Archives for September 2017

September 2017

Anecdote 11: What to do if you suspect that your child is using drugs, part seven

Introduction

During the last anecdote, we discussed the importance of patience, the importance of seeking a support group, the importance of trusting your own knowledge and instincts and good communication with oneself and with others. I believe that honest communication with oneself are key to success in achieving any goal or endeavor.

We will now continue with the list of actions a parent can take to help their child through to recovery.

Actions a parent can take

Your relationship with your child is of high importance: It is very easy to demand that your child just stop making bad decisions, or just stop using drugs, or just stop seeing friends that you consider bad influence. These demands will only hurt your relationship with your child, especially when you tried this approach in the past and have met with no success.

Let’s consider the following scenarios: Say you ask your child to stop using drugs and let’s assume that your child would like to comply. So, your child stops using drugs for some period of time. We will ignore withdrawals for now. If there is no substitute for the time that was spent using the drug, then your child will be in a need to fill that time with some activity. Having no other viable substitute (at least not viable in your child’s mind), drug use will come back.

Second scenario: Say you ask your child to stay away from his drug using buddies and let’s say that your child agrees and would like to comply. With no other friends to hang out with (at least none that your child believes s/he can hang out with right now), your child will be drawn back to her/his drug using buddies. Potentially you, at this point, would love to point out how many non-drug-using friends your child has. Your child, for whatever reason, may not feel comfortable approaching these non-drug-using friends right now. Your job is not to argue and prove logically that you are right and your child wrong. Your job now is to help your child find a path to her/his non-drug-using friends or new non-drug-using friends.

Knowing the above, you may attempt to direct your child to spend time in school or work, in the hope that having an activity away from drug use will lead your child to a path away from drugs. Depending on how addicted your child is, these activities, that you consider normal, may become high stress situations which will lead your child back to using drugs.

Help your child architect a path out of addiction with love and understanding.

Protect your relationship with the rest of your children: No doubt the rest of your children have guilt feelings that need to be aired out, or worse yet they may be on their own path to their own addiction. Make sure that you do not neglect your other children in your attempt to help the addicted child. Try not letting your other children feel that they are less important than the addicted child. You may care to set up regular scheduled time with your other children. Explain to your other children that their risk of being addicts themselves is greater than average and as such they may care to refrain or curtail their use of alcohol.

Next Anecdote: We will delve further into actions a parent can take up.

Prev: Part six Next: Part eight

You are not invincible—Stew Birbrower

Together we march towards a destiny

September 2017

Anecdote 10: What to do if you suspect that your child is using drugs, part six

Prev: Part five Next: Part seven

Introduction

During the last Anecdote, we discussed the fact that the user of drugs is in pain, had developed self-defense mechanisms that adds further isolation. We discussed the fact that addiction is a mental disease that hijacks the ability to self-control and lastly, we discussed that recovery from addiction is five (5) years period. Now we will turn our attention to the actions a parent can take.

Actions a parent can take

Arm yourself with patience: You will need the patience of a saint, because you are trying to help a person who wants none of your help. Use the Directed Free Association and the Master Mind Alliance to come up with different topics of discussion and strategies of behavior towards your child. Expect your strategies to be ineffective and yield little result. Keep in mind that you do not have the luxury of giving up on your child. Keep on consulting with yourself, professional help and keep on keeping on, even when the situation looks like nothing is working.

Neither you nor your child can solve the problem of addiction on your own: Seek out the help of a support group like Nar-Anon. Nar-Anon stands for Narcotics Anonymous which is the equivalent of Al-Anon (Alcoholics Anonymous). If you cannot find a Nar-Anon meeting in your neighborhood go to an Al-Anon meeting, the two follow an identical program. While you attend Nar-Anon, you need to encourage your child to attend NA and better yet, attend Rehab first. NA also stands for Narcotics Anonymous and is a support group for the habitual user. NA is the equivalent of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous which focuses on the alcoholic). NA follows the same program as AA.

