Rising from Tragedy to Become a Warrior in Hope

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 43 Rising from Tragedy to Become a Warrior in Hope” with Valerie Silveira.

Casey Arrillaga: How has addiction affected your family?

Female Speaker: It robbed me of my father.

Female Speaker: Addiction's affected my family in absolutely every way.

Male Speaker: It has caused a lot of turmoil.

Female Speaker: It goes back to what I understand is at least three generations.

Female Speaker: It robbed my daughter of her mother. It robbed my mother of her daughter.

Female Speaker: Addiction has made our family quite challenging.

Male Speaker: Addiction has affected my family tremendously.

Male Speaker: It's affected my relationship with my sister where I wouldn't – I'd go for months without talking to her. It's a very difficult thing for everybody involved. It doesn't just affect the one individual. It's a disease that affects the whole family.

Male Speaker: Addiction is spread not only genetically through some of my relatives and I assume ancestors.

Female Speaker: It's generational.

Female Speaker: I think of him every day.

Casey Arrillaga: Welcome to Addiction and the Family. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a clinical social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Center in Texas. I’m the author of the books Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions and Spirituality for People Who Hate Spirituality.

Kira Arrillaga: I’m Kira Arrillaga, addiction counselor intern and recovery coach at Windmill. Casey and I were in our addictions together for over ten years and have now been in recovery together for almost twice that long.

Casey Arrillaga: I've led hundreds of family workshops, but just as important is that Kira and I have lived the experience of being family to addiction as both children and adults.

Kira Arrillaga: Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

Casey Arrillaga: In this episode, we talk with Valerie Silveira, who shares her journey from being obsessed with trying to save her daughter from addiction and facing some of the most difficult experiences of her life to founding Warriors in Hope, her organization that seeks to help others overcome great adversity. We discuss how to go on after tragedy and not let addiction and devastation become the whole story and how vital it is for family members to find their own journey and their own recovery. All this and more after a break to hear from one of our sponsors. [Commercial] Welcome back. Let’s go and hear that interview with Valerie Silveira. Welcome to the show. Happy to have you on Addiction and the Family. Why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us what are you doing on a show called Addiction and the Family?

Valerie Silveira: Thank you, first of all, Casey, for having me. It’s really my honor to be a part of what you’re doing. I guess I would say that it’s not a journey or it is not a mission that I sought after. It’s one that found me. I would say that a lot of people that have anything to do with addiction could probably say the same thing, right? In a very, very short summary, my daughter, Jamie, who I said was the most brilliant person I’d ever known, I thought she’d be the first woman president, she met her addiction beast when she was 15. She entered this world that we just couldn’t seem to get her out of. We didn’t know what was happening, like a lot of people. By the time she was 18, her ex-boyfriend shot her and it was near fatal. From there, I thought that that would be the thing that would be the moment. How much worse could life get? It wasn’t. I was going to have to put on my seatbelt and strap on my shoulder harness because my ride on the rollercoaster from hell was about to get a whole lot worse. This had been a three-year period. Over the next decade, her life just spun further and further out of control. I don’t have to get into all the gory details that unfortunately go along with people living with that addiction beast, but I think what a lot of people don’t understand, really don’t understand, is what the families go through and how we’re not helping the situation. Because the further her life spun into darkness, I literally was losing myself. I felt like the worst mother in the world. I was covered in shame and guilt. I couldn’t save my daughter and I thought it was my job to do so. Literally, at my lowest point, I said to my husband one day, “I don’t want to be here anymore.” That’s how I felt. It was just so hard to live with that dark cloud hanging over your heart, and that I like to say, I was living on my rollercoaster from hell for 13 years. It’s interesting, though, Casey, because sometimes our lowest points can be the most important. It was literally in that moment when I said I don’t want to be here anymore that I thought, no. This can’t be my legacy. What am I showing my daughter, Jamie? What am I showing her? That when times get tough, we give up? That’s really when I decided to stand up and fight for my own life, my own recovery from life, and reclaim my life. That’s what I did. I decided to stand up and fight. Of course, I had no idea where I was going or how to get there. I just knew that this wasn’t acceptable for me and it wasn’t going to be my legacy to be this sad lonely woman. Then Jamie had a younger brother, Sean, that he’s watching his only sibling self-destruct and he’s watching his mom self-destruct now, even though I was pretending a lot that I wasn’t. I just said no. I’m going to figure out how to stand up and fight. That’s what I did. I wrote my first book, which is called Still Standing After All These Tears. I just literally – I’m sure you hear this story a lot, but it’s true. I thought what if one person could figure out how to find their way out of the darkness from my story. That’s really where it all began. Now I’ve got a movement called Warriors in Hope. It’s really to help women or anybody, but mainly a lot of moms who were in that same situation have found their way to my story. They identify so much with my story. I really want to help them to not be victims, how to shed the shame and the guilt that goes along with it and to live with hope and courage. It takes a lot of courage to find your way out of that dark place.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, it absolutely does. You talked about all the feelings that came from you when your daughter got shot when she was 18 and then saying – you actually thought, hey, that’s going to be it. Then it went downhill from there. I wonder. In your journey as a mother, there’s such a powerful story. That’s her story. What was going on inside you when you were looking at that shame? What messages did you pick up or were you giving yourself about motherhood and your role in things?

