Healing from Our Scars, with Christopher Morris

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 45: Healing from Our Scars.” With Christopher Morris.

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, a podcast by and for family members of anyone with an addiction. 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. I’m the author of the books ‘Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions’, ‘Spirituality for People Who Hate Spirituality’, and the new children’s book, ‘Mommy’s Getting Sober’. My wife, Kira, and I were in our addictions for over 10 years together and have shared recovery for over twice that long. Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together. In this episode I interviewed Christopher Morris, author of the book ‘We Are All Made of Scars’, his memoir of growing up with a mother who struggled with alcohol use. In this interview, Chris talks about his experience with this, what it was like to revisit it through writing the book, what he’s learned along the way, finding recovery for himself and how it impacted raising his own kids. All of this and more after a break to hear from one of our sponsors... [Commercial]

Casey Arrillaga: …Welcome back. Without any further ado, let’s get into our interview. Alrighty, well, welcome to the show. If you want to take a moment, introduce yourself to our audience and tell us, what are you doing on a show called Addiction and the Family?

Christopher Morris: Yeah, thanks again for having me. I'm Christopher Morris. I, in Madison, Wisconsin, worked in, actually, in the [03:17] industry for a number of years. That's my day job. I grew up a child of an alcoholic. I just recently published a book called “We Are All Made of Scars”, writing about growing up in that dysfunctional family.

Casey Arrillaga: It seems funny to say I enjoyed reading your book. I really did. But of course, there's a lot of stuff in the book that's not very enjoyable. It was very difficult to go through. If you don't mind, talk a little bit about that.

Christopher Morris: Yeah, thank you, I did – the book is a memoir. I wrote it basically like a novel. It is weird. Like you said, I've had many people be like, “This is a breezy read. I’m just zipping through it.” Which is the way I wanted it. I wanted it to be an immersive work. It primarily goes through from ages 13 and 19. My teenage years was really when my mother was drinking the most heavily and she really just descended. I ended up basically going right down along with her. As she was drinking more and more, I started using drugs. I didn't have a lot of boundaries, of course, being a teenager southside of Chicago in the 90s. No cell phones, I was just off the grid, having a fun time with my friends, getting into a lot of trouble, not going to school. Yeah, the book primarily talks about me trying to live this "normal existence” in suburbia as my mom has just been drinking, going to rehab, drinking, going to rehab, drinking on rehab, ultimately hitting a bottom where she loses everything. I realized, okay, I need to make some choices of my own because I’d hit my own bottom. That’s when the book ends.

Casey Arrillaga: It’s interesting you talk about her going in that rehab because the book starts pretty much with you being checked in somewhere and thinking okay, I'm being checked in somewhere, but really, it should be her. You guys don't understand. My mom's the one with the problem. This mirror is something that we see a lot in families, especially this idea. We call it the identified patient model, where there's somebody in the family where we can point to and say, “Okay, here's the person with the problem.” A lot of times, it's the adolescent kid who gets tagged with that. People may or may not take the time to say, why is this kid acting this way? What's going on? Instead, the family wants to make that person the identified patient. The original dynamic, as I read into the book, is you're the one being put in somewhere. It's not until a ways later that your mom even considers being checked in somewhere. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Christopher Morris: Yeah, that's an interesting mirror, as you said. The book starts with me in the psych ward of a hospital in freshman year in high school. My mom's on the phone. I'm trying to get her off the phone. Being a precocious attention-getting 13 year old, I ended up cutting the top of my wrists really lightly with a steak knife. My mom, in hindsight, I was like, I think she was trying to prove a point like, hey, I'm in charge here, being an addict. As people see in the book, time goes on. She becomes pretty manipulative in a lot of really dangerous ways. The next day, she took me in. She was like, “Oh, my son is self harming himself.” And all this, so I'm in the psych ward for a few weeks. Like you said, it was interesting. The whole time I'm there, I’m having group therapy. I'm like, “My mom was the one that should be in here. Really, I'm not suicidal. I'm not anything.” It was actually helpful because it introduced me to Alateen, but it also – I remember talking to the counselor. He said, “Hey, the first stage of alcoholism is denial. That's where your mom is right now.” I was like oh, interesting. For me at 13, it did give me some language for what's happening. Then ultimately, not too much longer after that, she was in the same psych ward that I was in. It was a weird, poetic justice there.

