by anesamiller_wuhi6k | Jul 11, 2015 | Blog, Issues in Our Orbit -- Substance Abuse & Recovery, Substance Abuse & Recovery
Today I’m honored to present more thoughtful information in the series Issues in OUR ORBIT: Substance Abuse & Recovery. This guest post is by Gregory K. from his website Suchness: A Mental & Spiritual Health Blog. Gregory K. holds a Masters of Divinity degree and is working toward a graduate degree in counseling. His goal is to help Christians and others who struggle in “finding some measure of peace living in our own skins.”
At my request, Gregory K. was kind enough to address the very problems that arise in fictional form in my novel Our Orbit. Part 1 of his discussion is here. Many thanks to him—
In Part 1 of this set of posts we considered a teenager who uses alcohol to find relief from her troubled feelings. Some rudimentary ideas were laid out for how a mental health worker, pastor, or caretaker might approach this problem. For this second half we will instead consider the spiritual components of her suffering and healing.
These posts are responses to a pair of questions given to me by Anesa Miller, an author who has considered these same themes in her most current book Our Orbit. Anesa asked for input on a spiritual approach in helping a teenager who has suffered spiritual alienation in her family. Religion in the West has become more polarized even as politics have become more polarized. This can certainly create a more caustic environment in some families when it comes to the way religion is approached. During my years at both the seminaries I attended I heard many stories from other students about how they were mistreated by spiritual people or how they had difficult breaks with family members over all kinds of religious stuff. This topic has become more important every day, even as it has become more difficult and dangerous to try and talk about it.
I wish that I could begin this discussion being very serious and spiritual, dispensing words of wisdom and matching Scripture. But when it comes to religious alienation in a family, at least according to my experience with it, the spiritual component is actually secondary to what is really upsetting things. Of course every family is different, but much of the turmoil surrounding religion in a family may connect with a certain lack of emotional honesty or emotional vocabulary.
I wish that I could begin this discussion being very serious and spiritual, dispensing words of wisdom and matching Scripture…
Let me break it down further by considering our hypothetical teenager and her family. Let us say that she has a father who has a very conservative Christian bent and she has been struggling with him and his religious ideologies for much of her life. In this case there are two parties. There is the teenager and there is her father. The teenager yells at her father, she throws things, she slams doors, sometimes she even leaves home without saying where she is going for hours or even days.
The father also yells, also slams doors, and he is constantly reminding her of his rules and beliefs and of how she has disappointed him. The fact that he is disappointed seems to throw her into a deeper rage and this elicits a new volley of ultimatums from the father. Around and around it all goes. As you can see by my description spirituality and religion are not actually what is driving this whirlwind of father and daughter. They may shout about God or sermons or morals, but those are not the deepest truths of what father and daughter are experiencing in those explosive moments. Getting to the deeper truths becomes the real work.
Perhaps in working with the teenager we discover that what she really wants is to feel heard by her father. She doesn’t want her words and deeds to bounce right off of him unacknowledged. She doesn’t want to feel that she has no say in the way she interacts with her family, as if she were only a servant or even a pet. At the bottom of it she really just wants a taste of that unconditional love we all crave. She wants her father to love her no matter what, without her always having to compete with his religious views. So she shouts to be heard, she breaks things to make noise, and she runs away hoping he will chase her and hoping that he won’t. This is certainly one possible scenario for the teenager in this position.
Perhaps in working with the father we discover a sense of betrayal and the grief of loss. Having the same views on religion and morals is one of the ways that families can feel connected to one another in simple straight-forward ways. So when his daughter seems to reject the family’s religious views it looks like she is rejecting the family. That is a betrayal that can really hurt. So he strikes back in the bitterness of that hurt, and he strikes back with a wild hope that maybe this time she will finally listen and join the family again. Because deep down he just wants her to be his little girl again, to be a part of his family like he always imagined it, and each word she screams at him is like a rock thrown through the walls of his glass house. This is certainly one possible scenario for the father in this position.
We discover a sense of betrayal and the grief of loss… Ideally we would be working to bring the family to a place of emotional honesty.
