In 2011, my family’s life was turned upside when I became addicted to heroin. My addiction progressed rapidly, and my family was desperate to get me the help I needed. Not one of us was prepared for the volatile reality of my road to recovery. After many stints in rehab spanning years, addiction-specialized therapy, and with the support of my family, I got better.
I’ve written about my experience with heroin addiction many times, and in doing so I’ve replayed the moments that stood out to me the most during that time. Many of these moments include my mom.
My mom reading to me while I soaked sore muscles, caused by a debilitating withdrawal. My mom breaking down on the front porch saying, “Everytime you drag yourself through the mud, there I am, tethered behind you.” My mom dropping me off at rehab after rehab, each time telling me she believed in me.
So many addicts have suffered horrendously, and so many parents have suffered right by their sides. I decided to sit down with my mom, Linda Trawnik, and discuss her experience coping with my addiction, coordinating my treatment, and taking care of herself during a time when it was easy to feel defeated – but how she refused to give up hope. This interview covers some of our journey and the lessons she learned along the way. Both of us hope it may provide guidance and comfort to other families trying to navigate a similarly difficult and daunting experience.
Emily St. Martin: The first time you tried to get me into rehab, had you been researching rehabs?
Linda Trawnik: I wasn’t aware of the extent of your addiction. I wanted to talk you into getting whatever level of treatment you would agree to, and you wouldn’t do inpatient treatment. I figured something was better than nothing. We met at Loma Linda University Behavioral Medicine Center. I had fooled myself into believing that it was helping or keeping you from using. When I walked in the door, I looked at you, and I immediately knew you were still using. That just hit me like a slap in the face.
ES: I left that treatment program early.
LT: Yes. I was in despair. I wasn’t shocked because I knew your heart wasn’t in it. You were only doing it to make me feel better, not to seek treatment, and that became clear to me. I was pretty helpless at that point.
ES: After this, you had to put a healthy distance between us.
LT: Yeah, I did. If anybody was cutting anybody off, you cut me off. I wasn’t going to enable you. But I refused to follow a lot of the advice, which is “Cut her off, don’t talk to her, don’t have a relationship with her.” I refused to ever do that. I refused to let go. There was a time when you wouldn’t talk to me, you wouldn’t take my calls, you didn’t even have the same number. And I would just email you. I would email you over and over. And hope that either you were reading them or at some point, you would.
ES: One of the hardest times for us was between the time that I left Loma Linda and the time I finally called you and asked you to please take me to rehab again because I was scared I was going to die.
LT: Yes, because there was a period of at least three months where I had no communication from you. Christmas went by … it’s really hard for me to talk about Christmas when you weren’t there … I had to do all the things I always had to do at Christmas, and have everyone over and pretend everything was OK. That period brought me to my knees. I was terrified the phone would ring at any minute, and they’d tell me you were dead. I was trying to be present for your siblings who were hurting so badly from it. And I felt this assurance from God, the powers that be, whatever — if I could get through this Christmas, it would be the only Christmas that I had to go through without you.
ES: After that Christmas is when I reached out and asked you to please come get me, that I wanted to give rehab another try.
LT: In the period of time before that happened, I researched all of the rehabs I could find. Anything I could get information about. Any ratings, reviews, recommendations, so that when you called me I would be ready. You weren’t on our insurance, but then miraculously, Obamacare passed and that allowed you to be on our insurance again. I felt like it saved your life. I mean, we would have found a way to pay for it. But having that available and knowing where I was gonna take you when you called — I was ready.
ES: Did you know at that point that you weren’t going to try outpatient again?
LT: There was no question in my mind. Because of all the research I did, and seeing what happened when you were in outpatient, I knew you had to be in a treatment center with no car and no phone. Obviously, you had to commit and be ready, too.
ES: Right, because in Loma Linda, I would arrive at outpatient care in the morning and then leave in the afternoon and smoke heroin in my car before I even pulled out of the parking lot. When it was that advanced, I had to be confined.
LT: Correct. There was a time down the road when I think you would have died, had you not been in a residential program.
ES: After Christmas I finally checked my email, and I saw all of your emails. I remember calling you and when you said hello, I said, please come get me.
LT: I took you to a hotel. I thought if I brought you home, it would be too easy for you to revert to just going right out the window. And so if I was in a hotel room with you, I felt like I had better control over the situation. And I knew we’d be at the hospital the next morning when the withdrawal kicked in.
ES: I don’t know if you were prepared for the reality of the withdrawals. Because whenever I read the symptoms online, it felt like, oh no biggie — cramping, spasms, trouble sleeping, and it sounds like a minor discomfort, but obviously there’s nothing minor about it.
LT: You were trying so hard to be brave and to get through it. We took you to the emergency room, because you were in full-blown withdrawal. You were flailing around and your legs were kicking out. You were making noises and clearly in distress. Your arms were everywhere; I couldn’t even hold you.
