Noodle Doodles

This concept is something new to me.  

I first heard the term 'wet house' a week or so ago.  In case you haven't heard a  wet house is a permanent residence for menand women who are chronically homeless and suffer with addiction. It saves the state money, it puts a roof over someone's head who has been living on the streets and is chronically addicted. 

Unfortunately, I don't believe our state has one.  It is however gaining support among many communities and agencies, etc.

A Wet House seems to be the humane thing to do for those who more than likely will never 'recover' from their addictions.  Living in a wet house does not mean that recovery is not sought after - for some reason some people think this. Recovery is always still the ultimate goal.

On a side note I am beginning to accept the fact that there are some addicts who cannot and who will never 'recover'.  I recently came across a blog called Substance Matters - www.mattsub.blogspot.com.  It is written by an addiction psychiatrist.

In one of his posts he states:

"In addiction, the brain loses the ability to regulate behavior relative to a specific intoxicant.  In really severe addcition this loss of control may lead to death.  I think that people in this situation are horrifed at what is happening to them and terrified that they can't stop it.  I've never met an addict who liked being addicted. (They want intoxication but not addiction.)

"The idea that someone can stop if they really want to, or if they really work a 12 step program, is a terrible thing.  Its not true.  Why would brain dysregulation be 100% curable merely by the individual wanting it to be so? We blame obese people for their problems, we blame people who get heart disease for eating too many hamburgers and not exercising enough, we blame people with cancer for not doing the right preventing thing.  We do this because it protects us from the terrifying reality that these things occur in spite of everything we can do to prevent them, that our own behavior is not well controlled, that our environment is often responsible for our predicament or worst of all that it's simply a gene-environment interaction over which we are powerless." 

"I have(clinically) stayed with many people as they died of their addiction. I didn't abandon them because they "didn't get the program" or "didn't really want to get sober."  They all did, desperately.  But they couldn't And I couldn't help them.  And they died." 

This makes a lot of sense to me.

AA doesn't.  It may help some and if it does that is great. But for society as a whole it is too easy to push someone who has a drinking problem in the direction of AA.  AA actually has a very low success rate.  But it's free and it can also be very religious which makes it very attractive to many who want to help. 

The thing of it is that I don't - I DON"T - believe in the cliche -"HITTING BOTTOM".  

People do sometimes learn from the consequences of drinking.  Is that hitting bottom?  

If someone learns that if they put there hand on a hot burner, they'll get burnt and don't do it again - have they hit bottom? ( I know that is extremely simplistic but bear with me.)

My point is that people learn from consequences.   

But some people can't help themselves - they keep doing the very action that is hurting them. They overeat - they cut themselves- they stop eating-they get into the same fight over and over again every time they see cousin Fred - whatever-

Sometimes we keep repeating the same behavior- we never learn.  That is for everyday behaviors and addictive behaviors alike.

over

and

over

and

over

again.

Even though we wind up with the same results or the results keep getting worse and worse - we keep doing it.

AA has a saying for this too - it's called insanity- Doing the same thing in the attempt at getting a different result.  Actually wasn't it Einstein who said that first - oh well.

If you read my dairy you have to bear with me because I just let it rip -

It's frustating - who isn't frustrated here and part of that I think is because deep down inside something just doesn't feel right.

There is the shame, the grief, the guilt, the anger, the saddness that goes along with loving someone with addiciton.

We confide in friends, in our celery, we stay tight lipped and hope that our loved one will recover and we can all go back to our 'normal' lives.

We get well meaning advice from people who have never had someone they love suffer with addiction, we get supposedly expert advice from AA- and advice from books written mostly by addicts themselves.   We try to live by the cliches - "One day at a time" - "Keep it simple stupid"-"Hitting Bottom"-"Stinking Thinking"- "Dry Drunk".

But somewhere deep in our souls something isn't right. Why isn't our loved one getting better? Why isn't the rehab working? Why isn't the conseling working? Can't they see how much they are hurting themselves? Can't they see how much they are hurting us?  Didn't that last DUI teach them anything?   

But we never think that maybe - they can't help it.

They can't get better.

For some Dear God I believe this to be true.  I'm afraid my son may be one of those.  Fourteen years and it's only gotten worse.  4 DUI's one utiltity pole, a few stays in rehab, jail, lost jobs, lost friends, lost everything.  Hit bottom?  What if there is no bottom?  What if that is just a saying that you hang on the door of your heart waiting for the day for it to come true?  But it never comes true.