Valerie Silveira: What’s interesting about that, Casey, as far as shame goes and stigma, I didn’t have to really wonder what other people were thinking of me because guilty as charged. I used to look at people who had sons and daughters who were in addiction or doing illegal things or just on a really bad path and I pointed my finger at the parents. I said it’s how you raise your kids. I really thought that if I raised my children right and I was a good example and I taught them about integrity and they lived in safe places and on and on it goes, that I could somehow control their journey. I call it standing on my soapbox. I would literally say it’s the parents’ fault and then it happened to me. I fell off that soapbox and got a hematoma on my head there. I fell so hard. I just had to decide. I had to decide to say you don’t know until you’ve walked this journey what it’s like. I also like to say that if you’re wondering what moms of those in addiction look like, they look like you. We look like everybody else. The addiction beast doesn’t give a rat’s what your background is, how much money your parents make, what your ethnicity is. It doesn’t care what your religion is. The addiction beast wants everyone. He’s an equal opportunity life destroyer. I just decided to start standing up and sharing my story. It's amazing how many people got the courage to then share theirs. I’m not saying that we should sit around sharing all the sad gory details of it. It’s really being a voice to say that this does and can happen to anyone. As you know, there are so many facets to addiction that need to be addressed that, thankfully, a lot are being addressed. I don’t have the answer for all of those. I just know that for every person in addiction, there’s typically a mom, a dad, a brother, a sister. It’s multiples. It’s every person in addiction times whatever, the fallout, the impact. If we self-destruct, that compounds the problem. Thank God I stood up to fight when I did because a couple of years later, I got the knock on the door that no parent can ever prepare for. You half expect or you think you won’t be surprised if you get a call or a knock on the door saying that your son or daughter overdosed, but my daughter was murdered. That’s a whole other part of addiction that people don’t understand. It’s a dangerous lifestyle that a lot of them are living in. While I knew that, I understood how dangerous it was, I never really imagined – really nothing can prepare you. No matter how strong you get, no matter how well you think you are, you really can’t prepare for that. Yet, at the same time, you can, because it took me a very short period of time to decide that I would stand up and fight again. You mentioned sometime earlier that made me think about this that Jamie’s legacy is not going to end with addiction and murder. That’s not going to be the end of her story and it’s not going to be the end of my story. I think what we do sometimes is when we have any of these kinds of traumas, we put a period. We put a period at the end of the story. That part of your story, you put a period. That’s it. That’s the end of the story. I chose a comma. I said, no, her story is not going to end like that. She did matter. She mattered. Even in her addiction she mattered. I’ve heard from so many people. I think this is one of the things that’s a really important message is that I was speaking with somebody recently whose daughter died. She’s out there with a big message and everything, but she said to me off camera, “I raised my daughter right and I raised her in the church and I did all of this. She was raised in privilege and all the stuff that you think will matter.” She said, “And in the end, it didn’t matter.” I told her it did matter, though. Everything matters. I’ve heard from so many people, Jamie’s friends in and out of addiction, that she was a wonderful person. She was a great friend. People in addiction aren’t sitting around with a needle in their arm 24 hours a day. They have a life. I’m not saying it’s good to be in addiction. I would much rather she weren’t, but I think that it’s important for parents especially to know that it did matter. It does matter. Because the shame and the guilt, that’s what happens. I go through the list a thousand times. What was the thing that I did? It was all about me. What was the thing that I did that caused it? That decision I made or did not make, there had to be something, right? It had to be my parenting, remember? I used to blame it on the parents. When you try to figure that out, you drive yourself insane. You just literally think, I’ve let everybody in the world down. I’m a terrible parent. I’ve let God down. He gave me this precious gift and this is what I did. You beat yourself up until really, there’s not much left of you. One day, I literally looked at myself in the mirror and I said, “Valerie, if you could’ve saved Jamie,” this is before she died, I said, “If you could’ve saved her, you would’ve done it a long time ago.” It was such an epiphany for me. That has actually been an epiphany for a lot of other parents to go, wow, it’s not that I didn’t love her enough. I didn’t pray enough. I didn’t try enough. I didn’t spend enough money on rehabs. It’s not that I didn’t guilt trip her enough. It isn’t that I didn’t do any of it enough. I never had that much power. I never had control in the first place. It’s a hard realization to come to, but it’s important. Because I think the other thing that it does is it takes the pressure off the person in addiction. Because what we do, we guilt trip the heck out of them. We try to tell them this, tell them that, what about grandma? We’re on them constantly. Because if you would just get better, then I could get better. I thought to myself one day, I thought, God, this poor girl, and I was mad at her because she didn’t fight hard enough, I didn’t think. I was mad at her, but at the same time, I thought, this poor girl is already carrying this vicious beast on her back and then she’s got to carry me, too. I just thought I’ve got to remove that pressure from her and step away from the journey that I didn’t have control over. I don’t mean step away from loving her. I always told her I see you. I know who you are underneath the weight of that beast. I love you. There’s nothing you could ever do that would take away my love, but I had to let her walk out that journey knowing that I was probably not going to be the one to make that big difference. That’s tough for parents.

