Parents

Tom@recovery help desk:

I just felt compelled to say thank you for your contributions in the form of insight-sharing comments on Intervene, The Partnership at drugfree.org. Whenever I see your efforts there I feel like I have a “compadre” in the goal of helping parents of addicted sons and daughters to learn and work toward giving themselves a break from their own self-inflicted blame and guilt about their child’s drug addiction challenge. Depleted parents desperately seeking some encouragement, support, “effective” tools are vulnerable to the influence of status quo commentary/ advisements (well intended ones at that) that further risk what is often a limited energy supply. There is just language that I don’t choose to use in communicating about addiction because, in my own journey of parenting an addicted son, I found certain buzz words and phrases related to “recovery” to seed and increase my sense of “this must be all my fault”-thinking. Words and phrases that carried stigma…even though I believe the intent behind constructing and then repeatedly using these kinds of communication tools was generally to deliver “epiphanies”. I’m not suggesting these commonly used phrases and words as having zero merit in helping parents toward discovery. I’m suggesting that there is more to be gained in support and encouragement of parents in the trenches on toward their discovery of methods that will help them and their children gain momentum in recovery by utilizing language that inspires a sense of “what I can do”, rather than language that has us focusing on “what didn’t I do”. This approach helps to keep blame-language stigma from robbing us of our much need energy for the journey.

Parents/families benefit so much from efforts like yours.

Thank you, again, for all you do for others…

Patti

Patti Wilson-Herndon
Parents Advisory Board Member
The Partnership at Drugfree.org