Jeff Elhart: Decide to Survive: Leaving the nest for drugs

This is the seventh in a series of articles on Brittany Midolo’s new book, "Decide to Survive: How I Beat Addiction & How You Can, Too." Brittany’s story is one of hope for those who may be suffering with substance abuse and/or mental illness.

Brittany shares:

I was becoming very addicted, and I had a hard time keeping a job. Even though I could never match that first high, heroin still felt great. It had taken less than a week to get hooked, and since everyone around me was doing it too, I had no reason not to keep on. I started doing it several times a day.  Whenever I came back down, I’d go a couple of hours before the next hit, but I always felt like I was completely tied to it, like there was no way out. This was just how it was going to be, like I was carrying around a ball and chain that didn’t feel heavy when I was high but always pulling me back when I wasn’t. 

And every time I did it, I knew I was further and further away from being able to be with my daughter. I felt dirty from what I was doing and guilty for letting my family down. 

It led to a literally dirty life too — Shane and I couldn’t keep up with rent and ended up living in a drug house with several other people. So, we’d have random people sleeping there, and it was a very unclean and unsafe situation. I started to feel very isolated and alone, even though there were always people around, and I knew this was not a good life. But that just made me want to escape even more. And the only way I had to escape was to get high for a couple hours at a time. 

We never had trouble getting our drugs. We had a dealer who was always loaded. We had trouble paying for them sometimes because using can be very expensive. We learned all kinds of ways to steal and sell things, cheat the system, and get by however we could. But heroin was never hard to find. 

I felt like I was at a point of no return. I had started using because of my pain, but I think I would have gotten into it anyway, considering the people I was hanging out with. You can only be around a lifestyle for so long before it starts to become your lifestyle too. But I did have thoughts early on about trying to get out before I became any more addicted. I didn’t want to miss seeing Alison or to disappoint my family. 

My parents kept trying to get me to come home. They told me they would help me however they could but that I needed to be with my daughter. They were disappointed in me, but they were also just very sad at what they were seeing. As a police officer, my dad saw this kind of thing every day. He knew what this lifestyle was like and what it led to. I know they were both in a lot of pain; I can’t imagine what it’s like to see your daughter going down the same destructive path you have to deal with on the job in law enforcement. And I think it scared them. My decisions were very hard on them.

Eventually, my parents gave me an ultimatum. They told me that my lifestyle wasn’t healthy for Alison, that I couldn’t just keep coming and going as I pleased, and that if I was going to continue to stay with them sometimes, I would need to make some different decisions. They told me I needed to choose between being a parent and walking away. If I chose to stay, they said they would help me however they could. But they knew if I walked away, I might take Alison with me. They knew they were taking a big risk. 

I don’t think they expected me to walk out the door, but that’s what I did. For me, life just seemed painful, and heroin gave me relief. I had gotten to a point of not caring about the direction I was headed.  But my daughter was in a safe place staying with and being cared for by my parents.

Neither my parents nor I knew what the next couple of years were going to look like — how far things were going to go and how it would affect all of our lives. They would eventually seek out help to deal with it all. They wondered what they had done wrong and had to struggle with regrets about what they might have done differently. They reached out to an organization that helps families understand how addicts think. They had counselors come to their home to speak with them, my brother, and both sets of my grandparents, just so they could all be on the same page, and all were encouraged to respond to me in specific ways rather than just reacting to my decisions. They learned that for an addict, the drug is like their air — they fight for their next “breath” like it was a matter of survival, because emotionally it is. They learned how to empathize without enabling, to understand when their “help” wasn’t helping at all. They had to learn how to say no.

That’s one of the hardest things for families of addicts because saying no seems unloving. And to me, it was. I thought they were terrible for not helping me when I’d come to them for help, even though I had made the decision to walk away. 

It was a terrible turn, but one I felt I had to make. Desperate people do desperate things, and I found myself in a lot of desperate situations over the next couple of years.

Leaving home was one of the worst decisions I ever made. But leaving Alison in my parents’ care was one of the best.

We’ll learn more about Brittany’s story next time as well as how when addiction is addressed in a positive way like in Brittany’s case, can save a life.

You can get a copy of her book, "Decide to Survive: How I Beat Addiction & How You Can, Too" at decidetosurvive.com or directly on Amazon.

Where there is hope, there is life. Take the 12-minute pledge on benice.org to equip yourself with the simplest tool for equipping yourself to recognize the warning signs of trauma and mental health disorders so that you can improve and potentially save the lives of those closest to you.

— Community Columnist Jeff Elhart is Playground Director II of the Elhart Automotive Campus in Holland. For more information, contact benice@elhart.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Jeff Elhart: Decide to Survive: Leaving the nest for drugs