Wednesday nights I meet with teen addicts. These are kids
who are using drugs and maybe some alcohol to alter their reality for some
reason or another. This week’s session was eye popping; I missed the previous
week due to family medical reasons; at that meeting one patient ‘graduated’,
and three new youth joined the group; this week two more joined in. We now are
working with 10 young people.
They are all intelligent. They come from good homes, mostly
stable, some divorced parents, but decent household incomes and hopes for the
future. But they are using drugs. Some have been caught by law enforcement and
are in the program by court decree. Others were corralled by their parents and
placed in the program. Most have been nabbed in a serious drug induced state or
near death moment; those have been relegated to lock-down rehab facilities in
another northern Illinois
city. From there they come to our rehab program.
Making some sense of their individual circumstances is not
easy. What led them to their use of drugs? Why did they persist in their use of
drugs? Do they see where this may lead – their impairment, physical decay, or
death? Do these ends alarm them in any way? And if they are alarmed, do they willingly
display the alarm?
Who is in denial here? The patients, the staff, the family,
the courts or society at large?
That’s a good question. And although many answers are
quickly offered the truth is that no one has the real answer at any one time.
This is a crap shoot most of the time. We don’t know for sure what we are
dealing with because each patient is unique. Norms exist, we measure the state
of their health both mentally and physically, and draw some conclusions from
those indices. But in the main it is a person who strayed into the drug world
for a reason.
What is the reason? How do we help them solve, placate or
ease the reason enough for them to get on with their lives? That is what our
volunteers are there for: help bridge the patients from rehab support to the
real life outside so they can self sustain their lives with purpose and future.
In many cases the kids don’t admit they have a problem. You
cannot build a bridge for them if they don’t recognize the shoreline exists. Or
the gulf over which the bridge is to be built!
Parents are our allies but we never meet them. Our
allegiance is with the kids. But parents are present in attitudes, fears, love
and mistrust. The environment is heavy with the homes from which these kids
come. And with good reason, because it is back to those homes these kids return
to each night.
I told them this week that they keep me awake at night. My
mind tries to piece together the reasons and logic of each kid. What makes him
or her tick? Why do they act the way they do, did and will? Why the quiet,
somber faces? Why the silly grins with no substantive comment? Withdrawal, too;
and distracting antics at times. But oh so much pained silence. Like being in
church when they don’t want to be. Very similar situation. They are there
because an older person or authority said so. It is up to them to make sense of
the interaction; or not. And mostly not.
In time – if they give us enough of it – most of the kids
recover well enough to return home and school, finish high school, and begin
their lives with a bit more purpose. Hopefully enough purpose to build an
education of value and a career with utility and happiness included.
I would rather hope that they return to the real world as
engaged, creative persons who build interesting and soul searching lives that
matter to everyone else, mostly to their own credit. They have worth. They
don’t know how to value that at this point in their life. But it is up to us to
help them see life as a process and journey that only pays off when engaged and
struggled with.
We learn about our inner selves under such circumstances. Me
too; that’s why I do this volunteer work in the first place – not because I
know, but because I need to. So do the kids need to experience this and process
what they learn into their lives as a tool for successful living later on.
Well that sort of sums up what we do and why we do it. The
results are not conclusive. Often they end in tragedy as a young life ends
quietly one night. That leaves us wondering what we could have done
differently. But the lesson is not lost on the survivors; they are sobered and
contemplate the meaning. It is writ large on their face for all to see.
Not all of adult life is this laid out for us. Most of it is
accidentally encountered, dealt with or ignored. We take from it what we can at
the moment and move on to the next challenge.
These kids, however, don’t have the tools for that yet.
Maybe next session?
November 17, 2016
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