The Stigma of Addiction: a Mother’s Point of View
Marybeth Cichocki’s son, Matt, died of a drug overdose. Marybeth is determined to make a difference, meeting with the Governor of Delaware to talk about the need for insurance coverage for 90 days in residential treatment/rehab (vs the current 28 days); working with John Lehman of FARR (Florida Association of Recovery Residences) to help them in their efforts to regulate sober living homes in Florida; sharing her opinions on sober living homes in Florida via YouTube; as well as sharing her thoughts in articles like this one. Marybeth welcomes your emails, mmassey4@verizon.net, and phone calls, 302-561-4619.
And now…
The Stigma of Addiction: a Mother’s Point of View by Marybeth Cichocki
Stigma is defined as a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance or person.
My son was an addict. Addiction is by far the most stigmatized disease in this country. I must say as the mother of an addict I had my own stigmatized view on who an addict was and I let my thinking be controlled by my misguided perception.
Marybeth Cichocki is determined to make a difference having lost her son, Matt, to a drug overdose.
My son wasn’t one of those people. He wasn’t dirty. He didn’t live on the street. He didn’t sell his body to get his supply of drugs. He didn’t shoot up in alleys or live under a bridge. Oh God, how foolish I was not to realize that my son was one of those people.
Denial got me through the tough times and allowed me to believe that my son had a problem, but was not an addict. My own stigma, like a set of blinders kept me protected from seeing the chaos life had become. My denial allowed my son to abuse his drugs in the loveliest of places. A safe, warm home with a mother who would believe the lies told and turned a blind eye to the horrific tragedy unfolding right before her.
My son didn’t have a problem. He was in control of his addiction. He was so good at convincing himself that he convinced me too. He wasn’t that addict. The one who steals and lies. The one who can’t hold a job because he showed up stoned to work. The one who lives at home and let’s his enabling mom pay his bills, buy his clothes, provide a roof and three meals a day without expecting anything in return. He was my loving son from a good family. I was a nurse, how could my son be an addict.
Being the mother of an addict is like being handed a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit and probably never saw coming.
You constantly question what you did, didn’t do, or should have done. Life now becomes caught up in lies, excuses and isolation. I worked hard to keep our secret safe, locked away afraid of the stigma that would brand us forever.
Living with an adult addict is the most helpless, hopeless journey. You, the parent have no control. You scream, cry, bargain and threaten. There is no where to hide. Guilt somehow always found a way to seep into my mind. Was I a good mother, always looking for something to blame. I thought of a million excuses for behaviors. My stories conflicted with these behaviors now witnessed by family and friends. I never realized it then but I was battling the stigma as the blinders were slipping from my eyes.
The stigma I believed regarding addicts was kind when compared to the public’s view.
Once I tried to get help for my son I found most people really don’t care about addicts. They are unworthy, disposable, unproductive people. When I finally came clean and revealed my son’s addiction I was shocked at how many so called friends no longer called. How many dropped me from their invite list like I was a leper. After all no one wants to hear about someone’s addicted son. Too close for comfort. Not worthy of dinner conversation. If I told them my son had cancer I would have gotten support and offers of sympathy. Mothers of addicts get stares and whispers like we are dirty and unwanted, the elephant in the room that no one sees and would never acknowledge.
Experiencing the stigma first hand made me angry. It also made me realize that addiction as ugly as it is deserves to be treated as any other chronic disease.
I became an advocate for my son. Little did I know the medical community has it’s own bias against addicts. Finding a physician willing to treat an addict was like looking for a rose in six feet of snow. No one wanted the responsibility of having an addicted patient, except the pain management clinics who are responsible for turning their patients into the addicts now dependent on the pills they hand out like candy with no remorse in wrecking lives.
The insurance industry I found is also biased regarding the treatment of addiction. Most insurance providers allowable stay is 28 to 30 days. Really, how generous. For most addicts
28 days is like spitting in the ocean. At 28 days, my son was just starting to feel human. Yet he was told treatment was over. It’s time to move out of the safe, supportive environment and get thrown back into a society that will not support or hire an addict. Addicts are set up to fail. Relapses happen frequently. When I called for help I was told he had to wait months to be able to return to treatment. It was like I was speaking a foreign language. I felt so helpless, knowing I had to get him into a program quickly while he was agreeable and willing to go, before withdraw and panic set in.
