LOVING TO GET HIGH SYNDROME

Going back to school should mean “bummer dude, summer’s over”. But for a lot of kids it’s a time of excitement, “I’m back hanging with all of my friends”.

School inadvertently provides kids who “Love to Get High” access to parties, new friends, the latest trends in getting high, pills, pot, and some alcohol. (not as easy to get as pot, according to students)

Parents it’s great to have the resources that school provides to help you parent; structure, homework, role models, care and support. But it’s our job to get involved, visit, call, find out if the staff at school has any concerns.

Parents, your other job is to wake-up to the fact that your kid might be getting high and loving it. If this is the case they will be keeping it a secret. You will be the last ones to find out.

Start talking, asking questions, stay connected, with school, other parents and most importantly your son or daughter. It may make all of the difference in the world.

Jeff Bridges plays a down and out alcoholic country singer in the movie “Crazy Heart”. It is absolutely an award winning performance.

Alcoholism looks different for an adult than the “loving to get high syndrome” does for an adolescent. The role of Bad Blake gives us a glimpse of what  loving to get high turns into if not dealt with.

On the soundtrack you get a musical sense of the power of alcoholism. The song Fallin’ & Flyin’, written by Stephen Bruton and Gary Nicholson does a great job of showing the heaven and hell aspect to drinking.

Fallin’ & Flyin’ by Stephen Bruton and Gary Nicholson

“I’m going where I shouldn’t go,

seeing who I shouldn’t see,

doing what I shouldn’t do,

being who I shouldn’t be.

A little voice tells me it’s all wrong,

another voice it’s alright.

Used to think that I was strong,

but lately I just lost the fight.

Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’, for a little while.”

Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’, is what’s behind loving to get high. Without the sense of flying no one would ever fall in love with getting high.

Thank you Hollywood for understanding alcoholism and addiction,  now you need to figure out where it starts, with Loving to Get High.

• 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.

Reefer Madness? Marijuana, increased potency is the gateway to a debate on addiction and treatment.

“It was as if she woke up one day, and decades of her life had disappeared. Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan, started smoking pot when she was 15, and for years it was a pleasant escape, a calming protective cloud. Then it became an obsession, something she needed to get through the day. She found herself hiding her addiction from her family, friends and co-workers.”

Loving to get high can happen to people of any age, from all walks of life and on any chemical. Your kids may tell you that pot is not addictive. Well it is. With the higher potency of THC, the chance of addiction and the need for treatment is on the rise, according to a 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s time for us as parents to look at pot from a new perspective. The pot that our kid’s parents and grandparents used, (that sounds weird) can’t be compared in “addict-ability” or “Loving to Get High-Ability” to the  pot today’s kids are using!

It’s time to to talk.

I just bought a book that describes in the most vivid way, loving to get high.  It is Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy, by Lynn Marie Smith.

Lynn describes her first experience with ecstasy:

“We were all silently looking at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move. I went to take a drink of my beer and as the coldness trickled down my throat, I was suddenly underneath a waterfall. A beautiful air passed through my entire body. My eyes slowly closed and I was in slow motion.” P. 29

“No words could describe this feeling, no worries, no anxieties, I was surrounded by love. I felt every breath that came in and out of my body, every breeze that passed was a part of me.” p.31

“The rain was kissing my body over and over. I was pure and innocent. I was pink sunset, ice-cream sundae, curtain call, rainbow, waterfall, and roller-coaster ride all rolled into one. All alone yet connected, I had just stumbled into the center of the universe and found the hidden treasure. The prize at the bottom of the cereal box was all mine.” P.33

“When I was five or six years old I asked my mom what heaven was. She told me that it was a beautiful place where all of life’s questions were answered. I now knew what she was talking about. For once I was speechless, free of questions, and full of answers. One pill and my whole life changed.” P.33

For Lynn Marie this was a spiritual, life changing experience; it was heaven. She felt pure and innocent. One pill changed her whole life.

If this was your child and that was their experience you’d both be in trouble. The power and attraction of this experience is mind-blowing. How do we compete with this big of a production? Or, can we? The answer to this question may lie in the remaining chapters of the book.

By page 48 Lynn Marie was saying, “I was all alone, crying, shaking, and thinking that this was never going to end.” Loving to get high is severely compromised by consequences. The proverbial “honeymoon” is over and the love that there was, is now only a memory.

It’s our job as parents to let this “loving to get high relationship” die, let the consequences and pure misery kill it. So the next time you are tempted to fix a problem, pay for a ticket, bail them out of jail, remember that what you are resurrecting, is their love affair with getting high.

The University of Minnesota has done a longitudinal study of more that 20,000 teenagers, with a surprising conclusion. Teens don’t participate in risky behavior because they think that they are invincible, it’s because they feel very vulnerable, and they think that they are likely to die at a young age.

 Loving to get high is fuel for this fire, “if I’m going to die young, I may as well party to the max, for tomorrow I might be dead.”

 Please read this article, it will give you a lot to talk about with your son or daughter.

Parents, I want you to hear this message now.

 The loving to get high syndrome needs our attention. There is something going on in the lives of our kids that we need to look at. If we ignore the signs and symptoms, it will morph into something more difficult to deal with, chemical dependency.

 The hear and now that I’m using is actually a play on the words for here and now, which is a popular way to talk about where and how we should live our lives. The benefit of living in the here and now is that we are not going to be gripped by our past or overwhelmed with the future.

