While on vacation recently I had time to relax on the beach and reflect about our family’s situation. There was no great epiphany. However, one thing weighed on my mind concerning the language of addiction.

For many years through this journey, people have counseled my wife and I that nothing will actually change until our addict hits bottom. It was always said with sympathy and understanding in a way that I am sure was well-intentioned. As a parent trying to deal with a drug-addicted child, however, just the thought of hitting bottom was frightening. What is bottom?  How do we recognize bottom when we see it? How long will it take? And what damage is my son likely to experience on his way to bottom?

The answers from people experienced in drug and alcohol addiction were always vague and indeterminate. All the while we kept looking for that elusive bottom. And with each terrible experience we assumed, surely we had arrived there: losing his car, losing his license, losing his home, put in jail, nearly losing his life, and then, entering prison. What exactly is bottom, again?

I have been told by addicts and loved ones of addicts that bottom is different for different people. For some, it’s losing one’s family, losing one’s home or incarceration, while for others it’s the thought of losing the respect of loved ones. 

The one thing I found out for sure is that there is no determining what bottom is for another person. That is what is so frightening for a parent about this whole bottom concept. Is death considered bottom?

With all of these examples of bottom and none of them actually defining the experience, I would like to propose a different term. I suggest we call it a “profound experience.”

A profound experience is something that anyone in any situation can encounter. Large or small, this event or series of events has the impact to change a life. Following a profound experience, a person is able to gain “profound knowledge” concerning his or her life and the impact this experience has on the future. With this new knowledge a person or addict is able to put in place the necessary steps to change his or her life.

To me a profound experience more accurately describes what an addict must experience before it is possible for him or her to begin a change process. It is the inspiration that causes an addict to wake up to the fact that drug or alcohol addiction can no longer be a part of his or her life.

For me, my vocabulary concerning drug and alcohol addiction is ever-changing.

What do I know about blogging?  That question occurred to me when I was asked by my colleagues to host this blog.  I quickly realized that I don’t need to know anything about blogging — only about this topic, which is near and dear to my heart.  Frankly, I consider myself an expert on drug and alcohol abuse, having used almost every drug on the planet prior to entering recovery over 21 years ago. 

If only there had been such helpful resources in the ’70s, perhaps my parents could have done some things differently.  But then I wouldn’t be here today, with my dream job and this wonderful opportunity to help others.  This chance to share my thoughts, insights and experiences with parents and other caregivers, is tremendously exciting and rewarding.

I began using alcohol and drugs at age 13.  My parents never talked to me about the dangers and were heavy drinkers themselves.  My father traveled frequently so raising me was left pretty much to my mom.  In my recovery journey, I have come to accept that she did the best that she could, but the truth is that her desire to be my friend more than my mother really backfired.  She was one of those mothers who thought drug use was a rite of passage and believed that sharing that experience with me would minimize the risks.  Her intentions were good but the outcome was not.  By the time I entered college, I was a full-blown alcoholic and addict.

The roots of addiction run deep throughout my family.  In addition to being an alcoholic, my mother was addicted to prescription drugs, as were her two brothers and her parents.  My older sister is, thank God, a recovering alcoholic, with almost 18 years of sobriety.  However, I watched her son, my only nephew, struggle with addiction for over 20 years.  Just like me, he began using as a teen, and just like my mother, I used drugs with him, wanting to be a “cool” aunt instead of a responsible adult.  Tragically, he died from a drug overdose almost three years ago, at the age of 36.  I often wonder what else could have been done to prevent his death.  Sometimes I feel that I failed as an aunt by not setting a good example, but I was in the midst of my own addiction, and made terrible choices.  I have made amends. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello everyone. As a guest blogger on Intervene I will share my ideas for bringing the latest scientific findings and treatments into the everyday clinical practice of alcohol and drug addiction treatment in this country. I will share my knowledge and expertise on the very important topic of how you can best position yourself andor your loved ones for optimal treatment success with long-term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. My goal is to inspire hope and confidence in patients and their families that they can have an enjoyable drug-free life over time. To this end, I have worked hard with many creative, very bright people to build a variety of treatment resources that educate and support patients and their families through this process.  The two primary tools that I have helped to create are my new book, Healing the Addicted Brain, and a patient friendly website enterhealth.com. An excerpt from the book’s first chapter can give you a better understanding of what I am trying to accomplish here with the help of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America:

From Introduction, Healing the Addicted Brain

If you’re a member of an addict’s family, or perhaps a close sober friend, you feel as if you’ve heard too many failed promises to sober up, covered up too much bad behavior, watched the family be pulled apart and the finances drained, and stood by helplessly as dreams were shattered and the life of the addict slowly slipped away. You’ve been through the emotional wringer too many times and seen the latest “guaranteed treatment” fail repeatedly. Sometimes you wish you could just walk away from it all—but you know you can’t and feel absolutely stuck.

