Play-It-Through: Adolescent Prevention Program
Parent Guide
Shannon Rozell
“If you feel the need to lie, ask yourself why the truth wasn’t good enough. This is where your work begins.”
Copyright © 2011 Shannon Rozell
Smashwords Edition
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Also available in print
For print copies, and training associated with this guide, contact:
Shannon Rozell
(248) 379-5502
Table of Contents
-Scientist Virginia Davis on Addiction
-The Doctors Opinion (Addiction) - excerpt
-Relapse is Not A Part of Recovery, Relapse is a Part of Relapse!
-Is it Addiction, Abuse, or Casual Use?
-The Environmental Setting for the Home Contract
-General Guidelines for Creating the Home Contract
-Consequences for Broken Rules - Guidelines
-The Importance of Details - Guidelines
-Families Involving More than One Household
-Education for Students in Recovery
-Answers and Explanations for QuickTest
-Where Do Adolescents Get Alcohol?
-Why Would a Parent Provide Alcohol to Minors?
-The Best Way to Run a Dealer Out of Town
-The Dangers that Lurk in Your Medicine Cabinet
-How to Properly Dispose of Unused Medications
-The Importance of Modeling Behavior
-Examples of Modeling Behavior
-Teens and Sleep: The Internal Clock of an Adolescent
-Resetting Your Teen’s Internal Clock
-About That Cell Phone and Computer
-If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online
-Reasons Why Cell Phones Misbehave
-Facts as John Underwood’s Research Show
-Reasons Behaviors Do Not Change
-Be the Support Your Child Needs, Not an Enabler
-Right Answer & Truth: The Difference
The intent of this Parent Guide is to educate parents about the differences between use, abuse and addiction as they pertain to drugs and alcohol. This guide will offer some tools and guidance as you navigate your children through adolescence and into adulthood.
While this Parent Guide is an educational resource on its own, it is part one of a three-part series: Parent Guide, Student Workbook, and Teacher’s Guide & Kit. This series was written with the intention of being combined with an eight-session program focusing on prevention, education, and intervention.
To learn more about the eight-session program, contact Shannon Rozell at srozell@comcast.net or (248)379-5502 or visit www.play-it-through.com.
Introduction
In today’s world, our busy day-to-day responsibilities often result in overlooking some important changes in our children’s behaviors; perhaps even discounting them as part of puberty or the natural course of maturing from child to adolescence and into adulthood. Unfortunately, if certain behaviors are ignored or discounted, the end result can be devastating to your child’s development, your child’s future, and sometimes have tragic consequences.
The first tool offered in this Parent Guide is a Home Contract. The Home Contract helps create rules and boundaries in the household with the goal of removing destructive behaviors and restoring harmony in the household. I recommend that all household members read the section on the Home Contract before the first Home Contract meeting. This will provide an understanding of the purpose of the Home Contract, how it works and sets the stage for what will happen if the family cannot come to terms with the process of creating a Home Contract.
When everyone reads and understands the Home Contract before the first meeting, everyone enters the first meeting fully aware of the goals and the consequences.
The second tool offered in this Parent Guide is the Risk and Protective Factors matrix. While there is no single answer that applies to every situation, there are some validated conditions that can lower the risk and serve as protective factors for better outcomes for adolescents.
Additional guidance offered in this Parent Guide includes Modeling Behaviors, interesting statistics and facts about the Life of an Athlete, a great conversation skit about the Life of an Adolescent as well as the importance of recognizing Denial. This guide concludes with some parting thoughts gathered from students who have taken the eight-week course.
I can’t stress enough the importance of listening to what triggers undesirable behaviors from adolescents. Please read this entire guide with a positive mindset and the goal of communicating better within your family unit.
Chapter 1
What Is Addiction?
Below are three resources I have found most helpful in defining addiction. The first is from scientist Virginia Davis. The second is an excerpt from Dr. Bob Silkworth, published in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Doctors Opinion. The third is the short definition from the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM).
Scientist Virginia Davis on Addiction
THIQ and The Disease Concept of Alcoholism: T.H.I.Q. --Biochemical Culprit
A scientist named Virginia Davis was doing cancer research using cadavers of homeless winos who had died. She discovered in the brains of those chronic alcoholics a substance that is closely related to heroin. This substance, as known to scientists, is called tetrahydrolsoqulnoline, or THIQ. When a person shoots heroin into their body, some of it breaks down and turns into THIQ.
The alcoholics studied had not been using heroin, so how did the THIQ get there? When the normal adult drinker takes in alcohol, it is very rapidly eliminated, at the rate of about one ounce of alcohol per hour. The body first converts the alcohol into something called Acetaldehyde. This chemical is very toxic and if it were to build up inside us, we would get violently sick and could die. But Mother Nature helps us get rid of acetaldehyde very quickly. She efficiently changes it into carbon dioxide and water - which is then eliminated through kidneys and lungs. That's what happens to normal drinkers. It also happens with alcoholic drinkers, but with alcoholic drinkers something additional happens.
