Letter to teen at Abraxas I Posted by:Lloyd Woodward--Monday, May 21, 2007

My Dearest Son,

Let me start this letter my saying how much I love you. By our visit last week, you are obviously angry with me. But please believe that no matter what, I will love you more than you can understand. You are my son and a major part of my life and my very being. I will do anything to help you, to get the rehab that you need, counseling that you need, any help that you need to stay off drugs and start your life anew.

You can be anything that you want. You are very talented and intelligent and I refuse to believe that God gave you all these gifts to waste on a life of drug abuse. You deserve a better life than such a life of drug abuse. And you deserve a long life. Not one cut short because of drugs. If you stayed on the path in February / March, you would be dead soon if not already. And there is no easy way out of your problems. There is no quick fix. So, take one step at a time and work through your issues. I know you have had some setbacks lately, but work through them.

I love you dearly and pray daily that you will be able to give up the drugs and continue to grow and develop into the man that you were meant to be.

It seems that you don’t understand the Abraxas program and it appears that you are trying to equate it to other drug rehab facilities that you have been in. However, places like Gateway and Ridgeview do not deal with the behavioral issues that long-term drug use causes. Abraxas does. One of your issues is that you have been deep into drugs for a long time. Sally at Gateway told us that once a teenager starts using drugs, emotional and maturity development stops. Also, extended drug use distorts people’s perception of reality and their sense of right and wrong. It also leads to anti-social behavior.

You started using drugs as a young teenager, and continued to use drugs through some critical years. This has affected your emotional and maturity development, distorted your perceptions, and distorted your sense of right and wrong. You have exhibited anti-social behavior and your defiance has become self-destructive. This process has continued through all of your teenage years and it has had a profound effect upon you. This is what Abraxas is doing for you: stopping the patterns of behavior that you have developed and getting you back on track to proper development. This needs to happen before anything else is effective, including drug rehab at places like Gateway.

I know you disagree with this and do not believe you fall into this category. You have mentioned that Abraxas is for teenagers with behavior issues, and that is not you. That all you have is a drug problem. However, your drug problem has continued long enough that behavior and perception issues have developed. I agree with you that you are not in the same category as most others there and some of those have severe behavior issues. . However, that doesn’t change the fact that you need to readjust your behavior, your perceptions, and get your development back on track. You need to develop your social skills and your coping skills. You need to understand your defiance and learn to control it. You need to stop your self-destructive behavior. You need to learn how to cope when things are not going well. You need to learn how to control your temper. You need to learn how to not feel out of control, be able to calm yourself and deal with your problems. And you need to learn how to do this without drugs. You need to develop whatever skills necessary to cope with life and move on with your life in a productive fashion. And you need to learn how to do this without drugs.

Part of this process is facing the behavior that you have exhibited and the things you have done. You need to deal with them, understand them so that you do not repeat them, and change those behavior patterns forever. You also need to get past the issues and guilt that you have because you have done these things. You need to work through these things and forgive yourself. You must do this in order to get past it and not repeat any of these actions, including drug use. You must come to terms with your past and take the time to forgive yourself. We all have forgiven and forgotten, and we just want you back, drug free and strong. We have all forgiven and we want you back, drug free and happy.

This is what Abraxas can do for you. It is behavior modification. It is undoing the effect the drug use has had on your development. It is stopping your anti-social behavior, teaching you how to deal with your defiance, and teaching you coping skills. It is readjusting your perceptions, and adjusting your sense of right and wrong. It is giving you life-management skills.

For example, you must stop excusing away your behavior because it is related to your drug habit. Your sister told me that you think your drug-using ‘friend’ received a light sentence because his forgery is related to supporting his drug habit. That is wrong. He received a light sentence because it was his first offense. I know that to be true, because I was there in the courtroom when his sentence was given and I talked to the Assistant DA about his sentence. If he appears in court a second time, his sentence will be much different, and if he appears a third time, his sentence will be severe. It will not matter that it was all for supporting a drug habit. The courts do not excuse away crimes because they were committed to support a drug habit. I hope you do not need to learn that lesson the hard way.

We have tried to help you with your drug use and provided a different array of professionals to counsel you. I have protected you from your mistakes relating to your drug use under the pretence that you would take the advice of these professionals. However, I was wrong. I was wrong to protect you from the consequences of your drug use. I know you do not believe that I protected you from anything. However, I stopped the High School from expelling you. I stopped the police from arresting you for Shoplifting and, hence, you avoided a sentence in Shuman. Your Father and I intervened when the police wanted to send you to Presley Ridge for several months over your drunken disorderly at Eat’N Park. I kept thinking that if you had the drug rehab, the counseling from professionals, that you would ‘see the light,’ the ‘error of your ways,’ but I was wrong.

I do think that you tried to leave the drugs behind, but you always returned to your destructive behavior and your drug abuse. The help that you were getting was not enough. There is no easy way out of this and it will take time. I hope that you use your treatment time wisely:

* You need to learn how to take advice from people.

* You need to drop your defiant self-destructive ways.

* You need to take the time to understand the reason why you used drugs in the first place. Then, you need to change that part of yourself. Perhaps your thrill-seeking need drove you to life on the edge and that drove you to drug abuse. You must control that part of your personality. You must learn why you started drugs and why you continue to relapse and change that behavior.

* You must reverse the damage that extended drug use has done to you in terms of your personality development, perception of reality, and your maturity development. You must take the time to regain the things that you have lost and get yourself back on track.

* And you may not believe this either, but your behavior changes when you are relapsing and probably just before you relapse, i.e., you start the destructive behavior patterns, the dissociation with reality, the irresponsible behavior, and the defiance. That is what must stop and Abraxas can help you.

We are with you every step of the way. We will be there for you! We will provide whatever is necessary to get whatever help you need; to send you to the schools that you want to attend, to help you get the education that you need, to continue to provide for you, to help you get you established and back on track.

You too must step up and accept responsibility for yourself. We will continue to provide for you, and those things that you want that are above and beyond, you will work for and provide for yourself. You must appreciate what it means to work for something that you want, as opposed to having it handed over to you. You must step up and assume responsibility for yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, the biggest mistake we made was protecting you from the consequences of your behavior, and we will no longer do that. We will help you with what ever you need to better yourself, to stay off drugs, to build a constructive life for yourself. However, we will allow you to deal with your mistakes of drug use. We will be there with you, but you must deal with them and accept the consequences.

You also need to recognize when you need help before the consequences hit. You need to ask for help if you feel yourself slipping, and not wait until you are in trouble. You need to start thinking things through and stopping yourself when your actions do not have a good ending. You need to think about what you are doing, understand the impact, and stop your behavior if there is a chance for negative consequences. You need to start thinking things through.

We will get you all the help that you need. We will go anywhere and spend anything to get you all the help you need. However, if you insist on drug abuse and if you refuse any help, I will do what I need to do to stop you. I will do whatever I need to do to avoid that day that I am called to the morgue to identify your body. You cannot comprehend how painful it is for your family to know that you can engage in Russian Roulette with your life; that you would choose this destructive drug-addicted life over anything else; that you would choose Heroin over anyone else. So please don’t any more.

Well, I will close now. I have been working on this letter for a few weeks, which is why I haven’t written for awhile. We will be back up on September 18th. Always remember how much we love you and how proud we are of you for the progress that you are making.