Casey Arrillaga: In the book, you actually talked about that a little bit about where it was difficult to see her in the same place that you had been, that it felt somehow wrong. Sometimes kids in that kind of environment can start to take some of this stuff on and feel like on the one hand, I wish there were some consequences for their behavior and not just mine. I wish that something would finally happen where they have to face their issues, but then feeling bad when that moment comes. I wonder if you can talk about those feelings a little bit.

Christopher Morris: Yeah, that’s so interesting because that is such a shock. I think people listening will probably relate. The wishing and hoping like, oh, my mom is the one who needs help. She needs help. Then again, I'm 13 at this time. To have those roles reversed, it's pretty shocking. Also, at the time – I should mention, I was living with my mom and stepdad. My stepdad, I was not really close with. I think it was this mix of, okay, my mom's going to be in the hospital. I don't know, is she going to be in there for a week, a year, a month? I have no concept of how rehab or things like that work at that age. No one, unfortunately, at the time, really sat me down and said “Okay, this is how it's going to work.” It is a pretty scary thing. [08:16] friends that have smaller children and their parents go into rehabilitation or get help. I can't imagine what that experience is like if you're six or eight. Even at 13 it was pretty shocking and scary.

Casey Arrillaga: In my line of work I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of kids of various ages, teenagers certainly, but as you said, down to kids who are six years old, sometimes younger. Usually, six is that traditional age worldwide where we, in our brain development, come to a stage where we can understand the world differently. We can start to also form memories where we remember where we learned something. Around that age when I notice, when kids come into a family workshop situation or into a family therapy session, and while they may be hesitant to say things, they have a little more to say. That's an age where we can start to recognize something's off here, something's not right and also recognize a little bit of our own feelings, what it is that we're feeling, how we wish the world was different than it is and being able to speak to that in a new way. Essentially, when you talk about that, what's it like for a six-year-old or an eight-year-old when their parent goes to treatment? This is actually a subject that's very near to my heart, because I've been working really to try and educate people about that; how to talk to kids about addiction and treatment, what's it like. One of the things recognized, like you said, is when a parent goes into treatment, people around them may say to the kid, “Oh, well, it won't be that long.” Nobody says here's exactly how long it is and here's what to expect. By the way, to you, as a little kid, this may feel like a very long time. We don't want to maybe pretend that it's not going to end. You touched on something. I think I'm going to start asking people this. What were you told about addiction when you were a kid, especially as a younger child?

Christopher Morris: Such a good question, what was I told about addiction? It's interesting, too, because as you slowly find out, as I get older, there was addiction on both sides of my family tree. I think what I was often told – and this was what I was told about my mom because my mom would say this was “Oh, they're just sick. They can't help themselves.” Or my grandpa would be like, oh, “He’s drinking just to make himself feel better.” That's a cultural thing, too. It’s, oh, you're having a rough day? You have a drink. My grandpa, who had this kind of Mad Men sales job and things like that; it was just like, oh, that's just what he does. That's part of his job. I was definitely often told, “Oh no, this person’s sick.” I always correlated sickness and addiction at a young age, with my mom even. I didn't know it at the time, but when I was really young, she would send me to the grocery store just like, “Chris, I'm not feeling well. Can you run, get some milk?” And stuff like that, I was like, “Okay.” Seven or eight years old, goes to the grocery store which is a little weird, for sure. Later on, I'm like, “Oh, no, my mom was ‘sick’ and really, probably drinking at the time.” Yeah, that's pretty much – sickness is what I was always told.

