Relapse – Opiate Nation

The Importance of Friends – Pt 2

(Translation into most languages at tab to the right.)

How do clean and sober friends stay involved with a friend who is in active addiction and/or alcoholism? I ended last month’s blog asking this question. In particular, I want to discuss ways that teens and young adults can deal with this difficult and at times very frustrating problem.

What does being a good friend to someone who is addicted look like?

The first thing is to not pretend you don’t know about their addiction. Talk about it openly but without judgment. Understand that they may deny any problem, so you may have to cite specifics that have made you concerned. Express that you care about them and don’t think less of them as a person because of their struggles. Risk your comfort zone. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down your life for your friends.” (1)

Be a good listener. A problem with drugs or alcohol may start from just experimenting with drugs at a party or concert. It may then turn into addiction and be fueled by problems at home or with friends or underlying mental health issues. When your friend feels cared for and accepted and not confronted with more guilt or shame, they will be willing to open up. Nobody planned to become addicted and nobody wants to be an addict. Here’s links to good info on how to help someone trapped in addiction. (2,3)

But, if you remain a good friend to someone who is living a self-destructive life, how do you help them without enabling their addiction? For young people who are good friends, enabling might be keeping secrets for them about their problem, especially from adults who may need to know in order to take life-saving action. It may be loaning them money or driving them to get drugs. The pressure would sound something like: “If you’re my real friend, you won’t tell…” Or “If you really want to help me you would…” Basically, when you support their problematic behavior in the name of ‘helping’ them, you are actually keeping them from living with the consequences of their poor choices. And this will only prolong their problems and delay change. (4)

Encourage them to get help through programs like SMART Recovery groups or AA for alcohol and NA for narcotics. Very few people overcome addictive behaviors alone. Community is key. Go with them if you can or drive them. And remember, drug and alcohol recovery take lots of time and most people don’t succeed the first time they try to quit. Dr. John F. Kelly, clinical psychologist and addiction medicine expert, says it can take 8 years and 4-5 treatment attempts at recovery to achieve one year of sobriety from opioid and other drug addiction. It can take years to achieve stable recovery and Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) is an important aspect. Gone are the times when a 30-day detox/treatment was seen as the solution to addiction. It may be an important first step in the process of ongoing recovery. People can and do recover, but it will likely be a lifetime journey. Here’s a YouTube 2025 video of Dr. Kelly giving a session on: The New Science on Addiction Recovery. (5)

You can encourage your friend with each small step and success, even through relapses. In our son’s recovery program, we ended each session by saying together: “Keep coming back ‘cause it works if you work it.” It takes hard work and it can be very discouraging for your friend to relapse because your friend wants to be free. No one wants to live controlled by addiction. No one. Encouragement to stick with it is vital.

If your friend or family member is using opioids, you should get naloxone (a medicine that can temporarily reverse the effects of an opioid overdose) and keep it handy. Available through local community-based programs or pharmacies.

It’s worth saying again: Friends are SO important for people in active addiction.

Don’t ever give up on your friends trapped in addiction. They need friends more than ever, friends who love them and will invest in their lives and let them know they are a worthwhile human – while you also need to encourage them to seek help in order to become sober and stable. And to remind them by example of what a normal and joy-filled life is like and one that they too can have.

A best friend is someone who believes in you

even when you’ve stopped believing in yourself.

– Unknown

John 15:13, New Testament
Helping Someone with a Drug Addiction

https://www.helpguide.org/mental-health/addiction/helping-someone-with-drug-addiction

How to help someone who is misusing drugs or alcohol:

https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/help-someone-who-is-misusing-drugs-or-alcohol#:~:text=Celebrate%20small%20successes%20and%20try,Narcotics%20Anonymous%20and%20SMART%20Recovery.

Four Signs of Enabling and How to Stop

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/enabling

Dr. John F. Kelly, Ph.D. The New Science on Addiction Recovery (lecture)

Enjoying the Ride or Reaching the Destination?

(Translation into most languages available at tab on the right.)

My husband and I learned years ago that in many areas, we see and experience the world in very opposite ways. I live in the future, he enjoys the present. I am content with less, he needs more. I want to get to the destination, he enjoys the ride. Our theme song is The Beatles Hello Goodbye: ‘You say Goodbye, and I say Hello’. After living together so many years, some of our ingrained predispositions have begun to change as we have rubbed off on each other – and this is a good thing as I believe it makes us each a more balanced human.

This thought came to mind this week as I began to work on this blog post. Sometimes I am so focused on my destination or goal and being faithful to stick with it that it takes a while for me to realize I am not enjoying the ride. As I wondered why, I realized that it’s not that I don’t feel passionately about advocating for those struggling with addiction and mental health issues. Rather, it’s that I have begun to feel stretched too thin – which is not comfortable or healthy. With the holidays approaching, there are increasing family commitments and events that I want to enjoy and not just endure until they are over. The path to this goal is to be more realistic about what I can and cannot do within my finite energy and allotted time.

This contrast in ideologies applies to recovery strategies as well. When our son was trying to recover from opioid addiction 10-15 years ago, the goal was to complete a recovery program and once and for all become clean and sober – get to the destination. As unrealistic as this seems to us now, it is still a prevailing goal for many recovery programs. Sadly, what it did for our son – and for us – was to set us up for discouragement and shame with every inevitable relapse. Failure.

