Читать книгу Loving Our Addicted Daughters Back to Life - Linda Dahl - Страница 11
ОглавлениеMy Daughter, Myself: Kim and I
“We parents see our children with a veil over our eyes,” a top addiction research scientist shared with me over coffee. She wasn’t talking as a scientist. She was speaking as the mother of an addicted child. And she was telling my story.
“Some experimentation is normal. Not all is pathological,” the author of a well-known book about adolescent girls’ growth in identity assures us.1 (Not so reassuring is another passage where she describes how teenage girls are “going down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”2) Of course it is every parent’s wish that a daughter is just going through a phase, that she’ll grow out of it —that, God forbid, it’s not a drug problem. She’s becoming a young adult, and the world is filled—as never before—with temptations. So, crayon-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, wild bursts of moods . . . I could live with that.
If only it were just that. One of the greatest tools a parent has in raising her child is intuition, but, as I and other parents share in this book, it can get lost in the tumult of dealing with teenaged angst. Time after time when talking to other parents of addicted daughters (many of whom are now in recovery), I’ve heard some variation of “I just knew something was wrong.” But they didn’t know what to do about it. That’s what I told myself about my daughter Kim, at first as a whisper, later as a scream. Something was off, then way off, but what? Why? When I first noticed differences in Kim’s interests, I felt that twinge. She’d loved playing the piano and she had excelled as an ice skater. She was a diligent student with good grades. But at fourteen, these interests began to fade. At fifteen, she got kicked out of the all-girls school she had begged to go to, for taking stuff from other girls’ rooms and hoarding it. No one was on hand when we went to pick her up on an icy February evening except a teacher’s aide who suggested to me Kim was a kleptomaniac. And no one from the school ever contacted us after that to express any concern. We enrolled her in the local public school and got her into counseling. But Kim wouldn’t communicate with us. She stayed in her room a lot. Her therapist explained to us she had self-esteem issues and that she had felt inferior to the many wealthy girls who were at her former school. This seemed an inadequate explanation to me, but she did appear to stabilize and made some new friends. So maybe the therapist was right.
When I found out a bit later she was smoking cigarettes, I was dumbfounded. Only two years before, Kim had begged her dad to quit smoking his nightly pipe, having learned of the dangers of nicotine in middle school. Of course we forbade her to smoke, but she just kept buying them from older kids and sneaking off to smoke. I now know it was the summer after her sophomore year in high school when Kim began smoking pot in earnest, drinking, and taking pills, as well as hallucinogens—“shrooms,” or mushrooms—and Ecstasy, known as “Molly,” while on overnight stays at friends’ houses where, unbeknownst to me, the parents would cover for the kids. (In fact, she took all kinds of pills with her new buddies, sleeping pills they took from medicine cabinets or bought from other kids, such as Xanax, Ativan, what have you.) I didn’t have a clue. I made a point of meeting Kim’s new best friend’s mom, a hardworking, friendly nurse with rosy cheeks. It was fine with the mom that Kim stayed over at her house frequently that summer. I had no idea she left the girls unsupervised or else drank with them. My husband and I found a bong in Kim’s room and a half-empty bottle of vodka (we didn’t yet know about the pills). So we grounded her. We had earnest, stern talks, we tried to encourage healthy interests. Kim was defiant, raging, sly, manipulative, always at least one step ahead of us.
Statistically, my daughter’s experimenting with cigarettes, marijuana, booze, and other drugs as a mid-teen was on target. When puberty hits, besides depression, which can show up as a preoccupation with body image, girls (as well as boys) may have other issues manifest in adolescence, from bipolar disorder to ADD to other mental health problems. Kim was a late-bloomer physically and secretly agonized over her slow development. I didn’t know how depressed she was. The therapist kept telling us she was working on her issues. And—I’m not proud of this—when I found out Kim was smoking pot and drinking, although I was upset, my attitude was mixed. Because I had done it, too. I remembered my own baby boomer youthful rebellion and angst, my own experimentation with loud music, hippie clothes, and drugs. I hoped I was helping her by telling her about my own use (a much-edited version), by emphasizing the problems drugs and alcohol had led to in my young life. Experts are divided about whether it’s helpful to tell our children about our own history with substances. In Kim’s case, what she heard from me was that I’d used different stuff and now I was fine. She simply blocked out all the trouble it had caused me.
