One night in a Nar-Anon meeting, a
woman described her addicted son’s latest crisis. I forget if he was facing
eviction or jail or some other calamitous but predictable consequence of
addiction. What I do remember is that the woman wrapped up her comments with
this statement: “It’s not my problem!” Her voice held a note of triumph, as if
she were celebrating some kind of liberation. And in a way, she was: liberation
from responsibility for fixing the mess her son had gotten himself into.
Her words made a powerful impact on
me because I have struggled mightily with the concept of detachment. At the
slightest hint that something was wrong in my addicted daughter’s life (and
there was almost ALWAYS something wrong), my mind would race to find solutions
to her problems. Was she depressed? I could buy her a car to cheer her up (and
make it easier to get drugs). Was her phone being shut off? I could pay the
bill (making it easier to contact her dealers). Had she lost her job? I could
call places that were hiring and set up interview appointments for her (that
she never kept). But despite all my efforts, her problems kept getting worse.
And because I insisted on inserting myself into her life, it was easy for her
to blame me when things went wrong.
The notion that her problems were
not my problems was a startling concept to me. It allowed me to look at
detachment in a whole new light. Somehow, I had gotten the idea that detachment
meant I had to turn my back on my daughter. That was something I would never
do. But thanks to that woman’s words, I saw that detachment simply meant that I
didn’t have to accept responsibility for my daughter’s problems. That I could
love her and still own what was mine and allow her to own what was hers.
The line still gets blurry at
times, and I don’t always get it right. But I am grateful to that woman for her
simple words, “It’s not my problem!” For I have increasingly come to value
detachment as one of the cornerstones of recovery – my daughter’s and my own.
Serious life trauma, notably adverse childhood experiences, is very often behind one’s debilitating addiction that results in ball-and-chain self-medicating.
ReplyDeleteThe greater the drug-induced euphoria/escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived.
By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
Lasting PTSD mental pain is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one's head. It's solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability/condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.
Hopefully, the preconceived erroneous notion that drug addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is gradually diminishing.
We do know that pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — I call it by far the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
And though I've not been personally affected by the fentanyl crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol or THC.
Yet, I had been one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit 'hard' drugs.
Either way, neglecting people dealing with debilitating drug addiction should never have been an acceptable or preferable political option.
But due to the common OIIIMOBY mindset (Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard), the prevailing collective attitude, however implicit or subconscious, basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support programs for other people’s troubled children?’