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“Detachment” has been the standard message of most addiction literature for the last twenty years. The conventional wisdom offered to an addict’s loved ones has been to let the addict “hit bottom” before intervening. Now intervention specialist Debra Jay challenges this belief and offers a bold new approach to treating addiction that provides a practical and spiritual lifeline to families struggling with alcohol or drug abuse.
In No More Letting Go, Jay argues that the traditional advice of “letting go” too often destroys both the addict and the family physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Jay contends that addiction is everybody’s business–not just the addict’s–and addiction doesn’t have the right to trump the welfare of a family.
In short, highly accessible chapters written with warmth, understanding, and compassion, Jay weaves together philosophical and religious thought; new science on the brain function of an addict; the physical and psychological impact of addiction on family members; and poignant, real-life family stories.
No More Letting Go is a powerful, informative guide that provides comfort, hope, and practical advice to anyone affected by a family member’s addiction.
- Sales Rank: #151830 in Books
- Published on: 2006-04-25
- Released on: 2006-04-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 319 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Addiction counselors have typically assumed several things: recovery can occur only when the addict decides he or she needs help; this happens only when the addict hits "rock bottom"; until then, the addict's loved ones should detach emotionally. But Jay, an intervention specialist and author of Love First, believes that untreated addiction is unacceptable because it wrecks families and destroys lives. She outlines a plan to help families get assistance for their addicted loved one without waiting for "rock bottom." Intriguingly, Jay also casts the battle against addiction as a kind of spiritual war: she redefines detachment as "a spiritual quality that makes action possible," and describes such action as an act of faith. A fascinating section entitled "What We Know Now," details current genetic and neuroscientific research into people's varying susceptibilities to addiction. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
DEBRA JAY is the co-author of the Hazelden Guidebooks, Love First: A New Approach to Intervention, and Aging and Addiction. A graduate of the Hazelden Addiction Professional Training Program, she currently provides private intervention consultation to families throughout the United States and Canada. Debra appears regularly on Oprah, has been featured in Prevention Magazine and More Magazine, and is a national speaker and workshop leader. She resides in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with her husband, Jeff Jay, where she writes a regular advice column for The Grosse Pointe News.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PART ONE
Questioning Our Assumptions
Hitting Bottom:
A Family Affair
When addiction begins causing serious problems, a family’s greatest fears turn into reality. They watch with disbelief as the alcoholic continues drinking while their lives are falling apart. Unable to convince the alcoholic to stop drinking, families begin searching for answers. In my years of working with the relatives of alcoholics and addicts, I have found that families rarely reach out for help until the drinking and drugging hit a crisis point, and then they are often told: “There’s nothing you can do until the alcoholic wants help. You’ll just have to let him hit bottom.”
Hitting bottom is an old idea, still imposed upon families as if it were an absolute. Many families sadly believe that they must wait for alcoholics to hit bottom before there is any hope for recovery. They rarely stop to consider that this belief sentences them to years of unhappiness and devastation. No one ever mentions the fact that alcoholics and addicts don’t take the trip to the bottom alone—the family goes with them. Families are never warned that the journey to the bottom takes even the smallest children.
Hitting bottom should never be our first strategy; it is a strategy of last resort. Only when every reasonable intervention technique is exhausted should we let someone free-fall. Even then, there are ways to raise the bottom, to stretch out the safety net of treatment and recovery. Addiction always presents new opportunities. The trick is recognizing them and knowing how to take action.
The premise of hitting bottom is that addicts hit one bottom and, when they get there, either are struck sober or go running for the nearest treatment center. But addicts are resilient. They find people to rescue them. They often bounce along the bottom for years without a flicker of recognition that they need help. When they find themselves in a tough spot, alcohol whispers reassurances: There’s nothing to worry about as long as you have me.
I was having dinner with some recovering alcoholics, and a particularly nice fellow in his late fifties was celebrating fifteen years of sobriety. He talked about living in a roach-infested one-room apartment above a bar for twelve years, drinking and doing drugs every single day. He said his life was miserable, but he just couldn’t stop. He came close to dying several times before getting help. One of the people in our group said, “Well, you just weren’t ready.” Someone else piped up with, “It takes what it takes.” Everyone’s head nodded in agreement. Stunned that my dinner companions thought that this man had had to lose some of the best years of his life before he was ready to get sober, I asked, “Where was your family?” He said his wife divorced him and his kids never came around. “All for the better, really,” he added. “I wasn’t any kind of father worth having.” I asked what might have happened if everyone in his family, along with his closest friends, had come to him with a solid plan for recovery and an outpouring of love. Might he have accepted their help? Could it have turned out differently for him and his kids? Would his marriage have survived? He looked at me for a moment and then said, “I never considered that before. Who knows, I might’ve taken them up on their help. Maybe we could’ve saved our family.”
Do alcoholics ever hit bottom and then climb their way up into sobriety? Of course they do. But we never know who’ll be the lucky ones or what price they’ll pay along the way. Three hundred and fifty people a day find a bottom with no bounce—death. Countless others go to prison, go insane, or just go nowhere. Families are torn apart, children lose one or both parents, and relationships are damaged beyond repair. But many begin a journey of recovery before hitting bottom—the path is tough and rocky at first but becomes easier to travel as time goes on. Many things motivate alcoholics to make a turnaround before tragedy strikes, but it is usually family, friends, or employers. When the Hazelden Foundation asked sober alcoholics what set them on their new course to recovery, 77 percent said a friend or relative intervened. Someone cared enough to raise their bottom.