My husband and I began to have conflicts over how to deal with Kim. She’ll grow out of it, I assured him, she’s seeing the therapist every week and we just have to be firm but not punitive. He was made of sterner stuff. He got angry at her antics, while I tried to understand. But neither of us really knew what to do. We cobbled out strategies, rules to lay down and stick by. But she was so defiant and such a good liar. In her junior year, I was relieved when she got a boyfriend. Tom seemed like a nice young man. He lived in a nearby town, with good parents and a kid sister and a horse. Tom was a guitarist and they were both huge movie fans, so it made sense to both sets of parents that they spent hours in Tom’s family’s finished basement with the flat-screen TV and stereo system. None of us knew what they were doing was spending hours stoned on Oxycontin, the powerful painkiller oxycodone hydrochloride.
I was still pretty clueless. Kim was never a “big” drinker, but she and Tom and their group got drunk occasionally. As I mentioned earlier, for young women, binge drinking, often coupled with eating disorders, is a serious, under-recognized problem that has increased in recent years. As for the pills, I had no idea kids in suburban, urban, and rural communities all around the country were finding prescription pain pills by the cartload in family medicine cabinets, or that they were sold illegally and easily available. At Kim’s nice suburban high school, there was a thriving market in the parking lot. There probably still is.
We didn’t know how quickly kids or anyone—there is a growing problem of addiction in older people, too, who are prescribed pain medication and become dependent on it—get addicted to opioids, especially Oxycontin, or “oxies.” The abuse of oxycodone and other opioids like Percocet and Vicodin, which has frequently led to heroin addiction, killed more young people from overdoses than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.
Kim was kicked out of Tom’s house when his father discovered they were using oxies, and he was sent away to rehab, but we didn’t know this for some time because we weren’t told. Now she spent time with other artistic, bored, alienated kids, including older kids who’d already graduated, which I now consider to be a red flag. Sometime before her senior year, I now know, Kim began sniffing crushed painkillers and then heroin. Our sense that something was wrong was now chronic. She had endless excuses about where she was and what she was doing, which is what addicts do. When I discovered what she was doing I went numb with shock—I was shattered. In the ’70s and ’80s heroin use was looked upon with horror by baby boomers like me. It was and still is a strong taboo. Some of us didn’t think twice about “experimenting” with pot and psychedelics when we were young, but the stigma attached to heroin was huge. It was for outlaws, gritty urbanites, and “minorities.” Well, those days are over. A few years ago, drug companies were pressured, after many deaths from overdoses, to change the formulation of Oxycontin so it couldn’t be tampered with to be crushed to snort or inject. Among women, deaths from prescription pill overdoses such as Oxycontin quintupled since 1999, to about eighteen women every day.3 But once oxies were made tamper-proof, voilà, heroin became the alternative. In the immortal words of one high school student, “It’s cheaper than a six-pack!” And this terrible epidemic has continued, an epidemic that so far mostly impacts young Caucasians, rich, middle-class, and working-class alike.
Let me tell you a bit about me. I’m an alcoholic who has been sober nearly forty years. I come from a loving, large family with a kind and hard-working father who hid his alcoholism for years, helped (endlessly) by my mother who was determined to keep that fact hidden, in order, as she explained to me years later, “to protect you children.” (It didn’t work, Mom, but I get it.) As a young teenager, I was ambitious in school, had a lot of friends, a boyfriend, and participated in lots of extracurricular and church activities, but underneath I felt more and more lonely, unsupported, and depressed—and increasingly “different.” I drank along with the crowd in senior year at parties and dances, but it wasn’t until I went away to college and discovered the “alternative” lifestyle of the ’70s that I felt the thick fog of depression lift, some of the time at least. Because now there was cheap wine along with beer, marijuana, psychedelics, then a raft of drugs including cocaine, Dexedrine to study for finals, and other substances I’ve since forgotten. For a while, my new lifestyle of mostly pot and cocaine and drinking in bars made me feel smart, sexy, empowered. But addiction is a progressive disease. Although I was ambitious and loved to travel and had friends, within a few years I was isolated and drinking as much as I could, as often as I could, because I had to. Then the momentary easing of anxiety and heavy self-criticism didn’t work anymore. I felt worse than ever. As many women addicts do, I rapidly became a blackout drinker. But I still didn’t connect the trouble in my life with my using: the bewildering and complicated phenomenon of denial is a hallmark symptom of the disease.
