No need for comment. The article says it all.
About 10 years ago, when OxyContin first hurtled through the pretty hollow just north of town where the Mannering family lives, the two youngest children were still in high school. Their parents tried to protect them, pleading with neighbors who were selling the drug to stop. By mid-decade, they counted 11 houses on their country road that were dealing the drug (including a woman in her 70s called Granny), and their two youngest children, Nina and Chad, were addicted.
A vast majority of young people, officials said, get the drugs indirectly from dealers and other users who have access to prescriptions. Nina and Chad’s father, Ed Mannering, said he caught a 74-year-old friend selling the pills from his front door. The sales were a supplement, the man said sheepishly, to his Social Security check.
“You drive down the road here, and you think, ‘All these nice houses, no one’s doing any of that stuff,’ ” said Judy Mannering, Nina and Chad’s mother. “But they are. Oh, they are.”
Strength? We don’t need no stinkin’ strength!
Nowadays I hear a lot of folks saying (to recovering people) things like “You’re so strong!” and “Be strong!” I hear newcomers say “I pray for the strength to beat my addiction,” and other stuff like that. While I understand the thinking behind such remarks (all too well), there are a few comments I’d like to make.
That does require a certain amount of guts. We addicts and codependents hate to admit that we aren’t in control. In fact, though, weren’t most of our problems based on our illusions of control: controlling our drinking or other drugging; controlling our addicts; controlling our kids; getting everything just right and then having it welded, as a friend of mine used to say? (He was talking about tuning his 12-string, but the remark is so addict!)
When we have the strength to admit that we’ve lost control, that we’re whipped, that we can’t go on, then we have finally reached the point where recovery is possible. Without that realization of powerlessness, recovery is unlikely, if not impossible. That’s why I worry when I hear folks speaking in terms of “strength.” When we think that way, we are in danger of becoming convinced that we are no longer powerless, that we can control our using and keep it “social” this time, that he really isn’t a rotten wife-beating s.o.b. when he’s drinking, that if we just took Muffy in off the street and give her a clean place to sleep, she’ll realize that she’s much better off and will quit using those nasty drugs.
In early recovery we don’t have much power, if any. We don’t need strength, we need the humility to learn from others the things that we were unable to learn on our own: how to handle our urges, our relationships, our jobs, our spiritual growth — in short, how to live lives of sobriety. Then, after we’ve gone a good distance in that direction and our bodies and minds have begun to recover from the beating we gave them for all those months or years — at that point we begin having some power over our addictions. As long as we don’t use.
Addiction is like a rattlesnake. I can pick it up and haul it around wherever I please — all day long, if I like. That’s strength. But if I get careless, that’s when I find out what powerlessness is all about.