D’Anne Burwell’s smart, athletic son—raised in a loving and prosperous home—begins abusing OxyContin as a teenager, and within a year drops out of college, walks out of rehab, and lands homeless on the streets of Boulder.

Struggling with fear, guilt, and a desperate need to protect her son, D’Anne grapples with her husband’s anger and her daughter’s depression as the family disease of addiction impacts them all. She discovers the terrifying links between prescription-drug abuse and skyrocketing heroin use. And she comes to understand that to save her child she must step back and allow him to fight for his own soul.

Saving Jake, D’Anne Burwell’s powerful new book, gives voice to the devastation shared by the families of addicts, and provides vital hope. Above all, it is a powerful personal story of love and redemption.

It is with great pleasure that I share D’Anne Burwell’s interview…

Why did you write Saving Jake?

To offer hope. I remember when I first learned my 19-year-old son was addicted to OxyContin, then heroin, I felt sick with fear. I wanted to crawl under my covers, pull the sheets over my head, and not get out of bed. One minute I was the mother of a smart, athletic, kid who’d gone off to college with a bright future, and suddenly I was the mother of a drug addict. That’s an awful lonely place to be… until I realized there were thousands just like me. Just like him.

During the worst, I read until I was dizzy. Every bit of knowledge about addiction helped get me through. But there weren’t enough books written by parents. There’s real power in stories. We’re wired to remember stories much more than data, facts and figures. If I tell you the most rapid growth in heroin addiction, according to the Substance and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is occurring among young people under age 21, it might register. But if you read a story about a mom discovering the terrifying links between OxyContin abuse and heroin addiction in her teenaged son, it will make an impact.

I’ve written Saving Jake to share hard-won knowledge. As my son gains time in recovery, I’ve realized how essential it is for stories like ours to be told. Prescription drug abuse leading to heroin addiction is screaming from the headlines. Families everywhere are trying to figure this out on their own. I’m honored to add my voice to the thousands speaking out about the current crisis of addiction.

Besides struggling parents, who else would benefit from reading Saving Jake?

Everyone! Soaring addiction is a national crisis and we’re all in this together whether we want to be or not. If people had a better understanding of what’s happening, positive change might happen quicker. Readers will come away with knowing more about addiction, they’ll gain compassion for a struggling person and empathy for the family who often has to deal with stigma, shame and silence.

Parents, family members and friends will immediately identify with the raw emotion in Saving Jake but I also want to reach the greater public. There are so many misconceptions around the disease of addiction. A big one is, “addicts use because they want to” so they get what they deserve. And with that thinking, we all get bogged down in arguing about choice vs. responsibility when we need to be talking about solutions, we need to be learning from the science of the brain, and we need to be implementing treatment programs instead of housing addicts in jails.

What are 5 things in your book that might surprise a reader?

1. Taking care of yourself will often help the addict.
2. Lying, stealing and manipulating are symptoms of the disease of addiction.
3. An addict is not bad, lazy or immoral; he or she is sick and needs treatment.
4. Treatment works, though it may take multiple attempts.
5. OxyContin is a synthetic opiate and highly addictive. Kids get it easily and some move on to heroin because it’s cheaper than Oxy and readily available.

I’ll stop there and hope readers will pick up the book and read the rest!

Could you share some lessons you learned along the way? In other words, what might help other parents going through the same thing?

Well, much of the story is me scrambling to learn as fast as I can. Once I realized my son was derailing himself from college, distancing himself from relationships, losing weight, and always broke, I felt driven to fix his problems. I really had no idea about addiction. Attending the family week at his first rehab, helped me learn he wouldn’t “be fixed” in 30 days which was a devastating realization. We all wanted to get back to our nice lives, put his drug use behind us. Instead, we learned this would be a long road, that addiction was a disease of relapses, that our son would need a lot of support over a long period of time to get back on track. On top of that, he was naturally feeling invincible at 20, not wanting to listen to his parents, and like so many others, he would fight the information he’d learned in treatment, ignore the fact that he would need to stay clean and sober. His brain was telling him he didn’t have a problem.

Time went on. I felt crushed. Fear for his life consumed me, especially when he walked out of several rehabs. I slowly learned that while I could convey my love, encouragement, and boundaries, helping him in any other way robbed him of feeling the consequences of his choices. To me, it felt like doing nothing, watching him go it alone, standing with my arms hanging loosely at my sides hoping he would live. And yet—learning from support groups, therapists, and his rehab counselors—if I focused on my own life, it allowed him the space to take responsibility for his. That change in me, to let go, turned out to be the light to follow out of the deep dark woods.

Your story includes your entire family struggling. Describe a bit about what your husband and daughter went through.

Wrestling with my son’s addiction tore us all apart. My younger daughter became depressed feeling as though her older brother had abandoned her, as she was left alone to watch her parents agonize. My husband threw himself into work—something he could control—while I obsessed about how to save my son. It seemed that addiction would crack our marriage in half. We found a therapist who specialized in addiction who helped focus us on our marriage. She emphasized that we wouldn’t be of any use to our son if we weren’t together on boundaries.

Eventually, I began to see that each of us was grappling with Jake’s addiction in a different way. Realizing there was no right or wrong way helped me get free of my misplaced anger and resentment. Each of us experienced on-going fear, stress, anger and sadness differently. But we’re all doing much better…there’s lots of forgiveness and love.

Why did you title your book Saving Jake when you learned you couldn’t really save him?

As much as I tried to save Jake from pain, from drugs, from himself, it was the hardest of lessons to learn—in the face of enormous everyday worry and fear—that I HAD to step back and let my child fight for his own soul. I titled the book Saving Jake because I couldn’t. He had to do that for himself.

______________________________

Currently ranked #1 in New Releases in the category of Drug Dependency Recovery on Amazon, with 5 Stars reviews, you can read D’Anne Burwell’s book in paperback or on Kindle: Saving Jake: When Addiction Hits Home.

And check out the Early Praise…

“A brave and powerful memoir… Rooting for Jake on every page, we come to share in his struggle and in his family’s hope for recovery.” — Katrina Kenison, author of The Gift of an Ordinary Day

“Too much shame and silence surround addiction. Burwell’s terrific memoir will move dialogue forward on one of the top health problems of our time.” — Greg Williams, director of The Anonymous People

“Exquisitely detailed, this book chronicles the tortuous journey to recovery for both addicted  individuals and all those who love and care for them.” — Katherine Ketcham, co-author of Broken and Teens Under the Influence

 

To learn more about D’Anne and her story, connect with her on her website or log in to Facebook and follow D’Anne Burwell on her page, D’Anne Burwell.