Let’s Be Brave And Share Our Stories. I’ll Go First

When I was twelve years old I told my father it was me or the heroin; I had just set my first boundary. Although it was unclear to me at the time, it was in that moment that my career in the helping profession began.

 

Now this is the part where I tell you how I rose above this adversity to become one of the youngest chemical dependency counsellors in one of the nation’s leading residential addictions treatment centers, and I tell you how I was able to help bring recovery to children just like me and families just like my own…. and that would all be true.

 

BUT I would be leaving out the most important part of the story…

 

While my experience with my father’s drug abuse and the impact it had on my family in the decade that followed did eventually lead to a path of hope and recovery for myself and others…the journey for me has been long and at times strikingly lonely.

 

Losing my father to his addiction was like watching my hero commit suicide, slowly, in front of me with nobody to help us. I watched in horror as the man who had once been my protector became the person I feared most in my tiny world. The man who had carried me on his shoulders, taught me about nature, and never missed an opportunity to remind me how brilliant and beautiful I was, was gone…disappearing seemingly overnight for days and weeks on end with no explanation…and those were the good days.

 

And none of it makes sense….

 

Because you can feel that something’s wrong but you are told that everything is fine…and so you stop trusting your feelings and start pushing them down where you think they won’t hurt you anymore and you start pretending.

 

We are amazing pretenders.

 

But, what I know today is that addiction is a disease that divides and separates us at a time when we need each other most. I can see now that my loneliness, this isolation, was a choice that I made out of fear and shame and because of emotions I couldn’t begin to know how to express. I know now that, above addiction, it is the silence that is killing us.

 

And so I begin to share my story…