Because he lived

In honor of International Overdose Awareness Day, Pam Lanhart shares her story

Today is International Overdose Awareness Day and a reminder to all of us that grief is universal. The overdose crisis is still an epidemic, though reports suggest that deaths have decreased annually since 2020. Despite this, every year for the past 5 years, we’ve lost 87,000 to 122,000 people EVERY YEAR to opioid overdose fatality.

While it might be easier to forget that death can be a part of the recovery journey (especially if it has not touched us personally), it is important that we remember and honor the stories of loved ones who have experienced tragedy.

I met a dad touched by overdose loss and something he said years ago has stayed with me:

“I don’t do this work because my son died. I do it because he lived.”

Pam Lanhart is someone I’ve met through my advocacy work. She is the founder of a recovery community for affected family members in Minnesota called Thrive Recovery. This is her family’s story in her own words.

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Pam’s Story

“You need to come and get your son. He showed up to school with a backpack full of pills.” Jake was in seventh grade and just thirteen years old.

We had seen the signs. You know the ones. Matches in his pocket. Small amounts of missing money. Times where I would go in his room and check on him and his bed would be empty.

But this . . .

We had read the books What to Expect When You’re Expecting and What to Expect with Your Toddler. But we hadn’t read the book What to Expect When Your Thirteen Year Old Is Using Drugs.

Looking back at the history of our family, we knew it was a possibility. Both my mom and my dad had struggled with alcohol use. We had uncles and cousins and siblings who had struggled, now all in recovery, who were plagued with mental health and substance use issues. We were educated on addiction and how it could impact future generations. We had done our homework, learned what we could and believed all the parenting books and information that said, “If you do X, Y, and Z, you can prevent your child from going down the wrong path.”

But this . . .

We also knew that Jake was at a high risk. From the moment he was born he was an extraordinary child. He was a contradiction of personality—both anxious and a risk-taker at the same time. He self-soothed by sucking his thumb until he was about twelve, needing the comfort that brought into his body. Yet he was fearless and reckless.

When we couldn’t find Jake at any given moment, we simply had to look up to find him. He climbed everything, jumped off anything higher then he was. And despite his small stature, he would stand up to anyone, anytime if he thought they were wronging him. He was fierce on the football or rugby field, tackling opposing players that were twice or three times his weight.

But this. What do you do when you have a thirteen year old smoking marijuana?

If you followed our initial protocols you do everything that you aren’t supposed to do. We defaulted immediately to our “make it stop” behaviors.

Step 1: Get him even more involved in risk-taking activities. So instead of playing football where he could get kicked off the team, we moved on to mountain biking, MMA, and eventually rugby.

Step 2: Become hypervigilant and monitor every single thing that he is doing. Track his whereabouts, check in with the families he spent time with, take his phone away, check his phone when he had it.

Step 3: Lecture and talk, talk and lecture until our voices were hoarse and we were exhausted from the chaos and conflict that was a daily part of our lives. None of these tactics worked, of course. While they gave us some short-term satisfaction that we were doing “something,” what we know now is that most of the things we did simply made things worse and caused harm in our relationship.

The other thing that happened is that we began to dehumanize our son. We treated him as we saw him, like a “bad” kid, rather than treating him like the person that we thought he could grow up to be. That led to lots of behaviors that involved lecturing, telling, blaming, and shaming him. If I had a dollar for every man-to-man talk that my husband had with my son, in hopes that he might change, we would be wealthy individuals.

At the young age of just fifteen, Jake went into his first treatment. It is a nationally renowned program that has an incredible reputation for leading people into recovery. I remember a counselor looking us in the eyes and with as much compassion as he could muster, saying to us “You know your son could die from this disease.” While we had hoped that this treatment experience would be a one-and-done situation, as it turned out, it was just the beginning.

Over the next few years our son’s use escalated, and our feelings of helplessness grew deeper. We were told that we were powerless, that there was nothing we could do and that we had to “disconnect,” “detach,” and “let him hit rock bottom,” which was absolutely terrifying as we began to see overdose deaths start to rise during the time we were fighting the hardest to get our son help.

Not long after his first treatment experience, he ended up in trouble with the law and was charged with a felony: breaking and entering. We felt we had no other choice but to support the narratives of taking a punitive approach to fighting his addiction. And as we tried to navigate his behaviors, our relationship deteriorated more and more.

