I realized last night that one of the reasons I'm so dreading the intake at the CD treatment center this afternoon for MIke is that I had given up hope. Nine years with us and he still treats us as nothing more than a checkbook and a free place to live. I do not know that he cares about us at ALL ... any of us ... nor that he has the capacity to. He has stolen from us until we have nothing small enough to steal, let us lie awake countless nights wondering where he was, chosen not to tell us the truth nearly every time we asked him a question. Every chance he has to get interviewed by a professional he paints me out to be abusive. He manipulates everyone in his path.
Do I think that Chemical Dependency Treatment is the answer for Mike? Absolutely not. And that is why I dread this meeting today.
I want the people who work at CD Treatment facilities to believe that they can help the people there. I want them to have hope for their clients. I want them to believe.
Mike was in an excellent Wilderness Program from June until September. We went up to pick him up and participate in the "family circle." We talked. We listened. We had a wonderful time. The staff instilled hope.
You can read in this post about how Mike, in the ceremony, left behind "blaming other" and was taking home "accountability for his actions" and how that lasted about 2 hours. On his way home he talked about how he was never going to break the law again. The first time we let him leave the house unsupervised he overdosed on cough medicine. Within 2 weeks we had gotten him an excellent job but he failed his drug test and never got to start work.
Within 6 weeks he had been arrested for shoplifting. And within two or three weeks of that incident he had stolen a car.
Or we could go back to last Christmas. How much hope did we have when we surprised Mike by taking him out of the RTC on Christmas Day only to have him go have him go downhill to the point that he had to leave our home again on March 7th.
Or back before I was even blogging -- all the places that gave us hope that their treatment facility was going to be the one that would turn him around.
So today, I'm not anxious on hopping back on the hope train. I feel horrible that I'm giving up. But I don't see a miracle. And I hate that -- because I'm a positive person who usually has faith and hope. So I dread the meeting. Because I know, being a person of hope, that even if I don't jump back on, somehow I might get nudged up on the train, and each time it wrecks it's harder.
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