The other day, I was alone in a room with person and we both had such a moment and we both recognized it at the same time. It was way weird. Parker was referred to me for assessment by his loving parents, who had searched the area and had heard my name over and over in reference to substance abuse intervention. He presented with both parents and I noticed they sat together in the waiting room and he chose to stand alone gazing out the window, aloof.
They described the problem in parent’s words “I’m afraid for what might happen to him if he keeps this up” and “he just doesn’t seem goal oriented” “problems in school” “creepy friends”. It reminded me of the things I heard when I was a teen, and Parker reminded me of myself at that age, all existential philosophy and self-centeredness and eaten alive with sexuality and longing and seeking. And then his parents gave him over to me and gave me their trust in the same profound way that a mother gives her newborn over to the nurse to be cleansed, just for a minute and please please be careful with him, he’s all there is in the world.
After a blinding and blurry binge between college semesters in 1972, I returned home to recuperate and gather money for the next drug storm and my parents required that I see a psychiatrist named Duncan Woodstock
We discussed philosophy and news during our sessions and he was encouraging and helpful but he did not recognize and diagnose what was, by then, full addiction to several drugs. I was honest with him but this was 1972 and we had all just reeled out of the 60’s and we did not then know what we know now about addiction. I have wondered many times how my life might have been different had he intervened more effectively more effectively back then and I have dedicated my career to becoming more effective at recognizing and intervening with addictive disease. I went on to spend the next fourteen years suffering from the effects of my addictive disorder.
So when I got Parker alone, I spent an hour convincing him that I was on his side. That I would not release his information to another living soul without his permission and that I would tell him the truth. He told me he believed he might have a mental illness and he shared with me the hopes and dreams that he fostered silently in his sullen and bursting teenaged heart. He shared with me the rationalizations and excuses that made it possible for him to suppress his powerful, beautiful spirit with an array of synthetic chemicals. And he shared his powerful ambitions to live this life fully, in the first person and right out loud, because after all, a well lived life is the most any of us can hope for.
At the second session, I tested him with the Substance Abuse Subtle screening inventory, but I already knew he had become addicted to the multicolored array of chemicals he was using. I needed to watch him and gather information about his perceptions to prepare for the intervention to come. I discussed it with colleagues and supervisees so that the words would come to me naturally. O my goodness it is almost like magic when it works right, the words just flow out and there is that connection that seems like the therapist has lived in your mind for a while and listened as you spoke silently to yourself.
When Parker burst into my office he grabbed my hand and shook it with a squeeze that surprised me and he looked back at me fondly as I searched his brown eyes for signs of impairment. I started with a deflective technique, discussing the symptoms of his attention deficit disorder. I asked him directly and repeatedly if he wanted me to tell him what I had learned about him and repeated that this information would never leave the room without his enthusiastic consent.
I told him directly that he was experiencing addiction. Not that I believed it, not that it resembled it, but that I knew it like I knew the sun had come up that morning, unequivocally. I have learned when to wait for the defenses to come up and how to roll with them and I prepared for this. But they did not appear, he just sighed and looked down and it was at this moment that I flashed back in time to a skinny young poet slumping in a leather chair in a therapist’s office, hurt and defective, wondering what in the world was wrong with me. Wanting the answer but deathly afraid to hear it. O God what is wrong with me…
And that moment in my office seemed to congeal into one of those times when all the previous moments had converged. Parker just looked back at me and bit his lower lip in a smile to see if I recognized the moment too. The rest of the hour was spent with me saying the words he had thought but had never said aloud. Words about the emptiness that is left after the drugs are gone and the life has been drained out of you and you are only a hollow shell. Words about the friends we had made who now seemed to reflect back to us our own shallowness and sadness and hurt. Words about the hopelessness we feel when our heart already knows what our head cannot acknowledge, that we have cheated our brains too long with artificial happiness and now we must pay with our grinding, twisting, seething misery.
There is no telling how it will go for Parker. He might summon the courage to change now. Or, like me, he might wait until the suffering reaches a crescendo later in his life. He might never recover. He knows, though, that I had messed up his drug use and that he would not be able to enjoy the joint he had rolled to smoke in the car after our session. He knew what my brother knew when I recognized my own addiction, finally, in1986. Rob wrote me a note that I still have with words to the effect that no matter how things go in the future,”I know it will be different for you. I am loving you and wishing you well”.
Dave Seward
April 2005
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