The turning point came gradually for me. The final straw was a visit from my sister with whom I was very close. She told me lovingly, tearfully, but firmly just how my addiction was affecting her and my family. After a bit more of the paralyzing sense of aimlessness and fear I had gotten so used to and that continued to fuel my drinking, I hit a wall. I didn’t want to quit using—but I didn’t want to live the way I was anymore. This seemingly hopeless moment, when despair meets clarity, can be priceless for an addict, because it can lead to recovery. It was the late 1970s, and there were few options for treatment at that time. But my moment of clarity somehow brought me to the twelve-step meetings that turned out to be all over the place. I went to meetings with no idea of what I’d find, out of desperation. There I met people—especially women—who were calm and supportive and who told stories I could relate to. They gave me endless practical suggestions, which I desperately needed, on how to stay away from substances and learn to live a healthy life. Getting into recovery was painful and hard, but the healing has been worth everything. Along the way I met thousands of women and men with the same disorder who now have calm and productive lives. And these days more and more young people are crowding the rooms of twelve-step fellowships looking for a foundation for their life in recovery—as well as many other alternative support systems that didn’t exist until recently.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, I’d have recognized Kim’s addiction sooner, given my history. I knew that, as one study puts it, “a genetic predisposition to addiction and/or co-occurring mental health problems [put kids] at greater risk of progressing from substance use to addiction.”4 Yes, I worried about that, but I also thought having a role model of a mother in recovery as an example of a disease that can be arrested with diligence would give her the necessary ammunition against the temptation to use when the time came. Wrong! Also, who could have predicted middle-class kids, with opportunities that most of the world can’t imagine, would turn in such numbers to a drug that adults today associate with hard-core street users? And then there’s that thick veil, that inability or unwillingness to see—the denial.
My daughter became bone-thin, either slept all the time when she was home, raged and cried hysterically, or disappeared. My husband and I stepped it up. We took away serious privileges. Then, in the spring of her senior year at an alternative program for gifted, alienated kids (most of them miserable and many on drugs), one of her teachers called me in for one of those “talks” I’d grown to expect and dread from the authority figures in her life. Usually, they talked about Kim cutting class, missing homework. But this teacher was different. She cut to the chase: Kim had a serious drug problem and we needed to get her help. Hearing the truth from another responsible adult—that Kim was actually “hooked”—was like having bandages ripped off my eyes. I had been distracted by the side issues, her slipping grades, her questionable new friends, her new, horrible temper, her arrests. I’d continued to see her as she had been, like looking at photos of the adorable little girl I’d doted on. “Miss Social Butterfly” in preschool. Lead in the school play twice. Brownies and Girl Scouts. Theater camp. Talented in a variety of artistic pursuits.
In my research I’ve read or been told time and time again that girls often escalate their drug use to deal with trauma. It can cover a range of experiences, from physical or sexual abuse to what they perceive as a life crisis. In our family’s story, the escalation of Kim’s drug use is tied to a major loss. After suffering increasing pain, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the fall of her senior year in high school. By the time the teacher laid it on the line to me in the spring, he was in and out of the hospital and in constant pain. We knew he didn’t have long to live and I determined to shield him from this painful news about his beloved daughter. I got her into an outpatient group for adolescents that met five nights a week at a local rehab center. At the weekly parents’ meeting, where kids, moms and dads, and grandparents and counselors met in an enormous circle, Kim was soon speaking up articulately about how grateful she was to be giving up the drugs and finding healthy alternatives. Of course, I wanted to believe her so much. And she wanted to believe herself, I understand in retrospect. But she also tells me that before and after the outpatient sessions, there were kids selling drugs to each other in the parking lot.
With drugs available all over suburban New York she soon caved after her short “clean time” in outpatient treatment. Her addiction pulled her further and further away from everyone and everything she had liked. This is the bewildering beast at the heart of an addict’s self-destruction. It is too painful and too frightening for the addict to think of stopping and it leads to bad decisions and terrible isolation.
Watching her vigorous, active, fun-loving dad crumble and eventually die a week before she managed to graduate from high school, Kim fell apart. When she stood before her class to give a presentation as part of the graduation ceremony, I watched the tears pour down her face and felt my own stream down on mine.
I was completely exhausted in body, mind, and spirit from caring for my dying husband, trying to deal with Kim, trying to be there for her grown brother, much less dealing with my own grief. That summer, I hardly noticed when she’d stay out all night and make up lame excuses when she got home. I simply reacted. When money went missing and I found sheets of paper on which she’d practiced imitating my signature to forge checks, I hid my checkbook, my wallet, my credit cards, and I changed the password to my bank accounts. I searched Kim’s room obsessively for bits of tinfoil, doll-sized Ziploc bags, and syringes. Sometimes I would beg her to stop. Sometimes I just cried. So did she.
Did I make a lot of mistakes with Kim? Of course I did. But as I was to learn, I was doing my best with the energy and knowledge I had. A parent’s basic instinct is to protect a child. What I didn’t yet understand was I was not protecting her: I was protecting her addiction.
