A book review by Linda
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff 2008
Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff 2009
As a parent going frantic over my child’s drug use with its related anti-social behaviors and criminal activities, a dear friend suggested I read this set of books written by a father and son detailing the same issue...
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff 2008
Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff 2009
As a parent going frantic over my child’s drug use with its related anti-social behaviors and criminal activities, a dear friend suggested I read this set of books written by a father and son detailing the same issue, the son’s drug addiction, from their very different perspectives. Eager to learn anything from another family that could help my family through this, I went to the library and got both books out as audiobooks that I listened to on my nightly drives to visit my son in the detention center.
Beautiful Boy, the father’s book described the emotional rollercoaster he and the rest of the family members were on for years as Nic would cycle through periods of using and recovery. Theirs was a family that survived a divorce when Nic was young to become two homes that contained many markers of success. Nic shuttled between both parents in a shared custody arrangement and both homes were filled with loving relationships that provided young Nic with support and parents attentive to meeting his needs. But such a life of abundance did not prevent Nic’s genetic predisposition toward addiction from becoming realized when he entered the teenage years of experimentation. For him, experimentation triggered compulsions to keep the pleasurable sensations various drug could provide going forever. Nic would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. His using would take him to depths of depravity and the brink of death. As Nic graphically describes his life in his book Tweak, he knew he hurt others, especially his family, when he was using which made him feel so bad that he would use more to escape from those bad feeling too. This story has a happy ending in that Nic has been clean long enough to write this book and David has been able to distance himself enough emotionally from his son’s highs and lows to be able to regain his own life in a more whole and healthy way.
So what did I learn from their story of their journey? The commitment to never giving up on your child was a powerful force that though extremely difficult for the parents and siblings was nonetheless critical to keeping the child alive long enough for him to learn how to manage his own addiction. I really appreciated the father’s searching for information, approaches, and alternatives that would help him understand how to help his child better. Things that work for others might not work for them in the same way at any given time, but trying something different or trying it again at a different part of the journey tended to work better or in a different way. I totally related to the father’s description of how his emotional state was locked into his child so that if his son was doing well, so was the father, but if the son was spinning out of control, the father was an emotional train wreck. The father eventually worked with a therapist to help him separate emotionally from his son and develop an emotional relationship that was healthier for both of them. My sense of this part of the story is that it was an important step for him to do at the time when he did it for his son was in his 20’s and was beginning to figure everything out himself. But I do not feel the father could have taken this step earlier. Knowing that the physiological changes that drugs make to the developing brain retard normal development, a kid’s chronological age is not their mental age when drugs are involved. It is right for parents to have high levels of involvement in pre-teens and young teens lives and be emotionally invested in helping them learn and grow. If a big kid’s body has a damaged brain so that his emotional development is of a little guy, then its normal for a parent to keep working on helping them grow. David Sheff’s story is an example of whatever it takes for that kid as long as it takes coupled with an awareness that he had to take care of himself and the other family members. The stresses and strains of his balancing act journey were ones I could relate to even though my child is only 16 so my family is early in the process. It gives me hope to hear that one day, this intensity will be over and a greater degree of emotional separation will be possible.
The son’s, Nic Sheff, book had many parts in it that were hard for me to hear about. I found the descriptions of the pleasurable aspects of drug use and the distorted thinking that accompanies it unbearable. The description of the unpleasant aspects of drug use and the struggles in recovery were much easier for me to listen to. To me that type of pleasure represented regression and made me scream while the struggle represented growth and forward movement and made me cheer. Nic gave me many insights into the driving force of compulsion and the sadistic seductiveness of the various drugs. One statement Nic made really struck me. He was talking about how when he was a kid, he worked with therapists who helped him understand some of the issues he was going through, like the divorce, but he didn’t know what to do with this awareness. His musings were about what difference did it make that he knew that some of his struggles were related to his parents’ breakup since knowing that did not help him cope with its effects any better. I found that insight from the kid’s perspective intriguing, alerting me to look more carefully at what therapy programs were and weren’t doing for kids since naming the problem was clearly not enough for Nic. He could not figure out the action steps to go with that knowledge to be able to make positive change.
I appreciated Nic’s life story for its ability to show me something about my son’s perspective. Tweak is billed as a young adult read so found in the juvenile literature section but I cannot say as I am comfortable recommending that my son read it yet. I could just imagine my child focusing on the pleasure passages and skipping over the pain passages. Nonetheless I did talk to him about the book and what I was learning from it.
My son pointed out that the kids he hangs with see the results of these very physically destructive drugs in the lives of the older addicts in the community. Looking at the horrible state these people are in seems to be a deterrent to him to trying those drugs. May it always be so.
links to the same audio file of an interview with both David and Nic Sheff
1 comment:
Both are great books!!!!
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