As always, when I was down and out, I called my mother, who invariably seemed to have the answer. Mom rarely asked me many questions, other than “Are you OK?” We really didn’t talk too much. But maybe we should have. Mom spent a lot of time researching all kinds of ways to help me. She spent less time—if any—looking into counseling or other methods that might help her.
It’s a catch-22 loving someone struggling with addiction. Try to protect them from hitting bottom, and you’re accused of enabling. Distance yourself, and you feel guilty when something bad happens. Either way, you can’t win. What I wish my loved ones had done more of was focus on themselves.
Here’s what I mean by that. Speaking from personal experience, I know that one of the big challenges, especially for youth, is that when addiction takes hold, it can be so extreme that it necessarily becomes the entire focus of attention of the family. Many times it has to be, in an effort to save that kid’s life.
But once any true life-or-death situation stabilizes, the most powerful intervention can often be to broaden the spotlight to include not just the person with the addiction but also their loved ones, caregivers, and peers. Not to cast blame or criticism on others, but to give the person who is the center of attention some space and grace to begin to heal. And to give loved ones some time to do an honest inventory of any unhealthy personal family dynamics which, if eliminated, might work to everyone’s benefit. That’s called finding the “why.”
I think of the growing addiction crisis in our country as the canary in the coal mine—an early warning of greater trouble to come. Like canaries, whose sensitivity to deadly carbon monoxide gas underground gave miners time to escape, those of us with substance use disorder are highly susceptible to toxic environments. Our negative coping mechanisms (drinking and drugging) are a signal that something around us is wrong.
Coal miners knew a sick canary meant an invisible danger to which they’d soon succumb. So they beat a hasty retreat. By improving the environment (which, granted, back then wasn’t possible) they might also have saved the canary.
My mom married an alcoholic after she married a man with untreated mental illness. She buried her own pain under nonstop work. That was healthier and more socially acceptable than drugs and alcohol. But it was an escape just the same. Had she done work to create a less fraught environment—not by working on me, but by working on her—would she have been happier? Probably. Would it have made a difference in my own trajectory? It well may have.
My father carried the pain of his own childhood trauma for a life time. His father abandoned him when he was only six years old. If he had addressed the impact that had on his own self-worth early on, might his mental health struggles have become more manageable? Might he have been a better dad? We’ll never know, but it would have been worth a shot.
I say that not to excuse my behavior during my years of active addiction but to shed a little light on how a young, developing brain—speaking from my own experience—can misinterpret things. This is significant because so often the seeds of addiction take root at a very young age.
I felt demeaned throughout my childhood. So I self-medicated those self-esteem wounds. Eventually my addiction became hard to ignore. That’s when my family decided my “problem” was disrupting our family dynamic and I needed help. Which just made things worse. When the focus became solely on me, it just compounded my belief that I was the reason everything was wrong. The best way to cope with that shame was to use. Getting high will make it go away, you think. And when it doesn’t, what do you do? Use more.
To anyone weighed down by the complexity of life with someone active in their addiction, trying to help keep them alive while preventing everyone else in the family from going over a cliff, the idea of taking time out for deep self-reflective work might sound ludicrous. I get it. And we can’t rewrite the past. But we can change our approach moving forward. There are things each of us can do individually and together to heal. And that extends to society as a whole.
That’s why I use the canary example when talking about the addiction epidemic in this country. It’s not just unhealthy family dynamics or early childhood traumas that foster addiction; it can be societal toxins as well. So when addiction and overdose deaths reach an all-time high, it may be time to ask: What is it about today’s toxic culture that is causing so many deaths of despair? What’s out there killing the canaries that will eventually take down the rest of us too?