Ideally we would be working to bring the family to a place of emotional honesty, where father and daughter become able to express their feelings in ways that actually penetrate through the guardedness of the other. This is not easy work. It takes some tact and skill, and will only be accomplished after many mistakes and much backpedaling. But, as far as I can see it, this is the heart of the matter. A spiritual approach can work for this teenager if that spiritual approach honors her frustration and helps her to feel truly heard. There are certainly many seeds of inspiration in all the world religions that can help us along this path. On the other hand Scriptures tossed at the teenager like hand-grenades will just make her angrier or drive her to despair. Morals for the sake of morality (that is, without being grounded in anything solid or pragmatic) becomes just another smokescreen preventing the intimacy that this teenager craves.
At last we get to the actual nuts-and-bolts of doing this work. But describing all the actual techniques and approaches out there is beyond the scope of this post. There are just so many paths. For example, much of my approach in this post is informed by my study of Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) which was created to help couples better communicate but which has since been generalized for use in other kinds of therapy work. What is important for us then is that we have a path in the first place. There is a temptation to help others relying only on our instincts and our empathy, but such an approach lacks any real goals and any real methods that can be tested and shaped by experience. A person can play a videogame and receive some inkling of what it is like to fly an airplane, but they would be utterly lost in the cockpit of a real fighter jet. So for some this may mean developing a spiritual approach, studying the pastoral skills of many successful spiritual teachers that have lived all through history. For others this may mean studying things like EFT or other therapy models, even if they are not mental health workers specifically. Whatever way you decide to go it is essential to have some real honesty with yourself about this path, and to spend real conscious energy on preparation.
The opposite of love is the making of assumptions. When we give up the process of pursuing and discovering we have closed off all the real channels of communication…
Perhaps I have gotten a little away from the original question given to me. So before I finish I want to consider how a person who has a more spiritual approach to helping others might help someone like this teenager who has received some form of religious injury. At the start it appears to be a daunting problem, trying to use spirituality to heal spiritual alienation. I personally believe that what I have described about emotional honesty already in this post is essential if we are going to try and accomplish this. That emotional honesty begins with us as the spiritual helpers.
Consider our hypothetical father from earlier in this post. He is not yet able to fully understand why his daughter’s attitude hurts him so. He does not yet understand that he feels betrayed by her. As a result he throws his religion at her like a weapon trying to subdue her without being fully aware of why he is even so furious.
Can spirituality help heal spiritual alienation?
Are we similarly ignorant of the beginnings of our own spiritual work? What is it that put us on this path of being spiritual helpers in the first place? Of course many will answer that they were “ordained by God,” and this is certainly true, but it is not the whole answer. It is not enough. I have become a counselor interested in emotional honesty myself because emotional honesty was difficult to come by in my family growing up. I could say that God turned that difficulty into a calling in my life, but sticking too closely to that perspective can lead me to easily gloss over the painful details of my own history. And just like that I can find myself furious at dishonest clients, not knowing why, not caring why, using my counseling skills to hammer instead of heal. So I ask again, what has brought you to this path and to your particular spiritual perspective?
Next this emotional honesty must be extended to the teenager we are working with, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. This emotional honesty is not just about the teenager but is between us as helpers and the teenager herself. We must become aware of where the teenager is at in her life. We must learn her way of thinking and feeling, her way of understanding the world and her place in the world, as well as her history. We must exercise our spiritual love. A thing cannot be loved if it is not known, and love naturally drives us to learn all we can about the beloved. In this case then it is useful to remember that the opposite of love is not hatred. The opposite of love is the making of assumptions. When we give up the process of pursuing and discovering we have closed off all the real channels of communication between us and the teenager. She will feel this and respond in kind.
I wish I had all the time in the world to fully explore all of these topics and ideas, but I must cut it off at this point. As always I encourage you to take what is good in what I have written here and leave the rest. Also, feel free to tell me your own thoughts on all of this. I am always interested in hearing about the experiences and perspectives of others, especially since I am just starting off with all of this myself.
Thank you again Anesa for your great questions. I hope this at least a good start to finding the answers. For those of you interested in reading a more narrative exploration of these themes feel free to purchase Anesa’s latest book Our Orbit now available on Amazon.
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The links below provide helpful information on addiction and recovery.
Visit the Harvard Help Guide
Visit SoberNation
Visit Parent Treatment Advocates
Visit Gabbertsite from mental health counselor Gail Gabbert
And here’s a recent article from the New York Times on teenagers discussing what might have stopped them from using drugs.