Casey Arrillaga: It absolutely is. Thank you so much for sharing all that. I was scribbling down some notes as you went because you hit so many themes that I told about in my family workshop and in my own work. It’s one of the things that gives me so much passion in what I’m doing in that I’m a family member of people with addiction. I’ve got addiction all over the family tree on both my birth family and also in my adoptive family you can find addiction. I would say it's probably not coincidence that my adoptive family chose a kid who came out of chaos and addiction because who else would fit in the family, right? They didn’t think that logically, I’m sure. They just looked and said, “That kid seems like he would fit here,” but this idea –

Valerie Silveira: I don’t mean to laugh. It’s –

Casey Arrillaga: No, it’s one of those attributes that’s considered so important in working in the field is a sense of humor. If we can’t have a sense of humor, we’re probably not going to make it.

Valerie Silveira: Oh, my gosh. What a lifesaver that is.

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely, and yet, you talk about that illusion of control because one of our main trauma responses that we have when we go through anything, it doesn’t have to be about addiction, any trauma, we stop and say, “What in this was my fault? What could I have done differently?” I think that illusion of control is actually a protective mechanism because we think to ourselves, if I can figure out what I did, then maybe I can prevent this from happening in the future, but it’s still an illusion because we don’t have that much control when it comes down to it. I’ve told many of the parents that I’ve worked with. You don’t have the power of life and death. I don’t have the power of life and death.

Valerie Silveira: We’re playing God, aren’t we?

Casey Arrillaga: We are. We’re saying, “I get to decide who lives and who dies. If I hustle fast enough or if I pray hard enough or if I spend enough or whatever, then my loved ones will be okay.” Yet the track record of human history does not bear that up. It just isn’t true. Some of the most brilliant minds on earth have still lost their kids. It used to be assumed that this was just a part of life. No one liked it. It was tragic, but you just knew this might happen. I talk about this a lot. We happen to live in a day and age where we assume, at least in our society and our little chunk of the world that the kids are all going to make it, and if they don’t, somehow, we screwed up. There’s no evidence to say that that’s true. You’re right. Lots of people can get very judgmental. The idea that if I just raised them right, but I can tell you, I’ve worked at several different treatment centers and seen a lot of – I can’t count how many outpatient clients I’ve seen, how many family members I’ve worked with, all that stuff, from every imaginable walk of life. Sometimes at the treatment center where I work right now, Windmill Wellness Ranch, I can walk in and we’ll have some people who are coming out of a lot of privilege and they’re in treatment with people who are coming off the street homeless with no family support. I tell all of them, look, there’s somebody at the Salvation Army getting sober right now turning their life around and they are homeless with no family support. Nobody is talking with them. Nobody is really on their side except for whoever happens to pick them up off the street. Again, it’s the Salvation Army, but somehow that miracle is happening for them right now, but we don’t know how long that’s going to last either, right? I mean, life goes up and down.

Valerie Silveira: No, we don’t know. It’s interesting you say that about judgment because I remember calling this treatment center one time, ahead of the game here. I was trying to get ahead of the game. I’m pretty sure she’s going to want to go this time. I asked if they had any special programs for somebody who didn’t have money. They said, if you don’t have any money, ours is $10,000. I was thinking Jamie doesn’t have $10, but there’s this other treatment center. A lot of our counselors have come from that treatment center. It was highly regarded by her, but I knew where it was. It was right in the belly of the beast. I said, oh, I don’t want Jamie to be around those people. You know what she said to me? “Your daughter is taking street drugs. She is one of those people.” Whoa, that was an ear opening, heart opening, mind opening moment for me with regard to judgment.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, and I think so often, again, the judgment that people lay out there has partly to do with their own guilt and shame of whatever is going on inside of them. I think it is, again, another protective coping mechanism to say that can’t happen to me. Not my child.

Valerie Silveira: Yes, you’ve got it. That is exactly what it is.

Casey Arrillaga: Yes, and so we fear.

