When a Family Member is Struggling
[Warning: discussions of overdose]
“Now I’m attending the family support program, because my son at 19 fell into addiction as well, and he’s had some serious struggles. He’s been in nine different rehabs. He was using fentanyl – but he just actually had three months sober yesterday… When your kid is fully into addiction, and you’re an addict, it’s triggering. It causes a lot of emotions to come up. You blame yourself, you have a really hard time differentiating. [My peer counselor] really really helped me build boundaries and figure out how to speak to [my son], and how to navigate through what he was going through and not make it my own problem. To really just be able to have a relationship with them, and not lose them, and have the skills to get them into rehab, and now that he’s out how to talk to him now that he’s sober… When my son first was active in addiction, I really felt alone. I reached out to programs at the rehab, and most of the time they didn’t even want to speak to you.”
“I felt like there was absolutely no one that knew what I was going through it felt like. I don’t have a circle of people that I know that I could reach out to. Anyone that I talked to would have some kind of opinion, or say, “oh, he needs more discipline,” or this or that… When I first messaged Sophia Recovery Centre on the Facebook page, I just said, “my son is an active addiction, I’d like to join this page.” Within 24 hours, I had somebody calling me to see if I wanted to come in for counseling. It was really at a time that I needed it desperately and having it all free and available was huge.”
“Eventually two women in my family in their own recovery journey came with me [to SRC]. There was community within my own family in recovery. I was a fun party person – so some of them probably wished I was still drinking. Finding people in my family and my community has made this journey a lot easier. It helped me build my own life here, in all kinds of ways.”
“My boyfriend died for four minutes of an [overdose]. He was in his friend’s car. He thought he was gonna be this big kingpin drug dealer. He comes home with his big chunk of fentanyl – I’m like, get this out of my house, this is terrifying. Apparently, he brought it into his friend’s car and spilled some and when he was smoking crack, he dropped a piece on the floor and instead of picking up the crack, he picked up a piece of fentanyl. His friend had to do CPR on him. If his friend didn’t know CPR, he would be gone.”