LOVING TO GET HIGH SYNDROME

It’s time I give my son some praise.

Christmas Eve is always a big deal at our house. A lot of food, music, family, friends, gifts and games. This year was no exception. We had a Christmas Carole Sing Along with my mother on piano and a friend Rebecca, on Fiddle. Wonderful. The food was spectacular. Our youngest daughter is a Pastry Chef and our youngest son a Food Chef. Their creations were the best they have ever been.

My son, who gave me the inspiration to this web-site, “Wowed” me with his cooking. Short-Ribs and Brussel Spouts, the best I’ve ever had.  He has developed into a talented and successful Chef. His contribution to our family is significant.

Maybe the key to this success is similar to the key to his loving to get high, PASSION. He is passionate about cooking, food preparation, food presentation, his job, his co-workers and his customers. This passion is being directed into something that he is proud of and wants to show-off. For that I am very grateful.

Son, you are doing great, I’m proud of you.

P.S. I’ve discovered that if you want to comment on my blog you need to first click on the “Title of the Post”, which will take you to a page where you can leave a comment. Your comments are greatly appreciated.

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.

The Addiction Project is produced by HBO in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex and fine-tuned communications network containing billions of specialized cells (neurons) that give origin to our thoughts, emotions, perceptions and drives. Often, a drug is taken the first time by choice to feel pleasure or to relieve depression or stress. But this notion of choice is short-lived. Why? Because repeated drug use disrupts well-balanced systems in the human brain in ways that persist, eventually replacing a person’s normal needs and desires with a one-track mission to seek and use drugs. At this point, normal desires and motives will have a hard time competing with the desire to take a drug.

http://www.hbo.com/addiction

This is a powerfully, edgy blog post by a rock musician. I don’t know anything about who he is, what kind of music he makes, or where he lives. All I know is that he “Loves to Get High” and he articulates it in a very powerful way.

People think my addiction is a weakness. They say it is “humiliating” or “degrading” to watch me chase drugs or get high. But I say humiliation is a relative term. It’s only humiliating if I’m humiliated, and it’s only a lonely lifestyle if I feel lonely. Sure, the first time I tried drugs; it might have been motivated by weakness, by loneliness, but not anymore. I mean, consider all the acts committed out of loneliness or weakness that turned into great meaningful pursuits.

And now I’m completely in motion, I can’t even stop if I wanted to and I love every minute of it (not every minute, but that’s true of any great work). “Yes, but what are you producing? What are you creating?” That’s what most people claim is the difference between what I’m doing and what I’m drawing parallels with.

But I say that I’m creating my own perceptions, I’m creating sensual symphonies and emotional masterpieces. When my world falls and crumbles to pieces, in a matter of hours I can whip up the wind of my personal life into a froth of manipulation and borrowed money and bummed rides and pawned accessories and with my face down in the f–king dirt, surrounded by the foulest scum of the earth, I can feel as high as the damn clouds. I feel like, with my mouth open against the gravel or the pavement, that I could swallow the whole world. I can shape my mind into a mountain, and stretch my body over it like a rubber band, and snap, snap, snap, against the bottom just for fun. I have access to another plane of existence; it’s like a magic power that takes certain expensive keys and all of my energy to perform. I merely dabble in the world you call “The World” and my place is not here, it’s a step above. Sometimes I sink back down here, but it’s not long before I’m back up where I belong.

Parents, it’s important to realize this is a personal testimony by a Rock Star that your kids look up to. The scary thing is that your son or daughter may agree with him 100%. It’s time to wake up to this possibility.

Posted by Bent Ruth a member of a Canadian rock band http://www.gramophone.com

• 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”.

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.”