Addicted Like Me (2 page)

I met every opportunity for change that she presented to me with a fight. I had no idea this resistance was a part of my disease. Addiction tries to find any way it can to survive and thrive. When I was confronted about my addictions, it only intensified my anger and the burden I felt from carrying so much rage around. It created a pressure inside me that nearly drove me crazy. I medicated myself with drugs and alcohol to cover up the pain I felt, meanwhile causing everyone I came in contact with to suffer.

As a teen, I tried any high that came my way. I didn't discriminate against any drug. It didn't start out that way, but year after year I found myself more willing to try anything, and do anything, for a high. When I began using drugs and alcohol, I withdrew from my life. It seemed inevitable, and is now evident, that the beast of addiction was devouring me.

My thinking was altered after I lost myself to addiction. Lying became a priority to keep addiction the most important thing in my world. I found myself willing to hide my secret at any cost. If you are living with an addict, you have to remember that you are up against secrecy, shame, and an intense desire to retreat from everything, even the healing that you may be yearning for underneath it all.

My mother first approached me with the idea of writing this book many years ago. Initially, I was excited to start the project, but
once I began to write I found it draining to relive the nightmare we had experienced together. Feelings of regret engulfed me. I began to think about all the pain I caused my family. I feel deep remorse for the people who crossed my path during the time that addictions ruled my life. I may have influenced many people to try drugs and alcohol. It has become my mission to right this wrong, to write this book, and to speak out about recovery. I want to give others the hope I was given as a tribute to every person I may have victimized.

In my section of this book, I take you through the journey of teen addiction and how it came to take over my life. I try my best to remember the feelings I was experiencing, and the justifications I made up, to give you an idea of how a drug user thinks. There were times while writing about this part of my life that I didn't think I would be able to finish sharing the sort of person I used to be. I had doubts about opening myself up to admit my failures, mistakes, and vulnerabilities. However, the fact is that no one can tell my story better than I can. Let my story begin to show you the way.

Anybody can sit and point the finger and say an addict has to change. It wasn't until I was shown how to start making changes, and the people around me began to educate themselves, that I was able to make the decision to hope I could be different. It didn't take just my willpower to choose hope; I also needed to be shown that I was worth believing in. It has not been easy to believe in myself. Faith in my own personal power to remain sober is something that I will always be working on, just as you will if you begin recovery by reading this book.

In recovery you can expect to sit in the front row of your own life instead of hiding in the back, withdrawn. I think about my own two children and the world they are growing up in. I wonder if they will experience the same addictions I faced because our addiction is a family legacy. I wonder if the beast of addiction will wake in the next generation and become stronger, or if my mother and I have tamed the beast for good. These are questions that can only be answered with time. It is now my turn to educate, and my time to protect my children, and to engage others in a conversation about the road out of addiction and toward recovery. I am proof that a legacy of addiction can be broken, even if it is a family affair that has lasted for years.

 

—LAUREN KING
2009

AT AN EARLY AGE I learned unconsciously that the way to cope with life was to abuse substances. My grandfather abused alcohol and then abandoned my father and his siblings. My father abused alcohol and then abused our family. After my mother passed away from cancer, my sister married and moved, and my brother joined the Air Force. I was left alone to receive my father's rage. At first I abused food but quickly turned to abusing other substances to numb my pain.

I remember taking my first drink at thirteen years old. A girlfriend invited me to go drinking with the crowd she was hanging around with. Because I didn't know what effect drinking would
have on me, I was insecure about the invite. The night before we were supposed to go out with her friends, I decided to do a trial run. At home alone I drank two big glasses of vodka and orange juice. I felt numb, but only a little dizzy. I felt relieved, like I could do it. It was essential for me to appear as if I knew what I was doing because of my hunger to be accepted. It was propelling me into a state of internalized mental and emotional anguish to live alone with an alcoholic father who was prone to heated rages after the death of my mom. I was lonely, chronically distressed, and full of shame.

I felt that somehow my life situation was my fault. I desperately needed the acceptance of my peers because I felt so bad about myself most of the time. I wanted to be viewed as normal and put together by the outside world. I had learned I could handle a night out with friends drinking from my trial run. It was not going to be a big deal, and I wouldn't be made fun of. I knew that if someone were to make fun of me, it would just confirm my suspicions of what I already thought about myself, which wasn't worth the risk.

The next night a group of us went to a park where some boys showed up and brought the alcohol. I was pretty confident from my previous experience, so I acted like a pro. I don't remember anything after being at that park because I blacked out. The next thing I knew it was morning. I woke up in my girlfriend's bedroom, the room spinning, and she told me I'd been hysterically funny the night before. She also told me I had gotten really wasted and thrown up several times in a car. The boys had dropped us at her house, and she had had a heck of a time getting me up the stairs to her bedroom.

That was just one step in my process of becoming addicted. I started smoking a year before, at twelve, smoking marijuana at fourteen years old, and taking hard drugs at fifteen. I became bolder as an addict, and I liked it. Because I had experienced disappointment so often growing up with my alcoholic father, my expectations had always been for the worst. My fears would grow inside me until they permeated my entire being. Once I got into drugs, I felt less fear. I spent most of my time away from my father. I stayed out at friends' houses to party on the weekends, and it was a relief to be rarely home.

When I was home, I began to stand up to my father's drunken rages. I also began to lie and steal. I would later see the same signs of boldness in my daughter and son, Lauren and Ryan, as their addictions progressed. At fourteen I stole my first painkillers from my father. His pills had been prescribed following an emergency appendicitis surgery, but he prided himself on not taking any pain medication. I think the alcohol probably did the job just as well, so his pills went untouched. He didn't miss them a bit when he returned to the house after his operation. The day he came home from the hospital, he got in the car and drove straight to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars bar, his home away from home.