She was supposed to go to peer-support twelve-step meetings after the adolescent group ended, but I didn’t know if she actually attended the meetings. I told myself she was and that this was a clear sign of her getting better. She’d been accepted by the college she wanted to go to and I thought this would be a positive move. She’d get away from all those sleazy friends and start a new, independent life. In October, when I visited her at her residence hall, though, there seemed to be no supervision of the freshman girls. The suite they shared was a mess. Soon after that, the dean of students called me to ask if Kim had dropped out since she hadn’t been to any of her classes. I called and confronted her. That weekend, I drove her and her stuff back home. She’d have to get a job, I said.
Crisis management had become the new norm. And the worse things got, the more I hunkered down; fear became a constant poison in my heart, my brain, my joints. Kim did get a job, then she promptly lost it, got another, lost it. I kept on rescuing her, fixing up her messes—in short, I continued enabling her addiction. I remember one awful night when she swore she would stop using drugs if I would drive her to an ATM and withdraw four hundred dollars she had to pay a drug dealer who was threatening to harm her. So I drove her to the ATM machine. I felt impelled to protect her, and I wanted to believe she could straighten out with the right support from me.
Each recovery story follows its own arc. The path to long-term recovery is often not straightforward. Along the way, Kim went to therapy, two outpatient adolescent groups, an inpatient rehab, moved away, came back home, and then went to a second inpatient rehab and aftercare at a sober house. She then had several more relapses before she became serious about her own recovery. And that’s not unusual for young people! (Nor for not so young people.)
Of course, I didn’t know about the latest scientifically backed types of treatment that help women of all ages with addiction. I didn’t know about the great deal of research in the last twenty years into the differences between female and male brains, hormonal functioning, and psychological needs; and that women are particularly vulnerable to trauma. I didn’t know each individual facing recovery needs careful screening and the proper treatment. I was fortunate to stumble onto these discoveries when I was desperately searching for a new rehab. For some mysterious reason, I got into a conversation with someone I knew only slightly who worked at the bank I frequent. He had always seemed sympathetic and one day I ended up sitting in his office, spilling out my story. He in turn shared his addicted son’s story with me, and how he happened to know about a small, women-oriented recovery center that his sister, a noted addiction researcher, had helped establish. (I have had too many of these conversations over the years to think they are coincidental. Many others have had them too. When we open up to possibilities, there is room for grace.) It was at that treatment center that Kim began the process of letting go of her fear and shame and trauma. She began to blossom. Though, as I say, she had relapses after that, Kim tells me the core experience of learning to trust herself and other women at the recovery center stayed with her. Getting into recovery is a process, and rehab is an important first step, but often it can be just that. Kim had to move far away from all the “people, places, and things” that tempted her in her home state, get a good sponsor—a woman with longer recovery who advises and supports a woman who is new to recovery through the inevitable growing pains—and open up to recovery because she wanted to. Her path has been full of the ups and downs of being a young adult, plus dealing with the aftershocks of active addiction, such as paying back her debts, dealing with health issues, emotional issues, and generally needing to acquire life skills. Today, our relationship is based on truths that were painful and hard-won for both of us. It was Kim who had to make the decision to get well. I had to learn to let her.
Accepting my child was addicted was the first of several difficult steps I had to take. Later came clarity about separating the addiction from the child and learning new ways to protect both of us from her addiction. That I couldn’t fix her was one of the hardest truths I’ve ever come to terms with. But step by faltering step, it was also liberating. And it was essential in order for the healing to begin. How I wish I had known sooner how to love my addicted daughter more effectively. That is why I’ve written this book, to share a wealth of tools and tactics and information about treatment that best serves young women caught up in addiction. As parents and loved ones, let’s arm ourselves with the most effective knowledge. And, just as importantly, let’s avail ourselves of nurturing lifestyle changes. We can make the journey to peace of mind and offer the strong possibility of a healthy life to our kids. As one parent of an addict who is now in recovery, journalist Bill Moyers, said, “If your daughter came to you and said she had breast cancer, you would work out a way to have it treated. The same goes for addiction.”5
It is us parents and caregivers who are on the frontlines when our children find themselves in trouble with substances. I hope this book will offer you hope as well as useful, practical support and guidance for both you and your daughter.
Notes on Chapter One
1. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 19.
2. Ibid.
3. Sabrina Tavernise, “Deaths in Painkiller Overdoses Rise Sharply Among Women,” the New York Times, July 3, 2013.
4. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), June 2012, “Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap Between Science and Practice,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/addiction-research/reports/addiction-medicine.
5. Bill Moyers, “Addiction Can Be a Disease and a Behavior,” the New York Times, April 10, 1998. William Cope Moyers is the author, with Katherine Ketcham, of Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption (New York: Viking, 2006).