Through it all, whether you’re the addict or the family member, you’ve wondered if there is any point to treatment. Why have your hopes been dashed over and over again? Why not just accept the obvious fact that an addict is an addict, and addiction is ultimately untreatable?

Before they came to me for help, many of my patients and their families feel that way, with good reason. Traditionally, the success rate for addiction treatment was abysmally low. A few of the medicines we had available were effective, but their use was limited or restricted for various reasons. The treatment most health experts pinned their hopes on, talking therapy, was not very successful. As a result, most addicts, their families, and friends were repeatedly disappointed. Understandably, many simply gave up.

I’m here to tell you that you no longer have to feel helpless and hopeless. There is hope, new hope that stems from a new scientific understanding of the nature of addiction plus novel medicines that finally allow us to control cravings and fix the physical damage to the brain caused by addiction. We now know that addiction is a chronic brain disease, that brain damage interferes with the addict’s ability to respond to talking therapy, and that once the physical brain damage has been repaired, talking therapy and other elements of traditional treatment can be very successful.

We’re at the beginning of a new era in addiction medicine, armed with a fresh view of the disease plus high-tech medicines and other treatments that will allow success for up to 90 percent of those who seek help. This is not just a tremendous improvement in the treatment rate; it represents a paradigm shift that will help us to turn the understanding of addiction from a shameful habit that destroys lives into a treatable illness.

As you can see from this excerpt, you as a parent or patient have your work cut out for you if you want to get excellent alcohol and drug treatment. I assure you though that it can be done, and I believe that it will be worth your time to invest in learning more about how to accomplish this success.

I plan to post at least weekly on this site, but in the interim all of my thoughts and knowledge on the topic have been poured into the above two resources — my book and the website, so you can get started right away with the learning process. What you need to learn as a parent is not “rocket science,” rather, you just need to understand a variety of easily understood issues and then do your best to ensure that you or your child is receiving services in these areas. If not, ask about what you are not getting and work to figure out a way to get it.

Please feel free to share your questions.  I am here to help you in this process.  Thanks for reading.

Someone asked me, “What has been the hardest part of sharing a story that has a lot of personal experience woven in?” My answer may be difficult to understand for someone who doesn’t write.

Once I get going on a novel, my own experience becomes material for me to use. As I said in a previous post, it is no longer “my story.” As in any novel, it must have what all good stories have: characters we believe in, dramatic tension, maybe some light that shines through for somebody at the close. A novel is usually a lot more ordered than our real lives. So I write, and to make it a good story, where I need to go next is pretty much intuitive: there are real events and imaginary ones that “come” to me, and I don’t differentiate. It’s like I’m building a house: I just haul over what I need next to try to keep the structure from falling down.

And maybe there’s another reason writers write as opposed to telling a support group the truth of their troubles as they see it: In a story, what has happened can be transformed into how it might happen. People still struggling in the writer’s real world can, in this invented story, make some small move that leads us all to believe recovery is possible. 

But — and here’s what turns out to be the hardest part, and maybe if I’d fully faced these consequences, I wouldn’t have written Night Navigation —

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of personal experience woven into my novel, Night Navigation, but from the moment I started writing it, I worked to find a way to make the leap into “real” fiction; I did not want this to be “my story.” I wanted it to be the story of what was left of a family — an adult man, Mark Merrick, and Del, his mother — after the suicide of Mark’s father and brother.

The main way I chose to create a novel, rather than autobiography, was to move back and forth between the two voices of son and mother. By working in the point of view of a manic-depressive 37-seven year old man who was addicted to heroin, I was able to enter places I could never have gone if I had chosen to work in the “I” of memoir or spoken only in the voice of Del Merrick.

Also, strangely enough, Mark, the mostly imagined character, was much easier to create, while Del, who was a lot like me, tended to go on and on with all the backstory she thought essential, but which really just bogged things down.

Here’s an example of how differently each of these characters spoke to me when I sat alone and worked on reinventing their two worlds:

Read the rest of this entry »