What is your Drug of Choice?
Addicted to the idea of Addiction
Addiction; the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing or activity. Hope; the feeling of expectation and desire for certain things to happen.
How do you look at these two words? Do you believe that they can intertwine with each other? Connect somehow? That being an addict, or having an addiction, is the desire to find something more out of life, the hope to improve your life? Or do you look at these two definitions as polar opposites?
To me, a sibling of an addict, hope and addiction are more connected than anything. I constantly want to be hopeful about my brother’s sobriety, that sobriety will finally stick with him. But his addiction, his desire to black out the reality of his own world scares me; his desire to escape his reality trumps my hopefulness of him beating his addiction. Is that wrong to say? To say that I am doubtful of my brothers run with sobriety? No, because living with an addict takes a toll on a family, and their faith in recovery.
When people think of addiction, they only think of the addict; the boy or girl who became addicted to Bourbon or cocaine. They do not think of the boy or girl who is a sister, son or a brother; They don’t think of the parents who raised them or the siblings who watched their family member turn into a monster addicted to substances that were slowly killing them. That’s where we lack education, not only on addiction and the disease that addiction is, but that addiction is a family disease. And now I understand; I was once uneducated on the subject of addiction and guilty of believing that recovery was what the addict needed and not what I needed. I could not have been more wrong and Debra Jay sums it up perfectly on the first page of It Takes a Family; “Up until now, families have been mostly left out of the recovery equation, which surely contributes to the ubiquitous nature of relapse”
Jay educates her readers in her book on what addiction is and how recovery is not only a thing for the addict but just as much as recovery for the family members. Reading her book made me realize things about addiction and the effect it really had on me that I didn’t realize. Reading books like It Takes a Family and Love First and different articles and stories of addiction has opened my eyes to the severity of the hold that addiction has on people. “Without help, active addiction can totally disrupt family life and cause harmful effects that can last a lifetime.”(Family Disease, NCADD) We become addicted to the pain that has taken our hours, days and years because of having an addict as a family member. The resentment we hold inwardly from living with an addict and the pain we have is something that we, too, have to let go of- we cannot hold their addiction against our loved ones forever, but, sometimes, we feel like we need to, but isn’t that the same thing as continuing to take the drug to an addict just because they have done it before?AA meetings are for the alcoholics, NA meetings are for the drug addicts and Al-Anon are meetings for the family members and loved ones who need to let go of the addiction that has changed their lives.
So can you now see why hope and addiction are so close in my mind? I became addicted to my hopefulness of my brother getting sober, addicted to the idea of a clean Charles, a healthy Charles. I was so into the idea of his sobriety over the years, so hopeful of it, I would dismiss anyone who said it would take time or that sobriety wasn’t for him. So hopeful, I dismissed every negative comment. I became addicted to the desire of my brother and his sobriety. “Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.” (Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution) Donnelly could not have said it better; the hopefulness I had was shot down every time my brother went back to drugs. I didn’t realize that my brother’s addiction was turning into one of my own.
