I grew up in a home that was free of addiction. I was lucky that this was my story. I married a man, my husband John, who was not addicted to drugs or alcohol, though he did smoke and overcoming that addiction was a huge challenge for him and for our relationship. So when my daughter got married to a young man from a third-world country, I wasn’t ready for what came next. I didn’t have my radar tuned to the addiction station.
My daughter met her husband on a 4-day trip to to this country. It was love at first sight. But unfortunately, this country is the origin-point for many drugs and it is not the type of place where public service announcements educate the masses about saying no to drugs. So when my daughter and son-in-law began their journey together as a couple into the complicated labyrinth of immigration on a weak third-world passport, neither of them knew that my son-in-law was addicted to methamphetamines.
But the story of my son-in-law’s addiction and recovery is beautiful to me now.
My son-in-law lived in a poor family in a poor village in one of the poorest countries of the world. He knew a version of poverty that challenged his physical survival, not just his comfort in the world. He was raised in a place that had not embraced even the most basic tenets of psychology so he had no vocabulary around addiction or any kind of mental health issue. He was beaten in school and then when he went to lunch, he sometimes only ate rice for lack of funds to buy the other food on offer. It was humiliating as well as traumatizing physically and emotionally for a young child. He went home to an alcoholic father.
Trauma defined his world growing up and at one point, he was sent away to live and work at a restaurant where he slept on the tables and got only 2 days off every month. He made $120 USD each MONTH during this time and sent most of that money home to his family. At some point, he was offered methamphetamine pills to stay awake. He didn’t know what they were and, as a kid, he didn’t ask. Thereafter, he sought out these pills whenever he felt like he needed them.
Discovering that my son-in-law had an addiction after he met my daughter was difficult. We were all living in his country for a while and he had mood swings and would get angry easily when he needed another hit. We didn’t know that the pills were causing the mood swings. In fact, my son-in-law didn’t know that the pills were causing his mood swings. He didn’t take the pills regularly or often – usually about once every 10-14 days, a common cycle for people on methamphetamines, especially the meth found in his country. My daughter, of course, had no idea that he was taking these pills, but his mood issues caused problems in their relationship. She kept asking for my son-in-law to return with her to Mexico, but he refused and he wouldn’t tell her why. In retrospect, he had only the vague sense that he couldn’t tolerate being without these pills.
John and I had dreams at this time. We went over them with each other every day because we felt blind and inert in regard to the problems our kids were having. We had the sense that there were things that we didn’t know and living in this third world country was isolating in and of itself. It was hard to learn the language as books and resources on the language are limited. So we were in the dark on many levels and being in the dark like this made us turn inward naturally and begin watching our dreams. And as we did this, we realized that we were often having shared dream content.
I would often dream that I was standing in a pool of tiny little orange, red, white, and green rectangular and circular things that were floating in water. I couldn’t figure it out. Later, when I finally saw what meth in this country looked like, it was crystal clear, no pun intended.
At one point, I dreamt that my daughter had died and I was dressing her body for a funeral. John had a similar dream the same night and that really got our attention. We knew we needed to leave this country and return to Mexico, but our son-in-law might not go with us.
We continued having dreams that guided us to leave and to take our daughter with us no matter what. The dreams told us to move slowly and when to take steps forward. We moved ourselves from the middle of the country to the periphery near an airport so that we could leave. It was in this big city that we finally put all the pieces together to understand that our son-in-law had an addiction. We waited near the airport at a hotel for several days to see if our son-in-law would come back to Mexico with our daughter. And then, one morning, we knew it was time to go with or without him.
We passed through South Korea to Mexico with our daughter on the day before the COVID pandemic shut down the airport. Of course, we didn’t know at that time that COVID would shut down the airports, but when we arrived back in Mexico, our son-in-law was officially trapped in his country of origin by the pandemic.
We knew that our son-in-law was addicted to meth, but he didn’t know what it meant to be addicted to anything. He was angry, devastated, and trapped. At first, he refused to communicate with our daughter let alone listen to her talk about addiction. She couldn’t just say to him, “You’re addicted to meth.” He literally didn’t understand what that meant. So when I talk about hope for addicted loved ones, I tell this story to demonstrate how improbable recovery from a drug addiction can be and yet how recovery is always the most likely possibility if a family dealing with addiction can stay open to the possibilities. I have a master’s degree in psychology and special addiction training so I felt like I was an expert on the topic of healing from addiction. When it was my own family’s addiction though, I was at a loss. The lack of hope in conventional medicine and psychology regarding addiction was absolutely devastating.
My own “expertise” stood in my way to finding some hope. I had no hope for addiction recovery let alone hope for addicted loved ones when we first arrived back in Mexico after leaving my son-in-law behind. I felt like I knew it all about addiction recovery and that was a block that I had to get past first before I could begin to see that addiction recovery is a natural process that wants to happen. Everything is poised for an addict to recover, but then we get in our own way, especially as a family. A lot of trauma, both personal and ancestral goes into the lack of hope and the sense that we should give up and figure out how to let go of a loved one who is addicted to a drug. But at every turn in an addict’s life, there are opportunities and a family dealing with addiction can gather around the problem to build power to overcome it on behalf of the addict. This is not a popular view, and I know it, but it’s a perspective that’s wanting and needed for every family dealing with addiction.
