Tales of My Cubawan, XII: How I Accidentally Got Him Off Drugs
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Hello and welcome or welcome back! As my disclaimer reads, this is the story of my relationship with my late adoptive son, Otso, from back in 2022.
I’m fairly sure that this is the part of the story that many of you are interested in. After all, I managed to get an addict to quit drugs cold turkey in a couple months without even trying. A lot of people dedicate their lives to helping people with addictions and often fail, after all. So if you’re wondering how I pulled that off without even trying, read on.
As I’ve mentioned before, I know how a lot of people deal with addicts by default, so I had a lot of examples of what not to do.
It’s worth saying up-front that the Finnish system can be decent at diagnosing mental health disorders (let’s be real though, the private side is good at diagnosing mental health disorders), but is abysmal at actually doing something useful about getting those people real help. For example, if they consider you an addict in any way, shape, or form, they require you to sober up before you can get help.
You can guess how often that works. And yeah, it makes me really fucking angry, because, if it was so easy to sober up, these people wouldn’t need help in the first place. I’ll blow my top if I keep on that subject though, but let’s just say that a lot of people whose job was to help my cub failed him, like his psychiatric nurse, who wouldn’t give him help even after he gave up like 47/50 substances. The psychiatric nurse eventually just started ghosting his calls. Mine was no better. Fuck this system.
Okay, moving on, again, before I make myself too angry.
First up, and probably most critical, was not judging him. If he had the forthrightness to admit to me right up front that he had severe C-PTSD and was an addict who couldn’t control his emotions sometimes, who the fuck would I be to judge him for it? Especially after he’d told me how pretty much everyone had treated him throughout his life. Even his closest friends couldn’t always be trusted.
If you’d been abused your whole life by everyone you’d ever known, if friendship to you was to go to hell together, and if family to you was nothing more than endless hurt and disappointment… well, you’d probably be an addict too. Anything that numbs the pain of life. Even the cousin he liked, who treated him well and that he had a nice relationship with, told me that he expected nothing from my cub and imagined he’d just end up in jail someday, “like the rest of his family.”
His inner world was pain, plain and simple. He could escape it sometimes, by being social, or by making music, but in the end… silence was agony for him.
So what good would judging him for his choices do? Most “nice” people won’t touch an addict with a 10-foot pole. They’d see a sweet kid like mine and roll their eyes in disdain, call him a thug and avoid him in fear, or maybe mutter, “Oh, that’s so sad.” But do most people actually do anything about it? Nine out of ten times, no, not a chance.
So judgment was off the table right away, and that was one of the wisest things I did, because it was the lack of judgment that drew him to me. I asked him questions, certainly, because I was interested in understanding him (that’s often how therapists work too, from what I’ve gathered), but I didn’t comment or opine on the situation, because that would have been rude and disrespectful. Because of that, he considered me a safe space to be honest and opened up to me about everything.
And to be clear, he did pretty much everything, with the one notable exception being heroin, which he had never touched because that’s what took his dad from him. He said once that the list of things he hadn’t done/tried was shorter than the list of things he had, and when we watched Requiem for a Dream, he said that the only part of that movie he wasn’t familiar with was gangrene. I’m not going to elaborate on that, but let’s just say that needle-induced gangrene is probably the least horrifying thing that happens in that film.
He once told me this was one of the most relatable songs he’d ever heard:
Having someone he could talk openly to about his problems, who understood with compassion and didn’t give him shit for it was huge. Especially because I wasn’t, technically, the only person who looked out for him. When he was still in school, there was a woman whose job was something along the lines of a guidance counselor, who noticed him getting bullied and not wanting to go home, so she offered to make him sandwiches if he’d come over to her place to do homework after school. After some time, she became some sort of official sponsor for him, but I was never sure what the details were.
As such, even at age 23, she still looked out for him and he had her to come to if he was in trouble, but you know what his biggest issue with her was? She constantly judged him for the drug abuse. Thing was… she wasn’t offering any valid alternatives to doing drugs, she was just making him feel bad for resorting to them, and that didn’t feel good. So instead of honesty, he hid it from her.
I could rant about this until the end of time. JUDGMENT ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING OF VALUE. Human psychology has shown that you can’t really shame people into healing or improving or changing. Shame makes people close up and start lying and avoiding. Change has to come from within, and you have to feel safe in order to get there. Shame doesn’t help. I’ve experienced this my whole life, though certainly not to the degree he had, so while I did gently guide him away from certain mindsets or open his eyes to things, I never implied that my opinion of him was negative for anything he did or said (he did struggle with accepting and believing that, naturally). After all, he was a kid with zero tools and basically no support trying to survive in a very harsh world that didn’t give two fucks about him.
So, no judgment. What else? I listened to everything. Literally everything, and he told me that because of this, he told me things he’d never told anyone before. Things like how he was abused just as badly in group homes as he was in his own home, if not worse. That was a big one, because he never gave me much detail, but he also said he’d never spoken about that place before to other people either, until he bumped into someone else he’d been in one of those homes with.
And yes, he told me some bizarre and shocking things. We’ve already touched on his weird sex life, for example. He told me things no one in their right mind would breathe within the same country as their mom, but an 11-year age difference surely helped there, and again, I didn’t judge, I just laughed and cringed along with him.
