emotional pain – Opiate Nation

The Cost of Secrets

(Fourteenth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

When Breaking Bad was released in 2008, our son, and most of his generation of young people, watched it. He told us about it and encouraged us to watch it while also warning us that there would be some parts we wouldn’t like – but to keep watching. We did and he was right. But JL knew that we wanted to be connected to his life through the media he viewed and so we became fully engaged and finished the series.

When I think back about it now I realize that we didn’t fully ‘get’ why JL wanted us to watch this series. I believe now that he wanted us to understand the complications and conflicts that drug use brings into a life, perhaps knowing it would reveal secrets that he just couldn’t talk about with us directly. His life was complicated and so he lived with many inner conflicts. It is the inescapable nature of any addiction.

Science Fiction and Self-Protection

(Sixth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

I have always loved Star Trek. From the early 1960’s shows with the corny scripts and goofy hairdos to the 21^st century high-tech and high-stakes extravaganzas. Science fiction envisions the future for us and pushes inventions and technology from getting “beamed-up” in a flash to having a force field to deflect foreign objects.

The concept of a force field would be an incredible tool to have at our disposal – to be able to switch it on and off at will. And I can think of no better time to employ an emotional force field than during the early days and weeks after a sudden death. When it takes all your energy just to exist, to wake up and to face the next moment. An invisible barrier for self-protection.

PAIN – Part 2

Not only did we, and many of our generation of parents, try to shield our children from as much physical pain as possible, we tried to spare them emotional pain too. But there is one source of pain that we will all experience and that parents and loved ones of an active addict experience on a daily basis: pain of loss. Lost hopes, lost dreams, lost potential, lost futures. When we birth our children, we experience the joy of a new life and all the expectations of journeying through life together. We embark on a path with goals and plans and dreams fueled by hope and joy. But life rarely delivers what our dreams foresee.

“Awakening to joy awakens us to pain….Eventually, I am guaranteed to lose every earthly thing I have ever possessed. I will lose every single person I have ever loved. Either abruptly or eventually. All human relationships end in loss (death).” (Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts)

The losses that people who are addicted (to anything) experience on a daily basis brings pain for them too. Sadly, addicts will lose most of their relationships while they are still alive. We watched this happen to our son as his addiction progressed. Initially, friends who were not involved in drugs slowly distanced themselves. Eventually, JL was spending more time on his relationship with heroin and had no energy left for friends. When he was sober, this was a source of pain – and shame – for him.

The sense of shame that hangs like low black clouds gathering over our lives any time we as humans engage in something we know is not good for us – or others – is the ultimate loss of self-worth. It erodes the very core of our being and I believe it is the hardest obstacle (aside from the physical addiction) for opiate addicts to surmount in seeking recovery. Shame paralyzes us.

“Shame is an overwhelming negative sense that who we are isn’t okay. It is a no-win situation. Authentic, legitimate guilt is the feeling or thought that what we did is not okay…Compulsive and addictive behaviors are shame-based. If we participate in them, we will feel ashamed. It is inevitable…When guilt is legitimate, it acts as a warning light, signaling that we are off course, and need to make a change…Learn to change shame into guilt, correct the behavior, and move forward.” (Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go)

Yet, it seems that for the rare few who have escaped their addiction and are in recovery, that very shame and sense of worthlessness somehow became the impetus for seeking change. Herb Stepherson is a young man who is in active recovery and helping others. His website/blog is: https://junkboxdiaries.com/. It seems he had a similar story to our son, with one exception: he was not propped up by well-meaning parents and was allowed to experience the full degradation of his heroin addiction. While in prison and planning on suicide, he had an epiphany and God entered the story.

As we look back at the path of our son’s addiction, we feel that by our being overly involved probably prevented him from hitting whatever ‘bottom’ would have been the stimulus he needed to desperately seek help. Although we know he felt a lot of shame, our continual encouragement to him as a person of value and worth to us and God was constant. The conflict was how to communicate that to him without enabling his addiction? Did we short-circuit the role of shame fueling legitimate guilt and the desire to change? We were never sure. We always tried our best. May others learn from our story and do better.

PAIN

One time when our son was camping with friends and their families in the wilderness, a friend of ours asked him why he used heroin. JL said: “Because it takes away all the pain.” Our friend shared this with us and several hundred other friends at our son’s memorial – and said he always wondered if JL was referring to physical pain, emotional pain, or both.

From my earliest memories, my knees and legs ached at random times and varying intensity. Sometimes I thought it was from running or playing too hard. At other times, it seemed like it happened when it rained. But, being in a large family growing up in the late 1950’s and 60’s, there were not many options for relieving that pain. My parents would sometimes rub my legs with witch hazel, which made my legs feel good at the time. Sometimes they would wrap my knees in an Ace bandage to help while I was at school. Yet there was one thing that never happened: I was never given any medicine to relieve my pain.

I didn’t realize when I was young that most likely even if my parents had known of a drug that would have relieved my pain, they would not have given it to me because they were not worried about me having to suffer a little pain. They knew that pain was an inevitable and bearable part of life, and an important part of forging resilience. Sadly, John and I — and many of our contemporaries — did everything we could to help our kids avoid pain. Now we are experiencing the result of those mistaken values. We found the same thoughts expressed by Sam Quinones, as he discusses this at length in Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. (www.samquinones.com/books/dreamland/) He believes this dynamic is in large part responsible for the opiate epidemic because it is intertwined with our American culture of comfort and prosperity.

Yes, the pharmaceutical companies and their executives who shamelessly promoted drugs that they knew were highly addictive are responsible for much of what we are living with — and dying from — in America today. But we are responsible for facilitating a culture of pursuing a pain-free existence. It can be obtained, but at what price? Is it one more way we humans think we can overcome the perils of nature and living in an imperfect world?

We are not sure when our son first started using opiates, but we think that it started with prescription pills that were not his or ours. And we know that after a serious accident, when the doctor would no longer give him prescriptions, he bought Oxy on the street, then switched to BT Heroin. He just couldn’t deal with the pain and he was not motivated to do physical therapy — it was too much work.

I feel certain that JL was referring to both physical and emotional pain. What may have started as looking for relief from some physical pain when he was a young teenager, turned into a monster that was causing him shame and ruining his life — and that is painful.