Valerie Silveira: Then when it does happen to you, like you said, then you have to go through the list. Because once I can put my finger on it – now, what’s interesting is, let’s say I put my finger on it. What can I do? I can’t go back in the past. I’ve told a lot of moms, unless you held your kid down and put a needle in them or stuffed some drugs down their throat, it wasn’t your fault. When we have children or we adopt children, however they come into our lives, when you hold that child, you just know. You know you can protect them. You know you can keep them safe. You know you can teach them everything. Nobody in a million years ever expects this, ever. It’s so far out of left field. The other thing, too, is – so I lost my daughter. I mean, I obviously suffered the ultimate lost, losing a child. I don’t know – at least in my experience, I’ve got a permanent hole in my heart that hasn’t shrunk one single bit, but you can live with joy and grief at the same time. I have learned to honor the hole in my heart, but I refuse to crawl inside of it. I would say that when my daughter was in addiction, and I’ve seen this with so many families, is in some ways it’s harder because you don’t know when the phone call is coming, the knock on the door. My phone had rang and it’d be a number I don’t recognize, my heart would be in my throat. I didn’t want to answer it, then I was afraid not to answer it. I guess really, Casey, what it comes down to is we want control and fear and love and all of this is colliding together is we love this person more than life itself. I would’ve exchanged my life in a second for my daughter’s. If that’s how it worked, I would’ve signed up and been the first one in line, but of course, it doesn’t work like that. It’s out of the natural order, and yes, people have been losing their children since the beginning of time. When your grandparents die, it’s very sad, but it’s not tragic. It’s tragic when your daughter only lives 30 years, 7 months, and 4 days, and 15 years of that was living in addiction. I was losing her for 15 years. I think with addiction, what happens is we’re losing our loved ones over a period of time and then sometimes we ultimately lose them. It’s this constant living in, I call it, paralyzing fear. We literally have to figure out how to live courageously, how to know, to know as a parent, which almost seems crazy, to know that even if the worst happens, I will not only just be okay, but I can do something with it because I’m a firm believer that everything can be used for good, everything, including my mother’s murder. It can be used for good.

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely, and this is something that, when I talk with families about the idea, we don’t have the power of life and death, there is a power that we do have. It’s not about control. It’s about recognizing that, look, here’s this reminder in front of our face, whether it’s a fear that is going to happen or as with people in your case, where it has happened, to recognize that life is finite. This is a limited time offer. What am I going to do with that time? Am I going to be on my loved one’s case all the time saying you’ve got to change, you’ve got to change, you need to change, and you said it beautifully, you need to be okay so that I can be okay? What a setup for everybody. Like you said, I talk to the families all the time about this, what’s nice is in doing the family workshops that I do, because I work with the families and the client there, is sometimes I’ll just turn to the client and say, “Have you ever noticed that your mom needs you to be okay, that your dad needs you to be okay?” They’ll say, “Yeah.” I’ll say, “Great. Are you ever tempted to be dishonest with them on that basis because you know if you tell them the truth, they’re going to spiral down?” “Yeah.” I’ll say, “Okay. Let’s turn to the families. Would you want your kid to be honest with you?” “Yeah, of course I want that.” “Do you want to hear when they’re struggling?” “Yes, I wish they’d tell me.” “Then you have to learn to be okay when they struggle. Otherwise, you’re going to be highly motivated not to tell you the truth.” The reality is, just like you said, they will feel like they’re carrying the weight of the whole family. I need to disappear or pretend to be okay or whatever I need to do so that my family doesn’t struggle. I don’t want to be the black sheep. I don’t want to be the burden on the family. Sometimes they’ll think, okay, then, I juts need to vanish and not talk to them or not tell them the truth when I do. The way out of that game is for the family members to start embracing their own recovery.

Valerie Silveira: Right, here’s the other thing I tell people, too. Let’s say that your son or daughter gets into recovery and stays there. What about you? Haven’t you changed? We just think magically – I’ve got to do the air quotes even though it’s a podcast. Everything will go back to “normal”. Yeah, it’s called new normal. We have changed. We have our own stuff to deal with. I mean, poor Jamie was like, “You get better and I’ll be good.”

Casey Arrillaga: I was actually talking about this at the family workshop at Windmill Wellness yesterday. I was telling the family members because this came up. If you don’t work on your own recovery, your loved one can get sober and be doing great and they’re five years sober and they’re kicking butt and you’ll still be living in fear. You’ll still be trying to subtly nudge them, control them.

Valerie Silveira: They will surpass you.

Casey Arrillaga: You check on them and they’re like, “Are you going to your meetings? Are you calling your sponsor? Are you doing SMART Recovery or whatever recovery stuff they’re doing?” You find yourself still smelling their breath when they come home or checking to see if their pupils are dilated. You never get to relax until you give yourself permission. You can do that at any time. It sounds simple. It’s not easy. We went through a period of time when my daughter was younger and we thought we were probably going to lose her and I just woke up every day knowing today could be the day. This might be it. I’ve told this story in the podcast but the short version is I had to look her in the eye at one point and say, “I can’t keep you alive. I would love to but I can’t. You will have to decide if you make it or if you don’t. You’re old enough now that I can’t run in the street and pull you out of the way. You’re going to have to decide if you make it or not. I’m rooting for you.”

Valerie Silveira: Thank God you’re able to do that, though, because so many are not able to. It’s funny. You said a bunch of things and I kept thinking I want to write this down and then quote Casey. I need to write this one down and quote Casey. One of the things I think is very powerful for parents, it’s three words, but it makes such a difference. You alluded to this. Give yourself permission to matter. What happens with moms especially is we think, when my son or daughter is self-destructing, what kind of a mom would I be to go on? What kind of a mom would I be to get myself better, to be happy, to go on vacation, to laugh, to have joy, to have peace? What kind of a person would do that while my child is on a freight train headed toward a brick wall?