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Thank you so much for visiting my blog today! Feel free to nose about the website and let me know if you like what you see, or if you have suggestions. You can reach me by leaving a comment in the box below or by clicking the Contact link at upper right (or just click here). Consider subscribing to my blog or newsletter. And stop by again soon!
by anesamiller_wuhi6k | May 8, 2015 | Blog, National Foster Care Month
The topic of child welfare looms large in my novel Our Orbit. It tells the story of an Appalachian girl who crosses the tracks to become foster daughter to an educated family. Love and conflict ensue as all the burning social issues of our time raise their sometimes ugly heads. In gratitude to those who helped me learn about the many demands and great rewards of foster care, I am sharing information on this topic throughout the month of May 2015, National Foster Care Month.
Parents’ nightmare? In a 1976 photo, famed “girl” band, The Runaways, show attitude.
Today’s very insightful post comes from blogger, bio & foster mom, Jill Rippy. Her words brought tears to my eyes. Based on personal experience, a teen foster child tends to become the central figure in much of my writing. Visit an example here of what can seem so frightening about these “characters,” whether real or fictional. Then get the true story from Jill.
By Jill Rippy
Scary, emotional, unpredictable, scheming, hormone driven, false accusation making, window jumping runaways…who could I possibly be referring to? Teenage girls in foster care?
These frightening beasts are without a doubt, the most feared children in the foster world. I mean after all, don’t you know, they all are pretty scary. And every single one of them has made a false accusation. All they do is cry all the time and plot revenge. They are out to destroy everyone around them with their rage and emotional instability. Right?
The phone rings. It’s child services and they are asking you to take this teen girl. Instantly, your mind takes you back to the first time you watched the movie Carrie. Your mind fills with visions of teen girl rage and telepathic fire balls flying through the air. As you envision your house being destroyed with a single fiery look from your imaginary foster Carrie, you are filled with angst, fear and doubt. So you tell them no.
I get it my friends. I really do. There was a time when I thought I’d never welcome a teen girl into my home. The thought was frightening and in my mind, it wasn’t even an option.
Fast forward many years, many foster children and many age ranges later and now, we only foster teen girls…at least for now. I add that disclaimer because our preferences have changed over the years (and they may change again), but we find that our personalities, skills and dispositions are a great fit for fostering teen girls.
10 Things You Need to Know About Teen Girls in Foster Care
10. They are a lot of fun. When my teen girls are in the kitchen together, the laughter, snorts, silliness and antics are music to my ears. Humor is our best tool. Quick wit, corny jokes and being able to laugh at yourself will take you far with teen girls.
9. They are relational. Teen girls provide an odd dynamic. At times they hide in their room for hours on end having Gossip Girl or Chopped marathons. When they decide to come up for air (or food) and they come sit with us, we know that wanting to watch something with the parentals really means they need to be close to someone.
They also crave stories. We tell stories from our pasts. We are vulnerable with sharing our mistakes of our teen years and in return, strong bonds form and they don’t feel so bad about the choices they have made in the past. They are able to reason and you can have in depth, enjoyable conversations. Teen girls are great company and genuinely interesting creatures. No doubt, they have many things to teach you as well.
8. They want to be accepted. Many teen girls in foster care have been victims of bullying for one reason or another. Being bullied hardens a child. Chiseling away at that hard exterior takes time, but genuine affirmations go a long way and no doubt, you will see positive, slow change in a short amount of time.
7. They are protective. Once she loves you, she will have your back. She will see your heart and how much you want to support, love and help her and she won’t let anyone speak an ill word of these new parents that love her. Another teen sassing you? Your imaginary Carrie might surface for a second.
6. They are forgiving. Teen girls expect fairness. An apology really can fix most mundane mistakes or hurtful comments. However, if it’s not heartfelt, they will see straight through it. Apologize when you are wrong. Set the example and you will eventually get that in return.
5. They want boundaries. Most likely, she wasn’t protected by those who should have loved and cared for her the most. She wants rules that are fair. She wants consistency. She wants to please you, but she will test you now and then because she is testing your love in her own weird, teenage way. Let her set the rules and boundaries with you. Be clear, firm, but kind. She isn’t your adult equal or your roommate. You are the parent, but she is old enough and wise enough to be empowered with helping set the boundaries.
