Sometimes I try to give people who are struggling with addictions a little chizik.  Chizik (rhymes with whiz-ick, hard “ch”) is the Hebrish (Hebrew/Yiddish) word for strength. 

I tell them a quick story a patient told me a long time ago, but the message still works.

I imagine the old-timers in the 12 Step programs tell annecdotes like these over and over again.

An abused teenager cuts school to get high, with or without her friends. She’s severely depressed. At some point her family garbage has worn her down. She used to get good grades. She used to care about people.  No longer.

She’s only 15 and already has a nasty addiction to pot and/or alcohol. She’ll take whatever she can get.  Drug-seeking is her life.  It is everything to her.

She leaves school during lunch and doesn’t necessarily return. She likes to go to the woods and get really high, relax and look at nature, especially when the leaves are turning.

Getting high works so well for her, she isn’t consciously depressed anymore. She’s usually stoned in school, but passes with fairly good grades anyway.  The drugs, she says, keep her normal.  Kids call her a pothead but she doesn’t care.  She says she likes her world better this way.

She hits bottom when busted at 18, narrowly escapes jail for dealing marijuana. She starts a 12-Step program because her family hit its own bottom months before she hit hers.  Her alcoholic father hit her mother and started AA.

She doesn’t go to meetings with him, but speaking the same language, they share a respect for one another.  The whole family gets a little therapy.

It is extremely hard for her to stop using, but she does. She wants to use every day for a year, but she doesn’t.

She stops going to meetings when she starts college and slips a little, but always has her program in mind and keeps in touch with the family. So it’s start and stop while in school, all the while she’s working on it, not accepting it, not seeing alcohol/drug abuse as okay.  

She graduates, marries a guy who has no interest in drinking or drugging. She wants him to love her. She finds a job, goes to school, finds a profession that suits her.

At some point, perhaps ten years into sobriety, she forgets she once had an addiction. She has other things to do, many things she wants to do. Places to go, people to see.

Thirty years later, same spouse, three kids, she’s not rich but not poor. She has a good group of friends, an affiliation with a church. She hasn’t thought about using in so, so many years. She has an occasional drink but it doesn’t make her want to get drunk. She’s productive.  She gets up in the morning with a list of so many things to do, that the idea of getting high at lunch is absurd to her.

She returns to her home town, and on her way to visit an old friend, passes the woods. It’s fall and the leaves are turning, the sun is shining, the day absolutely gorgeous.

An addict would say, Perfect day to get high. But as a sober middle-aged woman she looks at the wood, the falling leaves, and compares her mood, her mind-set today with how she felt at 15, and marvels at the difference. 

At 15 all she wanted to do was erase whatever was in her head.  Today she wants to remember everything, has to write it all down; there’s so much to do, so little time.

Same person, same DNA, same looks, same name, same place, totally different person. No psychotropics, no therapy, really, with the exception of a little family therapy at 18.

Pretty wonderful.  A little family therapy and a 12-Step program at the right time, the right place.

Well, I thought it a good therapy yarn.

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