Casey Arrillaga: What’s funny is, again, in doing this family work, it’s one of the reasons I’m so blessed to do it, is that I sometimes get a chance to actually ask the person with the addiction, “Do you need your parents to suffer?” “Well, no.” “How would you feel if they were doing okay even when you’re struggling?” Almost invariably, the person with the addiction comes back and says, “I would be relieved. Please get your own recovery. Please live your own life. Don’t make it dependent on mine.” It actually gives permission for the person with the addiction to let go of their own guilt and shame, which I can tell you, as a therapist, that guilt and shame is not doing them any favors in their recovery.

Valerie Silveira: No, it’s suffocating.

Casey Arrillaga: It can be. They could also choose to shrug it off. It’s not up to them, but for each person in the family to recognize I don’t have the power to make it all better. I don’t have the responsibility to make it all better. On that basis, we are free to just love each other. When I was talking earlier, we don’t have the power to control our loved one’s outcomes. We do have the power to love them now. We have the power to say let’s make the most of whatever time we happen to have, because any of us, I might not make it to the end of the day today. I’m planning to and I’ll do what I can to make that happen –

Valerie Silveira: Right, today is the only day you’re guaranteed. This is it, right now.

Casey Arrillaga: This is it. Yeah, this is a great day to love the person, not even despite of, but including their struggles. I love what you said about the fact that the struggle is not the whole story. You were talking about making a comma. I don’t know if you’ve seen this one but I’ve actually seen it on a lot of people that I’ve worked with as a therapist. I didn’t know what it was at first. They’ll have a tattoo often on their wrist of a semicolon. That represents the idea that my story didn’t end here. Yeah, so if you see that semicolon on anybody, they’re saying sometimes it’s more specific to suicide survival or prevention, but as you said, addiction is often a long slow suicide attempt. When it comes down to it, like you said, whether it’s the drugs that gets somebody or the lifestyle around them, people get that kind of tattoo to say, “My story doesn’t just end there.” I think it’s so powerful for you to say, “My daughter’s story doesn’t just end here at this moment.” It’s not defined by this one tragedy. It’s not the only thing that happened in her life and it’s not the only effect she’s ever had on anybody.

Valerie Silveira: Yeah, and I think that’s what happens to people, though, is that they don’t want to talk about their loved one. They don’t want to talk about the person in addiction. They don’t want – so for us, with Jamie, my son, it was interesting, my son, Sean, he struggled a lot with anger. He was mad at her. The first time she was shot, I know it’s such a weird thing to say, but the first time she was shot, he had to go back to high school and he had football practice. We were in a small town up in the Seattle area at the time. He had to go back to school and everybody knew. Everybody knew that it turned out the guy was a gang member. My son was so ashamed and embarrassed and how could he do this and he didn’t want to talk about it and he pretended. He literally would just try to forget about her. He lived with a lot of guilt that he had done this throughout these – well, for him, 15 years. Then after she died, he was so mad, so mad at everything, so angry. When any of her anniversary dates would come up, her birthday or her angel anniversary, those can be tough days, those milestone days. Sean decided, gosh, I’m going to make every day so much fun that I’ll look forward to them. He didn’t even know that he was rewiring his brain. He was just trying to avoid crawling into a dark hole in each of those days, but it’s turned out to be a phenomenal thing is that on her anniversary of her death especially and even on her birthday, we have people who have never even met her come. We have parties. We celebrate. We go do fun things. We talk about her. We tell funny stories about her. We want to help people understand – grief, at least for me, it didn’t work like this. Okay, I’m going to mourn for a period and then it’ll be like, oh, that was that thing that happened. Like Sean says, I don’t want people to think it was that thing that happened. You mean my sister who was murdered? My sister who lived in addiction? It’s not that thing. She was a part of my life. It’s okay for us to talk about her. Why do we not talk about the addiction part of her life so much? Because why should we? I mean, we lived through it. We don’t pretend it never happened, but we know who she was. Every single one of these people that’s living with an addiction beast, that is not who they are. That is the beast living with them, talking for them, acting for them. I’m not making excuses. Anything that my daughter did that was illegal or whatever she did, she had to take responsibility for. I’m a firm believer in that, but I think it’s important for us, like you said, the semicolon, or me, the comma, and people do this – Casey, you’ve seen this with people in your life everywhere, it could an illness, it could be a divorce, it could be any number of things. People go, oh, that’s me. I’ll put a big D on my forehead because I was divorced, or me, mom of an addict. We label ourselves and that’s the story. That’s not the story. I wanted to tell you something that I thought was really important. I didn’t see Jamie for a year and a half before she died. I know that would be hard for a lot of people to understand, especially people who don’t have sons and daughters in addiction, that it wasn’t because I said, “You can’t be in my life.” It wasn’t anything like that. We always had a loving relationship. It was because I told her, “It’s very important for you to understand what my life looks like because I want you in it more than anything, but it’s only fair for you to know what it looks like. It’s filled with integrity and people showing up for each other. It’s not illegal drugs and people don’t shoot each other.” It’s just here’s the picture. She just went off and did her thing. In my opinion, it was out of respect. She did that – I’m lucky because a lot of people don’t have that. Anyway, so she sends me this email and it was a couple of series of emails. One of the things she said to me was such a blessing for me, but I feel like it’s a message to be carried to others. She said, “Mommy.” Yeah, even at 30 she called me Mommy. She said, “Mommy, I’m so proud of you.” After she died, they collected the few things that she had at this house. One of them was my book and a workbook. She had been reading and here’s what the message is. She was never proud of me when I was guilt tripping her. She was never proud of me when I was crying in the walk-in closet. She was never proud of me when I was sending her pictures to remind her about her family. She was never ever proud of me when I was self-destructing. She was proud of me when I stood up to fight to reclaim my life and to work on my own recovery. That’s when she was proud of me.