Casey Arrillaga: I hear that come up a lot. It’s interesting because we talked about addiction as a disease from a medical or scientific perspective, which I very much agree with. Yet usually, when people say it, they don't mean it like, oh, well, there's something wrong with their mind and it needs to be addressed and they should see a doctor. It's just more like, oh, well, they're feeling under the weather. They're feeling tired or feeling sick. I was told the same thing as a child myself growing up in a household where my dad had the drinking problem. I remember as a kid, that thought would come up like, oh, that's what it's like when you get sick. What's it going to mean for me if I get sick? My mom says, “Oh, you're feeling sick.” It's like, “Oh oh, okay, am I next?” I guess the second part of that question is, what do you wish you had been told about addiction as a child?

Christopher Morris: What's interesting hearing you talk, it made me think. The one thing I was glad to be exposed to Alteen, I learned pretty quickly that there was nothing I could do. I think there was a short period, a year or so where I was like, “Hey, mom, just stop drinking.” Because I didn't have the conceptual understanding that it is a disease, my mom just couldn't stop drinking. I learned pretty quickly, okay, I couldn't stop her drinking. One of the things I really wish I knew at a young age, and especially as a teenager, something I learned at Al-Anon was the notion of you can't control it, you can't cure it and you didn't cause it, those three things together. When I meet people in the program, I can see them in meetings and they hear that, you can see their mind is just like wow. It just hits so many different layers of understanding. That's something I really wish I knew. That would have saved me so much worry and anxiety as a teenager, just to know those three things.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, the classic three [12:51] at Al-Anon. You’re right. They're very, very powerful. I'm always happy to pass those along. It's funny, I'll say them in a family workshop and somebody's like, “Oh my God, you are so wise.” I’m like, “I just want to let you know, I didn't make that up. Here's where you can go to hear more of this wisdom.” Another question I want to ask, though, for you as a parent, how have you talked to your kids about addiction, it running in the family and that sort of thing?

Christopher Morris: Great question, because this comes up a lot with my kids. Obviously, I have a teenager – well, one’s 20 and one’s a teenager. I was careful. When they were preteens, as they stick in their phones and start going out with their friends more, I remember sitting both of them down, and being like, “Hey, as you're getting a little older and even – whatever, it just happens. You can experiment with some weed or drinking, whatever it is. Just know, there's some kids and some people that could just drink a little bit and smoke and go on with their day. It's fine. Unfortunately, there’s our family, on both sides of the family – you really have to be careful because it's – it could be harder for you to just be like, ‘Okay, well, that was fun. I'm never going to do that again.’ You really need to keep an eye on that. Whether you're 14, whether you're 40, it's just something you need to keep an eye on.” They kind of knew that already because as they were little, my mom was still alive and still drinking pretty heavily. I remember they would ask sometimes, "How come we never see Nana?” I was like, “Well, she's not feeling very well.” Then as they got a little older where I knew they could understand the idea of alcoholism, I’m like, “No, she's always had a drinking problem or substance abuse disorder. It's hard for her to move through the world and things like that.” I was pretty okay talking to them just about the disease and things like that, but also giving them the warning like hey, this – you need to be careful.

Casey Arrillaga: I'm glad you were able to do that. This is how we shift family patterns intergenerationally. We know your mom did not invent addiction from the ground up. Her parents did not invent any of the addiction, mental health things that run in families. There's no way to ever go back and say, “Ah, right there, that's where it started.” These things have just been passed down for so long. Not just the addiction, the genetics and stuff like that, but the family culture around it. How do we talk about it? Do we talk about it at all? All these things, do we talk about emotions? These are things that get passed down hand to hand through each generation, even if the addiction skips a generation or several. Being able to make those shifts in your family and the way that you're talking about the way you talk to your kids versus the way you were talked to about it, versus the way I would hazard to guess your mom or her parents were talked about it, really has the potential to make a lot of difference in the future. I commend you for that.