She is also terrified about the future. The thought of being on her own is a scary thought. She needs to soak up as much as she can in a fairly short amount of time and she knows this. In everything you teach and with every consequence, discuss the immediate ramifications and look into the future. What is the consequence for this behavior now and what would the consequence be if she was 19, in public or on the job? She is almost an adult and consequences for our actions magnify as adults. The world isn’t nearly as forgiving as foster parents or parents. Help her see these new perspectives and think out loud with her.
4. They know they need you. Nearly every teen we have fostered wanted to be here. Though they love their parents and families, for the most part, they are mature enough to see some truths regarding the needs of their family. Truth is, most teens don’t want to leave us. Of course, they may have moments of teen insanity just like any other teen and sure, they may throw out idle threats about leaving, but when push comes to shove, they know they need you and they want to be with you, even though they may still have pain and guilt about not being with their family.
3. They carry a badge of shame and they need your help letting it go. Shame is a big, bad demon that so many people carry. It’s a storm cloud that just follows teen girls around and rears its ugliness often. What that young lady needs to know is the day she stepped foot into your home, her slate was clean. Anything she did willingly, unwillingly, choices she made or acts she participated in are forgiven and she stepped into your home a new person. That doesn’t mean there are not legal or medical consequences for past choices, but in your eyes, she is clean, new and free of the shame of her past. This is a new start. She deserves it.
2. They aren’t that scary. They get attitudes sometimes. They might threaten to “go back home” or share some other load of attention seeking garbage, but when they are angry, leave them alone. They will work it out. Talk it out later. If you push it when she is angry, that is when beast mode kicks in. No one is at their best when they are angry.
1. They want to feel beautiful. Without a doubt, her self-esteem is in the toilet. This is true of EVERY SINGLE TEEN we have fostered. Teen girls need to be built up and have their inner and outer truths brought to light.
Buy her new clothes. Slowly encourage subtle changes. Bring special gifts home for her. A new dress, a necklace or a pair of shoes will make her day. Tell her that you thought of her when you saw it.
If she came to you with the makeup caked on, find a moment where she doesn’t have it on and tell her how naturally beautiful she is. Nonchalantly, drop a quick comment about how you’d love her see her just wear mascara one day and how she doesn’t need all that other junk. (Don’t belabor the point. Trust me, she heard you.)
More importantly, recognize her inner beauty. Notice her heart. When a song makes her cry or she turns her head toward the car window, notice. You are getting a glimpse into her soul at that very moment.
When she wants to make her mom a piece of artwork or give her a birthday gift, help her.
When she comes home upset, ask her about it. Relate to her and tell her a story from your past. Then offer suggestions for how to help the situation.
Introduce her to a positive social group like a church youth group or a teen program that offers a positive environment where she can enact change and you will see change happen before your eyes.
Don’t fear teen girls in foster care. I know the thought of welcoming a teen to your home can be a frightening thought when you have primarily fostered the littles.
If you have never fostered a teen girl, I am giving you this personal challenge. I encourage you to call your agency and share your curiosity, but also your fears. Ask to be put on the respite list if a teen girl or two need respite. Respite is a great way to try fostering different age groups without the full time commitment. However, I will caution you to not judge all teen girls by one experience. Though my experiences shared have been true of the vast majority of the teen girls we have fostered, there is no cookie cutter for teen girls. So I urge you to provide respite for several different girls.
Teen girls are filling group homes and remaining in unstable home environments with services in place because foster parents are afraid to take them. There simply are not enough homes willing to take them. Please don’t assume that all of them are broken beyond repair or will turn your life upside down. Be willing to explore the option. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with how much you enjoy being their parent. If you want to see the evidence of your hard work as a foster parent take place right before your eyes, foster a teen girl. It’s a pretty amazing thing to be their mom.
Visit The Foster Life, website of today’s guest poster, Jill Rippy.
Follow Jill on FACEBOOK: THE FOSTER LIFE and TWITTER.
Thank you for learning about issues involved in foster care! For additional information—
Visit the official site of National Foster Care Month 2015. That’s right now!
Visit the National Foster Parent Association.