Trust your knowledge and instincts: I recommend that you evaluate the suggestion of any external advice, be it an advice from a support group member, a health professional or anyone else, then apply the given suggestion only if it makes sense for you. Use caution when you take an advice from an advisor having no skin in your game and none or little knowledge of the specifics about your situation. This is, for the most part, true for professional counselors who listen to you for a period of 45 minutes during which your counselor remembers none of the information that you shared during any other counseling session. I do not mean to imply that there is no benefit to be had from a professional psychologist, I am asking you to evaluate their advice—or my advice for that matter of fact.

Common sense: Be honest with yourself, with your child and with your family. (Being honest with oneself can prove to be most difficult as the adage says: A person can lie to strangers half of the times, a person can lie to their own spouse seventy five percent of the times, but a person can lie to her/himself a hundred percent of the times.) Say what you mean and mean what you say. My advice is not to let your emotions run away with you. Don’t make threats, especially not idol threats. Be consistent with your opinion, your message and your goals. Then, stay positive and work tirelessly toward achieving your goals even in the face of no-progress and defeat. Keep in mind that your struggle will take some five years, so expecting success overnight is not realistic. Then if you do not succeed, this lack of success does not mean that you failed or that there is no solution, it means that what you had done did not work, right now.

Next Anecdote: We will continue the discussion of actions a parent can take

Prev: Part five Next: Part seven

You are not invincible—Stew Birbrower

Together we march towards a destiny

September 2017

Anecdote 9: What to do if you suspect that your child is using drugs, part five

Previous: Part four Next: Part six

Introduction

During the last anecdote, we discussed symptoms of a frequent user. Let’s turn our attention to understanding of the child’s behavior and actions a parent can take.

Information points and action steps

Your child is in pain: Recognize that your child is in pain and therefore your job is to add no further pain. Getting to the source and cause of pain is the hard part that will require an investment of mental energy and communication with your child. Potentially you will need to seek the help a professional counselor.

Self-defense: Your child developed some self-defense mechanism techniques. Some of the defense mechanisms include hiding her/his behavior and emotions from you. You are trying to break these defense mechanism barriers down. Breaking those barriers down will require creative thinking and deviation from the normal BAU (business as usual).

Addiction is a mental disease: Addiction is classified as a mental disease that is co-morbid with other mental diseases that may have developed due to the addiction itself. You may meet folks who are willing to share their ignorance and even sound intelligent while they lay out an argument as to why addiction is not a disease. Keep in mind that the folks conducting research on addiction, like Nora Volkow, the head of the Drug Abuse Division part of the NIH (National Institute of Health) believes that addiction is a disease and has research to back her opinion up.

Stress leads to more drug use: In general, an addicted person cannot handle stress. Stress will lead an addicted person to more drug use. Drug use, especially opiate use, not only takes away physical pain it also takes away emotional pain. We all learn from our past behavior and create patterns of behavior called paradigms of behavior. So does an opiate user and the pattern of behavior that and opiate user develop is that pain, discomfort and stress can be resolved with another dose of opiates.

Addiction hijacks the self-control mechanism of the brain: Consider the following scenario: an addicted child decides not to use drugs any longer. The child even tells you so and means it; you feel that your child means every word they said and you believe your child. Then your child goes off and uses the drug again. This behavior means nothing more than the fact that the child is addicted and lost her/his self-control. When the child told you that s/he will not use drugs any more, the child meant it and was honest about it. Due to lack of self-control the child could not resist her/himself when the drug was offered to them. Your child’s addicted friends and drug dealer will give your child drugs, free of charge, and exert pressure on your child to use drugs, just to keep the status quo. Friends would like not to lose friends, especially not a good drug-using buddy and a dealer would like not to lose a client.

Recovery, a path out of addiction: Recovery from addiction is a period of about five (5) years. Plan your child’s recovery with that time frame in mind. Preferably long-term rehab is part of the picture.

If your child had attended rehab and now out of rehab, then this is a dangerous time for your child to overdose. Rehab lasts a short period of time during which the drug is, physically, out of your child’s body, but not necessarily out of your child psychological need. Your child may have been dreaming, during rehab’s time, of using their drug of choice. Now after rehab, your child’s tolerance for the drug is not what it was before rehab and hence the danger of overdose. Even leaving your child to find their way home on their own, after rehab, could be a time for purchasing and using their drug. You need also to watch out for your child’s safety, from overdose, during the holidays and especially on your child’s birthday.