Christopher Morris: Thank you, and definitely the other thing I will say is, as they got a little older – I’ve been going to Al-Anon for a dozen years now. They got to the point where it was like, where's dad going every Thursday night? Kind of thing, so I was pretty good about dad goes to therapy, dad goes to Al-Anon. It’s just helping me because I grew up in this sort of situation. I've tried to also model like hey, you do – you’ve got to work on yourself as an adult. If there's something similar, they can see me go to therapy.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, modeling is huge. Being able to say on some level, not just with words, but with your actions, it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to talk about it when we struggle. It's okay to not be okay, ask for help and let people know what's going on. That's a really big deal. I like to say that my daughter, when she was really young, she thought where I was going is that she probably thought I was going to parenting classes because it just kept getting better and better in how I related to her. She would say that. Sometime into my recovery, about five years in, one of my favorite all time recovery stories is that I'd mentioned around the breakfast table like, “Hey, you know what? I've been in recovery for five years now.” My wife was like, “Hey, good for you.” My daughter just big hug and said “You're so much of a better parent than you used to be.” I remember that really struck me, because she was only like seven years old at the time. To say, okay, she's been paying attention. She notices the difference, probably more than I notice the difference. Being able to model that, I think, is such a big deal. I'd say that anybody out there listening, that I've said it to many, many family members and many, many clients who struggle with addiction themselves, the most powerful thing you can do to help everybody around you is to work on your own recovery.

Christopher Morris: Absolutely, and that's one of the things I think I learned in Al-Anon. I've seen so many people, including myself, it's like okay, how can I get help for the alcoholic? I went down very quickly. I was like, “Oh, wait, this is for me, not to change the other person.” It's interesting, because that's one of the things I learned writing the book. I think when I started writing it, I was like, “Okay, this is going to be this compendium of all the bad stuff that my mom did. I'm going to show people how bad alcoholism is.” Certainly, that's in there. As I took the time to write it over a span of years, it was like, “Oh, wait, I did some really not cool stuff myself.” That was also another eye-opening moment. Just to realize, wow, okay, I have to make amends and I have to really keep working on myself because I was a big part in this, too. Obviously, it's my life. That's something I still really try to keep a check on. I was like, “Okay, there's alcoholism. There's the addiction, but I'm the main character of my own life here, not this supporting character in someone else's.”

Casey Arrillaga: I was really impressed with that, in the way you wrote the book you're writing. It could have been just like, “Here's the horror show of my mom's addiction.” While there's plenty in there to look and say, "Wow, yeah, how difficult that was.” You spent, I'd say, really a lot more time talking about, well, here's what I did. Not just everything wrong, but here's what it felt like. Here's where I went off the rails. Then towards the very end, okay, dear reader, here's how I actually pulled it back together. It doesn't end on just okay, crash, burn and there's the book. You do spend a little bit of time talking about where things got better from there. That's a really important part of the story. As they say, we're going to clean up our side of the street, but also looking at how you learned and grew from it. What would you say you most took away; not just from the experience, but from writing about the experience?

Christopher Morris: I learned so much. There's so much gratitude and also compassion. Someone [19:21] in therapy, having so much compassion for my younger self. To see myself as I'm writing like, wow, I was doing my best; but I also didn't know what I didn't know. I was just really moving day to day, never thinking long term. It was also interesting because – and I encourage listeners to write their story, even outline it. As I was writing, my gran was still alive at the time. I would sit with her and be like, hey, remember that time when I was little, this happened? To my uncle, remember this time – they filled in all these gaps in my story that I never would have known. Some of them were just chilling things. For example, when I was a kid, my parents were divorced. I was living with my mom. We moved back in with my grandma. I was wondering, why did we move back in with my grandma? My grandma said, “Oh, well, didn't you know that she was drinking and she said that she was going to kill herself and take you guys with her because she was just at the end of her rope? I said, ‘You need to live with me now.’” I was like, wow, I wouldn’t have known that [20:20]. There’s a part of me that’s like, maybe I didn't need to know that, honestly. Now I do. That's fine. Writing the book, too, it was super cathartic. We were talking about kids. The first people I gave the book to when I was done, I was like, “Here.” I gave it to my daughters. It was like just – no matter if no one else reads this in the world, you are the two most important people. Like you were saying, the generational trauma. It’s just like, I want you to know this is a part of our family history. Also, more importantly, this is your dad. This is where – how I grew up. It’s led to some great conversations with my kids, with my brother, with pretty much any remaining family member. Just because so many of them were like, “Wow, I had no idea.” Or, “I knew some of it, but I didn't know your story.” Even though it was super vulnerable to put so much out there, the conversations I've had with pretty much everyone close to me, has probably brought me closer to them than I probably ever would have.

