with your child and a look at the checklist of warning signs you do suspect there may be more going on with her than the ups and downs of adolescence. Or that, again, you have that sense something else is wrong. Respect your parental intuition. But now what? It is a huge step to confront your child’s risky substance use. Minimizing a suspected problem by making excuses for her drinking and/or drug use changes nothing, but a full-on confrontation usually does not work either. Demanding the truth from her can backfire. As one mother of an addicted daughter writes, “In my experience, denial, dishonesty, and manipulation are the behaviors most fundamental to addiction . . . . These behaviors become like second nature, helping the addiction take root and blossom.”8
The operative word being denial—hers and yes, yours: an inability or refusal to face the truth because it is so painful and frightening, whether for the person who is addicted or her loved ones. The user becomes incapable of being truthful to herself about what she’s doing. This is the aspect of addiction that may be the hardest to understand. When I was at the worst phase of my addiction, the need for the substance and the neurological distortions caused by the substance, degraded my ability to see reality to such an extent that using logic with me was pointless. My daughter, for her part, would explain away a slew of symptoms associated with addiction—irresponsibility in every area, extreme messiness, poor hygiene, high irritability, and deceitfulness—as being due to “teenage hormones” and “PMSing.” (Ironically, she was partly right, as we do know sex hormones play a vital role in the emotional lives of young adult women.) Kim also played the moral outrage card: I was “invading her privacy.” I was “a snoop.” And my favorite: I was “bipolar.” Like many other parents of addicted daughters I’ve met, she used lies and anger as weapons to fend off the truth. She lied because she was on the defensive and had to protect her addiction. For a while, it was effective.
When confronted about her use, a young woman is likely to minimize the problem or just lie about it. In scientific terms, the intake of booze or drugs increases the experience of pleasure and reward in the user’s brain because more dopamine is being produced. Anyone who has a drink knows this feeling. But for the habitual user, there is a hazard: Over-stimulated by all those calls for dopamine, the brain of the heavy substance-user in time slows the process down by decreasing nerve cell proteins that function as dopamine receptors. It is then that the alcoholic or addict experiences a deficit of pleasure, tries to recapture that pleasurable sensation by drinking or using more in compensation. In short, a user needs more and more of the drug to recapture a sense of normalcy and, in short order, to avoid a mental crash since alcohol and other drugs drastically change the normal brain circuitry. In time, to feel just “okay” she has to get the next fix, which becomes a constantly diminishing okay, and in-between the lows get lower and lower. When backed into a corner, an addict guards her addiction as ferociously as a mama bear protects her cub. She’ll view confrontation as an attack. This is the tough reality we have to face to be helpful.
Things kids who use drugs may say to protect their drug use:
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m just having a tough time right now.”
“I’ve cut back.”
“I can cut back.”
“I will cut back.”
“I can stop whenever I want.”
“I’ll deal with it when I find the right person/get the right job,” etc.
But the truth may be quite different: She physically craves the pleasure—the “high”—and the escape the drug provides. Soon she needs the substance(s) she began using to feel more relaxed or to boost her energy or to forget her problems or just to avoid feeling terrible. Her brain-body chemistry now screams to avoid the physical pain of withdrawal.
During the initial period of my daughter’s increasing use of drugs and alcohol I clung to the fiction that “things” weren’t out of control. I kept hoping I’d overreacted and that with the right combination of discipline, activities, and friends, Kim would be alright. Following are comments from parents who, like me, got caught up in their own denial. Do you identify with any of the following?
“I wanted to believe her so much.”
“Drinking with friends at that age was normal, as long as she wasn’t driving drunk.”9
“It was just marijuana.”10
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“I allowed her to manipulate me.”
“I covered up for her.”
“I gave her money.”
“I couldn’t let her sit in jail.”
“I should have set stricter limits.”
“We let the problems in our marriage ruin our child’s life.”
“I kept trying to fix her problems.”
“I sat at home worrying.”
“The harder I tried to make her see the problem, the more she resisted.”
“I was overwhelmed with everything because of what was going on in her life.”
“I didn’t talk to anyone about the problem.”
“I didn’t want anyone outside the family knowing about our problems.”
“We kept giving her one more chance.”
“I would know if my kid was using.”
I said each of the above at one time or another. As parents, we want to protect ourselves from what is painful to accept in our children. As Kim’s addiction worsened, I learned a vital lesson: By evading the evidence of my child’s drug use, I was actually delaying the process of her getting well because there were no serious consequences to her actions.
We needed to have a different kind of conversation. We needed to communicate about consequences—positive as well as negative—for the choices she was going to have to make.
Samantha’s Story
“Trauma,” says Stephanie Covington, a leading expert on women and addiction, may be “any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.” She adds “Trauma also impacts how the brain functions. People under extreme stress often process and organize information differently.” 11
Pam and Neal have two daughters, ages eighteen and twenty-two, and live in a pleasant suburb of New York City. Pam, who recently retired because of a medical condition, worked as a Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC), both in outpatient and inpatient programs at a rehabilitation center. “I was shocked by the lovely young women getting into opiates,” she says. “Many of them came from the courts. With the repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws, they could get treatment the first time instead of jail.” These drug laws in New York State had been among the toughest in the nation. Repealed in 2009, they had required mandatory prison sentences for lower-level felons. “I remember one young girl especially. She had a very strict, loving family and she was a full-blown heroin addict by eighteen. The parents were overwhelmed. They couldn’t believe it. And that was my story too.”
Pam’s older daughter