In all my years of nursing I have never heard anyone ask a cancer patient what bad habits caused their disease. No one accusing them of smoking too much, drinking too much or eating unhealthy.
Yet, I had to defend my son’s disease. I was told that addiction is a self inflicted disease. The stigma strikes again. Addicts use because they want to get high loving the euphoria that only drugs provide. The public has no clue about altered brain chemistry and how your body turns against you after the first hit of heroine or a few days of opiates. I heard too many times that if my son wanted to stop he would. Yes, at first I believed that too. Until I watched him try to stop. It was a medical horror show. His body fighting his will to change. He didn’t want to live the life he was trapped in. Cravings consumed his mind and pain wracked his body when those craving were not met. It’s just too easy to blame the addict.
Treatment centers are run by professionals that need to step out of the comfort zone and fight for the addicts. Counselors need to have the power to ensure the addict receives adequate time in treatment. Insurance providers need to become educated. Research confirms allowable stays up to 90 days have been proven to decrease relapse events and help provide the addict necessary time to learn new coping skills, self esteem and to restore their bodies to a healthy state. Cancer patients are never told they will get 28 days of treatment, then good luck you’re out the door and if you get sick again you must wait for your insurance provider to approve another treatment admission.
Addiction is a life altering, chronic disease.
It needs to be treated with the same respect as any other disease. Addicts are dying everyday because no one gets it. These addicts are people just like you and me. Sons and daughters, husbands, fathers, mothers all deserving of life saving, affordable treatment that knows no time frame. My son lost his battle, but I will continue my fight. This stigma must come to an end before the next generation is forever lost.
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To read Marybeth’s first article appearing on BreakingTheCycles.com, please click on this title, “A Mother’s Heartbreak.”
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Marybeth, I have been following your story and I am right there with you all the way. I hope you can get people to lisen to you and make things change. I would love to hear you speak if you are speaking anywhere. Please keep me posted of your battle, I wish you the best always!
Thank you so much for your support. I’ll keep you posted. Please follow our story on mothers heartbreak.com. God bless.
Marybeth,
Keep up your fight! I am a recovering crack addict, 6 plus years sober. The way addicts are treated is terrible, I never meant to become the addict that I was but I did. I feel into addiction it was not a thought about decision that I made. My life was altered and I became a person I no longer knew. I lived a life I never intended to have. I have now had to fight to return to sobriety, I am not nor will I ever be the person I was before I was an addict- a fact that I am both thankful for and morn the loss of every day. I am now a junior in college for Social Work another blessing and curse But this one I got to choose! So please for all of us addicts and their loved ones as I now know the pain I put my mother through. Best of Luck!
-Jami
do you believe in tough love ? What do you think you could’ve done differently?
Yes, tough love was tougher on me. Looking back I would have realized just how sick he was and fought harder to keep him in rehab.
Damn, those are some real words. Honestly, until reading what you said, I’ve always believed my addiction was self induced. I mean, to some degree it is. But I didn’t choose to be wracked with depression, low self esteem, relationships that got out of hand but I was too loyal to just give up and leave. Add on the stress of everyday life for a cherry on top. One day of ‘experimenting’ doesn’t fit the punishment of a lifelong debilitating addiction. Everyone experiments, I wish I could undo that day , but I wasn’t able to ever try antidepressants or other means of help. So I inadvertantly self medicated, and before the gravity of my actions even weighed out in my mind, the locks had been set. The stigma begins….
It truly is a misunderstood predicament. I thank God every day for the brothers and sisters who try and understand, offer compassion and love. The people who make recovery appear to not be entirely an uphill battle, for with friends at our side, what was a tiresome trek would become a memorable adventure.