Mixing drugs with opiates can be fatal: You may care to educate your child that mixing other drugs with opiates can be fatal. If your child had engaged in use of any drug then during that day your child should refrain from opiates and vice versa, if the child used opiates, then on that day, the child should refrain from using any other drug.

Next Anecdote: We will discuss what actions a parent may take

Previous: Part four Next: Part six

You are not invincible—Stew Birbrower

Together we march towards a destiny

September 2017

Anecdote 8: What to do if you suspect that your child is using drugs, part four

Previous: Part three Next: Part five

Introduction

During the last anecdote, we distinguished between the casual user of drugs and a frequent user of drugs. Our discussion continues with the frequent user of drugs. There is little to say about the casual user of drugs except to caution that this casual use does not turn into addiction.

A person under 20+ yoa (years of age) is most vulnerable, to further complication from drug use, because our human brain is not fully developed until our 20+ yoa. To our discussion the Orbital Frontal Cortex, the area in the front of the brain, right above our eyes that is responsible for our self-control is not fully developed until 20+ yoa, the area of the brain responsible for self-control. Addiction disrupts our ability to self-control ourselves. For more information see the video by Nora Volkow who heads the Drug Abuse Division of the NIH (National Institute of Health): https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=nora+volkow%2c+study+of+the+live+brain&&view=detail&mid=71AFD11A366AB2F7244771AFD11A366AB2F72447&FORM=VRDGAR.

We will concentrate on Opiate substance abuse, even though addiction is broader than substance abuse, we know of addiction to food as in a morbid obesity, addiction to gambling, addiction to pornography, etc.

Opiates

Opiates is the substance that our prescription pain killers are based on, like Oxycontin, Oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin and the first billion dollars drug—Valium. Opiates is the substance that Heroin and Morphine are made of and there are synthetic opiates like Fentanyl. I will use the term “Opiates” to describe all the above substances and there is no need to distinguish between them, they all have the same effect on the body.

Symptoms of a frequent user of drugs

Some of the symptoms of a frequent user of drugs are:

The child changes behavior in a short period of time. By a short period of time, I mean a period that is shorter than a year. So, for example, the child changes friends/best friend, changes interests, like: sports, music, pastime, etc.
The child’s grades drop, all within that short period of time (a year or less).
The child cannot hold down a job for very long.
Small mishaps occur almost daily, like a fender bender, like being late, like having wrong directions to an important meeting, like forgetting an important task, etc. Those mishaps, each one of which, on its own, is meaningless, but considering their frequency as a symptom of an underlying cause, makes them very meaningful. They indicate that the child is constantly distracted and life cannot continue to tick normally. This symptom is telling because folks who are addicted to Opiates, in general, think of the next use of opiates, all the time. (An exception is Methadone, a person can use Methadone, get a high that is similar to that of Heroin but not think about the drug constantly to the point that they cannot hold down a job, or cannot function.)
As the disease of addiction progresses, the child will lie and steal from you habitually. This behavior infuriates parents. Please consider the fact that your child is no longer in control; their self-control is not intact. You, as a parent, is witnessing the effect of a disease. This is not a cause for punishment. I am fully aware that the parent is in an internal conflict and dilemma. You, the parent, is left not knowing what to do, on the one hand you are not supposed to let the child lie and steal without some form of retribution, but on the other hand you are not supposed to punish your sick child for being sick. Use your Directed Free Association and/or Master Mind Alliance to find ways to encourage your child to attend a long-term rehab and NA (Narcotics Anonymous).

These symptoms do not have to occur all at once, so if you find a symptom from the above list that your child does not exhibit, don’t sigh a sigh of relief yet. Moreover, be aware that your child will tend to hide the symptoms that s/he believes are tell tailing about her/his addiction.

Next Anecdote: We will explain some points about addiction and the person using drugs

Previous: Part three Next: Part five

You are not invincible—Stew Birbrower

Together we march towards a destiny