During that challenging time two things happened as a result of his criminal justice involvement, which both changed our lives. The first was that our son was given the option of a diversion program, which involved juvenile treatment court. During that time we were exposed to family dialectical behavioral therapy, which began to equip us with necessary communications skills.

We also saw the power of creating a “wrap team,” which offered a scaffolding of support that involved not just the entire family system but also other robust supports including mentors, school counselors, social workers, and of course a probation officer. It was a true, visual example of how the system should work for people who have problematic behaviors that are a direct result of their substance use.

The second thing that happened was that as we began to engage in the changes we needed to make in order to support him, we were convicted more and more that we had to take a serious look at our own behaviors and how we were interacting with our son. During that time, we met with a pastoral counselor and discussed our situation. We wanted to show up for our son in a way that aligned with our values.

Our intention was that we would walk out character attributes like kindness, compassion, empathy, and love. Most of the time, our behaviors didn’t match our intentions. We were activated, angry, fearful, distraught, impatient and very shaming towards our “addict” son. As we sat in front of this counselor, in total desperation, he made a profound statement that would change the rest of our lives. I wrote down his words and they are taped to my bedroom mirror to this day: “Are you going to be right for the sake of justice or love for the sake of relationship? Because love never fails, and justice was already paid for on the cross.”

Breaking that down in a very simplistic way looked like, “Are you going to be right, or are you going to love right?” We had tried to force ourselves on our son to move him to recovery. But in reality, all it did was drive us farther away due to judgment, unrealistic expectations, and loads of resentment.

As we left that office, I knew that I had to change. I had to “be done.” And I was done, but not in the way that you would expect. As I look back, that was the day that I truly began to work my own recovery program.

I was done instigating confrontation. I began to learn how to respond to my son with compassion, understanding, and unconditional, positive regard rather than dehumanizing him and creating conflict and chaos.

I was done treating my son like he was bad rather than ill. And I began to get educated about substance use, to see that my son’s behaviors made sense and that he was just trying to feel better and mitigate his own pain. I began to learn that his substance use had actually changed his brain, created new neuropathways, and formed deeply rooted instinctual behaviors. For him, to use was to breathe and to sustain life.

I was done taking the behaviors of the disease personally. And I began to self-differentiate. His behaviors were not about me. And when I learned to separate my son, who I knew as a human, from the addiction that was consuming him, I was able to respond differently.

I was done behaving in a way that didn’t match my values. When I really looked at my way of being and the energy that I was sending to my son, I had to admit that I was a big part of the problem.

When I began to look at my own trauma, my own ways that I was activated, and most importantly how I was modeling health and well-being, things started changing. I began to learn how to pause and how to self-regulate so I could make decisions aligned with my values.

I was done putting the addiction in the center of our family and letting it consume every ounce of my time, energy, and mental capacity. And I began finding joy in other relationships, investing in my marriage and my relationships with our other children.

I was done feeling powerless. And I began to discover all the important things that I could do to help myself and learn how to show up differently in my life. Things like creating healthy routines, taking care of my mental and emotional health, being consistent with my spiritual practices, giving back to my community, and walking out my own mission and purpose.

As I began to do my work and heal from a life of personal trauma, my relationship with our son also began to heal and repair. Recovery for me, as a family member, was about returning to my own health and well-being and reclaiming all the things that I had lost not just as a result of our son’s addiction but going all the way back to my life as a child with parents who had both struggled with substance misuse.

During the next six years, while our son’s journey was rough and jagged, we were able to connect in deep and meaningful ways. We had healing conversations, we made repairs, and most importantly we had fun together. We climbed mountains, both literally and metaphorically.

I wish that I could say that this story had a perfect ending. During a short return to use in October of 2021 after the isolation and challenges during COVID-19, our son lost his life to an accidental overdose.

So how do you find hope in this story?

When I look at our grief journey and how we have walked through the last three years of our lives, the gift we have is the gift of our personal recovery, as well as the beauty of repair and of no regrets.

This is recovery.

Living our lives in a way that when we look back, regardless of outcomes, we have the assurance that we have walked through life in the most honoring way possible. Honoring our journey, honoring our faith, and most importantly, honoring our son.

Pam’s story might be your story, and if this is the case, my heart breaks for you. No parent or loved one should ever have to lose someone they love to addiction.

If your world is hurting, I want to encourage you to reach out for support. Organizations like Pam’s can provide support from people who are walking in your shoes. We never have to do life alone.

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