The Big Deal - Part 5 Of 5

FAMILIES COME UNGLUED

When One Member Becomes Addicted, The Entire Family Is Pulled Into The
Disease And Is Threatened With Disintegration

Drugs and alcohol destroy all kinds of families in all kinds of ways.

In a three-room shack in Mississippi, Lois Scales grew up in noisy chaos
with relatives who drank and fought and regularly beat and sexually abused her.

Scales, in turn, hasn't been much of a parent to her 10 children. When she
spent her time drinking and living with violent boyfriends, her relatives
and friends took care of and ultimately adopted some of her kids. When
cocaine and eventually crack became the focus of Scales' life, some of her
other children went into taxpayer-financed foster care.

"I deserted them. I stole from them," the Rochester woman says. Now 45, she
says she has been drug-free for more than a year and is working toward
getting some of her children -- the youngest is 10 -- back home.

In suburban Monroe County, during the period that Scales was having her
first children, Alan Cole was a popular high school athlete who was getting
hooked on beer and marijuana. And his mother, Donna Bislow, got pulled into
his downward spiral.

When he was kicked off sports teams, she begged coaches and administrators
at his Webster high school to take him back. When he was caught selling
marijuana at school but insisted that he didn't smoke it, she believed him.
She and her daughter fixed his favorite meals and let him choose which TV
shows to watch in a vain attempt to keep him home, to keep him safe.

"I didn't eat. I didn't sleep. I lost weight," Bislow, 61, says of those
hellish years more than two decades ago. Divorced when the children were
young, she worked full-time to support the family. She says that she became
consumed by trying to fix her son's problem -- while keeping it a secret.

"It took every waking moment. My goal was to make him stop destroying his
life and our family's life."

Drugs typically hurt others besides the person who uses them. A basic
definition of an addict is someone whose relationship with drugs or alcohol
has become more important than other relationships. Friendships, family
bonds and connections to colleagues twist and can break under the strain of
an addiction.

An addiction is like a pebble thrown in a pond, says Clifton Thomas, a
counselor at Action for a Better Community in Rochester, who evaluates
clients' drug and alcohol problems. "The ripples kind of disperse out and
you don't know where they will hit," he says.

"For every person with a chemical-dependency problem, seven other people
are affected," says Chuck Montante, vice president of clinical services at
Westfall Associates, an outpatient treatment program in Brighton. That
often-cited statistic is conservative, says Montante, a drug and alcohol
counselor for 29 years.

"To try to understand chemical dependency without understanding its effects
on the family is futile. It's a family disease. They can be part of the
solution or they become part of the problem."

A family snared

Bislow now understands that she unintentionally contributed to her son's
addiction by following her natural impulse to help. Alan Cole would miss
school and work, but his mother and younger sister, Susan, made excuses.
That common response is known as enabling.

"It was normal for me to do his homework," says Susan Kenny, who is 18
months younger than her brother. "It was normal for me to help him get
dressed. It was normal to show him where the bathroom was. It was normal to
check that the stove was off after he came in late."

The little sister took the blame when Alan broke the television "because he
was so bad I didn't know how much Mom could take." Later, Kenny worked two
jobs to pay for college because her mother was still paying off the cost of
Cole's drug treatment.

Bislow became codependent, meaning that she was so wrapped up in trying to
control Cole's addiction that she lost touch with reality. She felt alone
in the world and suicidal. She believes that a support group for addicts'
family members saved her life. There she learned that she hadn't caused the
addiction and that she couldn't cure it.

That awareness can begin to change a whole family, says Rabbi Laurence
Kotok of Temple B'rith Kodesh in Brighton, who has worked with people
struggling with drugs or alcohol. When one family member stops denying and
making excuses for the problem, he says, it breaks the "web of conspiracy
and collusion" that allows out-ofcontrol behavior to continue.

When Cole was 20, his mother, sister and grandmother worked with a
professional counselor to plan and carry out an intervention. Cole went
into treatment. Now 40, married and living in Irondequoit, he says he has
been drug-free and alcohol-free since -- except for a two-week relapse two
years into his sobriety.

Scales, however, took decades to seek help. This is what she recalls about
those years:

She dropped out of nursing school. She was drunk through her mother's
funeral. She dropped from a size 16 to a size 4. After years with abusive,
married boyfriends, she grew violent herself, pulling a gun on one
boyfriend, stabbing another and once setting the place on fire.

Scales kept having babies, believing love meant children. But she left her
children with friends while she spent welfare checks getting drunk or high
instead of buying food.

Two years ago, it all became too much for Scales. She went to inpatient
treatment, then supportive housing. Her pastor, his wife and others at Lily
of the Valley Church of God taught her she wasn't all bad, despite a
relapse last year.

She has apologized to the people she has hurt. She continues to attend
treatment groups while living at the YWCA Stepping Stone supportive living
apartments for women in recovery. She spends time with her children and
looks forward to more of it.

Addicts talk of living life one day at a time. "It's like one minute at a
time," Scales says.

Scales and Cole both know that their children are at higher risk for drug
and alcohol abuse because the problem tends to run in families.

Some of Scales' grown children abuse alcohol, she says. "I want the cycle
to be broken."

Cole worries about his two young sons -- and so does his mother.

Bislow, who works part-time in the treatment field, is trying to teach
Robbie, 8, and Brendan, who is almost 2, to deal with their feelings. She
hopes they won't someday try to medicate their way through difficult times.

Remembering that her son loved the feeling of being out of control, she
worries when she sees how much Robbie loves to spin around, get dizzy and
fall down.

"I want to say, 'Stop!' "