What I hear from current recovery advocates is that recovery is a goal and a process. If your desire and goal is to become clean and sober, you will embark on a plan of some sort. It is absolutely essential that you get to your destination because with many drugs, continued addiction often leads to death. But it’s also absolutely essential that you understand that it will be a journey with many ups and downs – and that you need to be able to enjoy the ride, the process, as much as possible so that you will have the continued desire to make it to the goal. And that those who are advocating for you, riding with you, will understand and assist you on your journey.

So, in attempting to take my own advice, I am going to discontinue weekly blog posts for a while. Instead, I will write blogs as often as I can and I look forward to your comments and ‘likes’ – every ‘like’ helps with visibility and brings new readers. After almost four years of posts on all aspects of addiction & substances, grief & loss, and mental health, if you search the site, you should find something to bring insight and encouragement for the issues that you are facing today. Let’s enjoy the ride as much as possible as we head toward our destinations.

Isolation Loneliness

It has been said thatthe opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection – to others, to a community.The Coronavirus pandemic has brought disconnection and magnified loneliness and stress for people the world over due to social isolation, economic instability, reduced access to spiritual communities, and overall national anxiety and fear of the future. “We certainly have data from years of multiple studies showing that social isolation and social stress plays a significant role in relapse…relapsing to drug use can play a role in overdose.” Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director NIDA.

The acronym HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, is used in Alcoholics Anonymous and most recovery programs. It is a simple reminder that when our basic human needs are not met, one is susceptible to toxic thoughts and self-destructive behaviors including relapse and suicide.

Regardless of where you live, there have likely been restrictions imposed to limit the number of people who can gather together – from dozens in some countries to only the members of your immediate household in others – in order to slow down the high-speed train that is Covid-19. For many of us, we have been able to maintain our emotional equilibrium because we know this is for a limited time and we can look forward with hope to the future.

But what about those vulnerable members of society who already struggle on a daily basis with insecure housing and food supplies and to maintain their mental health, sobriety, or recovery? In the midst of one of the most isolating crises the modern world has known, it is no surprise then that cities across America, and around the world, are reporting dramatic increases in drug overdoses, alcohol relapses, and suicides.

In-person community meetings are at the foundation of recovery programs. And no wonder. It is in community where individuals become part of something greater than themselves. And I believe it is in the breakdown of communal life in individualistic American ideology that has, to a great degree, contributed to the anxiety, insecurity, and depression that so characterizes our national psyche and has led to the pursuit of finding relief in so many unhealthy ways.

A friend of our son who is an alcoholic who has been working his recovery for the past 8 years, put it this way:

“Self-isolation breeds relapse for people in recovery. With quarantine, people are losing the accountability they have relied on from in-person meetings and it’s a lot easier for people to further isolate and close off their emotions. Attending virtual meetings keeps me grounded and gets the message across as much as regular in-person meetings but lacks the fellowship aspect. This will no doubt expose many in recovery to loneliness.”

Even though increasing numbers of people around the world are vaccinated, it will not stop some of the isolation and loneliness. Is there anything those of us who are not isolated emotionally can do to help? The one thing my husband and I have made as a priority in our weekly schedule is to check in with friends around the world via texts, emails, letters, phone or video calls – including our young friends who are in recovery and elderly friends who just need to know they are not forgotten. With our social networks and finances, we can support organizations that are working the front lines to serve the addiction/mental health population. We can make or purchase masks, buy food and basic supplies, to give to those in need and support recovery programs in our area.

Woefully Unprepared

(Today begins a series of topical blogs based on excerpts from Opiate Nation, chapter by chapter, that will run for 28 weeks. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

It’s a bit ironic that as I begin blogging through Opiate Nation we are in the midst of a pandemic. Ironic in several significant ways.

Opiate Nation was written because of the opioid epidemic – which, in reality, is a pandemic. Every industrialized nation, and many emerging and third-world nations too, are dealing with the results from the ease of availability of opioids, whether natural and home-grown, or synthetic and imported. Or both, as is the case in America.

And like the Coronavirus pandemic that crept up on us so gradually that it’s deadliness caught us by surprise and mostly unprepared as nations, the opioid epidemic crept up on us too. In both cases, certain international players were unscrupulous for various reasons, causing delays in awareness when there might have been a chance for all of us to not be caught off balance.

The “inoculation” that should have happened, especially in the United States, by way of accurate scientific information disseminated by responsible leaders, didn’t happen. Instead, false information fueled by political agendas and financial motivation created a scenario that so crippled a timely public health response that, for many nations, it became too little too late.

Loneliness Pt. 2: Unemployment Anxiety & Isolation

We are a global community – like it or not. We are connected down to the minutia of life, from what we breathe, to what we eat, to what we think, to what infects us. And right now, the world, our world is in a life-or-death struggle with a microscopic enemy that seems to keep gaining the upper hand. The result in just one area is massive unemployment and the subsequent loss of access and funding for public and private support services.

I don’t want to get in to the politics of whether economies should be opened up regardless of Covid-19 and suffer the consequences in lives lost, verses lives ruined by no work and massive personal and societal debt. What I am concerned about are the consequences of what so many millions of people are facing from having lost their means of livelihood, and in particular, those whose lives were already balanced on a knife edge on a daily basis.

Loneliness in a Lonely Time

It has been said that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection – to others, to a community. The Coronavirus pandemic has brought disconnection and magnified loneliness and stress for people the world over due to social isolation, economic instability, reduced access to spiritual communities, and overall national anxiety and fear of the future. “We certainly have data from years of multiple studies showing that social isolation and social stress plays a significant role in relapse…and relapsing to drug use can play a role in overdose.” Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director NIDA.