Casey Arrillaga: That's a beautiful answer. First of all, I love when you talk about self compassion, self forgiveness and just recognizing I was doing the best I could. Even if it wasn't pretty, I was doing the best that I could, and being able to see yourself in a compassionate light. Then, like you said, sparking those conversations. I'd encourage anyone listening to this to think about, what are the conversations that you never have that maybe you should have? Like you said, even just writing down questions. Even if you're not going to make a book out of it. Even if you're never going to do anything else with it, just to be able to ask each other those questions and be able to explore some of those topics. Like you said, they're not always pretty answers that we want to hear. At the same time, I like to think that the truth, at the end of the day, is going to serve us better. Rather than you going to your grave thinking, “Well, why did we move in with my grandmother?” Okay, there it was. Yeah, that's a scary truth to hear. Yet at the same time, it helps things make sense. I think the scariest things, especially with kids, are the things that we can’t add up; that never quite make sense. Being able to help them through and see what the honest truth is, that at least – I hate to use the word closure because I'm not a big fan of that idea. But I'm a big fan of the idea of being able to just settle something in our heart and say, “Okay, at least I know what really happened.”

Christopher Morris: Absolutely, the thing you just made me think of that I also really took away from those, again, those conversations I never would have had. When my uncle was telling me during his time as I'm writing the book, I was just saying, “Tell me about your dad.” This is my mom's brother, my mom, the alcoholic. He was telling me about their dad and how much he drank. How he would drink to the point of hallucination, go on the garage and be talking to golf clubs, and getting to the point where you're chasing him around with a shotgun because he’d just get so out of his mind drinking. I'd hear this. Of course, I knew my grandpa was an alcoholic, but not to this extent. That was really interesting. I came out of writing the book having more compassion for my mom. I’d already forgiven my mom and the alcoholism, the disease, but to really hear more, I’m like oh wow. Like me as a child, she grew up in this environment where she had an alcoholic father. That was something that I never would have had just – it was pretty almost weirdly healing to hear these stories about what my mom went through and be like oh, wow, of course. As you know, so many adult children of alcoholics grow up to be alcoholics themselves. Even though I intellectually knew that, to hear my mom's story and be like, oh, well gosh, of course. She had no model for a lot of this stuff. That's why she drinks. That gave me a little bit more – again, some contextual background for my mom. It was amazing.

Casey Arrillaga: Alright, that seems like a good place to take a quick break and hear a word from one of our sponsors... [Commercial]

Casey Arrillaga: ...Welcome back. Let's hear more of that interview with Christopher Morris. Sometimes as a weirdly wrapped gift of the experiences that we have, for instance, we could say coming out of all of this that your mom went through, probably as difficult of a circumstance growing up. She didn't have the benefit of getting checked into a hospital at 13 and running into a counselor who said, “Hey, by the way, there is a way out and here's what it looks like.” Even though we know that, especially working with adolescents, sometimes we're just planting a seed, right? We might just be saying something that isn't going to come to fruition for 10 years. At the same time, most people wouldn't look back and say, "Wow, what a blessing you went to this psych hospital.” Yet from what you're saying, your life might not be the same if you hadn't had that experience.

Christopher Morris: Yeah, that’s o true. I'm grateful for all of those experiences. I'm sure you get this, too. Many times people ask me, “If you could go back, would you take your mom's alcoholism away?” I'm like, “That's the hardest question to answer.” Because I think I'm the person I am, and as resilient as I am, and have done all that I have because of the hardships I’ve had to endure. All the darkness, as I like to call it, has made me appreciate the light so much more.

