Lack of knowledge and understanding

I am thankful that I did not develop a substance use disorder. By all accounts I should have, but my resilience is strong. I didn’t have to engage in it to know it was not for me. I saw the devastation, I lived the devastation and am a product of the devastation. When I was a child I didn’t understand addiction. I didn’t know what it was. I thought you could just stop using. I thought you should be able to understand how important life is. I thought you should put your children before your addiction, boy how wrong was I. Addiction ravishes everything in your life. I know there are people who believe that they control their addiction, but those are lies they tell themselves. Denial, ambivalence, ignorance these are all parts of addiction. I used to be embarrassed by terms like crack head and dope fiend. I used to be very critical of drug addicts. I had the mindset like so many others “Why can’t you just stop?”. I am not sure that I would have sought the answer to that question had it not been for my mother’s overdose.

In fact it wasn’t until I moved back to California from living in Texas that I even gave that question some real thought. That is when I began to become involved in the recovery community. At this time my father had coordinated an NA group at his place of worship. I attended a few times, just to see what it was all about. This was the first time that I heard part of his story. This was the first time that I heard about how addiction affected his life. I was honestly shocked. Before hearing his story, I thought his absence was for more selfish reasons. I had so many thoughts when I was younger. My lack of knowledge and understanding about addiction caused me to treat him poorly and unfairly. It caused me to be mean and disrespectful. It caused me to think and believe things that weren’t true.