When Helping Isn't Helping

Living with an addict is like riding a wild rollercoaster, only it isn't fun. Sometimes things "coast" along smoothly and you settle in, enjoying it like a ride in the country on a beautiful Spring morning. You begin to feel happy again, loving again, and your hopes and dreams about the future resurface. You may even stop anticipating that next "drop," believing in your heart that it was all just a bad dream.

Inevitably the drop hits and you feel that gut wrenching adrenaline in your stomach once again. The fear is back, the enveloping sadness and overwhelming dissapointment returns and you wonder how you ever could have believed that it was over, that they were "cured."

It's so easy for concerned friends and family to say, "Why don't you just leave?" Sounds like great adivce, if only it were that easy. Especially if we have children, whom we know should't be exposed to the chaos created by our addicted loved ones. But how do you stop loving the person you know is burried beneath the avalanche of addiction? It's like they've fallen into a deep hole. You're standing at the mouth of it looking down. You know they're in there. You can still hear the faint but familliar sound of their voice. You can barely make them out way down there and you're filled with compassion and empathy and fear for them. To "just leave" is to walk away from the hole, leaving that person that you love more than your own life trapped in that hole - leaving them to die in there. How can you do that? How do you just give up on them, even when you know their illness is killing you too? Some people can, in a very matter-of-fact fashion, assay a situation, determine it's value for their own welfare and, if it does not suit them, simply walk away and move on. Is there a shut off valve that the rest of us are not aware of? Where is the spiggot? Why can't we just shut love off, forget it and move on?

My next "disspoinment" returned with my husband's return to work just yesterday. I thank God that he's back at work because we were almost out of money. But it gives my husband the "opportunity" that he is, apparently, unable to resist. It's is a pretty sure bet that, if he is out of my sight for more than 15 minutes, he's going to go pick up his crack. He did it yesterday. I'm certain of it. I saw the dealer's phone numbers on the cell bill online. I saw that look in his eyes and saw it in his behavior when he wouldn't eat and wouldn't sit still for more than 2 minutes. I'm really getting good at this. He knows I know, but he lies anyway. Now I'm back to checking the bank account and cell bill, checking his pockets and the trash can... back to being sick to my stomach and wondering how I ever could have believed...

That's a pretty typical scenario for most people involved in a long-term relationship with a self-destructing addict. What seems to escape us is that, while thinking we are "helping" by sticking it out with them, we are in actuality "enabling" them to continue self-destructing. It seems that hitting bottom is paramount in recovery from addiction. Maybe not for everybody, but I know it was for me.

"Just leaving" sounds simplistic and rather cruel, but strength can come from the realization that it may just be the best thing for them. So perhaps, as it was in my own case, without the loss of something important to him, my husband may never change. Maybe walking away is, instead, truly putting our loved ones first and our needs, wants, hopes and dreams second.

But I'm so afraid. I don't know where I'll go, don't know what I'll do, how I'll live, where I'll live. What about my animals? What about my stuff? What about me, me, me? Everything I do, I do for him, right? Then why isn't it working? I stay and suffer and cry and pray and all the while, all this time I'm trying so hard to help him, he's still down there, way down deep in that hole and I realize I not helping him at all.

God's Words of strength and encouragement:

2 Timothy 1:7
"For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline."

2 Corinthians 4:8,9
"We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed and broken. We are preplexed, but we don't give up and quit. We are hunted down, but God never abandons us. We get knocked down, but we get up again and keep going."

Philippians 4:7
"And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."


A Prayer for Strength and Serenity:

Father God, help us to be fearless, Lord. Fill us with a true Spirit of Love. Help us to know your Will in this situation, God, and help us to take the necessary steps. Give us your strength, oh God. Lift us up and help us to move forward toward your truth, your light and your everlasting peace. In the Holy name of your precious Son, Jesus, Amen.

Regretting the Past

From the time I was 15 or so, I have been into one "substance" or another. Out of 4 kids, I was the only one who ended up with a substance abuse problem. Those were great odds for my family, since my mother was a raging alcoholic. She did her best, but when I think back on my chidhood and young adulthood I only see darkness and chaos, much like a creepy nightmare. Looking back, I wish I knew back then what I know now. I wish I could have helped her. I wish somebody had. Things would have been so much different. Maybe I wouldn't have wasted my whole life.

When I was 14, mom would let us "party" with our friends in the livingroom. I guess she figured, if we were gonna drink, better we drank right there at home rather than who knows where. By 16 I was a smoking pot, dropping acid, popping those little cross-top "whites" (I don't even know what they were, only that they got me really wired), snorting coke and drinking, always drinking. I was raped once at a "mountain jam" in Malibu at 17 when some guy popped 3 10 milligram Valiums in my mouth and I swallowed them. I remember being awake off and on, but I couldn't move. I know what he did. I've lived with the shame of that ever since. The utter stupidity. I didn't deserve to be raped, but if had known better, I could have prevented it.

I think the years that I was having babies were probably the best years of my life. I was sober during those years and happily married and proud of my family. I wasn't a Christian yet though, and when my husband moved our family, unknowingly to a party neighborhood up in the Antelope Valley, everything changed. I started drinking again and started snorting coke. "The Devil dwelleth in a desert," I heard somebody say once. That might be true. But more the truth is the fact that the devil dwells in the hearts of men, if we let him. He hates marriage because it is "of God." He'll do anything to destroy it. And so it was with us. That was the beginning of my downward spiral. For the next 14 years I have paid and paid and paid for my sins. But there was no forgivness because I didn't know who to ask for it. I just kept on making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Not until I had sunk to the very bottom in 2005, homeless, addicted, alone and afraid, did I begin to feel that I wasn't really alone at all. Yes, "feel." When I finally cried out to God for forgivness, when I asked Him to take me and do whatever he wanted with me, when I admitted to Him what a mess I had made of my life, I began to feel his presense there - in the cold, darkness of that broken down van, in the filth of that heartless city, something came over me: a strengh? A will to fight? I don't know what it was, but change began that night.

At the end of the movie "Shawshank Redemption," Morgan Freeman's character, "Red" is up before the parole board (again). They ask him if he feels he is rehabilitated. He wonders what they mean by that. Did they mean is he sorry? He conveys that there is not a day goes by that he doesn't feel regret. Not because he has been in prison for 40 years or because the Board feels he should. He looks back on the way he was then: a young, stupid kid. He wishes he could talk to him. Try to talk some sense into him. Tell him the way things are. But he can't. That kid is long gone and all that's left is this old man. He has to live with that.

That is how I feel every day of my life. There is a scripture in the bible that goes, "Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Phillipians 3:13-14). This passage helps me when I focus too much on the regrets of my past. I can't change it. Oh God how I wish I could, but I can't. The consolation for my children is that they have their mother back, whole and complete. They can rest in the knowlege that I'm here for them, sober, at any time of the day or night. My faith is my consolation. I have to have faith that, no matter what God's will is for my life, it's better than anything I could dream of on my own. Look where my will got me.