And always feel free to share your insights in the “Comments” section below.
by anesamiller_wuhi6k | Apr 29, 2015 | Blog, Issues in Our Orbit -- Substance Abuse & Recovery
Learning to care for others
Substance abuse is an issue that I’ve been discussing with friends and visitors here on the blog lately. I have confronted this problem in my own life and wouldn’t wish the harm that drug abuse brings in its wake on anyone. But in the spirit of making lemonade when lemons come along, I have called upon those difficult experiences in my creative writing.
Today, a person close to me (who will remain anonymous) shares the conclusion of her story about how drugs affected her family. The first portion of her story is posted here. Scroll down for several links to resources that can be useful to those facing a similar challenge.
A Mother’s Struggle —
Frustrated by her teenage daughter’s denials and drug abuse, this mother was driven to distraction. In last week’s post, she describes “one of my most awful memories”—
…I confronted my daughter. As usual she snowed me with lies. I slapped her in the face. 3 times I slapped her. I demanded she admit what she’d done. I was that desperate. She called me abusive and ran out of the house…
So things dragged on longer than you can imagine, now a little better, now a lot worse.
One tricky thing in the situation is that my kids were in joint custody. Their father is basically a good man, he lived a few blocks away from me. The children could walk to his my house, which seemed like a great arrangement at first. But when my older girl started high school, the gap between Mom and Dad turned into something for her to slip through. She would claim she’d left a favorite sweater or outfit at Dad’s house. Had to have it today! No problem—she could walk right over and get it. But then she didn’t come back for hours. No one knew where she went.
Also her dad insisted she attend his church every Sunday, even when she was with me on the weekend. Okay—I dropped her off at church. But you guessed it, she promptly slipped out another door and ran off to meet the friends she smoked and drank with, instead of meeting her father to join the service.
When we wised up to that, I told her dad I wouldn’t force her to attend church anymore. She was not interested in religion at that time and wanted to stop attending. I thought I could show her some support and let her sleep in on Sunday when she was finally at home and quietly in bed! But the upshot: her dad showed up at my house insisting I get her up so he could drive her to church. This led to all sorts of argument and trouble.
Probably our daughter wanted drugs in order to escape. But lack of a united front between parents is a dangerous thing. Some kids suffer in silence; others learn to use the arguments to a bad advantage.
When all this got started, it was alcohol and marijuana. Soon she added Ritalin, Adderall, and Xanax, which were sold in the halls of her school. I’m sure she tried cocaine and crack at some point. Thank God—those didn’t hold her, but at community college, she got into meth. She stuck with meth until she discovered Oxycontin. From there, it was on to heroin, which is where the progression stopped because she was addicted. Like many addicts, she tried the “geographical cure,” trying to get clean by moving away from her source of supply. She moved in and out of my house several times, but did not know how to really make a change.
She stole money and valuables from both of her parents and other relatives. Supposedly she had “financial” problems: most of the family actually believed she had run up debts due to a “shopping addiction.” Nothing worse than that! I did not believe this but could find no support and didn’t know what to do.
My daughter had become like the magical gingerbread man—
I ran away from a little old woman,
and I ran away from a little old man.
You can’t catch me—I’m the gingerbread man!
She could elude any attempt to pin her down and make her admit that help was needed.
One sunny Saturday morning, I called our local police. My daughter had left our house earlier that week, and now my husband had discovered several hundred dollars missing from his dresser. A kind and soft-spoken policeman sat on our porch and heard our sad story. He told me about something called “treatment in lieu of conviction,” available in our county. It sounded like a legal process that could spare me from setting my girl up for criminal charges while still teaching her that she was facing real consequences.
There was no guarantee that my daughter would qualify for “treatment in lieu of conviction.” It would depend on the circumstances of her apprehension, items that might be in her possession at the time, how she bahaved, and other crimes that might come to light. But it could also work as a way for setting up court-ordered rehab. I agreed to charge my daughter with theft. The policeman filed a warrant for her arrest.
Of course, my daughter’s experience of all this was much different from mine. Once she found out that we had filed a criminal complaint, she went into hiding. She stayed at a hotel with other users and lived on the streets. I talked to many people who knew her, and some of them helped me put up flyers begging for information.
