I have a family member in rehab right now. Addiction is nothing new in my family. It's something we have all struggled with in some shape or form. Mine took the form of an eating disorder when I was 20. Now, I work too hard. It's healthier, but only just.
When you have an addict in the family, you read everything you can get your hands on. You talk to as many 'experts' (ie. ex-junkies) as you can find (and it's not hard to find them). You reflect in therapy on your own addictions. The hole that they pretend to fill. The obsessions that they perpetuate. You hold on and enable. You let go and feel afraid.
It's hard.
I've spent a lot of time in the last 5 weeks visiting rehab, sometimes 5 or 6 hours at a time. There is a suburban middle-aged Indian woman there for heroin. A lovely Irish chap with two young kids, debt-ridden and borderline divorced from a horrible coke addiction. There's a 36 year old British stoner who has smoked away his Oedipal Complex for 20 years. There's a 22 year old vegetarian Crystal Meth addict. Her mom's a psychiatrist. She has sores all over her body, swollen gums and the signs of self-mutilation on her arms. This is her fourth stint in rehab. After speaking to her, I get the sense it won't be her last.
It all seems so senseless.
And it's rife. There are big shots and little people in rehab. Addiction knows no colour or class or age. It throttles everyone it touches...and then some. Our children will grow up in a world where weed is completely acceptable, when in actual fact, it is terrifying in its insidiousness, robbing the ambitious of their drive and the thinkers of their true smarts, rendering their lives static and their emotional intelligence subdued at best. A sort of quick-sand for life.
And then, at parties, our kids will be confronted with cat and meth and smack and pills from someobody's mom's medicine cabinet. It's real and it's more pervasive than most people would like to admit. And it scares the shit out of me.
For what it's worth, I read a book called 'Raising Drug Free Kids' and these were the big insights from it:
1. Children have to learn to self-stimulate. If they constantly rely on external sources of stimulation, like TV, computer games and Nintendo Wii, they will never develop the capacity to create an acceptable level of stimulation from within. They'll seek it outside, in substances.
2. More often than not, people use drugs and alcohol to numb bad feelings. We shouldn't tell our children not to cry or not to vent their anger. They have to feel that ALL emotions are okay and that their parents are big enough to contain them. That doesn't mean all behaviour is acceptable.
3. Children that play sport seriously are less likely to use drugs in high school. If they learn to respect their bodies, they're far less likely to put harmful substances into them.
4. Families need to stay close. This can work in a divorced home or in a single parent family. A child just needs a safe space to call home.
5. Kids with good self-worth are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Self esteem is not built through praise. It's built through giving children responsibility, the opportunity to develop real competence and unconditional love when they stuff it up.
Good luck to all of us. It's not easy to parent in this world.
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