary helps teens and parents understand how today’s substance abuse epidemic is taking a huge toll on teens, families and entire communities, and how education and awareness can stop chemical dependency before it starts. You can view “Collision Course” and share it here.
If you live in the Miami area, you can watch “Collision Course” on PBS-17 at 9:30 PM on Sunday, July 29. Learn the details about the showing here.
“Collision Course” will inspire conversation, action and change. Please spread the word about this resource and get your rehabs, families, schools and community groups in front of the TV to talk about awareness, education, and the prevention of teen substance abuse. Together, we can stop addiction before it starts.
When my son was merely “experimenting” with pot, some family friends stopped by to talk about the cache of pot and rolling papers they discovered in their son’s room. They were trying to tell us, “We’ve got a problem and you do, too.”
I didn’t hear them, and I wonder why. Did part of me say, “It’s just pot—what’s the problem?” If so, I would be in good company: many American parents smoked pot in the 70s and didn’t become addicts, so it seems relatively benign, especially compared with the alternatives. Drunk driving, now that’s a problem. Stoned driving—not so much. And anyway, smoking pot is a rite of passage….something he or she will outgrow. That’s a common sentiment, based on what I’ve heard from other parents who have tried to understand their loose rules and ability to look away from a growing storm. What parents don’t say or know is that there are more kids in rehab today for pot than for all other drugs combined.
Maybe I didn’t hear them because I was in denial about my son’s drug use. I wanted to find another problem with another solution, one I could wrap my brain and energy around. A learning disability, boredom with school, anger issues, and teenage rebellion would fit the bill. I had a name for all those conditions, and a solution, too: academic accommodations, more stimulating activities, therapy, the passage of time. Those could solve the problem; but I didn’t know how to solve addiction, even if I had been able to name it.
My action (or lack thereof) helps me understand why parents today fail to sound the alarm when they discover their child is getting stoned. I didn’t take action; why should you?? Check out our Denial “Meeting in a Box” to get some answers to that question.
June brings memories. Traditional high school graduation activity returns me back momentarily to a time that was fraught with emotions: elation as well as disappointments and regrets.
I desperately believed that when and if my first born child finished high school, everything would be better. Finish high school meant participating in the main event: the graduation ceremony. But the years, months and weeks prior to graduation were filled with doubt, anxiety and worry. His graduating was definitely important to me; I had a lot of expectations around it. Imagine the difficulty in “pre-orders” for announcements…invitations, gown & cap, to name a few – what if he didn’t make the grade? How do you plan a graduation reception with relatives and friends if you are not even sure? I was certain I was the only parent with this kind of worry. Graduation is an expensive ordeal– not just the ceremony but all the school events and merchandising around it. My worry about the investment and fanfare for naught was a driving force in my obsessive behavior to make this happen and if it did not happen, I would be very resentful.
He did graduate and I’ll never forget how proud I was and how much I had banked on that event being the solution to all my problems with him. Life lessons have shown me otherwise.
Addiction is a progressive disease. As my beloved child struggled into adulthood, he had many accomplishments all shadowed with the dark & negative impact of drug addiction. The tug of the drug would be his driver and I had no control over it. A few years of recovery would reveal that graduation from high school should have been the furthest concern for this loving parent. With a new perspective, what seems important just isn’t! Turns out, expectations breed resentments!
It’s June, and that means graduation, an event with a potential mortification factor second only to the proverbial Christmas letter. You know, the one where the Perfect Family flaunts their flawless year, and you cringe because your year was a tad “off,” relatively speaking, while you struggled with your child’s chemical dependency.
I was so relieved four years ago when my son graduated from high school, which had gone down to the wire. Part of the problem was that I wanted graduation much more than he did, just like I wanted sobriety much more than he did. And that’s not a recipe for success.
Now, many of his high school friends are graduating from college, and I can get a bit wistful or wishful, or even downright envious, truth be told. What do you say when your neighbor’s daughter is graduating from Harvard with high honors and moving to Oxford for graduate studies on a full scholarship? And your child is graduating from a three-month stint in rehab, with a special certificate in safe driving from the local DUI academy.
