We all know addiction is wreaking havoc on our world. I don't know a single person who hasn't seen it up close. Whether it's prescriptions, alcohol, cocaine, gambling, love, or sex. It is everywhere, and it touches everything.

And now we understand something important about it: addiction is, at its core, a bonding problem. It happens when someone struggles to bond with people and community, so they bond to a substance instead. When you look at it that way, it makes a heartbreaking kind of sense.

It makes even more sense when you've grown up with it directly in your family. When it's a parent. When you experience all the ways they wanted to be and could never show up for.

My dad

My father is an addict. He didn't raise me. I was fortunate to have a mother who could do that. But my dad has always been around, in the way that people are around when they're both present and not quite reachable at the same time.

Its always been a challenge. We never knew when we'd see him. He'd disappear for weeks or months at a time. We never knew if he was alive or not. He couldn't hold a job, he moved a lot and was in and out of relationships like it was a game show.

He is also one of the most joyful, playful humans I have ever known. I can picture him so clearly: air guitaring to Guns N' Roses, climbing trees with us instead of standing at the bottom watching, climbing his legs so I could flip backwards, and playing airplane. He was an early childhood educator, so he really cared about children and worked with neurodivergent children. He read obsessively, dove headfirst into topics, had a dynamic way of seeing the world and an openly caring heart. He was one of the few people in my life who consistently told me I could do anything, with no conditions attached, no strings, no judgement. Just belief.

That man is still in there. That's the part that breaks my heart.

"The painful part isn't the addiction. It's watching someone you love have absolutely no compassion for themselves."

Every time we talk, and it's not often, the conversation follows the same pattern. He guilt trips me. Then he turns it on himself and tears himself apart. He hates himself in a way I have never witnessed in another human being. He carries so much shame that he can't see past it to the light. He can't see that he is worthy. He can't see that he is loved. He can't see that when I look at him, I still see him.

Knowing what I know now. I think he's un-diagnosed AuDHD. I think he's one of the people who slipped through the cracks. I think that what I mostly see is a chaos mind and intense rejection sensitivity. He's also mixed race and extremely shy which didn't help in his teenage years. Drugs and alcohol made him come out of his shell and make friends. It gave him a sense of belonging.

That is what makes my chest constrict. That is what closes my throat. Not the addiction itself, but the self-hatred that lives inside it. The possibilities of what could have been if he was understood. Watching someone you love be utterly convinced they are worthless is one of the most helpless feelings in the world.

Me

I'll be honest about what happens to me in those conversations. My nervous system kicks into high gear trying to fix it, trying to say the right thing, trying to make him feel better. Trying to let him know how much I love him. When another person's nervous system is dysregulated, my conditioning makes me try and calm him down. This makes me excellent at what I do, but it was also born in trauma.

And when I hang up the phone I'm left holding all of it. The sadness, the anger, the exhaustion. That particular kind of tired that comes from loving someone you can't grasp.

The moment on the street

For a while, he was living on the streets of Victoria. And one day I saw him there.

My 16 year old brother and I went to visit him and it was shattering.

My brother and I went to go look around a shop and came out to witness him, looking like a junkie, a little out of it, clothes too big, dirty and brutal. My brother turned to me and said, "That's our dad. Everyone is just passing by thinking that he's an addict. But that's our dad."

I came home that night and I couldn't stop crying. Not because I hadn't known, I had known, but because seeing it with my own eyes made it real in a different way. And somewhere in those tears, something shifted in me. I knew, in a way I hadn't fully known before, that no one chooses this. Nobody wakes up and decides to end up here. Addiction is hell. And the people inside it are not their addiction.

"The stats are in. There is about a 30% increase in addictions with people who are neurodivergent. They speculate that 25% of addicts have un-diagnosed ADHD and being AuDHD gives you one of the highest risk factors for addiction. I think these numbers are low."

How do we catch the neurodivergence before the addiction? How do we differentiate the addiction from self medicating? These are a couple of the many great questions that are being asked right now. Because the consequences of not figuring this out will continue to be catastrophic.

He now has stable shelter and I am grateful for that every single day.

I keep my distance, for my own health. That was not an easy decision and it is not a comfortable one. But loving someone and being able to absorb the full weight of their pain are two different things, and I had to learn the difference.

The miracle I almost missed

For a long time, I was waiting. Waiting for the miracle of his sobriety. Waiting for his recovery to be the proof that miracles are real, that love wins, that things can get better. And because I was so fixated on that outcome, I couldn't see what was already there.

The shift happened when I stopped looking at his addiction and started looking at his spirit.

And I saw it. That brilliant, joyful, tree-climbing, air-guitaring man who told his daughter she could do anything. He is still in there. He is still alive. I still get to carry the image of him, the real him, in my mind and in my heart. That love doesn't require his sobriety to be real. It already is real.

He is a miracle. Not because he got better. Because he exists. Because I still know him. Because love, even complicated and grief-soaked love, is a miracle in itself.

I will keep loving him. I will keep my distance. And I will stop waiting for results to prove to me that magic is possible. I haven't given up hope, but it looks very different now. I hope that I'll get to see him healthy again in some way. I hope that he'll get to meet my son and be lucid enough to enjoy it. I hope that he'll find some kind of joy and purpose in his life. Mostly, I hope he finds peace.

"That playful, brilliant man who climbed trees and believed in me completely, he is still the miracle. He always was."

Where are the miracles that you aren't seeing?

Much love,

Kat

Ps. Have you had experience with a family member with addiction that you suspect is un-diagnosed neurodivergent? I want to know.

Photo credit: Lauren Lulu Taylor on Unsplash