About the AuthorBeverly Conyers MA, (pseudonym) for editor and freelance writer, was born in Fairfield, California, raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and moved to New England in 1970. She is the mother of three grown children, the youngest of whom is a heroin addict.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 2
The Stranger You Love
All addicts’ stories are heartbreaking in their own distinguishable ways. But if you listen sufficient of these stories, you begin to realize that they are also distressingly similar. They follow a predictable pattern of experimentation, addiction, and eventual loss of everything most of us hold dear, including family, home, job, and personal values. Addicts become estranged from the nonaddicted world and seem not to mind when they are scaled down to circumstances that would be intolerable to closely any individual who is thinking clearly. My own daughter was a prime example.
A heroin addict at age twenty-three, my daughter and her boyfriend, a fellow addict, were forced out from their apartment for not paying their rent. In the four months they had lived there, their apartment had become almost uninhabitable. The filthy bathroom contained a phone book that they applied for toilet paper. The living room was a chaotic jumble of dirty dishes and soiled costume and bedding. The bedroom floor was covered with animal feces from their cats and ferret.
They at last moved in with friends for a short time and then to the back of their car, a little station wagon. By that time they had lost or sold most of their possessions. Only a few items of costume and a good deal of bedding remained. My daughter always wore the same long-sleeved shirt stained with sweat; the cuffs and sleeves were speckled with dots and streaks of blood. Her shoes smelled like rotten meat.
Yet when I confronted her when it comes to her situation, she insisted that not one thing was wrong. “A lot of humans live in their cars, Mom,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “We’re going to get a new apartment next week. This is not a big deal.” She refused the addiction outright.
As sickened as I was by her situation, I did not to a complete degree realize that I was dealing with an individual who populated a dissimilar mental world than my own. Only later did I get started to see that we shared no mutual ground, that it was inconceivable for us to commune because she had lost touch with every day reality, and that my daughter had, in fact, become a stranger.
Most families of addicts experience similar sensations regarding their loved one. They say such things as “I don’t even recognise who he is anymore” and “I look into her eyes and it’s like there’s no one there.” One mother of an addict said to me with tears in her eyes, “What a terrible impairment of normal physiological function this is. It takes away our kids.”
People on occasion assert that addicts have “lost their souls.” What they mean is that the addicts no longer seem to care regarding anything but their drug of choice, that they have become untrustworthy, and that their value system seems bizarre or nonexistent.
Families experience a immense sense of loss as they see their loved one, who once possessed sure defining characteristics such as a good sense of humor or a strong work ethic or an affectionate nature, lose these positive traits. Indeed, individuality deteriorates as the addict takes on behavings that are typical of other addicts, behavings that are aimed at achieving one end: the next high.
Recognizable addictive behaviors, present to a dandier or lesser degree in most addicts, emerge as addiction takes hold. They are the result of a subconscious routine in which new thought patterns are adopted to facilitate addiction. Addicts do not consciously determine to change their behavior. Rather, the procedure of change occurs at a deeper level, a result of the marvelous humane capacity to adjust to altered circumstances. The addicts, not realizing what is happening, commence to think and behave in ways that may have been alien before the addiction took hold, but that now seem natural and even necessary. Their brains have been biologically and chemically altered.
Families in general sense the changes in their loved one but do not to a complete degree be grateful for the depth of those changes. They may proceed to treat the addict as they have in the past, only to find their interactions with the addict more and more confusing. They cannot find any solid ground in the changed kinship as the addict begins to exhibit a disturbing repertoire of addictive behaviors.
Foremost amidst these addictive behavings is denial.
Denial
It is not not common in our society to listen an individual described as being “in denial.” This condition is in general understood to mean that the person in question is unwilling or unable to face the truth in regards to a peculiar circumstance. Who among us hasn’t been in denial with regards to something, whether it’s our relationships, our diet, our spending habits, or some other troubling aspect of our lives? Many families of addicts, including myself, deny their loved one’s addiction for a long time before circumstances strength them to face it. Denial seems to be a natural humane response to situations we are unready or unable to cope with.