You say, “Hallelujah! And Thank You, God, for keeping my child safe, for giving me back a piece of my sanity, for giving us the opportunity to grow and learn and appreciate the time we can spend in each other’s lives.” Feel free to sing praise as you see fit. If you look around, I know you will find something to be grateful for, even if it’s quite different from what you might have asked for.
And here’s a big secret: those Christmas letters and graduations can diminish you only if you let them. To avoid contracting a terminal case of Keeping up with the Joneses Disease, which can be fatal when taken to heart, take one hefty dose of acceptance, temper it with a generous helping of gratitude, and call your Higher Power in the morning.
I spoke with a friend this week who wanted to know what pearls of wisdom I would impart to help other parents reduce teen substance abuse. I was caught off guard by this question but have been chewing on it ever since. Here is my short list of important things parents should know:
85% percent of high school kids try drugs or alcohol in high school.
Addiction/alcoholism is an equal opportunity disease: being a good kid from a good family does not protect anyone from the possibility of drug or alcohol dependence. Addiction is a disease of the brain. It is not a disease of willpower or character.
Some drugs are so highly addictive that one “experiment” is all it takes to launch the neurology of addiction.
Your child can become addicted to and die from prescription drugs that are prescribed by a doctor and taken according to the prescription.
Because of the plasticity of the developing brain, the younger your teen is when they have their first drink or pill, the more likely it is that they will develop a life-long problem with substance abuse.
One in five high school kids are abusing prescription medications, and prescription meds are the drug of choice for 12 and 13-year olds.
More young adults will die from alcohol-related homicide, suicide or accident than all other drugs combined.
Marijuana isn’t “safe:” There are more teens in rehab for marijuana than for all other drugs combined.
“Environmental prevention” – keeping drugs and alcohol out of the reach of teens — can reduce the chance of abuse. Get a drug safe, lock up the alcohol, and “model” responsible drinking.
Talking openly and repeatedly with your kids about the dangers of drugs and alcohol reduces the chances that they will “experiment.”
When my friend answered her front door a while back, she faced an angry young man who wanted to talk to her son. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there for cordial conversation. She sent the kid away, but a stench remained — a bad feeling, a sense of foreboding, a “knowing” that something was afoot. Now she is perched on the edge of High Alert because of what may or may not transpire between two agitated young men. Not her problem to solve, but still, the confrontation brought teen addiction into her home and into her consciousness.
Our addicted teens track their problems into our house like dog poop on a running shoe. Never a welcome discovery, but what to do?? Should I politely ignore the stench or maybe cover it up with air freshener? Perhaps I should ban shoes from the house, or even throw the shoe away. Now, let’s apply those possibilities to our addicted loved ones who bring their messes home. Should we gloss over their mistakes, set boundaries with love or eject them from our lives entirely? It is such a hard call to make, even though I don’t want to be cleaning that carpet over and over and over. But the bottom line is that I am entitled to a home that is free of crap, both literal and figurative.
For me, the key is to consciously grasp what I can and cannot control. I can’t keep my son from stepping in it, but I can keep him from tracking his mess all over my floor. If he chooses to step in poop, I choose to set down rules about how and when he enters my home. Poopy shoes and those who wear them are not welcome in my home.
Maybe when I stop cleaning up his messes he will learn to avoid stepping in them in the first place.
Having a child struggling with drug or alcohol abuse is a very difficult situation. We're glad you are visiting our site and we hope you find some peace of mind through the support of other parents and services offered by this site. Please keep coming back!
Moms and Dads tend to deal with a child’s chemical dependency in different ways. Dads often want to fix the problem, dammit, to make the kid better, to solve all the problems he or she created along the way. For fixers, all this hard work gives rise to some serious resentment and tests even the best anger management skills. In contrast, Moms want to soothe the hurt, protect the baby, kiss the problem away, even if that requires them to bear their pain. For us enablers, speed dialing grief counselors or Jack Kevorkian can be the order of the day.
alloween, a good time to revisit some of the demons of addiction and possibly vanquish them from my life. Perhaps I could enlist the services of the 12-year old Zombie Hunter who just knocked on my front door. Guilt is one of the tenacious remnants of my son’s addiction. I know, I know: I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, I can’t control it. I understand that intellectually, but still….couldn’t I have done something different along the way to derail it?
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