A Very Fine House: A Mother's Story of Love, Faith, and Crystal Meth

by Barbara Cofer Stoefen

It’s said that addiction is a family disease, and I do know that some people suffer alone and in private about the things they don’t want others to know.

“You’re as sick as your secrets.”

Secrets can become lies, which become burdens, which become manip...

There are certainly times for discretion, both personally and professionally, but making addiction the family’s dirty little secret compromises everyone’s health. It can lead to sick behavior and perpetuate further addiction. Without even realizing what a healthy choice it was at the time, Pete and I began telling our friends and family about Annie’s drug use as soon as it began. Talking about it gave an outlet for our despair. Rather than facing judgment, we were loved and embraced. I even spoke with some of my business clients about it, and many had their own painful stories of addiction to tell.

What I came to realize is that when I was real about my life, it seemed to give others permission to be real about their own lives.

The kindness of others, during my darkest times, could only be claimed when I was willing to throw open the shutters. Your secrets can make you sick, but your life lived authentically can help you heal.

Be careful not to give the neediest of your children more time than the others. No matter what the issues, all of your kids need you.”

“If all we do is look at the addict’s behavior, we are going to draw some quick conclusions about who they are as a person. It is nearly impossible not to do this, because the behavior of addicts is just so shocking! We might say that addicts are ‘morally weak.’ Or that they have ‘an addictive personality.’ We may judge their character, their friends, perhaps even their upbringing to be flawed. Sometimes addicts even describe themselves in such terms. These ideas about the nature of addiction are very powerful. If we were to look at behavior alone, these ideas make the most sense as the reasons for addiction. But what if that’s wrong?”

“The truth is there is no such thing as an addictive personality. Addiction occurs in people with strong moral values, regardless of their upbringing or social environment. While moral flaws, character defects, and family dysfunction can indeed accompany addiction, they cannot in fact cause addiction.”

“Is addiction really a disease?” He claimed that some of what he had learned and would now share with us was information with “power to change the world.” Cleverly simplifying a very complex topic, he taught that the disease model used in medicine can also be applied to addiction. It goes basically like this: An organ in the body gets a defect, and the defect produces symptoms. For example, a leg (organ) is broken (defect), which produces pain and swelling (symptoms). Once the defect is corrected, the symptoms will disappear. Similarly, the model can be applied to addiction. “But addiction is not an easy disease,” Dr. McCauley said. “It takes place in a far more complex and far less understood organ — the brain. Its cause is not straightforward. And its symptoms, well, they look more like badness than symptoms.”

Experiments were conducted in the 1960s using rats, Dr. McCauley told us, when it was discovered that “rats will self-administer drugs of abuse to only one specific area of the brain — the ventral striatum, also known as the midbrain. Rats will press a lever to deliver drugs to this area over and over to the point that they ignore all their other survival drives and eventually die.” He shared that “studies like these have dramatically weakened the idea that addiction begins as a moral failing or personality disorder — because none of these factors are at work in rats.” Rats don’t weigh moral consequences.

I learned that brain scan technology now allows observation of this phenomenon in the human brain. When drugs are administered, it is the midbrain — the part of the brain responsible for survival (and that does not weigh future consequences) — that will light up. That is where drugs take effect. Activity in the frontal cortex, on the other hand — the thinking, feeling, loving, moral, law-abiding part of the brain — will show diminished activity, a result of its inability to inhibit one’s drive to use drugs. This explai...

Dr. McCauley taught that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the population meets the definition of addiction. Who knew? The other 85 to 90 percent can be found somewhere on the continuum between nonuser/drinker and heavy user/drinker. Technology does not yet exist that can definitively differentiate a severe abuser from a true addict, so the best indicator of addiction, as Dr. McCauley defined it, is the presence of these three things: ...

Anyone can abuse substances and make poor or uninformed choices that yield negative, even deadly, consequences. This doesn’t make them addicts. However, in the face of a DUI, repeated arrests, or the threat of losing one’s spouse or children, an abuser can put down the drug or the bottle and walk away. Part of what distinguishes an addict from an abuser...

I’d previously learned that family history can predispose someone for addiction, but Dr. McCauley told us that genes alone don’t do the job and do not necessarily doom someone to addiction. There is apparently “good evidence that genes combined [emphasis added] with severe environmental stress cause addiction.” He emphasized that this isn’t the kind of stress we usually think of in our normal, harried lives. It’s extreme stress resulting from traumas such as physical abuse, rape or molestation, extreme violence or war, mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression, ADHD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. For one with a history of such stress, “drugs wouldn’t just be pleasurable . . . but would be instantly recognized by the midbrain as a survival coping mechanism. Such a scenario would account for the way some add...

The function of dopamine is another powerful component in understanding addiction. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, or chemical of the brain, and part of the body’s natural reward system. It is key to many brain functions such as motivation, learning, memorization, and motor control. Nearly all drugs of abuse have the ability to enhance dopamine transmission, and the euphoria experienced by a person in the early stages of drug use is a result of the dopamine process. It was long held by scientists that this pleasurable effect, or the “liking” of the drug, at least in part accounted for the development of addiction. It was the hedonic reward that perpetuated the drug use. The incentive sensitization theory, however, proposed by Dr. Terry Robinson and Dr. Kent Berridge, neuroscientists at the University of Michigan, suggests that the reverse may actually be true. Many individuals describe an actual decrease in drug pleasure after prolonged use, yet they experience continued craving (“wanting”). The incentive sensitization theory poses that addictive drug use in susceptible people creates very long-lasting brain changes in dopamine-related systems, leading to intense incentive motivation for drugs, or excessive “wanting” where drugs are irrationally craved. While “liking” and “wanting” drugs are strongly linked when drug use begins, only “wanting” becomes sensitized and thus more intense as addiction develops.*

Celebrate Recovery, a Christ-centered program originally launched at Saddleback Church in which addicts share “experience, strength and hope” with other addicts and learn coping skills to help manage and lower their stress. What Dr. McCauley pointed out, which I hadn’t understood before, is that the “serenity” sought in twelve-step programs is what helps reduce those dangerously high stress hormones. It actually helps heal the defect in the dopamine system.

While Annie was ultimately responsible for her choices, as we all are, she had not chosen addiction — it had chosen her. She was one of the 10 percent.