All I could picture was my heroin-thin daughter running down the road with her coat flapping in the cold wind, thinking, “Oh my God, she’s going to die! She’s going to die.”

There is an epidemic of drug use among young Americans, as well as in many other parts of the world. We’re seeing a generation of college-bound, middle class kids falling into using heroin as a party drug. The consequences can potentially be devastating for the young people.

But What About Parents?

How are parents equipped to deal with this when it enters their families and homes? Tragically, over the past couple of years, I found out for myself. It was hard. To tell the truth, it almost destroyed my relationship with my college-age daughter. I believe that I was so lucky to have the resources of Clean Language available to me. If I had not, I don’t know if I would have gotten through what happened and that precious relationship may not have survived.

My Story

I would like to share my story in the hope that it may offer hope and help to other parents or professionals who have to deal with drug use. In the autumn of 2013, I had started to notice my daughter seemed to be having difficulties. I kept an eye on what was going on with her, and it became apparent in April 2014 that she was using heroin. She was smoking it, which at the time I didn’t even know you could do, and that gives you an idea of how little I knew.

Although she was managing to hold down a part-time job, she had failed two semesters of college and I couldn’t help seeing that she was getting “heroin-thin.” So the drug use was interfering with her school, was starting to interfere with her work, and it was definitely negatively affecting her health.

I brought her home from college and offered her a choice. She had the option to stay home and do her best to clean up, and she had the other option to find her own way which would mean she did not live under our roof. When I asked her, she made it clear that living on the street was not an option for her. So we started the process of getting her off the drug and facing the inevitable withdrawals. Something I learned later in my journey to understand more about heroin is the way it affects the future-thinking part of the brain. My daughter wasn’t really able to think about “what’s next,” – it was really hard for her. We decided we needed more help. She agreed to go to the drug and alcohol program near where we live.

Deep, Dark Trauma

On her intake interview, she was interviewed for about twenty minutes then they brought me into the room.  When I was there, the girl (who must have been in her mid-to-late twenties) looked at my daughter and said in all sincerity,

“You know, most girls, with the kind of drug use that you’re showing have had a deep, dark trauma.”

At that point, I just bit my lip. I didn’t dare open my mouth, I was so mad. I noticed my daughter look from me to the woman and back to me. Neither one of us said anything.

I remember thinking to myself, “I bet you do find that. Because, if they don’t have a deep, dark trauma when they come in, I would imagine that you guys just pick away until they make one up.”

When we got in the car to leave, my daughter looked at me and her eyes got wide and she simply said, “Deep, dark trauma my ass!” We both knew there was no unusual trauma in her life, beyond the normal childhood stresses. I asked her later why she was using and her explanation was that it took her to her happy place and that was all. I learned that, for her, the initial use was all about pleasure and not about running away from any trauma or pain. But, of course, that didn’t fit with the support system that was available to us. To her credit, she attended that service for several weeks but eventually had to give it up. The staff could only keep digging away to find some alternate, dark reason why she was using, as though they couldn’t believe that somebody might actually use drugs for pleasure. Their whole mode of working did not work for my daughter.

Dangerous Therapy

I remember the addiction worker’s comments threw me straight back to a time when I was working with my own memories of sexual abuse and how sick the system was. I spent ten years as a client of therapy, immersed in its victim mentality, until I decided to break free. My own family had started in therapy when my brother was quite young. I remember he was described as “out of control” and he was prescribed various ADD medications. When that didn’t work, they put my mom on Valium — which really didn’t work for someone with four young kids!

That was followed by two years of Transactional Analysis. Over all that time, I did not notice any positive change in my brother. In fact, he ended up creating his own demise at age 24, the victim of a drug-related murder. In my book “The End of Therapy” (2015), I write at length about how frequently therapists make massive assumptions, even when they do not mean to. I also describe how those assumptions can hurt the client, unless either the therapist of the client is able to discern them.

Let’s be clear that I am not saying that no cases of drug use are in response to trauma. What I do say in the book is that forcing people to re-live the “reasons why” they have suffered may not be the most beneficial for them. Reprogramming our thought patterns or behavior using NLP or CBT may help to a degree, but I have always imagined a better way which engages a client’s imagination and passion towards a life that they want, and then help them find the behaviors and actions that will help propel them, in an observable way, towards that outcome. “The End of Therapy” explores my journey that resulted in my finding that better way.