My arrogance stood in my way to finding hope for the addict and for myself. But I had another resource. What I DID have was the idea and the HOPE that I had followed my dreams (and my husband’s dreams) to discover a well-hidden secret (the addiction). We then used dreams / an altered state of consciousness to find our way across the world, through the eye of a needle before the entire world shut down. This wasn’t just lucky. It was not a coincidence. We’d received guidance and we’d followed it and the guidance helped us. I couldn’t deny it. The strangeness of the situation got my attention and functioned as a source of hope that things were not always the way they seemed and maybe I couldn’t predict everything about the future.
So I had to look at this addiction situation through that lens of having achieved something that was unlikely. But at first, I literally had no idea how to even begin considering that there might be an alternative way to overcome drug addiction. I wasn’t really open to that idea at all at first. I thought that my daughter would have to divorce my son-in-law and try to move on. But she didn’t want to divorce him and he didn’t want to divorce her. We were a desperate family in need of help with addiction and for the first time in my life I felt the full weight of addiction and how painful it is to be someone in a relationship with an addicted person. It felt like I was carrying a ton of bricks on my back. It became clear over time that their marriage was not “ending” (despite the grim prognosis set forth by our family members and friends) and so then, the question was about how to overcome my own preconceptions about addiction recovery that stood in the way of finding an actual way to recover from an addiction. I believe that a family dealing with addiction is the biggest resource for an addict if the family embraces a stance of openness, that is. I’m not just talking about openness to the standard addiction treatments on offer, but openness to the Universe in terms of addiction healing. Like – what is REALLY possible in terms of healing another person from addiction? I know some things now as a result of my own personal experience with addiction in the family, but I don’t know it all. There are many types of addiction and a lot of them respond to the same nutritional and herbal remedy for addiction that I talk about at this link, and of course, one of the most powerful tools for overcoming addiction permanently are the sacred medicines including Ayahuasca, Sapito, and psilocybin (as well as iboga). But beyond herbs and nutrients, is the idea that we are all connected to each other energetically via our autonomic nervous systems. When one person heals themselves, other people who close to them in their system will feel it and be required to make certain personal changes to accommodate the systemic change.
Nonetheless though, the weight of all these trauma-bricks slowed me down considerably. I focused only on the steps just ahead – on the day ahead of me – and I stopped trying to make grand plans for the future. This was incredibly powerful in terms of healing another person from addiction. I stopped resisting the process that enveloped me and that occasionally overwhelmed me and instead I tried each day to flow with it. Doing this was an act of blind faith, and I gathered faith in a jar like small tokens, hoping that these tokens would somehow translate into something more. I talked out loud to empty rooms and spoke my peace and asked the empty room for help. I spoke to God, to Guides, and to ancestors…anyone or anything that would listen. Slowly my concept of time shifted from something on a continuum in both directions from past to future into something that existed only in the present-tense. I sensed that the present tense held some kind of power that I lost whenever I tried to plan ahead too far. I also lost touch with the power of the present tense when I looked backward into the past. I noticed that planning ahead hurt me and that the present tense helped me, but I couldn’t understand how or why. The present tense orientation was work and I felt tired at the end of days spent in a present-tense mode.
In the ended, the present tense was where the answers and solutions were located. I didn’t find solutions to addiction from a Google search or from a book. I didn’t go sit in a room with some expert. The LOCATION where you can find answers and solutions to unsolveable problems is in the present tense. I found solutions by orienting myself to the present tense, which allowed me to have sparks of insight. But as my world was grinding painfully to a halt, I didn’t know that this was the case. I didn’t even have faith that the present tense had something to offer me. The present-tense was imposed on me like a Cosmic Time-Out and I resisted it with the arrogant conviction of two-year old.
It’s natural for family members dealing with addiction to find themselves in a present-tense mode and I believe that that’s because the present-tense makes us aware and the present tense is a source of healing. Our awareness shifts when we stop making plans for the future and when we stop lamenting about the past. We aren’t located in the same psychic space anymore when we step into the present-tense. When we bring all parts of the soul into the present-tense, possibilities emerge like new life growing out of a pile of cow poop. I’m not talking about mindfulness meditation every now and then, but rather a persistent, ongoing present-tense focus. I believe from my own experience that this state of being should be cultivated by any family dealing with addiction because there are Beings of Light who are trying to help us help the person who’s sick. In tribal communities, the shaman might get a group of people together to do shamanic journeying for a soul retrieval to heal someone with addiction. The group, the family, has special power to heal and this power really becomes palpable in the present-tense.