Casey Arrillaga: That is so powerful. There’s something that I hear in there, the idea that whether our loved one is still alive or not, we can honor their life and their journey through service and joy. That’s what I hear that you’re doing. This idea that our illness does not define us, if somebody has diabetes or dies of cancer, we don’t tell that that’s the whole story or that’s the only thing interesting. In fact, like you said, we’ll acknowledge they lost their tragic battle to cancer, but we don’t say, that’s it, that’s all you need to know about them.

Valerie Silveira: No, we’re like, hey, uncle Bob was funny and let me tell you some stories about him, yeah.

Casey Arrillaga: Exactly, and when somebody has diabetes and they’re still alive, we don’t just say, hi, that’s who they are. Oh, how’s your kid doing? Oh, I don’t like to tell you, they’ve got diabetes. That’s a shameful family secret. We just say, oh, life’s going on. They deal with this thing and all that. Of course, when it comes to any mental illness, especially addiction, it’s just a form of mental illness, people get more nervous because it’s their brain. It’s the control center. People start making self-destructive and sometimes other people destructive choices. That’s hard to handle, but it’s not more a choice than the diabetes or the cancer. People don’t choose to have an addiction.

Valerie Silveira: Yeah, it’s an odd one because those other ones you talk about, the sensible person will say, let me do something about this diabetes. It’s Type 2 diabetes. I’m going to change my diet or whatever. People choose different types of treatment. Addiction is the only thing I know that actually repels treatment. It’s very different than most conditions out there. It’s frustrating. You were saying something, too, about people not wanting to bring up your loved one, whether it’s in addiction or they have died, they don’t want to bring it up for fear, right? I don’t want to remind them. You don’t have to remind us. We already know. We don’t need any reminders. Trust me. There isn’t a moment that goes by that a parent in addiction isn’t thinking about it. I think it makes us feel like you are discounting our children or our loved ones when you don’t ask. It might be a painful conversation for you to have with somebody who’s got a child or a loved one in addiction. It might be painful for you, but we all have to have courage in life. If we care about people, we should be okay to say how are they doing? How are you doing? People avoid the situation like the plague and then it makes us feel ashamed. It makes us feel like our loved ones don’t matter.

Casey Arrillaga: I honestly believe that some of it comes down to also just that basic fear, like maybe it’s catching. If I admit that it could happen to you and your friends, then maybe it could happen to me and my kid and no, no, we can’t have that. I think that’s one of the reasons people don’t want to talk about it. Also, they just get awkward again. When it comes to any mental health, and I’ve pointed this out to a lot of people, I don’t remember if I’ve said it on the show before, but if you ever want to see the difference, there’s an experiment you can run, which is figure out the visiting hours at your local medical surgical hospital and swing by and just see what the atmosphere is like. You see some people who are crying and torn up. There’s also going to be balloons, flowers, cards, people singing hymns, prayer groups, people coming to visit, get well, hope you get well, all that stuff. Now, pick another day, if you can around a similar time, around the visiting hours at a mental hospital and go see what the atmosphere is like.

Valerie Silveira: Nobody is there.

Casey Arrillaga: People show up. There’s not a lot of balloons, not a lot of flowers. There’s not a lot of cards. There’s a lot of people staring at their shoes, a lot of people avoiding eye contact with each other.

Valerie Silveira: That’s a really, really interesting perspective.

Casey Arrillaga: It has to do with mental health in general because I love what you said addiction repels treatment and there’s good reason for that biologically speaking and psychologically speaking. We get into that, into why it is that it repels treatment. That’s what a lot of mental illness does is a lot of people with schizophrenia who do not want to take those medications, who don’t want to come in off the street, who would rather live homeless because they don’t trust anybody and the families have to live with that tragedy of my loved one will not accept treatment. They don’t want to fit into what society has to offer, whether that’s right or wrong, doesn’t matter. It’s just this is what happens when the control center of our brain goes sideways. One of the reasons that I love working in addiction treatment is because when somebody really grabs on to a solution, and this goes for either the family member or the person with the addiction, it’s not to say the person with the addiction who gets recovery when they come to treatment, sometimes it’s the family members who get it. For the first time, they recognize I can work on me. I could stop relying on my loved one to make me okay and I could just cut out the middleman and learn how to be okay. It benefits everybody in the family. Miracles start to happen.