Good luck in your recovery process. You are worth the fight. God bless you.
my addiction to opiates and heroin were the worst thing that hit my life and I’m here to tell you my story about it, I was like any other teenage kid in public high school, i was a quite and shy kid who was in uncharted territory and scared of what was in front of me at the time. I wanted to be liked and to be popular you know that story,so i started hanging out with some people and they were into smoking weed and drinking and i got into smoking weed and a bit of drinking, after a year of doing that i got into doing coke and taking ecstasy, after that i got into doing triple c’s (poor man’s acid) after a couple months i hit a clean streak for some time and only smoked weed, I also had a horrible habit of lying and being someone i wasn’t (i hated it i was so scared that people would hate the real me), after that clean streak i met some new people and i was just getting into my senior year and i dropped out to go to a sister school they had called krop west, i started to do pills but it wasn’t such a over the top amount of pills i took, like at parties I would take some and smoke weed, let me tell you something i made juicy j and the rest of those idiots look like amateurs the way i was taking drugs. About a year after i graduated i started doing codeine syrup and smoking way to much weed and here and there a Oxycontin, and Oxycontin knocked me on my ass i use to literally crawl on the floor from being so high while i had that lil wyte song in the back playing. Now I’m heading down that hill and not caring the destruction I’m causing, it got to the point where i was taking things from house and pawning them for money to get my next hit and just ending up in these horrible places to get high, I didn’t care where I was heading and the consequences were dyer! It came to the point where I would take everything from my parents and knowing the consequences i still took from them whatever i could to pawn and get some pills or heroin, the stealing never lead to outside of the house only within my family like my aunt and my parents, it got worse by me taking money from there ATM card and forging the name on her check to get bigger amounts of cash for pills. I was going down fast and and not caring at all what would happen to me, i wanted to reach a point of no return and just overdose and die, i eventually got kicked out and lived on the streets for three months and lived with friends who were junkies just like me and that’s where i learned to use the needle to use my drugs with and i fell in love real quick, it hit me like a gorgeous woman walking into a room and she locked eyes with you and only you, and for that moment everything i felt was warm and safe it was like being surrounded by love itself and nothing could harm you. Shit was i wrong that first feeling was the only feeling and i chased it for over five years of my life hoping to feel that false sense of love all around was going to be the death of me and i knew it, but i had to find that feeling again! I even thought i could contain relationships and be some kind of normal person while hiding a addiction to heroin, the reason why i wanted to become this addict was because my deepest darkest secret was that i suffered from child abuse at the hands of my uncle and my fathers sister at a very young age and became convinced that i was the one to blame for leading them into there horrible temptation, for years i suppressed those memories and has a teen they started to come to light in the form of nightmares and vivid ones at that, I knew i had been violated at a early age and never wanted to self acknowledge it for myself, the second thing that killed me inside was the loss of my grandmother from my mothers side, she was the woman i had a voice to vent to a woman that heard me out and became a huge part of my life and gave me direction when i needed it most! i remember being at Camp Shalom sleep away camp where i was a counselor for the kids, and i just lead my kids to the cafeteria and i forgot somethings at the cabin and went back, now around this time my grandmother was on her death bed in Miami and my mom refused that i come back and see her, she had skin cancer. So anyways i was heading back to get some stuff from the cabin and on the way back to the cafeteria they called out my name on the PA system and i went to the office and everyone was quite and looking down and someone handed the phone to me and my mom was on the other side crying her head off saying she has passed and shes sorry, i froze instantly! i said okay mom i love and i will call later, i leave the office and half way to the cafeteria i collapse on the ground and broke down screaming to the heavens why wold you take such a sweet woman like her and not me!!! bursting into tears hoping God would strike me down right there and then! that day changed my life forever just like when i was a young boy vulnerable to a terrible act of molestation. The worst thing for me through all this was that i was a very quite person it was hard for to express the pain and to talk to people who i loved about it, it destroyed most of my relationships and made me a very lonely person, i thought that the things that i hid from people were things that would make me a outcast to the world. The best way possible for me to express that pain was through the drug use and the lies i told, i wanted to be someone else something that was normal and part of everyday society but at heart i wasn’t and i was a horrible lair,I hated myself and everything i did, even when i got sober i couldn’t bare to forgive myself for all the shit i did and the person i was when i was addicted to heroin and prescription medicine. It took four years for me to forgive myself and to love myself with each day learning something great about myself, i learned to express things with my words and become my own personal hero in my life. No matter what happens with your life weather you face addiction or any hardship make the first step to a greater life and be free from all obstacles.
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You are very courageous to speak out on behalf of all those who are currently struggling with the stigma of addiction. It is something that each individual must come to terms with when they seek recovery from their addiction, whether it is to heroin, cocaine, or any other addictive substance.
I believe that if the stigma is wiped away addicts will receive much better treatment and have a greater chance at recovery.