The best cases against hitting bottom are the real-life stories: A college-educated, forty-seven-year-old divorced father of three loses everything, lives in his parents’ basement drinking and smoking pot daily, and is unable to hold a job. A twenty-four-year-old trades his girlfriend’s new car for crack cocaine. The police find a seventy-two-year-old grandmother half naked and passed out on her front lawn. Babies are strapped in the backseat as a mother drives drunk to buy more wine; the police stop her, taking the children to protective services and Mom to jail. A young father goes to bed drunk and suffocates on his own vomit. A successful thirty-two-year-old woman driving home intoxicated kills a father and his daughter when she slams into them on the freeway. All of these stories come from families I’ve worked with, and no words can express their pain or deep, abiding sense of loss. Waiting for alcoholics to hit unknown bottoms results in much tragedy and heartbreak.
“Bottoms” can be temporary. Alcoholics resist getting sober even when things are going badly in their lives. They are good at weathering storms. Perhaps they’ll swear off alcohol for a while, but as soon as things cool down, they begin drinking again. The addicted brain can’t make lasting connections between alcohol and the problems it causes. Once the problems go away, alcohol is their best friend again. Addiction is both invisible and sacred to alcoholics: they deny its existence yet sacrifice everything to it.
Addicts don’t want to cause trouble or hurt the people they love. Quite the contrary: they struggle to be the person they think they still are, the person they were before the addiction took hold. They can’t make sense of their own actions. As their addiction progresses and troubles mount, they work harder to manage their lives, but addiction never lets anyone lead a life free of trouble. There are always problems, big and small. Bad behavior, poor decisions, and emotional upheaval are all symptoms of this disease, which affects both the brain and the soul. Families are confused, too. Not understanding what is happening to their loved one, they mutter, “When will she learn?” But addicts can’t learn because addiction keeps tightening its grip, demanding complete allegiance.
The apostle Paul could have been describing an addict when he wrote: “I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do things that I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing that I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want—that is what I do.” As alcoholics try to resolve the conflict between how they want to behave and how they are behaving, in the end, the only solution they can see is another drink.
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
The absolute best book I've found!
By A. Hansbarger
This is the best book I've found on the topic of addiction. I liked it so much, I've bought multiple copies and handed them out to people in need. It is full of compassion and remarkably free of blame for both the person with the addiction and the family members who suffer the effects. Furthermore, it offers direction and hope rather than the advice to detach while the addiction takes your loved one down and you with him or her.
This book is well-written (clear and concise) and easy to read (which is a good thing if you're in the chaos of an active addiction), but it is also thorough and profound. I especially like that Jay takes a detailed, but not overly-complicated look at the brain processes that lead to addiction, manipulation, hypervigilance, and other ill effects.
The last portion gives information about putting together an intervention (and why talking to the addict on your own is likely to be met with frustration). Confronting an active addiction requires a group effort and careful planning. Debra and Jeff Jay's book "Love First" goes into greater detail about how to do an intervention. Both books are excellent, but I recommend this book over "Love First" as a starting point.
Addiction is a medical issue, not a moral issue. It is a brain disease that causes immoral actions. Your loved one cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps because, if they are addicted, they lack bootstraps! Even if your loved one is taking illegal drugs, it is likely they began taking drugs (illegal or legal) at a young age, before the decision-making area of their brain was fully developed.
One point that I especially liked (and which has steered me away from divorce on several occasions) is that if it is the parent of your child that suffers from addiction, even if you divorce, you will still likely have to deal with him or her and the behavior that results from addiction, so perhaps seeking help is a better course of action than letting go.
My one suggestion to Ms. Jay is to write a book on recovery and relapse. I hope one is in the works.
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
A new paradigm for families
By Rob
Debra Jay has been on Oprah more than a few times. She's the blond lady with the glasses who is always so direct with addicts and their families. Her new book is a revelation. Basically, her idea is that there should be zero tolerance for untreated addiction in the family. After all, why should the alcoholic have the right to "hit bottom" in their own sweet time, when the family is suffering?
She brings up an interesting analogy. Twenty-five years ago, drunk driving was tolerated. Bartenders even gave people to-go cups! Then, two women who had children killed by drunk drivers, started MADD and everything changed. Now, even the beer companies say "friends don't let friends drive drunk."
Debra Jay is proposing that the same thing should happen with alcoholism and drug addiction. Treatment works (it worked in my family) and so we should have zero tolerance for untreated addiction.
She makes some good points about how an alcoholic is like a magician who uses misdirection to fool everyone. If you've ever tried to talk to an addict, you know how they blame everything and everybody but themselves. She shows how to take action to stop that kind of thing, and how to start organizing an intervention.
If one of your family members is an alcoholic or a drug addict, you should read this book. It is amazing.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Great information, solid, scientific and so moving
By Jess
In trying to get more information about alcoholism, I've been frustrated by a lot of Al-Anon and AA literature. I wanted to understand what the heck is going on and really learn more about the disease at least. Debra Jay's book is so excellent both in helping to understand the disease, and giving you realistic, helpful ways to try and help an alcoholic in your life. She so clearly outlines clear facts and scientific information about this disease, and why is it so maddening and confusing to deal with. This book helped me sort out my understanding of the disease before we did an intervention.
If you are thinking of doing an intervention, I recommend their intervention workshop videos [...] - they are super detailed, so helpful. We actually got my sister into a treatment facility, using their outline and tips! Yea!!
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