Addiction: From Bondage to Freedom

By Cathy Napier

Catherine (Cathy) Napier received her her Bachelor's degree from Dallas Baptist University in Dallas, Texas and her Master's degree in counseling from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Cathy attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey for her post-graduate studies in addiction. Cathy has worked in some of the major ps

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cathy Napier
• Release date: Aug 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735603445

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Contents

Introduction

Part One

A How-To Guide for Navigating Through Family Crisis

Intervention

Talk About It

Fitting Families into the Big Picture

Exposing the Family Secrets

Addiction Can Happen to Any Family

Encouraging Your Loved One to Have God Take Over

Tool Work for the Chemically Dependent

Stopping the Opioid Epidemic and Averting the Family from Crisis

Coming Full Circle

How Did We Get Here?

Part Two

This Is Not the End

The Addiction

Getting Treatment by Admitting I Was Powerless

Turning It Over to God: Doing the Therapy Work

Cipa the Sponsor and Doing a Moral Inventory

Giving Back

The Rewards of Recovery

Staying Humble

Coming Full Circle

About the Author

Copyright

Dedicated to Debbie Cope Williams—in recognition of her work with Shatterproof, and in loving memory of her daughter Jessica

Introduction

It's another night of sleeplessness as I pick up my cell phone. The time is 2:40 a.m. and there’s still no text from her. I had conditioned myself to listen intently for the notification. The only communication I would receive indicating she was alive was a text, never a phone call. My daily mantra whenever I received one was, She’s drug-free. She’s alive. But when the texts stopped again, unfortunately, I knew she had relapsed—or worse, was dead. How many times do we report her missing?

How many times have we stayed home instead of roaming the streets looking for her? We knew she was running with the wrong crowd. We knew that she was shooting up heroin. And we were in a state of terror most of the time. On this morning, I lay tossing and turning until 6:00 a.m. That seems to be a good time to get out of bed. My body is tired, my eyes burning from lack of sleep. I am full of fear, sadness, and a deep sense of struggling to keep things together, especially my work.

She’s twenty-four years old. I can’t ground her or spank her. I can’t put her in time-out or take her phone away from her. I can only hope and pray for her protection. I arrive at work, and that familiar wave of panic starts to well up inside me as another day moves on without a call or text. I cringe every time I get a call from an unknown number, fearing it will be the morgue. What’s worse is the fear that she’s having sex with strangers or being beaten up because she owes money to the wrong person. It hurts when your thoughts take you down a path that was unimaginable a few years ago. It hurts to think that, if she were in prison, I could relax, because at least I would know where she was every night.

This scene has been voiced to me and other therapists in various family sessions throughout the years. The scenario plays out daily across America. Families from all over the United States—all over the world, for that matter—live in sheer panic for their loved ones. We’re facing one of the worst health crises since the Spanish flu in the early 1900s, or the more recent AIDS epidemic. Our children, our young adults, and yes, even some elderly, are dying in great numbers due to the opioid epidemic.

The chemically dependent will not wake up one day and decide they’re going to get help. They need their loved ones to intervene on their behalf. Otherwise, they will remain caught in the web of addiction and denial.

Families don’t need to feel helpless if they jump into action. Part one of this book was written as a guide to you, the family, to get out and become involved in the fight—not only for your loved one’s life, but for our communities that have been overcome by this problem of addiction. This section will give families tools for self-help when they have an addicted loved one. This guide—a plan and manual of sorts—will enable you and your family to help loved ones in the throes of addiction, so they can get healthy.

In part two of this book, families will read my story and will come to understand that the addict doesn’t have to come from a terrible environment. I came from a wonderful family and wonderful town, with many friends surrounding me. My addiction was insidious. I was in the throes of addiction before I realized I couldn’t stop it. My family genes were a definite set-up—these were received in the first few hours after conception from my family’s DNA, and included the gene for addiction. My genetic makeup was a time bomb—all I had to do was put the chemicals in my body.

I’m sharing my story so families and addicts know that there’s a protocol for recovery. My faith has carried me through many challenging times, and helped me not resort to drugs or alcohol. I have trusted the Lord through the chemically free part of my life. The Bible has been the spiritual food to nourish me. I have reaped a changed life through my faith in Christ. I stand on and have believed the Bible verse of the book of Galatians 5:1. It is freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. The bondage of drugs and alcohol will keep the chemically dependent in slavery. A commitment to God and relying on Him is the only answer to this scourge and freedom from it. Also, along with the Bible, the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous have been tools to help me guide others into recovery. I show in my story how my recovery correlates with some of the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as the scriptures.

I have identified a family genetic history of alcoholism and drug addiction, going back to my grandparents. I have been able to trace the family genetic marker of addiction to my Scotch-Irish grandfather and my American Indian grandfather. Over a dozen of my family members have died directly or indirectly from addiction. I believe my own addiction was from the DNA of my ancestors. But my family was not at fault—this is truly a disease.

Part One

A How-To Guide for Navigating Through Family Crisis

Chapter One

Intervention

Intervention is something that comes between two things, or something that changes the course of something. The example of using an intervention in drug addiction would be a group of friends confronting a family member or friend about their drug use and asking the friend or family member to seek treatment. The intervention needs to come as a surprise to your loved one. There are many good therapists who do interventions. Be sure and check with a facility or private therapist and ask whom they would recommend for an intervention with the prospective patient and your family. Include friends, as well, who are willing to confront the behavior of your family member.