Breakdown

Over the next eight months, my daughter iterated with using on and off. However, I soon realized that when you have been using drugs habitually, and you have friends who still use, it is incredibly difficult to stay off them. That cycle continued until it brought us to the point of breakdown. On one occasion I remember she was coming into the house carrying armfuls of clothes or belongings. I said something to her and she replied “Yes mother,” in a sarcastic tone. I just grabbed whatever she was carrying and told her to get the hell out. She ran out of the house, and I went after her. All I could picture was my heroin-thin daughter running down the road with her coat flapping in the cold wind, thinking, “Oh my God, she’s going to die! She’s going to die.” I could have gone crazy. But I didn’t. I remember asking her to come home, and we were able to talk later.

Life-Saving Tools

I believe that the reason we overcame that breakdown was thanks to the tools of Clean Language.

Clean Language was created by New Zealand-born psychologist David Grove in the 1980s, and it takes a radical stance to therapy, or to any kind of facilitation. In Clean, the facilitator maintains a stance that is outside the other person’s psychic space. They may ask questions — but only Clean questions — and these help the client to discover her or his own answers. The facilitator responds using the client’s language and metaphors, always careful to add no ideas or concepts of their own.

Change Does Not Happen in a Day

I now understand that many processes are iterative, and I can appreciate that my daughter may need to go through the cycle many times, each time making one more advancement in order to reach where she needs to be. In fact, the Clean Language methodology fully embraces iteration. And I have been able over these months to prompt her, gently and persistently, with clean questions like,

• “What would you like to have happen?”
• “What needs to happen for this?”
• “Is there anything else that needs to happen?”

At first, we were only able to think ahead a few days at a time.  And, over time, we could start to look further into the future about what she wanted for her life. Sometimes I think I must sound like a broken record. But it keeps me from speaking the fears and the crap and the manipulation that I could so easily spew out.

An example was that recently I discovered evidence that she was using a little heroin at home. She lied to me about it. I could easily have freaked out. But I didn’t. Because of my training, I was able to access the Clean stance. So I approached her with a Clean question, such as, “When I have evidence that you have been using, and you have lied to me, and using at home while you’re living here isn’t an option, what needs to happen?” She was then free to volunteer information about how she was using. She told me that the clinic knew. She told me she was doing her best, and that she needed to stop seeing certain people. This is the point where I think she really decided — for herself — that living on the street was not for her. That was the point she decided to go to a Methadone clinic.

She has been attending that clinic continually for over eight months making the 35-mile round trip every day without fail. In that type of Clean transaction, I was able to stop and to let my daughter design her own solution. The outcome of this, so far, is that she has been able to stay in rapport with me, which means that when I have a suggestion or an idea (which I always will as a parent!) she is not adverse to hearing me, and is not constantly triggered to defend or to resist. She has remained both compliant and pro-active on her own part. I cannot imagine that, if I did not have access to these tools, questions, and way of thinking, that we would still have this type of relationship.

Is it an ideal situation? No. Is it completely resolved? No. But it is friendly. The Clean stance has helped me not to take it personally and instead to maintain and respect the boundaries that each of us must have. I can honor my daughter’s choices, even if I don’t like them, while looking to what I want to have happen, as a mother.

How Clean Language Has Helped

Where the Clean methodology and stance has been so helpful, and has really been a key to my survival, is that it really helps me tend to my daughter and her thinking, at the same time really keeping my fears and worries and anxieties out of the context of our conversations. If I went in with all of my fear and anxiety over it, I knew we would be at each other’s throats. I know that what I want my daughter to do, and what she is actually doing, are two different things. I want her to stop. I want her to go back to school and be that magical, innocent child again. So it helps my sanity, even when things get heated or when I get anxious. I can ask her Clean questions about what she wants and about what needs to happen to help begin to repair whatever fall-down or disappointment she is having, whether it’s work or the clinic, or even the stresses of living at home.  

Clean Language can help a person begin to design their own outcome, irrespective of what we may think they need. In fact, it is one of the core beliefs that each person knows better what is right for them than we ever can. And that is incredibly freeing. That is the key to me. It is her life, and her choice. Even if I hate what’s happening.

I am so grateful that, even after having had to face the conversation of confronting my daughter with the drug paraphernalia, and telling her that if she continued with those actions she would have to find someplace else to live…the very next day we still went for a manicure, pedicure and a movie together – because she wants to spend time with me. Although she is still using heroin periodically she is doing her best with work and still regularly attends the methadone clinic. But most of all, we have a relationship that is vital. I know that even if my daughter were to have a complete breakdown or were to fall into the gutter, our relationship and deep love for one another, even under incredibly trying circumstances, will keep us close. I have no doubt that I would not have been able to get to this point without the tools of Clean Language.