Chapter 2
The Stranger You Love
All addicts' stories are heartbreaking in their own unique ways. But if you hear enough of these stories, you begin to realize that they are also distressingly similar. They follow a predictable pattern of experimentation, addiction, and eventual loss of everything most of us hold dear, including family, home, job, and personal values. Addicts become estranged from the nonaddicted world and seem not to mind when they are reduced to circumstances that would be intolerable to almost anyone who is thinking clearly. My own daughter was a prime example.
A heroin addict at age twenty-three, my daughter and her boyfriend, a fellow addict, were evicted from their apartment for not paying their rent. In the four months they had lived there, their apartment had become almost uninhabitable. The filthy bathroom contained a phone book that they used for toilet paper. The living room was a chaotic jumble of dirty dishes and soiled clothing and bedding. The bedroom floor was covered with animal feces from their cats and ferret.
They eventually moved in with friends for a short time and then to the back of their car, a small station wagon. By that time they had lost or sold most of their possessions. Only a few items of clothing and some bedding remained. My daughter always wore the same long-sleeved shirt stained with sweat; the cuffs and sleeves were speckled with dots and streaks of blood. Her shoes smelled like rotten meat.
Yet when I confronted her about her situation, she insisted that nothing was wrong. "A lot of people live in their cars, Mom," she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. "We're going to get a new apartment next week. This is not a big deal." She denied the addiction outright.
As sickened as I was by her situation, I did not fully realize that I was dealing with someone who inhabited a different mental world than my own. Only later did I begin to see that we shared no common ground, that it was impossible for us to communicate because she had lost touch with everyday reality, and that my daughter had, in fact, become a stranger.
Most families of addicts experience similar feelings about their loved one. They say such things as "I don't even know who he is anymore" and "I look into her eyes and it's like there's no one there." One mother of an addict said to me with tears in her eyes, "What a terrible disease this is. It takes away our kids."
People sometimes claim that addicts have "lost their souls." What they mean is that the addicts no longer seem to care about anything but their drug of choice, that they have become untrustworthy, and that their value system seems bizarre or nonexistent.
Families experience a tremendous sense of loss as they see their loved one, who once possessed certain defining characteristics such as a good sense of humor or a strong work ethic or an affectionate nature, lose these positive traits. Indeed, individuality deteriorates as the addict takes on behaviors that are typical of other addicts, behaviors that are aimed at achieving one end: the next high.
Recognizable addictive behaviors, present to a greater or lesser degree in most addicts, emerge as addiction takes hold. They are the result of a subconscious process in which new thought patterns are adopted to facilitate addiction. Addicts do not consciously decide to change their behavior. Rather, the process of change occurs at a deeper level, a result of the marvelous human capacity to adapt to altered circumstances. The addicts, not realizing what is happening, begin to think and behave in ways that may have been foreign before the addiction took hold, but that now seem natural and even necessary. Their brains have been biologically and chemically altered.
Families generally sense the changes in their loved one but do not fully appreciate the depth of those changes. They may continue to treat the addict as they have in the past, only to find their interactions with the addict increasingly confusing. They cannot find any solid ground in the changed relationship as the addict begins to exhibit a disturbing repertoire of addictive behaviors.
Foremost among these addictive behaviors is denial.
Denial
It is not uncommon in our society to hear someone described as being "in denial." This condition is generally understood to mean that the person in question is unwilling or unable to face the truth about a particular circumstance. Who among us hasn't been in denial about something, whether it's our relationships, our diet, our spending habits, or some other troubling aspect of our lives? Many families of addicts, including myself, deny their loved one's addiction for a long time before circumstances force them to face it. Denial seems to be a natural human response to situations we are unready or unable to cope with.
When applied to addiction, however, denial is taken to the extreme. Denial permeates all of addicts' thinking, blotting out reality and replacing it with a twisted perception that everything is other than what it is. The denial is most obvious when addicts are challenged to evaluate their own situation. They immediately deny that they have a problem and insist that they can control or stop their use of alcohol or other drugs whenever they choose.
Denise, a secretary whose seventeen-year-old son was hooked on heroin, described talking to him about the problem: "At first he said I was crazy, that I was imagining things. He kept telling me to leave him alone. He was really angry. But a friend of his had told me he was addicted, so I kept after him. He finally admitted to snorting heroin 'a little bit' at parties and things like that. He acted like it was nothing. Then he started stealing money from my pocketbook. All that time I was confused because I felt things were bad, but he kept assuring me he had things under control. Then he sold his guitar, and I knew I couldn't go along with his denial anymore. I forced him to see a counselor. I found out he was shooting up four times a day. Even then, he still insisted he could stop anytime he wanted."
Peggy, married to a police officer hooked on cocaine, faced a similar experience. "He was spending every cent he made on cocaine," she said. "He stopped paying the bills, stopped buying groceries, so I had to take on all the household expenses. I kept threatening to walk out on him, and he kept saying I was crazy. He didn't have a problem. He was just fine. You know something? I honestly think he believed it. I don't think he had a clue about what was happening to him."
The pattern of denial that Peggy and Denise confronted is typical of most addicts. Denial is the mental mechanism that enables addicts to give up more and more of the things that are truly valuable in life in favor of an artificial and fleeting sense of well-being induced by a chemical. In other words, denial is the foundation of addiction, the fertile soil in which it grows and flourishes. Denial provides the comforting delusion that everything is all right, smoothing the way for addicts as they wind deeper into their downward spiral.
A truism about addicts is that they will always deny their addiction or, if forced to admit it, they will minimize its depth. They consistently say such things as "I can stop any time I want" and "I only use it occasionally" and "I don't need help—there's nothing wrong." Even when everyone around them knows that addiction is destroying their lives, addicts will deny that they have a problem.
The depth of their denial does not stop there. As addiction takes it inevitable toll, addicts will also deny the severity of the consequences. Even as their world crumbles around them, as everything of value is stripped away, they will claim that their losses are not of much consequence. Their entire belief system is altered by the power of denial.
Jerry and Teresa, who had recently celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary, described their horror as their only daughter endured one tragedy after another without apparent concern. Their daughter was a nurse, a single mother in a committed relationship with her child's father. She became addicted to prescription drugs and lost her job. Soon afterward, she was arrested for forging prescriptions, then for shoplifting, and finally for prostitution. Over the course of several years, she spent many months in jail and lost her car, her apartment, and most of her possessions. Her boyfriend left her, and ultimately she lost custody of her child.
"It wasn't until we were awarded custody of our grandchild that I finally realized just how sick her thinking had become," Teresa said. "As she was being led off to prison and we were raising her child, her only comment was 'Well, it's only for nine months. I don't see what you're making such a big deal about.' Nine months! Nine minutes would have been too long for me to endure a situation like that. But she didn't seem to get it."
The power and importance of denial cannot be overstated when it comes to understanding addiction. Even when addicts are facing life on the streets or incarceration, they will deny that addiction is the root cause of their troubles. Their perception becomes so distorted by denial that they may be truly unable to comprehend the disaster that has befallen them.
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Behaviors that are Symptomatic of Addiction
In my experience, denial, dishonesty, and manipulation are the behaviors most fundamental to addiction. They are the behaviors addicts call on time and again in the all-consuming effort to get drugs, use drugs, and conceal the addiction from others. These behaviors become like second nature, helping the addiction take r...