Schedule the intervention at a time when everyone who wishes to participate in the process can be there. The interventionist will meet with everyone prior to the loved one arriving. Many family members have staged an intervention under the auspices of having the loved one over for a scheduled dinner, and don’t consider it deceit. Dinner can happen if everyone feels like it after the intervention.

Many times, a friend or other family member will need to help the loved one make the appointment. If left to their own devices, the addict is unlikely to arrive on time or even at all. The interventionist should get there an hour before the loved one is to show up. The interventionist will prep everyone on what and what not to say, which will include no judging. Everything that is said should be said with kindness and love. Remember, you’re trying lovingly to get your loved one help.

Everyone attending the intervention will speak to the family member and give him or her an account of how they’ve seen their life deteriorate due to the family member’s use of drugs. Please always stick with the behavior, and do not shame the family member personally. If you know which drug they’re using, name it. Be direct—but again, be kind. Be specific about the marked difference in their behavior before using and after. Give specific examples. Tell the person you love them and couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. Tell them you want them to go for help now. Sometimes, an intervention can last several hours.

The interventionist will close the meeting, and tell the family member that they have arrangements for them to go for treatment, and name the facility. The loved one will be encouraged to go right away. The end goal of an intervention is that the family member will go for treatment. The hope is that the entire family will participate in family therapy that is offered by most treatment facilities. I have seen some good success when the entire family gets help through the facility and continues with family treatment long afterwards.

A verse of scripture like the one below can bring peace to your soul, and comfort when you’re going through difficult times with a loved one caught in the throes of addiction:

Psalm 91

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress my God; in Him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings Shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at Thy side, and ten thousand at Thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

The above Psalm is wonderful and is meant to shine a light in your darkness. Imagine each line as soul food in times of trouble. You may want to pray each line as a request to God to put a protective shield around your love one. I don’t know anything more heartbreaking than watching a daughter or son going through the throes of alcohol/drug addiction. Families and loved ones get so desperate trying to fix the addiction and addict that they become enablers. They become codependent, losing sight of their own needs—the addiction makes them sick too.

As challenging as it may be, you, the parent, will need to love from afar, but do your best to be supportive when your son or daughter needs a listening ear. Remember to take care of yourself through these difficult times by seeking support for yourself. While you’re meditating on the above quote, imagine your child having a protective covering that is provided by the God of your own understanding. Take each line within you, so it’s always with you—a mantra that you can whisper or share at any time. Feeding your soul, especially during times of crisis, is as important, if not more so, than feeding your body.

My story is for the families and the addict to recognize and understand that there is actually a protocol for recovery. The steps in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are guides about how to live life. By following the twelve steps, I have been given forty years of recovery. My faith has also been a factor in helping me overcome the desire to drink or do drugs. Families need to understand that support groups like Nar-Anon exist solely to give them support—a guide to get them through the day, one day at a time.

Chapter Two

Talk About It

I had the privilege of interviewing a mother in Kansas. She had lost her daughter to a heroin overdose. Debbie Williams has given me permission to write her story of inspiration and daily progress toward, as she puts it, getting back into life.

Jessica Williams was an energetic young woman who had the brightest future ahead of her. Her beauty was as easily recognized as her intellect. She was raised in a small town—Salina, Kansas—by parents who were and are good people. They loved her and noticed her unique talents when she was very young. The best thing a family can do is recognize and celebrate the talents of a child and provide them with a path to success. This was the way Wayne and Debbie Williams handled the precious being they had been given.

Jessica attended William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, and was curious about many intellectual pursuits. She majored in political science and theater and took classes in Mandarin that had her speaking it fluently within the year. Later, Jessica transferred to the University of Missouri with a desire to attend law school. While there, she partied, as most college students do, in order to relieve the pressure of a rigorous path to success.

The disease of addiction, like cancer, has no respect for individuals. One dark evening, Jessica felt the raucous call of anything goes, and stepped into a hole of addiction that few come out of alive. Heroin entered her veins for the first time. The high was like nothing she had ever experienced in her previous experimentation with various substances. The world became easier, directions in life became less stressful, and any pain, real or imagined, became non-existent. This was Jessica’s new world. All other goals and ambitions—to study in Beijing, to attend law school, to get married, to have children of her own—were now replaced by the desire to find more heroin. It led her into the greatest nightmare she could imagine.

Jessica is far from Kansas now. This monkey on her back took her away with an overdose that led to her death on a dreary, cold Kansas day: February 10, 2016.

The rest of the Williams family had to live with the tragedy. There’s nothing to compare to what they’ve experienced. Wayne and Debbie handled their grief differently. Wayne made a sign:

I imagine Wayne’s anger churning inside of him, like a volcano ready to explode. I imagine that Wayne has never felt that kind of anger before, and that he has no reference for expressing his grief and anger in a meaningful, safe manner. So he decided to plant a sign, to say to the world, We need to talk about it.

Debbie, on the other hand, became public and vocal.

I hear Debbie’s voice breaking on the other end of the