Quotes & Sayings About Parents Of Addicts

I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out. — Ashly Lorenzana

Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon - parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him? — Douglas Wynne

The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief. — Bear Bryant

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts draining their wallets for toxic substances to inject into their veins. Scraps of love are food for an abusive relationship. — Maggie Young

You can't "let go". You can't "detach with love". You can't let them "hit bottom". You can't seem to implement the strategies you have learned when you are faced with your adult child's chaos and anxiety. When you try to do this, it makes you physically and emotionally ill, and the anxiety and fear becomes unbearable. — Mary Crocker Cook

By the time kids are 15, they're drunks and they're drug addicts and they're getting chicks pregnant. The parents wonder, "What did I do wrong?" What you did wrong was, you were never there. You had the kid as a status symbol, that's what went wrong. And you're paying the price for it. — Andrew Dice Clay

Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves.
Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment. — Christopher Dines

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY RULES 1. Control or Chaos. One must be in control of all interactions, feelings and personal behavior at all times - control is the major defense strategy for shame. In the less-than-human shameless marriage, both parents may be cocaine addicts or addicted in other ways. They may be dishonest criminals. The children experience chaos, as well as secrecy rules that guard their family's behavior. 2. Perfectionism or Anomie. Always be right in everything you do. The perfectionist rule always involves an imposed measurement. The fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life. The members live according to an externalized image. No one ever measures up. In the less-than-human family, there are no rules - the children have no structure to guide them. — John Bradshaw

It's amazing how coke encompasses everything in your life. Addicts cannot confront life because they only think of their next hit. I ruined life for my parents, my sister and all my friends. — Kirstie Alley