- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Friends & Family
- Mental Health
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Loving, helping, and supporting the child is the natural behavior of a mother. If a mother finds out that her child is struggling with any form of substance use disorder she needs to change her natural way of behavior to prevent enabling. It is still loving, but in a different way. This is how things were for Pam.
Pam was always struggling with co-dependency and love addiction. It became a real problem for a while as she found out her son had a problem with drugs. He started using marijuana at the age of 13. Pam found out about it about a year into his using and gave him the choice to either get drug tested or go to therapy. He chose therapy, although he never gave up smoking pot.
Things got generally better with him for a while. He graduated from high school, but failed in the first year of college. Then he came home to Michigan and started again at a different college while he was supervised at home. He later changed to a private school in Florida. He was already using heroin at this time, but Pam had no knowledge about it. A visit in Florida surprised Pam as she found her son in depression but also raging on her, which he usually did not do. Pam was divorced from his father and her son’s raging behavior brought lots of emotions and memories back up in her.
Because she was a nurse by education, Pam had studied the field of addiction medicine and intervention to prepare herself for the day that she would need that knowledge to help her son. She had her own business helping lots of people, but it was so different when it happened within her own family.
The day came that her son confessed to his mom that he was shooting up heroin. It made all sense now to Pam. Things she did not realize because of self-protection and denial—facts such as he was always wearing long sleeves, even on warmest summer days in Florida. He entered a treatment facility right away within days.
“Marijuana is a gateway drug” was the phrase stuck in her head. She knows that some people get addicted and others don’t. It had to be her son who got addicted and proceeded into the use of heroin out of it, while others were totally fine. “Nothing is funny about this,” she remembers thinking during family week at the treatment center. All other parents were taking it easy, while she was thinking “it’s a treatment about life and death my son is undergoing.”
Although Pam was not an alcoholic, she drank an excessive amount of alcohol in an attempt to escape and numb her feelings during the years of watching her son struggling. She often asked herself where the border to alcoholism existed, and if she would reach it. On the day her son was discharged from treatment, she stopped drinking alcohol completely. She knew her drinking would not serve him, nor her or her family if she would continue with it.
Pam’s son went for a month of residential treatment and after that was in transitional living for a six month duration. “My son and my have the most amazing relationship ever since. We bonded and continue to grow and evolve together. We continue to connect due to our common recovery,” says Pam.
Her son went through a “gratitude training” in South Florida and she saw amazing changes in him. Pam decided to enroll in the same program and she found out that completely it changed her life, her way of being, the way she acts and reacts. Some time later her son graduated from college and is currently on a nine-month volunteer program in Israel. She enhanced her business by building a complete recovery tract, helping even more people find the path they need. Pam feels very fortunate that her son recovered and is alive, while others did not.
“We are continuously growing apart, but together, in many ways. I live today without fear, I’m not focused all the time on my son, I can focus on myself and what I need. I don’t have to find out what he needs, I can watch him getting it himself. I am responsible for my own health and actions, I’m not responsible for my son’s health and actions. Certainly I can guide him and support him, but he is responsible,” mentions Pam, “We are not living just sober; we are living.”