Casey Arrillaga: A subject that doesn't get discussed maybe enough is the idea of post traumatic growth. In fact, I can say to my clients – I'll write it on the board. If I'm teaching about post traumatic growth, I'll say, “Okay, I write post traumatic, what comes next?” They all go, “Stress disorder, PTSD.” I'm like, “And that's a very real thing. We need to look at that and how to heal from it. However, the most natural thing for our brain is to actually grow from trauma.” That doesn't mean hey, we wish people went through it, but just to recognize, we are built to heal and grow. Even the title of your book, ‘We Are All Made of Scars.’ Yeah, nobody gets through childhood unscathed, and probably shouldn't. If we did, then we're unprepared for anything that might happen in the world. How are we going to know how strong and resilient we are? Again, we don't wish these experiences on anyone, but to recognize all the ways that we have grown through that trauma and as a result of that trauma, inspired by that trauma, there can be a lot of gratitude for that. Speaking of gratitude, you talked about this a little bit in your relationship with your mom as it evolves. Like you said, most of the book takes place where you're 13 to 19. Your relationship with your mom evolves over that time, as anyone's would. There's more to the story that is kind of put as the epilogue to the book about how that relationship evolved towards the end of her life. Do you mind talking about that some?

Christopher Morris: Yeah, it's interesting because when things got really bad, I ended up joining the army. Then came back from the army, a new person, three years later, went to college, everything else. I come back. I was like 22 years old. During my 20s, my mom was still drinking heavily and living a couple hours away in Chicago. I just kept her at arm's length because I was still resentful. My whole goal was, okay, I want to just get the middle class existence. I want a happy family. I want kids. I want the dog and the house. I want normalcy. That's all I'm going for. It wasn't until I went to marriage counseling – because, of course, I finally got what I wanted. My life started spinning out because, of course, I've never had normal in my life. I was starting to be controlling and all the things that adults [28:19] alcoholics do, try to manage things that didn't need to be managed and super negative, things like that. We end up in marriage counseling, rightly so. Definitely needed marriage counseling. The marriage counselor is like, “Have you heard of Al-Anon? [28:32]?” I had never heard of that. Of course, started going to meetings and realized, wow, this is where I need to be. To have the laundry list of [28:42]. All that, that's background to say, finally going to the meetings and stuff finally gave me some more understanding of oh, wow, there's effects – long term effects of growing up in this environment. Which honestly, I always thought, I survived. Isn't that enough? I'm successful. I've got everything I wanted. Of course, my wiring was still stuck when I was a teenager. Going through the meetings, going through therapy really helped me reconcile with my mom. Again, hearing people talk about their parents and realizing, wow, so many adult children of alcoholics grow up to be alcoholics had started to change the perception of my mom in my mind. I was just like, oh, wow, okay. She did the same thing I did except when she was in her 30s, she started to drink heavily, whereas I started to be controlling, I started [29:31] alcoholism stuff. I reconciled with my mom a little bit. I started to talk to her more, had some great conversations as I was working the steps at al-Anon. It was pretty bittersweet. I swear months after we had – I get emotional thinking about it, but just talking on the phone and basically saying, “Mom, I forgive you. I know it wasn't your fault and disease.” This beautiful moment that you always wish you’d have, just with my mom. Then like two months later she passed away, just went to sleep, never woke up. I'm grateful that I found the program and therapy when I did because it was just – I’m glad that my mom and I left on good terms. She knew how I felt. She left knowing I loved her. We made up, so to speak. We had that moment together.

Casey Arrillaga: I’m so glad you had that. Really, a lot of people never get that. The idea that you did have the reconciliation, that you were able to find some peace with it. I think you referenced this in your book. The movie version might go that, okay, now you guys have [30:36] day to day work and the therapy, all that. It will be a movie therapy with one good session. Then it’ll be a montage of great life after that. We know life doesn’t always go in that direction. You did get to make peace, it sounds like, through self forgiveness and through being able to forgive her as well. That’s such a big and important part of your story.

