Learned Helplessness

Lea’s son “C” stayed with us for 12 days, then left for a planned 5 day stay with his dad over the 4^th of July weekend.  Two weeks later, he came back last night at 10 PM looking much worse for the wear.  He had an addict’s explanation of his timeline with the excuse of why he did not call being that he did not remember his mom’s or my phone numbers and forgot to take them with him.  I silently deemed his story for not calling us straight addict BS, let him know I was going to bed and then told Lea that he could no longer stay with us.

Addicts lie—I know that from personal experience.  Sometimes the lies are plausible.  Most of the time they are simply bizarre convoluted contradictory stories.  A good portion of the lies told by addicts are simply proven untrue or insulting with no further discussion.  That was the situation last night.  He could have googled my phone number with my last name, asked other family members to look up my phone number in their cell phone call log or even mailed us a letter to the address on his WA State ID card.

He left tonight after 7 to stay with another member of our morning meeting.  I hope it goes well for C.  He is a handsome blue-eyed blonde 24 year-old man that appears to have no sense of how to take positive action to improve his situation.  Bellevue is probably the best place in the State to get social services for those in need.  He walked out of DSHS, the college and Hopelink without a single piece of literature or new information about low-income housing, free bus passes, free cell phones, or other resources.  He might have gotten a replacement food stamp card at DSHS—he did not get any mail nor buy food while here.

I would loved to have been able to help him learn and use these resources to improve his life.  From what I saw, he was unwilling to take action in as serious a case of learned helplessness as I have seen up close in my life.  Sure, most alcoholics and addicts don’t get sober, but he was sober, or at least not using, for most of this year including 3 months of in-patient treatment.

Letting him stay here would have been annoying and counter-productive.  His baseline for activity would have been his mom on too much methadone and an old guy in a wheelchair healing from a burn.  Matching our energy level would have got him nowhere.

I feel bad that he had to go.  I am glad that he is gone.  That avoided a lot of future problems for me.  I have enough problems of my own without letting addicts in active addiction sleep off binges at random times.  Good luck Cory.

I am grateful for having learned to take action in my recovery.  Resilience or getting up when knocked down might be the most important lesson in life.  Doing nothing never works.