I don't know how I got the brilliant idea to try his morphine pills, but I did. He had several bottles of them, and I started passing the pills out to my friends. Some days I would swallow a handful before I went to school. I felt dizzy afterward, like I might pass out and never come up to life again. At the parochial school I attended, the nun who taught my homeroom class noticed instantly that something was wrong. She took me to the convent after school one
day and started to probe me for reasons. I broke down crying and told her everything about my home life. I told her it was unbearable and gave her details about what was happening between my father and me. Of course, I never mentioned the painkillers. Covering your tracks is a skill of an addict, and I was learning.

The next day my teacher met with my dad. I have no idea what she said to him, but when he came home he brought us pizza for dinner and tried to have a conversation with me, which was definitely not typical. It felt weird to have his attention, so I just played along. My father and I had so little communication outside of his screaming at me that I had no idea what to say to him. I felt so exposed. I just wanted the dinner to be over so I could go back into my bedroom and close the door to isolate and protect myself. My father and I were sinking deeper into our addictions, he into his liquor and me into my pills. We had both become reclusive when we were in our house, and the pattern that was being set would never be broken.

I grew into an addict during the 1970s, when the hippie movement was established, so drugs were flowing freely around me and rebellion was in the air. It all seemed seductive and glamorous. I was an impressionable teen, and I thought anyone drinking or doing drugs was cool. To be caught up in this high was the opposite of all the emotional pain I had locked inside. Feelings of depression, fear, and shame permeated my entire being, and I was desperate to be seen as normal. The drugs gave me the power to achieve this goal. Instantly I could numb out my distressed emotions and gain the acceptance I craved to lift my self-esteem.

During my ninth-grade year, one of my girlfriends started dating a boy who was eighteen and part of the glamorous crowd I craved to join. He and his friends were into smoking pot, and I remember it felt so special to be hanging out with really important older people, like them, who had access to drugs. After the death of my mother, I had felt only loneliness and a sense of disconnection from everyone. I missed her terribly, and I grieved the life I knew before her death. I knew my place in the world when she was alive. I felt secure. As part of this older, inner circle, I was considered cool and got that feeling back.

The first time I tried marijuana, I felt nothing. I couldn't understand what the big deal was. The second time I tried it, I felt the effect and loved it. It took the pain of life away, and I craved that release. It took the edge off, and I became a daily pot smoker, though it didn't take long before I experimented with other drugs, too. I continued stealing from my dad to fund my habit. I took money from him instead of painkillers. I would sneak into his bedroom and steal out of his wallet after he had passed out following a night at the bar. I would have risked anything to get my high at that point. I was scared to death of my father, but I would creep into his room anyway, every time I needed money. Even in broad daylight I would steal what I needed to get my fix. Sometimes I had to tiptoe inches from his slumbering body to rifle through the pockets of his pants hanging next to him on the bedpost.

I don't know if he ever knew I was doing this, but I never got caught. I never got into trouble with my father over drugs, but he did find out that I was using alcohol because I got caught drinking
at a school function. This was the only time he ever hit me. I was sitting in the school cafeteria when my name was called over the intercom, which blared out the news that I was to report to the office. When I arrived I had to stand before the principal and admit everything. That's when my dad got brought into the picture. The principal said I needed to go home and tell my father about the incident because I was being suspended. I needed to bring my dad with me when I returned to school.

I knew that I couldn't tell my father what had happened. He would blow up in his usual way and maybe even more. I was unwilling to find out how much more anger I might unleash in him. For the next three days I got up and got dressed for school as if I weren't suspended, but instead of walking to school I sneaked down to the basement and hid. I sat there quietly until I heard my father leave for work. When I went back to school, the principal asked where my father was because I hadn't brought him with me. I admitted that I hadn't told my dad and just stood there waiting to see what the principal would do. I figured anything that came was better than dealing with my father's ferocity, but my hopes were dashed when I observed a sad look of resignation on the principal's face, just before he told me there was no getting around my father's anger. He was going to call my dad himself and tell him the news I hadn't.

That night I was scared to death. I waited for my father to come home, but he didn't show up until two in the morning. I heard him come in, then he opened the door to my bedroom and walked up to me. He slapped me in the face, said nothing, and walked out of my room. My cheek stung at first, but then it just felt numb. It
was dark around me, and in that horror I felt completely violated at what my father had done, but soon feelings of shame and humiliation flooded over me. I turned the pain inward because I was sure it was my fault. I cried silently into my pillow, rocking myself to sleep in shame. Those were the last soundless sobs of protest I would ever make against my father.

The next time he yelled at me, I snapped. I told him I couldn't take it anymore, and that I felt like I was losing my mind. A look of fear came over his face when I finally exploded. The only time I had seen him look so fearful was when my mother lay dying. He began to sob, and then he grabbed me. My father hugged me, said he loved me, and told me he would get me some help. He said, “I love you.” It's the only time I remember those words leaving my father's lips. He promised to take me for an appointment with a psychologist, but I didn't think I was crazy. I needed something to deal with the pain we caused each other, sure, because I couldn't take the emotional battering anymore, but I didn't need a hospital. Still, he made an appointment at a mental hospital in a nearby town. My father found the hospital on a recommendation from his boss, because he also had a daughter in need of “help.” As we drove up to the hospital, I noticed bars were on all the windows of the building. I was petrified that the hospital staff would keep me there and lock me up.