When employed to addiction, however, denial is taken to the extreme. Denial permeates all of addicts’ thinking, blotting out reality and replacing it with a twisted sensing that everything is other than what it is. The denial is most apparent when addicts are challenged to valuate their own situation. They without delay deny that they have a problem and insist that they may control or stop their use of alcohol or other drugs whenever they choose.
Denise, a secretary whose seventeen-year-old son was hooked on heroin, described talking to him in regards to the problem: “At firstborn he said I was crazy, that I was imagining things. He kept telling me to leave him alone. He was genuinely angry. But a friend of his had told me he was addicted, so I kept after him. He ultimately admitted to snorting heroin ‘a little bit’ at parties and things like that. He acted like it was nothing. Then he started stealing cash from my pocketbook. All that time I was confused because I felt things were bad, but he held ascertaining me he had things underneath control. Then he sold his guitar, and I knew I couldn’t go along with his denial anymore. I forced him to see a counselor. I found out he was shooting up four times a day. Even then, he still insisted he could stop anytime he wanted.”
Peggy, married to a police officer hooked on cocaine, faced a similar experience. “He was spending each cent he made on cocaine,” she said. “He stopped paying the bills, stopped buying groceries, so I had to take on all the household expenses. I held threatening to walk out on him, and he kept saying I was crazy. He didn’t have a problem. He was just fine. You know something? I frankly think he believed it. I don’t think he had a clue with regards to what was happening to him.”
The pattern of denial that Peggy and Denise confronted is typical of most addicts. Denial is the mental mechanism that enables addicts to give up more and more of the things that are genuinely valuable in life in favor of an artificial and fleeting sense of well-being induced by a chemical. In other words, denial is the foundation of addiction, the fertile soil in which it grows and flourishes. Denial provides the comforting delusion that everything is all right, smoothing the way for addicts as they wind deeper into their downward spiral.
A truism with regards to addicts is that they will always deny their addiction or, if forced to confess it, they will minimize it is depth. They systematically say such things as “I may stop any time I want” and “I only use it occasionally” and “I don’t need help—there’s not one thing wrong.” Even when everyone around them knows that addiction is demolishing their lives, addicts will deny that they have a problem.
The depth of their denial does not stop there. As addiction takes it inevitable toll, addicts will likewise deny the severity of the consequences. Even as their world crumbles around them, as everything of value is stripped away, they will assert that their losses are not of much consequence. Their entire faith scheme is modified by the power of denial.
Jerry and Teresa, who had not long back celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary, described their horror as their only daughter endured one disaster after another without evident concern. Their daughter was a nurse, a single mother in a committed kinship with her child’s father. She became addicted to prescription drugs and lost her job. Soon afterward, she was arrested for forging prescriptions, then for shoplifting, and in the end for prostitution. Over the course of assorted years, she expended numerous months in jail and lost her car, her apartment, and most of her possessions. Her boyfriend left her, and in the long run she lost custody of her child.
“It wasn’t until we were awarded custody of our grandchild that I in the end realized just how sick her thinking had become,” Teresa said. “As she was being led off to prison and we were raising her child, her only comment was ‘Well, it’s only for nine months. I don’t see what you’re making such a big deal about.’ Nine months! Nine minutes would have been too long for me to endure a circumstance like that. But she didn’t seem to get it.”
The power and importance of denial can not be overstated when it comes to understanding addiction. Even when addicts are facing life on the streets or incarceration, they will deny that addiction is the root cause of their troubles. Their sensing becomes so distorted by denial that they may be genuinely unable to comprehend the disaster that has befallen them.
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Behaviors that are Symptomatic of Addiction
In my experience, denial, dishonesty, and manipulation are the behavings most rudimentary to addiction. They are the behavings addicts call on time and again in the all-consuming venture to get drugs, use drugs, and conceal the addiction from others. These behavings become like second nature, helping the addiction take r…
An essential resource for parents of addicts