Valerie Silveira: Sometimes that is the key, which you’re not doing it so they’ll get better. You don’t do that, maybe if I get better, they’ll follow me. People are watching us and I have had many moms say to me, they thanked me for helping them get better and that their sons and daughters told them that it’s because of you getting better that I had the courage to get better, too. It makes a difference. Then guess what else, Casey? Sometimes it doesn’t, right? I mean, we don’t know the future. We don’t know. We just have to do the best with what we have. I just know that being a role model – and we are. We’re role models all around us. We’re leaders. I want my son, I wanted my daughter, to see me fight because I was in my darkest days. I wanted them to know that in your darkest days, you can stand up and fight because I’m living proof. I think that you laying down on the mat with your beast on top of you whispering or screaming in your face, “You’re a terrible mother. You’re a terrible father. It’s your fault,” that’s not helping anybody. You standing up and fighting is truth that it’s possible.

Casey Arrillaga: Powerful stuff and so true. This seems like a good moment to take a quick break and hear from one of our sponsors and then we’ll be back with the rest of our interview with Valerie Silveira of Warriors in Hope. [Commercial] Welcome back. Let’s go ahead and hear the rest of our interview with Valerie. I love that the fight is framed as you learning how to be your best self rather than the first that so many people had to take on, which is I’m going to get all the drug dealers. I’m going to pull my child out of this circumstance that they don’t want to be pulled out of, by the way. They weren’t asking for that.

Valerie Silveira: No, no, my daughter, for the most part, honestly, didn’t want to be pulled out of her circumstances. It drove me nuts, but I was reading The Strong-willed Child when she was one. I could never figure out why she seemed to enjoy her, to me, horrible lifestyle. You made me think of a mom who told me that when she found out her son, when he entered addiction, same thing, she adopted him and raised him right and thought everything was peachy, when all this started happening, she said that she did nothing but talk about addiction 24 hours a day. She almost lost their daughters. She came to one of our events and her daughter told me, “I never thought my mom would be there for the birth of my daughter. All she could think about was Matt. It was just 24/7 him. That’s all she talked about ad nauseum.” She just said a couple of day ago, she goes, for that three-year period that before she really got the help, she goes, I don’t even recognize that person when I look back. Who was that woman who was basically, like you say, stalking everybody, trying to – she just figured if she could find that answer, you’re looking for that thing. As soon as you find that magic, you can just fix everything. Then she found the magic was to fix herself.

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely, that is beautiful. Yeah, if anyone figures out the magic lottery numbers for sobriety, call us up. Let us know.

Valerie Silveira: You’ll be a billionaire right away.

Casey Arrillaga: Any offers just over the course of my 54 years on earth, when I was a little kid, boy, did I want to solve my dad’s addiction. It never crossed my mind that at the time, I’m ten years old, I would’ve done or given anything for him to stop using alcohol, ten years old, I was sliding into sex and love addiction and I couldn’t see it. I just thought here’s a source of relief. This makes everything feel better. Never made the connection that, oh, wait, I’m doing something compulsive to make my life feel better. Maybe he’s doing the same thing. Maybe he’s not actually happy the way he is.

Valerie Silveira: Oh, my God. I can’t believe at ten years old you didn’t figure out that connection. Oh, my God. What’s wrong with you?

Casey Arrillaga: What’s amazing is somewhere around that same time, I did figure out that I was the issue. If I could change me, my life would get better, versus waiting for everyone else to change, but what never crossed my mind was that I could ask for help.

Valerie Silveira: Right, nobody around you was asking for help.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s true. It was not encouraged. Talking about emotional things was not encouraged within the family. For all of my daughter’s struggles, and again, the thought for quite a number of years there that any day could be the day was the idea that, okay, again, we raised her in love. We raised her to speak openly about emotional things. We raised her that it’s okay to ask for help. None of that kept her from struggling. It did give her some opportunities.

Valerie Silveira: That must have been very hard on you.

Casey Arrillaga: It was, yeah. It was hard, especially during – as that’s all unfolding, during that time, I’m studying to be a counselor.

Valerie Silveira: I was just going to ask you if you were in this field. Oh, my gosh.

Casey Arrillaga: I wasn’t yet. I was moving into it, but as I was moving into it, as I was running family workshops, as I was getting into this part of my work was when I started to recognize, wait a second, yeah, I can’t change her outcomes. That’s not going to be up to me. I can only love her where she is during whatever time we have together.

Valerie Silveira: Is she doing well now?

Casey Arrillaga: She’s doing better, definitely. I mean, it’s night and day compared to where she was at 13. She’s now 26, getting ready to be 27. Literally half her life has been this struggle with mental illness and the thought that at any given time, this might be it. The fact is the couple of times she’s gotten seriously suicidal where we thought this could be it, one of the times we did get her to a [44:45] we literally could not figure out her insurance card fast enough to actually get her to a hospital on, I think it was Christmas eve or something like that. It was one of those big things.

Valerie Silveira: It has to be a holiday, of course, yes.

Casey Arrillaga: Of course. Both times, when I look back, it was somewhat of an adverse drug reaction, something she had been given for her mental illness lowered her inhibitions enough that her suicidalities raised up and she thought, “I want to die now.”

Valerie Silveira: Wow, see, this is a whole other discussion, isn’t it?

