Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

At first one of us always flies with him, but at five, he begins traveling on his own. He graduates from the tiny suitcase to a canvas backpack filled with a revolving arsenal of essential stuff (books and journals, Star Trek Micro Machines, plastic vampire teeth, a Discman and CDs, a stuffed crab). A flight attendant leads him onto the plane. We s

However, if treatment is conceived of as an ongoing process rather than as a cure, a different, more optimistic—and far more realistic—notion of success emerges. According to the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study, although addicts may relapse, a year after treatment their drug use decreases by 50 percent and their illegal activity dro

Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

The mirth evaporates when an extremely shy woman, who mentions her “practice,” so maybe she is a doctor or a lawyer, reveals in a fractured voice that she tried to kill herself a few days ago. She has pale, almost green, skin, no makeup, bristly hair, and eyes haunted by sleeplessness. She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. S

From Addict in the Family: “None of this is easy. Addicts’ families walk an unhappy path that is strewn with many pitfalls and false starts. Mistakes are inevitable. Pain is inevitable. But so are growth and wisdom and serenity if families approach addiction with an open mind, a willingness to learn, and the acceptance that recovery, like addiction

Rather than co-dependent and enabling, with me trying to control him—even if to save him—our relationship can evolve into one of independence, acceptance, and compassion, with healthy boundaries. The love is a given. The brain hemorrhage helped me understand the distinction. It was something that I knew intellectually, but it has sunk in and I now

At this point, I am not sanguine about rehab, but I allow myself a sliver of hope. As in the Springsteen song, “At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” Mine is a mix of this hope and, once again, tenuous relief because I know where he is.

Your reward for your hard work in recovery is that you come headlong into the pain that you were trying to get away from with drugs.

A specialist on child development tells me that children’s brains are at their most malleable—that is, the greatest change takes place—before they are two years old and then again when they are teenagers. “The worst time for a person to be tampering with their brains is when they are teenagers,” she says. “Drugs radically alter the way teenagers’ b