Cassandra, former HLA student "guest" and Niles,
Thank you for your responses. I appreciate what you have to say and have been mulling it all over.
Dianne, you're more than welcome. Thank you for not copping out and taking the 'experts' mollifying assurance that it's all the fault of that fucked up little prick who won't accept their 'help'. As a program vet and deserter, it sort of makes up for a little bit of that whenever I see a parent break from the herd like that. It gives me hope.
Yes, as a parent I have definately screwed up and my son is the victim.
Well, I only brought that into it to say 'yeah, me too, we all do'. Now quit flogging yourself and let's try and move onto hopefully something useful.
However, I'm still not convinced that the answer is to bring him home and try again. He has had many, many opportunities, but he either cannot/will not stop abusing drugs and alcohol if it is available.
Well, I don't think you really have that much influence, far less control over if and how much your kid gets high. Sounds like your kid is having a very, very difficult time and your only choice is whether he has to deal with it with you on his side or as an enemy.
Yes, it is almost impossible to stop someone who is determined to get high, but shouldn't we try?
No, I honestly don't think so. If I were in your shoes, honestly I'd encourage him to stick with the cannabis as many times a day as need be simply because it's safer than any drug known to man. You simply can't kill yourself with the stuff. Just ask Al Robison.
Now here's what I think is the nut of the issue. I'm going to be a little harsh here because I'm just so fucking angry about it all and without apology. But I'm not mad at you or my mother or 'the authorities' or any individual or group. Just incredibly frustrated but helpless to keep slamming my head against this brick wall, hoping one or the other will finally crack and have done with it one of these times. So here goes.
We tried 5 different therapists/psychiatrists -- he didn't really respond to them.
Oh yes he did! Maybe not in any way that you or the pshrink or your son or anyone else would have liked. But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and pshrinks have a way of pushing anyone's buttones--after all, that's what they went to school to learn how to do. They're just, imho, quite clueless to the fact that they really don't know what they're doing or what the results will be.
We tried every punishment/reward we could come up with. We had him go to meetings, found him a sponsor, took him to visit jail, had family member recovering addicts talk to him, anything I could think of. And yes, I'm not terribly impressed with the success rate of any substance abuse program. I readily admit my failures as a parent, but I think he knows he is loved and even if he doesn't feel it now someday he will understand that we ran out of parenting options. It may sound like BS to some of you, but I truly believe that this kid would end up dead or in jail. Maybe that prospect has lost its significance since its tossed around with impunity, but as a parent who believed it was a real possibility, keeping him safe or at least safer was the best I could do.
Well, now again I can't blame you or my parents or any other well intended person for going along with the conventional wisdom, but
that's enough to drive ya ta drinkin! Like my friend Anne, I also spent a couple of years in a program and then had a world of trouble w/ my oldest daughter, who's now 22 and doing quite well for herself [whew!]. But I can't take credit for any of that except for one thing I think I did right. I knew when I was licked. I didn't know it because I'm so wise and smart 'n all. I knew it because I had been on the receiving end of so much 'help' when I was a young woman and, after awhile, it just became painfully obvious that I was making the same damned mistake my parents had.
Unlike Anne, my family had been in the cult for almost a decade before I landed up in a program. You'd a thunk I was the straightest damned kid there ever was, what with all the open meetings and my mother being a virtuoso at stepcraft `n all. And really I was towing a pretty straight line. My sole focus in life from the time I was about 9 or 10 was on NOT getting put in a program as my elder brothers and sisters had been. The trouble is that no human being, especially a kid, could possibly be straight enough to meet the unrealistic, simplistic and harsh standards of that fucked up cult. So I just stuffed it. I just tried to pretend that I had none of those troubling needs and emotions that normal kids go through. I thought I could just wait, tow the line and finally start being myself once I was safely past the age of majority. I'd just be a perfect little Seedling robot in the mean time. It didn't work out so well. I never did get into drugs much, just dabbled w/ pot and beer once in awhile and my rents never even knew about that, I don't think. But I was incredibly lonely, depressed and pretty near suicidal from the effort. Naturally, because they'd been in the cult for so long and completely brainwashed into the cult world view, it was a simple equation for them; any teenager who was depressed and withdrawn must, necessarily, be a druggie. Solution? Why, the Program, of course!!!
Fuck!
Sorry, yeah, I am angry and frustrated. But again, I don't blame you for listening to all of the best advice available to you. And I don't blame the people giving all this fucked up advice, either. They're well intended, if extremely obtuse. I believe that if there's a worse idea going than locking people up for unauthorized euphoria it's probably locking them up in close proximity to a bunch of well intended mindfuckers bent on helping them even if it kills them. I had that as an email signature for awhile, but it was too long, too little understood and made me most unpopular with a lot of my former friends in the drug policy reform movement. Especially that sanctimonious asshole, Richard Lake. I probably would still be contributing time and volunteer effort to MAPInc if they hadn't hitched their wagon so solidly to the 'treatment not incarceration' canard.
Anyway, at a certain point I realized that my daughter had had just about all the 'help' she could stand from me, any more was not going to do anything but further alienate her. So I quit trying to help her. I did just what my dad had done for me; I called a truce and stuck by it.
I would suggest you do the same. That means you have to accept that, no matter what you do or don't do, there are no guarantees. Your son might figure things out and be alright or not. But I guarantee that programs like HLA based on Synanon methods are NOT helpful! If there's anything you can do to be of real assistance to him you'll have to convince him that you'll never, ever try a stunt like that again.
