Are you familiar with Sandy Swenson’s work?
Are you ready to not feel so alone as you try to cope with your child’s addiction?
I’m excited to share my interview with Sandy Swenson today!
Sandy is an author and advocate who inspires moms of children struggling with drugs or alcohol.
However, as much as I wish my family could have avoided all the pain, trauma, and drama, the truth is I’m a better person now than I was even aware I could be. I have had to dig deep, feel big, see the truth, and be real. Because of that, I’ve discovered a deeper level of patience, acceptance, kindness, and understanding of what really matters. For that, I’m grateful. ~ Sandy Swenson
Some of the takeaways from the interview are below, but first, watch my interview with Sandy.
- It’s easy to feel like a failure as a mother when your child is struggling with substance use.
- Addiction is a disease, not a disgrace.
- Imperfect parenting is not what causes addiction. When we learn that, we can shed the shame, blame, and guilt because most of that is about thinking that we caused it.
- Recovery is possible within ourselves even if our child goes down a different path.
- We have the power to live with this heartache and thrive.
- We can acknowledge that we have heartache and live with the heartache by embracing our wishes, dreams, and good things in life, which inspires our hope. That is the mom power where we have the control.
- Not only can our behaviors and actions change so much no matter what happens next. It’s also a reflection outwards to our child and to other people and the way they treat our child.
- There is so much hope. Sometimes I’ve been at that place where hope hurts when my hopes have been dashed. But that is a momentary feeling. Hope is broad. It is real. It is the thing that carries us through all of this. Hope can be pinned on ourselves and how we react to everything.Imperfect parenting is not what causes addiction. We can shed the shame, blame, and guilt because most of that is about thinking that we caused it.Click To Tweet
- I became a better person through addiction and learned that my reactions could make things better or worse.
- What I learned from addiction, I can apply to everything that has come next in my life.
- All moms, if we stop and take a look, we have all in some way grown and learned and become better people in the way that we react to other major issues.
- I want to be an example for my sons. I want to live my life in a way that I hope they will live, trying to do the right thing every day and live in a positive manner.
- To honor my son, Joey. I don’t want him to think he destroyed our lives or our family. He does not have the power to do that unless I let him. I will not let the disease of addiction destroy our family or me out of honor for my son. The son that I know and love who is wonderful and beautiful.
- I want to help moms make their way through, so there is something healthy remaining within themselves so that they honor their child and their purpose or legacy.
- By speaking out, seeds are being planted, and it will help all our children along the way.
- Self-care is boundaries and looking in the mirror each morning and saying something nice to yourself. Start off by saying something good and setting a goal for the day that will make you feel that you’ve accomplished something.
- All these things are in my control.
- I have the power to control myself, but not anyone around me.
- There is nothing selfish about self-care.
- My biggest powers are acceptance and unconditional love.
Three simple steps from Sandy to help you move forward in positive ways:
- Start each day with a kind word or two to yourself.
- Start each day with the goal of doing at least one thing to help yourself become your best
self possible, whatever that may be, whatever you feel up to—big or small, personal or
out-reaching—on any given day. - Every day, jot down the kind words you said to yourself and the thing you did to help
become your best self possible, whatever that may be.
Sandra Swenson is the mother of two sons—one of whom struggles with addiction. Author of the books Just Dandy, The Joey Song: A Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction and Tending Dandelions: Honest Meditations for Mothers with Addicted Children and the Readings for Moms of Addicts app. Sandra lives in the place where love and addiction meet—a place where help enables and hope hurts. Sandra is a voice for parents of children suffering from the disease of addiction, putting their thoughts and feeling into words. Her latest project is MomPower.org, an easy-to-navigate hub connecting moms who have children with addictions to a world of help, hope, perspective, sanity, and empowerment. Sandra lives in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota. When she isn’t writing or traveling to speak with other parents who are coping with the disease of addiction in their family, Sandra enjoys gardening, reading, and spending time with family and friends.
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I live with adverse-childhood-experience-related chronic anxiety and clinical depression that are only partly treatable via medication. Thus I endure an emotionally tumultuous daily existence.
It’s a continuous, discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly I will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.
The lasting emotional/psychological pain from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside the head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others.
It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
My experience has revealed [at least to me] that high-scoring-ACE trauma, that essentially results from a highly sensitive introverted existence notably exacerbated by an accompanying autism spectrum disorder, can readily lead an adolescent to a substance-abuse/self-medicating disorder, including through eating.
The greater the drug-induced euphoria/escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived.
By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
Hopefully, the preconceived erroneous notion that drug addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is gradually diminishing.
We do know that pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — I consider it to be the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
And though I’ve not been personally affected by the poisoned-drug-supply crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.
Yet, I had been one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit ‘hard’ drugs.
Either way, neglecting people dealing with debilitating drug addiction should never have been an acceptable or preferable political option.