LOVING TO GET HIGH SYNDROME

In 1949 two wonderful things happened, I was born and Hazelden Treatment Center started providing treatment for alcoholics. Fast forward 61 years, I am writing a blog for parents and Hazelden has launched an on-line forum for parents. We have joined the the new media era of the World Wide Web.

“Families Facing Addiction, Uniting families in hope and healing” can be found by clicking here.

As a parent raising a kid that loves to get high you will find valuable resources from blogs, videos, forums, chat rooms, and event postings for community education.

You can also become a member and contribute to this great on-line forum for parents.

Happy 75th Birthday AA

Twenty years ago on a cold snowy winter night in Akron Ohio, a co-worker and I visited the home of Dr. Bob, Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Over the course of the evening a dozen or so members of the Founders Fellowship dropped in for support, fellowship and some black coffee. It was an absolute honor to hang out in Dr. Bob’s kitchen and talk about sobriety with a direct line to where it all started. At that time they were celebrating 55 years of helping Alcoholics stay sober.

Imagine the lives that have been touched in the past 20 years. Teens who were attending AA at that time are now parenting there own sons and daughters trying to figure out if they are in need of a meeting and the Fellowship that helps people of all ages stay sober

In honor of this 75th Birthday, this is an excerpt from the Minneapolis Star Tribune from July 9, 2010.

“My name is Chas. I’m an Alcoholic. I stumbled into my first AA meeting in the fall of 1997. I had been a hard drinker for 20 years, and a serious drinker for 10. I had lost my job, was about to lose my family and was having serious health problems. My Doctor said that I had to stop drinking.”

“That was impossible. Life without alcohol was unimaginable. I had been an anxious kid and a morose teenager. I’d suffered from depression and panic attacks. Drinking wasn’t a problem but a solution: Booze made me feel normal.” This is why your kid might be dating a drug, getting high isn’t a problem, it’s a solution. Thanks for the great insight Chas.

http://www.aa.org

I’ve created a list of things that our sons and daughters want and need.

Acceptance, Adventure, Affection, Affluence, Appreciation, Belonging, Bliss, Boldness, Care, Cleverness, Confidence, Connection, Control, Coolness, Courage, Curiosity, Desire, Determination, Devotion, Dignity, Discovery, Ecstasy, Encouragement, Energy, Enjoyment, Entertainment, Enthusiasm, Experience, Fairness, Fame, Family, Fashion, Freedom, Fun, etc.

This is a partial “List of Values” important to our kids. It includes A-F, only 6 of the 26 letters in the alphabet. As short as this list is, it speaks volumes about their emotional wants and needs.

As a parent we need to ask ourselves and our kids, “How’s it going?” “Are you getting what you want and need?” “What can I do to help?”

Meeting and fulfilling lifes wants and needs helps determine lifes outcome. What can we do to make this happen?

No matter who we are, we all have the same Values.

How could this be true? It is not the presence or absence of values, we all work off of the same list, it is how important  they are to us. How we prioritize them? How we honor them?

If your number one value is concern for others and your son/daughters number one value is friendship, you may assume that there would be no conflict. At first glance they seem completely compatible, but when you look more closely, you can see that values can give us something to fight about.

Hidden in your message of “concern for others” may be the opinion, “You are not concerned about me”. His/her value of friendship may communicate the message, “Quit bugging me about my friends!”

List of values.

(Circle your top 5 values and ask your son or daughter to do the same.)

Accomplishment,    Concern for others,    Creativity,    Pleasure,   Spirituality,    Accountability,    Power,    Reliability,    Discovery,   Freedom,   Honesty,   Openness,   Respect,   Friendship,    Independence,   Privacy,   Trust.

Discuss the results. What does it say about your relationship? Do these values reflect behaviors? Resentments? Opinions?

Loving to get high is an intense commitment to values.

Independence, freedom, friendship, creativity, pleasure, spontaneity are easily honored values in the life of a young person who loves to get high.

As a parent let’s not assume that “I have good values and you don’t”. It’s not true. What we need to look at is what we’ve attached these values to.

As a parent you need to ask, “Have I attached accountability, honesty and trust to trying to control my kid”?  Has your teen attached independence, privacy and freedom to getting high?

We all have the same list of values, let’s start talking about what they mean to us. Let the learning begin.

• When you get a call late Saturday night telling you that your son has overdosed and is in the Emergency Room, your DENIAL is confronted.
• When the Principal calls and tells you that your daughter has been suspended for coming to school drunk, your DENIAL is confronted.
• When you wake up in the middle of the night and your car and your kid are gone, your DENIAL is confronted, or at least it should be.

It can be devastating to all of a sudden realize that your kid is in trouble. Why didn’t I figure this out earlier? What else is going on? Will they be OK? Is this just a one time occurrence?  Which one of their friends can I blame this on? We start asking ourselves a thousand questions, all in a way of coming to terms with this new discovery.

Our DENIAL is confronted by something that happens to our kid, something that we can no longer ignore. This confrontation comes from a consequence. It’s a consequence of their alcohol/drug use, of loving to get high. Up ‘til now they have dodged the bullet, avoided being found out success and fully covered their tracks.

For some kids this has been easy, because we have helped them out. We’ve had our head in the sand. We’ve continued to say things like; “Not my kid!” and “Boys will be boys!” or “At least it was only Alcohol!”

This is what we call Denial. We love our kids and don’t want bad things to happen to them, so it’s easy to understand how and why this happens. But we need to put this idea aside and realize that pretending as if this didn’t exist doesn’t help anyone.

Consequences are a sign that things are out-of-control. Loving to get high is starting to catch up on our kid. This doesn’t mean that problems didn’t exist before; it just means that we didn’t see it or that they were able to keep it a secret.

My hope is that the “loving to Get High Syndrome™” and this blog will help parents wake up sooner, rather than later. And to not experience that frightening phone call in the middle of the night or the embarrassing call from the Principal. Before things are out of control, we need to remember that we are in control of how we perceive things. It’s time to take a deep breath and confront the possibility that our kid might love to get high and they are doing everything possible to keep it a secret.

The Partnership For a Drug Free Americacontinues to post great resources for parents, check out Dr. Drew Pinsky speaking about “When Addiction Runs in the Family”.