Beverly Conyers - Addict in the Family: Support Through Loss, Hope, and Recovery

I would not have survived without Beverly Conyers Addict in the Family, which provided guidance and hope.

David Sheff, best-selling author of Beautiful Boy

Addict in the Family

Support Through Loss, Hope, and Recovery

Beverly Conyers

Author of Everything Changes

Hazelden Publishing

Center City, Minnesota 55012

hazelden.org/bookstore

2003, 2021 by Beverly Conyers

All rights reserved.

First edition published 2003. Updated and revised 2015. Second edition 2021.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this publication, neither print nor electronic, may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. Failure to comply with these terms may expose you to legal action and damages for copyright infringement.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conyers, Beverly, author.

Addict in the family: support through loss, hope, and recovery / Beverly Conyers.

Second edition. | Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden Publishing, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

LCCN 2021028405 (print) | LCCN 2021028406 (ebook) | ISBN 9781616499556 (paperback) | ISBN 9781616499563 (ebook)

LCSH: AlcoholicsFamily relationships. | Drug addictsFamily relationships. | AlcoholicsRehabilitation. | Drug addictsRehabilitation.

LCC HV5132 .C645 2021 (print) | LCC HV5132 (ebook) | DDC 362.292/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028405

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028406

Editors notes:

This publication is not intended as a substitute for the advice of health care professionals.

All the stories in this book are based on actual experiences and personal interviews. Names and certain facts have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people who so generously shared their stories for this book.

Readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

Art director: Terri Kinne

Cover designer: Nick Caruso Design

Typesetter: Percolator Graphic Design

Developmental editor: Marc Olson

Editorial project manager: Jean Cook

This book is dedicated to the Tuesday night group with heartfelt appreciationand to my daughter with love.

It has been twenty years since I learned that my youngest daughter was addicted to heroin. At that terrifying moment of discovery, I could not possibly have anticipated the many difficult years that lay ahead. In my naivety, I imagined that, having uncovered her secret, I could soon find a way to make things right. After all, I had always been a problem solver. This situation, while scarier than most Id encountered, would surely turn out to be just another bump in the road.

How wrong I was! Addiction would come to dominate her life and mine far into the future. I became more familiar than I ever wanted to be with things like detox, treatment, recovery, relapse, and the criminal justice system. I lived with deep anxiety and burgeoning hope and devastating disappointment. I learned about boundaries and detachment and letting go, about frustration and expectations and humility and forgiveness. And through it all, I learned about the boundless human capacity for starting over. And then starting over again.

I wrote Addict in the Family in my early years as the mother of an addicted child. My goals were to find answers to my many questions, to figure out how to help my daughter, and to help other parents who were struggling with a childs addiction. Over the years, much has changed. As a nation, we have experienced an explosion of opioid addiction. Science has delved deeper into the physiology of addiction. New approaches to treatment have emerged. Society is slowly coming to accept that addiction is a disease and not a moral failing. And my own understanding of addiction has been deepened by experience and by input from others.

As a result, the time seems right to offer a new, updated version of Addict in the Familyone that reflects the latest thinking on addiction and that builds on the experience, strength, and hope shared by many wonderful people I have met over the years. My dearest hope is that, for anyone who is coping with a loved ones addiction, this new edition will be a meaningful source of information, insight, comfort, and support.

It is a Thursday night in late November. The sky is blanketed with low, thick clouds, the air heavy with impending rain. Bare branches of old trees carve faint silhouettes in a world of black and gray, relieved only by a single light above a narrow door and a horizontal row of five small square windows close to the ground and lit from within.

Inside the church basement, thirteen people sit around two rectangular folding tables pushed together to form a square. On the tables are books and pamphlets, a few bottles of water, and a box of tissues. The room is brightly lit by suspended fluorescent tubes, revealing pale yellow concrete walls, a green-and-white tile floor, and thin white curtains on the windows. The lights emit a faint whine, punctuated by the chirps and occasional clangs of three old radiators. No one pays any attention to the noises. All eyes are on Dot, a woman in her sixties with soft peach-tinted hair, a tired face made up in muted shades of pink, and sad blue eyes. She is, in her way, an attractive woman, with a large, soft body and a kindly facethe kind of face you associate with grandmothers who have spent their lives looking after their families and putting others first.

Tonight, Dot clutches a tissue in her hands. She announces to her support group, He almost drowned in beef stew. Her voice holds amazement, as well as grief. Honest to God. I was in the front room watching television with my husband. And something in the back of my mind says, Davids been awful quiet, so I went out to the kitchen, and there he was with his face in a bowl of stew. He didnt seem to be breathing. So I lifted up his head, and there was gravy and little bits of meat all over his face. You gotta stop this, I said to him. She twists the tissue in her hands. Honest to God. If I hadnt checked up on him, he would have drowned.

She is speaking of her thirty-six-year-old son, the baby of the family, the one who, as a little boy, had been the clown who made everyone laugh. A person couldnt be around David for five minutes without smiling at some silly thing he said or didlike the time during the third-grade Christmas pageant when he stood on stage with a dozen or so other children and sang both verses of Silent Night with his eyes crossed. She had wanted to kill him but ended up giggling instead.

Even now he can make her laugh, though tears are never far behind. David has been a heroin addict for eleven years and on methadone for the past three. She knows he still shoots up on occasion, but his latest thing is pills. Hes been prescribed painkillers for a knee injury he got from falling down a flight of stairs. The pills are morphine-based. David has gone through a months prescription in four days.

I locked them up in my safe, but somehow he got into them, she tells her group. A drug addict can get anything if he makes up his mind to do it, you know.

A few heads nod in understanding.