One day, after I finished reading a grim book about psychotherapy for addiction (success rates were low), I kept thinking that there had to be a better way to treat addiction. That got me thinking about people I knew who had overcome a methamphetamine addiction. So I started contacting those people to ask them how they did it. One woman told me that she remembered, “drinking a lot of coffee”. So this changed my course and then, with a couple of Google searches, I found that people regularly “switched addictions” in order to step down and at least stop taking illegal substances. Coffee and methamphetamines produce similar effects biochemically in the body. Eureka! This felt like I was on to something. And I was, there are tons of ways for people to switch addictions and this method can restore confidence about addiction recovery. This idea of “switching addictions” captivated my interest and I began researching the scientific data on some of these natural alternatives to meth and other addictive substances.
One night, I had a dream wherein someone handed me a note with the word, KUDZU written on it. I woke up, scrawled this word in my dream journal, and went back to sleep. In the morning, I woke up and saw the word and Googled it to find that KUDZU is an herbal remedy for alcoholism.
That got my attention.
Within 3 days, I had located an herb known as Mucuna pruriens that was in the same family as Kudzu. My daughter immediately started looking for Kudzu and Mucuna that she could order for her husband. She couldn’t find either of them anywhere. I worked on the project for at least 30 days to find out if these herbs were “safe” and not themselves addictive (they are not) and then very suddenly one day, a new company began marketing these two herbs online. My daughter had some of both sent to my son-in-law.
Quite a while before my son-in-law started working with Mucuna, several of our family members and I began taking it like an active prayer for his recovery. My theory was that being exposed to addiction damaged our dopamine receptors too, but that if we regrew our dopamine receptors to heal from addiction as a family, that this would alter the overall trajectory of my son-in-law’s recovery in a positive way. This seemed like a wacky idea at the time, but even while it seemed crazy as an idea, it felt like it was the right thing to do and I didn’t care about what anyone else thought. We’d fully given up on mainstream addiction treatments by this time and taking Mucuna ourselves was like an incredible epiphany in healing for ourselves. It didn’t remove the pain of what was happening as a family dealing with addiction, but it made the pain into something comprehensible and less physical. We became better able to solve problems in general. We were all less reactive to the addiction process itself. Mucuna helped us become more resilient within 4 hours after the first dose.
At first, my son-in-law resisted taking the herbs. He was concerned about taking so many pills (he had to take 30 of the Mucuna pills per day) because he was only familiar with the meth pills that would’ve killed him at that high dose, but eventually he conceded to try it. But within 30 days of taking the first 1500 mg dose of Mucuna, his addiction had officially ended. He had control over himself. Though the pandemic at that time was in full-swing and many airports were shut down, we had our dreams to help us find our way to him in Dubai. There, our daughter was able to rendezvous with her husband and we all went to Africa (which was far more open during COVID than other areas of the world) to figure out how to get back home to Mexico from there.
Back in Mexico, our son-in-law continued taking 6000 mg of Mucuna pruriens daily along with high dose B complex vitamins and other supportive nutrients like zinc and magnesium for 5 months, the length of time that it takes to regrow dopamine receptors that have been damaged by addiction. After this initial 5-month Mucuna dieta, he was like a new person. At 5-months there was a noticeable shift where he seemed remarkably more like himself than he ever had before.
One of the things I learned though was that when a person takes a drug like meth, they usually do so in order to escape from something that seems inescapable, namely trauma. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in trauma release. If your dopamine receptors are damaged by addiction, you’re less likely to have intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, but if you use something like Mucuna or Kudzu to regrow dopamine receptors, trauma bubbles to the surface again. This is positive as long as you have access to something like psilocybin, Sapito, or Ayahuasca to pass the trauma through the autonomic nervous system and release it. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) or craniosacral therapy can be used by people who don’t have access to psilocybin, Sapito, or Ayahuasca, but the sacred medicines release trauma more quickly and they leave behind a valuable residue of profound insight and empathy that can be really useful in a family dealing with addiction.
Families that work together with the sacred medicines on behalf of the addict can work their way through the pain and trauma to find magical resources that they may not have thought possible without the sacred medicines. An addict who refuses treatment may concede to it as the whole family system makes a profound shift using the sacred medicines.
Nonetheless, my family’s addiction story is unique. We were able to observe ourselves making changes on the other side of the globe by a meth addict who didn’t even know what “addiction” was. We got to observe him feel those changes and respond to them even though we were literally on the other side of the world. This was a powerful experience that taught me to look at all healing in a very different way. Not only is it warranted for a family to gather and take action on behalf of an addicted loved one, but it’s often necessary. Whether the addicted loved one is present or not in the same space doesn’t matter. When a group of people make changes out of love for another person, powerful things happen.
If you’re a family in need of help with addiction, please don’t hesitate to contact us to set up a health coaching consultation or sacred medicine treatment either online or in-person to overcome addiction as a family. We know how to harness the power of a group or even just as a singular loved one to open new options and directions for healing.
Contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com for more information or set up a health consultation with us at this link.