Late one night, a drug addict called my home phone. My daughter had given him the number long before, when she was living with me. This man sounded much older than my daughter. He flat-out told me that he wanted to find her so they could meet up and run some scam together for money, obviously for drugs. It was disgusting, but I heard him out. When I started crying, he said, Never mind: if he saw my daughter again, he would tell her to go home and get clean. To forget about scamming ever again.
I know that was just words of the moment that an addict may laugh about the next day. That man may be scamming still, for all I know. But I was touched and found a grain of hope in his effort to comfort me.
For me, bringing in the law was a turning point where things shifted for the better. At least we were beginning to admit the real problem. I realize that law enforcement is not always helpful to families like us. I’ve heard a few of the horror stories about young people forced to name names in some big police action and winding up in worse trouble than ever. I do believe we’re lucky that our county steers clear of those practices to a certain extent.
There were many more low points along the way. As my daughter would say later, her life was hanging by a thread. That phase went on for many months. But I refused to evade the root of the problem any longer, and I reached out for whatever help I might find. Soon enough, my ex-husband came around to my way of thinking. We used the A-word: it’s an addiction. We were still worried, more worried than ever. But waiting and hoping for our daughter to get arrested was actually a relief after all the lies and spinning wheels. For years we didn’t think our girl would ever shape up. We were afraid she wouldn’t finish high school, wouldn’t go to college or then finish college, wouldn’t stay alive long enough to mature into a real adult. But finally we found cause for hope.
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Anesa adds— My friend’s daughter evaded arrest for half a year. When she was finally brought to court, she was so intoxicated that her head kept dropping to her shoulder. The judge admonished her, but then he looked up and asked, “Does the defendant have family in the courtroom?”
Her two parents and one stepparent stood up. Persuaded that these elders in her life could offer enough support to give the young woman a chance, the judge ordered her into a county-run program of “treatment in lieu of conviction.” There was a condition that she must not fail a single drug test for two years of probation. After that time, although she was no longer a minor, she would have no criminal record.
Defiant at first, she went through the motions, and ran away from the treatment program twice. Then, over three months of residential rehabilitation, a true desire for recovery emerged. She spent another 15 months at a halfway house, worked a diligent program, and has now been clean and sober for seven years.
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Links below provide information on addiction and recovery. If you need to do additional reading, I’m offering a chance to receive $50 in free books through the month of April 2015. Click here for details.
Visit the Harvard Help Guide
Visit Parent Treatment Advocates
Visit Gabbertsite from mental health counselor Gail Gabbert
And here’s a recent article from the New York Times on teenagers discussing what might have stopped them from using drugs.
by anesamiller_wuhi6k | Apr 24, 2015 | Blog, Issues in Our Orbit -- Substance Abuse & Recovery
Substance abuse is an issue that I’ve been discussing with friends and visitors here on the blog lately. I have confronted this problem in my own life and wouldn’t wish the harm that drug abuse brings in its wake on anyone. But in the spirit of making lemonade when lemons come along, I have called upon those difficult experiences in my creative writing.
Today, a person close to me (who will remain anonymous) has agreed to tell her story of how drugs affected her family. As you would imagine, it was a painful journey for everyone. Scroll down, below the testimonial, for several links to resources that can be useful to those facing a similar challenge.
A Mother’s Struggle —
About 12 years ago a member of our family got into using drugs. At first, it was just experimenting. It probably started her first day of high school: out of the house, on her own more or less, because we sent her to a church school half an hour from our home (not to our local school). That space between home and school turned into a big enough crack for her to slip through.
Okay, I will say that this person was my own beloved daughter—the eldest of my three children. I won’t say more than that.
Over time when I became suspicious of what she was getting up to, I started searching her room and reading her notebooks. I did feel it was wrong to snoop through her personal things. At first I felt bad about that. You can imagine how a 14-year-old would scream about her privacy being invaded. Lucky for me, she never found out. Unlucky that I never found anything clear enough to bust her and try to put a stop to it. Not that I would have succeeded.
The trouble was that my daughter became a good liar. She could spin convincing tales of where she’d been after school, who she went with, etc., until I became desperate for any grain of truth. Of course, I could tell things were not right. Her personality was changing. In middle school, she had often been irritable, but now she would blow up over any tiny thing. She refused to help around the house, like she always did before, and her grades fell from excellent to okay to fair, and then poor.