And of course, you’re going to encounter people who couldn’t care less about addicts and have no empathy in situations like this. And that’s exactly what we encountered. So here you are in full-blown heroin withdrawal — it’s obvious to any trained medical personnel – and you were being ignored. I was in a panic, because at any time, my fear was that you would leave.
But a doctor came by who demanded that you be taken care of. You had an IV and were given some comfort so that you weren’t in excruciating pain. But you were not in your right mind. You were going through these strange hand motions like you were making tea or changing the channel on a TV. Just really bizarre behavior.
When the worst of it was out of your system, after several days in the hospital, they transferred you to GAADS (Glendale Adventist Alcohol and Drug Services), where you were admitted as an inpatient.
ES: We both experienced the pink cloud, right? [The pink cloud is a term used to describe a phase of euphoria that can happen in early sobriety.] We both thought we were out of the woods.
LT: We thought we’d fixed it. Like if you go to the hospital to get an operation, and they fix the problem. We both expected that would be the end of it. When you relapsed after GAADS, it was devastating. A huge letdown for both of us. You and I both were just as shocked.
When I read about recovery, especially at that time, they all said that relapsing is not a part of recovery. They led me to believe that it’s not a normal thing, and I believe that to be absolutely false. I think it’s a disservice that they don’t say, look, this is not a miraculous cure, and there will be stumbling. I was completely unprepared. Then, at that point, I was like, now what? I thought that I had found the thing, the place, this was going to be it. You really tried, you put your heart into it.
ES: You had a lot of people in your ear, saying you can’t enable her this way. Or you can’t do this or you have to do that. How did you interpret the things you were being told?
LT: Well, I am not one to take to heart what a lot of people say. It depends on who I’m talking to. There were two people that were key to getting me through this: Chris Aldworth, who’d lost his son, Mark, to a heroin overdose in 2010. He would take my call, anytime, day or night. And the other was Rebecca Deighan, your therapist. Who ultimately became my therapist as well.
ES: If you could take certain things back or change the way that you responded in a way that would make it easier on you, what would those things be?
LT: I would have gone to therapy a lot sooner than I did.
I tried Al-Anon (a 12-step group dedicated to supporting people affected by their loved one’s addiction), but it wasn’t working for me. Finding a good therapist helped me. I still to this day use those tools to help me to create that separation between what my life is and what my kids’ life is. I could have a life while you were in a place that, obviously, I didn’t want you to be in. I mean, it wasn’t roses and champagne, but I was able to function.
ES: At what point did you decide that you should get therapy?
LT: I was trying to get you into therapy, and I was calling different therapists. We’d been to some therapists and we didn’t click; finding the right therapist is daunting. I don’t remember how but I found Rebecca Deighan’s number, and I called her and she answered the phone. We had the most comfortable conversation; she was easy to talk to, very non-judgmental. And she said to me, ‘Well, how are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I just need to get my daughter help.’ But as I continued to talk to her, and as you began to go to her, I realized I was not fine.
ES: Right, like when you called my drug dealers.
LT: Yes, I did call drug dealers.
ES: What did you say to my drug dealers?
LT: I was horrible. This one in particular had a daughter. And I said something to the effect of, I hope someday you have to suffer what I’m going through, with your own daughter. He started crying.
And then I called another drug dealer. And he acted like I had the wrong number. And I remember you found out and said, ‘You’re gonna get me killed.’
That was one of the things Rebecca told me I had to stop doing. Stop calling drug dealers. I ended up in this codependency support group with five women who all had someone significant in their life who were addicts. We all had to say what we shouldn’t do, that we’d done. For me, it was not calling drug dealers. I also stopped GPSing and reading your messages, because it wasn’t helping.
I was giving you drug tests, and you were constantly failing them. And I remember telling her how disheartening it was and how we would both cry. And she said, then why are you drug testing her? And I just stopped the testing. And that was some of the best advice I could have gotten. Because it was accomplishing nothing, except hurting us both. You felt like you were disappointing me every time, and that was breaking your heart, and it was breaking my heart. We both knew you were using; there was no point in me rubbing it in your face every day, which is essentially what that was doing.
ES: If you had a best friend who’s going through this now with their kid, what advice would you give them?
LT: As much as you feel like you don’t know your own kid when they’re doing this kind of thing, I’d tell them, you do know your kid. When people would say to me, ‘Cut her off, don’t speak to her, don’t write her emails. She’ll come back,’ I would not accept that because I did know you and I knew that I had to keep telling you I loved you, I wanted you to come home, that when you are ready, I would be ready. We would work it out. We would do it together.
I would say to anybody who is in those depths of despair, let your kid know that when they’re ready, you will be ready. And you will do everything you can to help them through recovery.
ES: Do you have any other lessons that you learned that you’d like to share with other parents who may be struggling?
LT: Don’t blame yourself. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself a break. There were times when I wondered how I could have done things differently or wondered if I should have done this or I should have done that. I think that I did that as part of trying to come to terms in my own brain with what’d happened.
Also, seek help in whatever form you can get it. Just because Al-Anon didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it won’t work for you. Find what makes sense for you. And, don’t give up.