Casey Arrillaga: It is. It’s its own thing, but when I look back, what I’m proud of stuff is that I could just love her and support her knowing that this could be it. This may be the last moments we have together. I will try and do what I can so that that’s not the case. Luckily, again, from living in privilege in a society where I can say, let’s get you to a mental hospital, and all this stuff, it turned out to be such a blessing. She got an accurate diagnosis, which was lovely. That didn’t make everything go away. It just said, okay, we have a name for it. Nice, that’s better than not having a name for it and going from diagnosis to diagnosis, but also I can show up and say let me just show up for you as much as I can and also please let me know the limits of that. I don’t need to be superman. I just need to be me. I’ll try and show up as me and try to be honest with her when I’m frustrated, when I’m tired, when I don’t have it in me to be able to say, yeah, I can’t do this for you.

Valerie Silveira: You’re living your own advice.

Casey Arrillaga: I’m trying.

Valerie Silveira: Everything is always – people go, “It’s easier said than done.” No kidding. Everything is easier to say it than to do it.

Casey Arrillaga: I don’t teach this stuff just for fun. I teach this stuff because I need to hear it, too, and I need to be reminded of it every day. We have just a few minutes left, but I’d like to take a couple minutes and let you talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing because you’ve really created something beautiful and amazing out of this tragedy and out of also the joy of motherhood and of your life. Can you talk about that for a few minutes what that is?

Valerie Silveira: The bottom line is, if I had to do it all over again, all of it, every single horrible beautiful – all of it, I would do it all over in a second for the privilege of being Jamie’s mom. I truly would. The thing that I’m really excited about now is that I’m in Phoenix. We are having a two-day workshop, a two-day event. It’s called The Freedom Experience. It’s really helping people set themselves free from whatever is holding them back, keeping them down. A lot of it has to do with shame and guilt and fear and all of that. That’s going to be in Scottsdale on October 6th and 7th. I’m really excited because I did some events before called Still Standing. Now, I’m taking it to another level with Warrior in Hope and getting people to not just be standing but to move forward. We, as you can imagine, we have a lot of fun, too. It’s not just sitting in a seat hearing people talk. There’s a lot of interaction and a lot of fun. Then the other thing that I’m doing is I have what I call “The Nine Weapons of Hope.” They’ve really helped a lot of people. That is through my Warriors in Hope. That is really a mission. I decided a couple weeks ago, literally, I want to help a million women link arms. They don’t have to use my programs or come to my events or anything like that. I just want a million of us to stand together as warriors in hope and live with courage and stop living in fear and stop being trapped by all these self-limiting beliefs. I talk about the beast, you’ve heard me talk about it a lot, everyone has a beast. We know addiction is a beast. That’s pretty obvious. Everybody has something. Everybody has something they need to deal with. Yeah, it's really helping, I say women, but we have men that come to events and we have men that join us, too, but for some reason, it just seems to be women who reach out for help. You talked about – I don’t know if that’s been your experience in your work but that seems to be the women. It’s called Warriors in Hope. Everything can be found at valeriesilveira.com. It’s really an honor and a privilege. I would be lying if I said I was glad that this was my journey. I would go back and change it in a heartbeat if it worked that way, Jamie be healthy and everything be great and she never met addiction before, but here we are. I consider it an honor and a privilege that I can use my story to help anybody. I mean, I thought if I could just help one person – if I write this book and I help one person reads it, won’t that be great? I really do consider it a privilege that I can use my story to come alongside other people and be even just a small part of their story. I also appreciate so much you having me. I admire the work that you’re doing and truly – I mean, you can’t see me. It’s a podcast. I’m bowing down right now because anybody who works in the recovery field, it’s tough work. It’s a labor of love. It’s a mission. It’s not something that you went out for the big bucks or because you didn’t have anything else to do. I’m really grateful for what you’re doing.

Casey Arrillaga: Likewise, thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. Take a moment and let our listeners know where they can find you.

Valerie Silveira: Valeriesilveira.com, that’s V-A-L-E-R-I-E, and then I went and married a Portuguese guy so the spelling is all messed up. My last name is S-I-L-V-E-I-R-A, valeriesilveira.com. You can also go to warriorsinhope.com.

Casey Arrillaga: Beautiful, thank you so much for being on the show and hopefully maybe we’ll get you back some time.

Valerie Silveira: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s our interview with Valerie Silveira of Warriors in Hope. Thanks for being with us through another episode of Addiction and the Family. As they say in many recovery meetings, take what you liked and leave the rest. Go out and explore the possibilities for recovery in your life and give your loved ones the space and dignity to make their own choices. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe. It means a lot to us. If you know anyone else who could use what we have to offer, please tell them about Addiction and the Family. If you have comments about this podcast, have a question you’d like answered on the show, or want to contribute your voice, or just want to say hi, you can write to us at addictionandthefamily@gmail.com. We’re also happy to be your friend on Facebook and we can be found tweeting on Twitter.

Kira Arrillaga: Addiction and the Family is produced, written, and engineered by Kira and Casey Arrillaga, with music by Casey.