It’s hard for me to think about those times. I feel guilty that I failed to nip problems in the bud. I knew she was getting up to something, even though her denials were always believable. But even when I KNEW her clothes smelled of pot or her words got slurred, she could put a good face on it. She would claim that she just tried a bit of beer or marijuana because other people she knew were trying them. Not her real friends—Oh, no! Her friends were not “like that,” they never would use nasty stuff. “Nasty” because she hated it when she tried it, and now that she knows what it’s like, she will never touch it again. YUCK!
Like, What’s wrong with people, Mom? Why do they do that?
She was much too clever to leave anything in her room or backpack or even a pocket. Never so much as one rolling paper or a bottle buried in the trash. Nothing definite, that’s what I’m saying.
I know that some parents have seen deceit like this, based on half-truths that pull you in. Other parents have not, because their kids are still reachable. My daughter had an instinct for what I would believe and what I would want to believe. It broke my heart to think that I could not get through to her, could not convince her to fess up and start fixing the problem. We used to be close. Couldn’t I still be her friend, somehow make her realize that I was on her side, even if she wasn’t a little girl anymore?
Before I wised up, it was like she had already come to believe that getting high was on her side. Drugs were on her side, her real friends. Not mom or family or people, at all.
One time I slapped her in the face. She was bragging to a friend on the phone, using slang that I didn’t understand, but it was obvious she was bragging about something she had bought: What she had bought was expensive and important and a big secret. It sounded like she pooled money with a few others from her school. They would be selling it off in smaller bits to cover the cost. In other words, dealing. I was not in the room at the time, but her little sister was there and was overhearing the whole story. As I passed by the door, I caught on.
I saw that my older girl knew her sister could hear it all. She was bragging about this very bad thing in front of her sister, and she knew it.
That’s what hit me so hard.
I confronted my daughter. As usual she snowed me with lies. I slapped her in the face. 3 times I slapped her. I demanded she admit what she’d done. It was that desperate. She called me abusive and ran out of the house. It’s one of my most awful memories. I hate to think of it.
By the end of that day, I managed to get her set up in counseling. Sounds good, right? But this was at least the third time, over her junior high and high school years, that I got her into professional counseling. Something always came up to block any progress. For one thing, I know she tried to snow the counselor: She would talk about how unfair everyone was to her, and slip-slide over the heart of the matter. Or else she decided she hated the counselor (of which we had little to choose from), or my kids’ father refused to take part in the process.
This testimonial continues here. Links below provide helpful information on addiction and recovery. If you need to do additional reading, I’m offering a chance to receive $50 in free books through the month of April 2015. Click here for details.
Visit the Harvard Help Guide
Visit SoberNation
Visit Parent Treatment Advocates
Visit Gabbertsite from mental health counselor Gail Gabbert
And here’s a recent article from the New York Times on teenagers discussing what might have stopped them from using drugs.
These posts are responses to a pair of questions given to me by Anesa Miller, an author who has considered these same themes in her most current book Our Orbit. Anesa asked for input on a spiritual approach in helping a teenager who has suffered spiritual alienation in her family. Religion in the West has become more polarized even as politics have become more polarized. This can certainly create a more caustic environment in some families when it comes to the way religion is approached. During my years at both the seminaries I attended I heard many stories from other students about how they were mistreated by spiritual people or how they had difficult breaks with family members over all kinds of religious stuff. This topic has become more important every day, even as it has become more difficult and dangerous to try and talk about it.
The father also yells, also slams doors, and he is constantly reminding her of his rules and beliefs and of how she has disappointed him. The fact that he is disappointed seems to throw her into a deeper rage and this elicits a new volley of ultimatums from the father. Around and around it all goes. As you can see by my description spirituality and religion are not actually what is driving this whirlwind of father and daughter. They may shout about God or sermons or morals, but those are not the deepest truths of what father and daughter are experiencing in those explosive moments. Getting to the deeper truths becomes the real work.
Scary, emotional, unpredictable, scheming, hormone driven, false accusation making, window jumping runaways…who could I possibly be referring to? Teenage girls in foster care?
Substance abuse is an issue that I’ve been discussing with friends and visitors here 