What Virginia originally discovered has been extensively confirmed since. In alcoholic drinkers, a very small amount of poisonous acetaldehyde is not eliminated. Instead it goes to the brain. Through a very complicated biochemical process, it winds up as THIQ. Further research has found the following:
1. THIQ is
manufactured in the brain and only occurs in the brain of the
alcoholic drinker. It is not manufactured in the brain of the normal
“social drinker” of alcohol.
2. THIQ has been found to be
highly addictive. It was tried in experimental use with animals
during the Second World War when we were looking for a painkiller
less addicting than morphine. THIQ was a pretty good painkiller, but
it couldn't be used on humans. It turned out to be much more
addicting than morphine.
3. Experiments have shown that certain
kinds of rats cannot be made to drink alcohol. Put in a cage with a
very weak solution of vodka and water, they refuse to touch it. They
will literally dehydrate and die before they agree to drink alcohol.
However, if you take the same kind of rat and put a minute quantity
of THIQ into the rat's brain – one quick injection – the animal
will immediately develop a preference for alcohol over water.
4.
Studies done with monkeys, our close animal relative in medical
terms, show the following:
a.Once the THIQ is injected into a
monkey's brain, it stays there.
b.You can keep the monkey off
alcohol, but the THIQ remains in the brain.
As THIQ is accumulated in the brain of an alcoholic, at some point, maybe sooner, maybe later, the alcoholic will cross over a shadowy line into a whole new way of living-addiction.
It is not known by medical science at this time, where this line is or how much THIQ an individual brain will pile up before one crosses the line into addiction. Some predisposed people cross the line while they're teenagers, others cross in their 30's or 40's and others after retirement. Once this happens, the alcoholic will be as hooked on alcohol as he would have been hooked on heroin, if he'd been shooting that instead.
With the loss of control, the complex symptoms become chronic. All aspects of physiology have become progressive and incurable. Now it is clearly a chronic disease-Addiction.
BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS:
- Alcoholism is a treatable chronic disease.
- Alcoholism is not the alcoholic's fault.
- Alcoholics can get proper treatment for the disease, which begins with learning the facts about addiction and learning how to put this chronic disease into chronic remission.
- The alcoholic can be relieved of guilt (with a good program of recovery).
- The alcoholic can take on responsibility for arresting their disease (with proper education and application).
- The alcoholic can refuse to put more THIQ in their brains and refuse to activate the THIQ that is already there.
-Alcoholics can and do recover.
The Doctors Opinion: Addiction (excerpt)
Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot, after a time, differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems normal. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks - drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change, there is very little hope of his recovery.
On the other hand - and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand - once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules. Men have cried out to me in sincere and despairing appeal: “Doctor, I cannot go on like this! I have everything to live for! I must stop, but I cannot! You must help me!”
Faced with this problem, if a doctor is honest with himself, he must sometimes feel his own inadequacy. Although he gives all that is in him, it often is not enough. One feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change. Though the aggregate of recoveries resulting from psychiatric effort is perhaps considerable, we physicians must admit we have made little impression upon the problem as a whole. Many personality types do not respond to the ordinary psychological approach.
I do not hold with those who believe that alcoholism is entirely a mental condition. I have had many men who had, for example, worked a period of months on some problem or business deal which was to be settled on a certain date, favorably to them. They took a drink a day or so prior to the date, and then the phenomenon of craving at once became paramount to all other interests so that the important appointment was not met. These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.
There are many situations which arise out of the phenomenon of craving which cause men to make the supreme sacrifice rather than continue to fight.
The classification of alcoholics seems most difficult, and in much detail is outside the scope of this book. There are, of course, the constitutional psychopaths who are emotionally unstable. We are all familiar with this type. They are always “going on the wagon for keeps.” They are over-remorseful and make many resolutions, but never a decision.
Then there are those who are never properly adjusted to life, who are the so-called neurotics. The prognosis of this type is unfavorable.
There is the type of man who is unwilling to admit that he cannot take a drink. He plans various ways of drinking. He changes his brand or his environment. There is the type who always believes that after being entirely free from alcohol for a period of time he can take a drink without danger. There is the manic-depressive type, who is, perhaps, the least understood by his friends, and about whom a whole chapter could be written.
Then there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect alcohol has upon them. They are often able, intelligent, friendly people. (Most of us feel we fit into this category…..)
All these, and many others, have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.
American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Definition of Addiction
Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.
Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one's behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response. Like other chronic diseases, addiction often involves cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive and can result in disability or premature death.
The Author’s Soapbox
Relapse is NOT a Part of Recovery
I have sat around many recovery tables and every time I hear this saying, it makes my skin crawl. I want to stand on the table and scream “NO IT ISN’T!! NO IT ISN’T!!” Relapse is no more a part of recovery than putting your shoes in an oven turns an oven into a garage.
Relapse is a Part of Relapse!
Just as long-term (permanent recovery) is sustainable, long-term (permanent) relapse is also sustainable. Once the addict/alcoholic person is educated, s/he knows what needs to be done, and how often it needs to be done, to maintain life-long recovery. Once the addict/alcoholic stops working that plan of recovery, s/he is planning a relapse. And THAT is a part of relapse, not recovery.