Finally, I gave him compassion. Because I listened, because I had an open mind, because I didn’t judge, I was safe for him. He could come to me with anything and I would be there to help and I wouldn’t make him feel like a piece of shit for it in the process.
So, here’s how I inadvertently got him to quit drugs…
His worst problem was with benzodiazepines. I’ve got a massive beef with opiates and benzos because they’ve killed two people I love and, especially over here, they get prescribed WAY too easily. Most anxious people I know have access to benzos. I actually had them myself for anxiety for a while. They were the first thing prescribed to me, horribly enough. And they were good. They’d take me from a panic attack to a mellow potato in no time, to an alarming degree. I was warned that they’re deeply addictive so not to take more than one a day and to not take them unless I needed them, so I didn’t take them almost ever.
Once upon a time, I asked Otso what his favorite memories were of our time together thus far, and one of them was when I had been visiting him (pre-move) and he was going through benzo withdrawals (the other was the wheelbarrow incident I mentioned last time). He was having a rough time of it, pacing around his very small room. He was angry and he was sort of crawling out of his skin, but he was also keeping it together surprisingly well. I was so lost and I had no idea what to do—I felt very helpless—so I just tried to give him something else to focus on. I scratched/rubbed his back so he’d have a different physical sensation to feel than whatever was going on inside, and just talked and listened to him as he raged about his room.
My favorite pic of us together
Towards the end, he told me, “There must be something special about you, because I’m not lashing out at you like I usually do.” He told me he often got mean when he was in withdrawals. When we reflected on that time later, he said that was one of the worst withdrawals he’d ever experienced, so it was extremely meaningful to him that I was there for him and helped him through it, even though I had thought I was completely failing to be helpful at all.
With all that said, I wanted to understand what it was that made him feel like he needed to take benzos. I mean, I obviously knew why his inner life was hard, but on an acute level, in the moment, when it happened. So I told him that if he found himself in a situation where he wanted a benzo, he could call me. Day or night, anytime, I don’t care, if he was feeling bad enough that he was willing to indulge in his own kryptonite, there was nothing more important I could possibly be doing than talking him through what he was going through. He was so deeply appreciative of this gesture and I felt really good going forward.
Not long after, I had picked him up and we were driving somewhere, and he mentioned he’d had a benzo recently. “Oh,” I said with what I hoped was a neutral tone. “How come you didn’t call me?”
That was it.
That was the moment. He had a very expressive face and I watched his eyes go wide and realization settled in. He had forgotten. And he was PISSED at himself.
Now, from my end, that was fine. If it was easy for addicts to quit, they wouldn’t be addicts. Ergo, I was not expecting a drug addict to totally knock it out of the park the first time he stepped up to bat and I told him as much. I had asked the question just for the sake of understanding the compulsion. The answer was simply that he was feeling bad, someone offered him one, and before he had even thought about it, it was down his throat. I wasn’t disappointed. Sad, surely, that it was so instinctual to him to just take anything that appeared in front of him, but… I was not remotely mad or upset with him.
But HOO BOY was he mad at himself. I tried to tell him it was fine, but he was so thoroughly disappointed and disgusted in himself for what he perceived as “failing me,” his mamabear who loved and cared for him, that he quit everything from there on out, cold turkey. Yup, that was it. He was so upset by the idea of disappointing the one person who gave him unconditional love that he quit drugs, just like that.
From there on out, he was pretty clean. No coke, no speed, no uppers, no downers… maybe some weed to chill him out (that’s still illegal here, so I suppose I should mention it) and a rare psychedelic trip for exploring his soul and learning and healing. But from there on out, cigarettes were probably the worst problem—the one he could not kick no matter how he tried.
I once asked him, some weeks down the line, how sobriety was going, since he didn’t talk much about it, and he said it was extremely hard. It was wild to me, because he made it look easy, honestly. He didn’t talk about it, he didn’t express longing or cravings, he didn’t mention any physical issues… he just went about life without substances. He was proud of himself, I recall, when I told him that he was holding up fantastically all things considered.
And I got to watch something lovely. His eyes brightened. His skin cleared up. His smile got easier. He was less burdened. He wanted to get the help he needed to make life without drugs better and easier, by checking himself into rehab. He got into some programs where he would go and talk to people who had survived addiction. He really, really, really wanted to get better. And he was trying so hard.
Anyways, the main thing about this that I want to stress is that his healing journey was not about me. It was all about him and what he needed. I couldn’t have forced anything if I wanted to. He was an adult, so it was up to him to decide to make changes and it was up to him to make them and stick to them. And apparently he did, all because I didn’t judge him and I loved and supported him through it. And it wasn’t until he fucked that relationship up that he relapsed.
But that’s a story I’ve already told, to a degree, so I’ll be stopping here for the time being.
Thanks again for hearing his story. Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
PS: Please share this if you know someone who’s trying to help someone with addiction. Also, it’s worth saying that my cub very badly wanted a different lifestyle, so it was “easy” for him to make the choice when he had someone to love and support him through it. For people who don’t want to admit they have a problem, it’s an entirely different game, but it starts with that first step of admitting the problem and then wanting to change.
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
