her. After sixty days, we went out for weekends. When we visited, I got tense and had a hard time. I sobbed. I thought at first she was a wayward kid, I didn’t think she was an alcoholic. We hoped she would just grow of it. But Brenda said, ‘Mom, I’m an alcoholic.’ I was so sad about the stigma. Alcoholism runs on both sides of our family and her dad is a situational drinker. But I kept talking to her counselor—who was wonderful—once a week. And then there was a required weekend intensive seminar for families. There were about a hundred parents with a facilitator. The seminar made me really uncomfortable. It opened my eyes and changed me. I had been horrified by her behavior, but I learned it was not a reflection on me, even though I felt it was. I would hang on to stuff. I learned there that Brenda needed to hear us say, ‘We forgive you. But you need to forgive yourself so you can move forward.’ It was powerful for us parents.
“There was no access to the outside world at the center, it was a locked-down facility that was closely supervised. It was co-ed, but they were kept separate. To re-integrate into the outside world, Brenda had to work out a life contract with the family, which we all signed, in which she gradually earned more freedom. Her counselor told us all, ‘I guarantee success if you graduate the life contract.’ It was a six-month process, then she went away to college. There, she did get together with a second abusive boyfriend. He was not welcome at our home. It took her a year to let go of him. And she didn’t want to do the twelve-step program thing at first. She went to a women’s meeting and wouldn’t open up. But later she got into it and now she has a really good sponsor. And we’re supportive. Parents need to be supportive of twelve-step programs for their kids.
“Now Brenda has been in recovery for five years. She’s graduated from college and is going to get her master’s. She wants to work with junior high school students to educate them about the dangers of alcohol and other drug abuse. When I talk to her now, she’s loving her recovery and knows she wouldn’t be alive today without it.
“We know other parents, wonderful families, who have lost their children to addiction. What I tell other parents is: Don’t ignore it. Denial gets out of hand. Nip it early or it can be too late. Many parents aren’t holding their kids accountable. They think they are ‘protecting’ their kids. But you have to pull the trigger. Don’t be afraid of their anger. Also, parents are often divorced. But they have to be on the same page about this. You have to be uncomfortable enough to change. And it’s worth all of it.”
Notes on the Introduction
1. Andrew Kolodny, Chief Medical Officer of Phoenix House, a long-established rehabilitation center, and President of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), in a Statement for the Record to Senator Levin and Senator Hatch titled “Buprenorphine in the Treatment of Opioid Addiction: Successes and the Impediments to Expanded Access” (June 18, 2014).
2. Center for Disease Control (CDC) statistics, cited in C. T. Arlotta, “How Obama Plans to Combat Prescription Opioid and Heroin Abuse in 2016,” www.forbes.com, February 6, 2015.
3. Hazelden, 2014, “Parents in the Dark,” http://www.hazelden.org/web/public/parents-drugs-children-survey.page (accessed October 21, 2014).
4. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), June 29, 2011, “Adolescent Substance Use: America’s #1 Public Health problem,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/newsroom/press-releases/national-study-reveals-teen-substance-use-americas-1-public-health-problem.
5. CASA, June 2012, “Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap Between Science and Practice,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/addiction-research/reports/addiction-medicine.
6. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), “2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings,” September 4, 2014, http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Substance-Use-and-Mental-Health-Estimates-from-the-2013-National-Survey-on-Drug-Use-and-Health-Overview-of-Findings/NSDUH14-0904.
7. Laxmaiah Manchikanti, “National Drug Control Policy and Prescription Drug Abuse: Facts and Fallacies,” Pain Physician, 10 (May 2007): 403.
8. SAMHSA, “2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,” 3.
9. NCADD, “Drinking and Substance Abuse Among Women in the U.S. on the Rise,” http://ncadd.org/in-the-news/483-drinking-and-substance-abuse-among-women-on-the-rise (accessed 27 January 2015).
10. Rob Turrisi, Prevention Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University, A Parent Handbook for Talking with College Students About Alcohol, Tufts University, 2010, http://ase.tufts.edu/healthed/documents/parentHandbook.pdf.
11. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Women’s Mental Health and Sex/Gender Differences Research, June 20, 2003, http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-03-143.html.
12. SAMHSA/Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), Substance Abuse Treatment: Addressing the Specific Needs of Women. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP), Report 51 (Rockville, MD: SAMHSA, 2009): 17 and 74.
13. CASA, Women Under the Influence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 45.
My Daughter, Myself: Kim and I
“We parents see our children with a veil over our eyes,” a top addiction research scientist shared with me over coffee. She wasn’t talking as a scientist. She was speaking as the mother of an addicted child. And she was telling my story.
“Some experimentation is normal. Not all is pathological,” the author of a well-known book about adolescent girls’ growth in identity assures us.1 (Not so reassuring is another passage where she describes how teenage girls are “going down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”2) Of course it is every parent’s wish that a daughter is just going through a phase, that she’ll grow out of it —that, God forbid, it’s not a drug problem. She’s becoming a young adult, and the world is filled—as never before—with temptations. So, crayon-colored hair, piercings, tattoos, wild bursts of moods . . . I could live with that.
If only it were just that. One of the greatest tools a parent has in raising her child is intuition, but, as I and other parents share in this book, it can get lost in the tumult of dealing with teenaged angst. Time after time when talking to other parents of addicted daughters (many of whom are now in recovery), I’ve heard some variation of “I just knew something was wrong.” But they didn’t know what to do about it. That’s what I told myself about my daughter Kim, at first as a whisper, later as a scream. Something was off, then