 When our kids are bummed about life it is usually because of stress about the past and fears and worries about their future. With the use of a MAC (Mood Altering Chemical) a young person can experience a swing from bummed to bliss. This is a way for them to return to the benefits of the here and now.

Because of this, here and now becomes a significant part of the loving to get high syndrome.

 As parents, we are probably very accustomed to accepting a life filled with worry and regret. This is just a part of our job description. But because our kid’s job is to have fun and not settle into this kind of rut, they are usually a little more creative in how they deal with this stress and worry.

 They find that they can get back to here and now by getting high. Under the influence of a MAC all of the stress of the past and the worry about the future disappears. This feeling of relief is powerful. It’s the feeling of being alive without a care in the world.

 Having consequences from getting high is also a part of the here and now. But for our kids it is a very unpleasant something that they want to avoid. It is an instant reminder that getting high is not all fun and games. This is, however, one of the most important life lessons a young person can learn (if we let them).

 All too often we swing in and fix the situation or rescue them from the pain. We take away the lesson that they would gain from this particular consequence. The more these lessons disappear, the more they will conclude that getting high is just plain fun without any real down side.  As you can see, this will perpetuate the loving to get high syndrome.

 Parents, this can actually be your message to your son or daughter, “Hear this message now!  There are consequences to getting high.”

One of the best things that we can give our kids is the Freedom to Fail. In failure they will find success; their own success. This success will be hard fought, well deserved, something that they can be proud of. But it comes from their willingness to deal with the choices and consequences connected to their use of a MAC. (Mood Altering Chemical) More accurately, this success will happen, if we, as parents, allow them to fail.

 Our son who “loves to get high” has been hugely successful in his own way and on his own terms. His first year out of high school, he was enrolled in college. We were paying for his books and tuition. He was getting up in the morning and leaving, but he wasn’t attending classes; at all. After we figured this out, we asked him get a job, pay $200 a month in rent or to move out. He moved out. We stopped paying for his car insurance and cell phone. It was time for him to learn how much it was going to cost to live on his own.

 Since that time his success has been by his own initiative. He’s now 24. He’s grown up, paid his bills, cleaned up his credit, held down a job for years and started his own business. He made all of this happen independent of us and our financial support. We gave him the freedom to fail. In this failure he has found success.

 At the time, the emotions connected to this situation were hard to deal with. It caused a lot of stress. We started asking ourselves, “are we doing the right thing? Will he survive without our help? Will he resent us for doing this?” He actually started to flourish. He’s thankful that we pushed him out of the nest.

 We need to remember, it is their life, and it will be their success when they put it all together. At the same time we will be honoring them as individuals. Freedom is usually a very important value for a young person. By allowing them to make choices, we honor their desire for freedom. The Freedom to Succeed!

One of my part time jobs is driving Limousine. This is my 10^th Prom season, which I thoroughly enjoy. It is fun to see all of the young people decked out in full regalia.

My last prom was two weeks ago, with eight kids from the suburbs. I gave them the usual no smoking and no drinking lecture. They were fine with that. They had no intention of smoking or drinking. At least they didn’t plan on drinking alcohol. An hour later when I dropped them off for dinner, I found 22 empty bottles of “5 Hour Energy, extra strength”. That’s a lot of Caffeine. They were flying high. And it was all legal; they didn’t break any rules, mine or those of their High School.

I really don’t know much about these kids other than they were pleasant, polite, personable, and popped-up on caffeine. I don’t even know if any of them love getting high; all I know is that their first hour of the prom was a blast, loud music and a lot of energy. They opted for an experience that took them out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. 

It’s hard to imagine that our sons and daughters are getting high. It’s easier for us to keep an image of their innocent childhood, denying the possibility that they are going out and getting wasted. Unimaginable, but true, the experience of getting high, is very real for them; one of the most real things that they will ever experience.

 I still remember the shock and horror that I felt when I watched my 4 year old daughter respond to the effects of Nitrous Oxide. She got this “I’m as high as a kite” smile on her face. Even though I knew that this powerful drug would ease her pain, I still knew that it wasn’t a look that belonged on the face of my little girl.

 Parenting is tough. It’s hard to watch our children lose their innocence and start doing things that hurt them and us. We naturally want to protect them.  As hard as we try, we can’t. What we end up doing instead is protecting ourselves psychologically, by denying that this is actually happening. This wishful thinking doesn’t help us or our kids; in fact the problem gets worse the longer we hang on to this less than accurate picture.   

 Courage, understanding and tough love are the steps we can take in order to deal with the denial of this problem. A parent in one of my groups called denial the silent killer. What an insight for a mom with a son who loved to get high. As painful as it is to realize, it is very important we understand that loving to get high will not just go away.

 I’ve helped train the D.A.R.E. officers in Minnesota for years. I love the program and respect all of the Police Officers who take part in the training. Most of the graduates can’t imagine the thought of getting high. They have made a commitment to saying “No” to drugs. But for many kids, what was unimaginable becomes imaginable.

 Things change; the way young people think changes, their opinions about right and wrong change, their circumstances change, being able to imagine getting high changes. This is a reality that has changed. Now it’s time for us to do the same.

 A couple of years ago, while visiting my son in jail I met a mom who was wearing a sweatshirt that had the Serenity Prayer on it. Because of what was going on with my son at the time, this very familiar prayer took on a whole new meaning.

 God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

                                                - Reinhold Niebuhr