What Should I Be Looking For

Recently I was at an event for Pastors in my area. One of the Pastors there had heard of our losing Lauren. We talked for a bit, and he expressed his condolences. A little later in the conversation he asked: “As a dad who has children, what advice or things to be on the lookout for could you offer?”

That’s a hard question to answer. I did answer it but wanted to give a much-expanded perspective here.

What makes it hard is that the idea of Lauren being on heroin was simply foreign to us. Perhaps that’s the first comment I would offer. Never think, “This won’t happen to us.” We didn’t consciously think that, but we did act in that way. Lauren showed absolutely no signs of drug use. We had a good relationship with her. We loved spending lots of time together as a family. I could count on less than 5 fingers the times that Lauren was out of our home past 10PM, by her choice. Only one of those times was without our knowing where she was. She had left our home on a Friday and did not return until late Saturday.

On one occasion Lauren came to us and shared that she had experimented with pot. She was heartbroken. Thankfully a teacher Lauren really liked suggested to her that she really should talk to us about it, and she did. I feel that we responded in a healthy way. We of course pointed out the dangers, specifically for her as a person in a family that has shown susceptibility to addiction. We prayed with her, acknowledged her mistake as a poor choice, and applauded her for the courageous openness and honesty. We emphasized that no matter what happened in life that kind of communication is what would build great relationships. We wanted her to know that although she made a poor decision, we all have, she handled it in the right way.

As Lauren moved deeper into her teen years, I started seeing pain in her life. I had often asked her: “Honey, what is going on, how can I help you, please tell me.” On a couple of occasions, I remember saying to her “The things you are doing usually happen for one of three reasons: Someone has hurt you and if they have please let us help. You are weighed down by guilt for something you have done, there is no mistake or failure that God and the people that love you will not forgive. Or you are doing serious drugs.” I am sure that on one occasion I even added “which I could not even imagine”, or something to that effect.

What I told the Pastor was that I felt parents should be open to the possibility that there might be other issues driving the behaviors they are seeing. By that I mean that we should be open to the possibility that our child may be suffering with a mental health issue. That’s the thing that was not on my radar. I was not educated in it. I did not know what the warning signs were. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. In the article “Learning the Early Signs of Mental Health Issues” a local health care provider shares helpful advice. In addition here are links for two very proactive informational posters: one offers  10 Tips on How to Start a Conversation With Someone About Mental Health and the other 16 Tips to Support Positive Mental Health in Your Child.

Much of what we were seeing as rudeness or disrespect we later learned was Laurens inappropriate response to the anxiety that was escalating in her life. When we saw that she was really struggling with finding her place in school, feeling she wasn’t liked or fitting in, we thought she was merely going through what we all have. Most of us get through all that unscathed, but not all of us.

Addiction is often a response to pain or trauma (trauma can be more subtle, especially for children, than we think) in a person’s life, we are all vulnerable to pain and we all have different levels of sensitivity to the events of life. There’s a book called “Prisoners of Childhood” (its German distribution name), by Alice Miller. The book is about the fact that stuff happens to us as children, negative things happen. Then, we adapt to those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being. The result is we can allow the rest of our lives to be impacted from those defensive modes. The American name of the book is “The Drama of the Gifted Child”, by gifted the author means the sensitive child. So, the more sensitive a child is, we are all different, the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment. And the more affected they are.

A 2012 study from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child says “The tuning out that you (referring to the sensitivity of children) do to protect you from the stress in your environment, if you’re very sensitive, it doesn’t take a lot of stress, helps you endure but, in the long term, it becomes a problem.” Sometimes that problem shows up as a mental health issue, addiction or both.

The truth is addiction can affect anyone given the right circumstances, but when you compound that with a mental health issue in a developing child it can become lethal.

I am not recommending that we become over reactive parents, rushing our children to a psychiatrist or counselor at the drop of a hat. What I mean is that we should be informed, educated and not afraid to consider the possibility that things may be building up in the life of our children. In the post “How Did My Daughter End Up on Heroin” I do my best to demonstrate how in Lauren’s life it may have been a series of events over several years that lead her to make the poor decision to use heroin.

The other thing I wish “LaLa” (Lauren) had done differently was to remember how we handled the situation when she told us she tried pot. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for a child to tell their parents they are addicted to heroin. How incredibly harder it must be when your dad is a Pastor. The point for parents is to constantly remind and model for your kids that there is nothing they can’t talk with you about. Continually let them know that like God, you may not always be able to agree with their actions but that you will always try to help them and forgive them. Somehow, in Laurens’ life, guilt and shame stopped her from doing that. If it had not everything might have changed! We can’t know that now.

This weeks featured image is “The Choices We Make” by Brooke Shaden