Drug & Alcohol Intervention Help - We Get Them In to Treatment : NYC Intervention Specialists

photo: simone martin

Here I am, at 43 years old. Wow. When my dad was 43 it seemed so old to my young eyes. “Gosh, but you’re old…” I can hear myself telling my pop.

So here I stand. Recovered and learning and helping and growing in life. What a blessed life it is. Hooked no more.

Since that day my friends said STOP – YOU NEED HELP, so much has changed. I’ve gained, and lost. I’ve struggled and triumphed. I’ve quit smoking. I’ve learned to eat right. I got my teeth fixed. I went back to school. Learned how to be an honest man; how to quit lying. Changed alot.

I became a Board-Registered Interventionist and built a vibrant private practice unlike any other in the world. I have helped folks get better and heal in my private and public life.

I got married! I have a blended family – with three pooches and lots of barking depending on the moment. I have worked with thousands of people, including some for The Dr. Oz Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. My work has helped to begin a shift to the very paradigm of change, and how it happens.

Fine, fine, fine.

I have a book that comes out in a couple months now as a lead title from St. Martin’s Press. Amazing, all of it. Because, back during that summer of 2002 I had given up and given in to the fact that my addictions would kill me. I had tried to stop, but always restarted the things that were killing me day by day. Didn’t know when, but I knew I would not survive much longer on that path. The alcohol, meth, xanax and cigarettes. The rage and pain and blame and shame. Carrying it all around like a sack of dead chickens.

But then change began and life got better. In centimeters at times, progress was made. By yards at still other times, life got better and from the ashes of a broken, defeated, addicted life came wholeness and good.

So be encouraged. To moms, and dads and sisters and wives: Change begins. People recover. And you can help them get there.

Throw out the old lies about hitting bottom, toss away the myths that your loved one has to want to change. When you’re addicted, sometimes all you know is that you want the drug. There is strength in numbers as we step in to interrupt the behavior, the addiction, the chaos and offer a loving change plan.

This is my 2009 count down. It’s been a banner one. Really good. Great even. I’m not the lucky one – you are too. As you step out in faith to create change in your defeat and hopelessness, we’ll do this together.

Onward,
Brad

|diˈnīəl| (noun) The action of declaring something to be untrue : she shook her head in denial.
• the refusal of something requested or desired : the denial of insurance to people with certain medical conditions.
• Psychology failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defense mechanism : you’re living in denial.
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The Schuler crash: Dispelling the shock and disbelief
Brad Lamm

Like everyone else, I have been reading the coverage of the Diane Schuler case and the tragic loss of eight lives and trying to make sense of the tragedy. Most reading the coverage mourn the lost Hance family children and the unsuspecting victims in the other vehicle struck by wrong-direction driver Schuler, but I see it through a different lens and with a different empathy. In no way do I minimize the profound tragedy – but I see a larger and more dangerous story: That Schuler may have had an alcohol problem that no one saw and that it was on such a grand and deadly scale.

We need to replace the shock and disbelief with a teaching opportunity, in the hope that some meaning might emerge from our collective lament. My lens is different because each day I deal with families that have a living, breathing Diane Schuler in their midst, one that hasn’t had a horrible automobile crash, yet. These families are doing one of two things: enabling and nurturing a vicious cycle of addiction pathology through inaction and fear, or crying out for solutions while at their wits’ end. I feel uniquely poised to direct traffic at these crossroads as I was once very much like Diane Schuler, driving out of control on the wrong side of the highway of life.

My family (like the Hances and the Schulers) was largely unaware of the severity of my addiction to crystal meth, alcohol, cocaine and anything I could drink, snort, smoke or swallow. For 20 years I was the upwardly mobile life of the party, good friend and listener. At home I was a closeted addict and alcoholic, hiding in plain sight with secrets most of my loved ones, family and friends had no idea about. I went to tremendous lengths to keep the truth of my addictions away from those who loved me. I would explain my increasingly off-kilter behavior as “I have a fever . . .” or “My blood sugar must have gotten too low . . . ” or “I have a seizure disorder . . . .” I had the resume of a model citizen, not a common drunk. I was a nice person, from a decent middle-class family. And, yet, I couldn’t beat my addictions. I tried and failed many times.

Fate brought an intervention, rehab and finally recovery. I have since devoted my life to helping families that have a person like me among them, or a person like Diane Schuler – an alcoholic hiding in plain sight. Some of us are enabled. Some of us are obstructed. All of us are equally deadly, and we walk and drive among you.

The real sadness for me in this story is that it’s not at all shocking but completely routine. It’s my story and it’s the story of the family I met last night, and last Saturday and a year ago, and the family I will meet next week. It’s the quintessential addiction tome. The collateral damage one collects as addiction flourishes seems to be the luck of the draw, so a tragedy like the Schuler crash appears unusual to us. But that perspective, until changed, will serve to enflame the pandemic and periodically provide news stories like the Taconic crash.

So I argue that the greater horror is the reality of how many mothers make it home each night as their chronic disease state goes untreated. These afflicted people wreak a slow havoc on the children that make it out of the back seat. They are a catalyst for a lifetime of alienation, and their deterioration is nurtured by those closest to them who are too fearful to take action. They are ticking time bombs driving the wrong way in life . . . only we don’t sober up until someone crashes. I know because I see it every day in my professional capacity, but I really know because I am them and they are me.

Addiction is the only medical disease with its own social support system – friends, spouses and family actually assist the pathology through self-interest or fear. No other ailment enjoys this embrace. No other ailment is as abrupt and unforgiving and actually kills innocent bystanders while hiding in plain sight. And none, as typified by the Shuler story, is as preventable through brutal honesty, invitation and loving engagement for change. If Diane Schuler’s alcoholism was acknowledged for what it was and treated, would eight people be dead today? The answer is no. I know because I was that person.

The writer is a board-registered interventionist who does work in the Lower Hudson Valley. Learn more at ChangeSomeoneYouLove.com.

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