Christopher Morris: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. The thing I forgot, which – another reason I wrote the book is so many memoirs and things like that around addiction are always from the addict’s perspective, with the person going through it. The thing about my story that is so sad, but it’s I made it out of it. But my mom, at the end, there is no happy ending where she’s – went to the perfect meeting, heard the perfect speaker and stopped drinking forever. She just slowly drank until she died. That’s the reality. Sadly, there are so many people that that’s what happens. Even now I go to open AA meetings and hear people share their story. I’m like, [31:38] there’s my mom’s story. Then boom, they have that moment where they went to the right meeting and they’ve hit their bottom, whatever. My mom never had that. I really wanted to share, as sad as it is, that story, too. Here’s the Al-Anon's experience strength and hope because often times, there is no happy ending with alcohol.

Casey Arrillaga: It’s true. That's true, really, any chronic disease. We recognize that, yes, a certain number of people who have a heart condition are going to die from that heart condition. They have diabetes, they’re going to die from the diabetes. We like to say, hey, everybody makes it out alive but realistically, it’s only a small percentage of people that ever get sober at all, let alone stay sober through the end of their lives. Statistically, that’s a smaller number of people. The good news is, it only takes one person in the family to make a change. I think your story really illustrates this. The whole family doesn’t have to get recovery. Do I hope they would? Of course, am I going to encourage it, especially doing the work that I do? Absolutely, but I recognize that sometimes, if the family comes in to do family work, maybe the person with the addiction is going to get it or maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s going to be a son, a daughter, a sibling or a parent who starts to grab onto recovery. It only takes that one person to shift the family dynamic. I can only imagine how this same struggle would play out if you had never gotten into recovery. How do you imagine that would’ve gone?

Christopher Morris: Oh, yeah, I think about that a lot because my life was definitely – three chapters was growing up with my mom, being an adult before recovery. Then I think about the last 12 years in recovery, and it has profoundly changed every single part of my life. I don’t think I would be as happy, for sure. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned in recovery. It’s like oh wow, I can really nurture my inner child. It’s okay. I can be 15-year-old Chris again, play arcade games and read comic books and stuff. It’s okay. It's fine. No one is going to judge me. I really nurture that inner child stuff. I’m very creative. I paint. I play music. Obviously, I write. I could be pretty silly with my kids and with my friends. That’s something which I’ll never give away, being able to experience joy. As I think about pre-recovery, I was in my head a lot of the time. I was very negative. I’d be the person like oh, that’s great, but – the glass half empty person. I feel like now I’m really focusing on the gratitude, which has been a part of my recovery. I do a gratitude journal every day. I pray every night. That’s the thing that I feel like, overtime, has slowly rewired my thinking in a positive way. I would not give that up. Yeah, I couldn’t imagine the type of person I would be without that.

Casey Arrillaga: Beautiful, let’s take another moment and hear from one of our sponsors. Then we’ll wrap up on the interview with Christopher Morris, author of ‘We Are All Made of Scars.’.... [Commercial]

Casey Arrillaga: ...Welcome back, let’s finish up our interview. It’s hard to imagine that you would’ve been able to have those beautiful moments towards the end with your mom if you hadn’t been in recovery yourself.

Christopher Morris: Absolutely, yeah, I [35:59] when I think about it. Oftentimes, I’d be in my 20s. My mom would call me. She’d be like, "Why don’t you want to talk to me?” I’d be like, “Mom, I’m still mad about everything you did.” I would just sometimes hang up on her. Now, again, it terrifies me. It wasn’t until recovery I was like, oh – it just gave me so much compassion and, like I said, forgiveness for my mom [36:19]. Yeah, I don’t know if I ever would have that. That makes me really sad, honestly.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, well, luckily you did. I’m going to put that out there again for anybody listening. If you’re a family member of somebody who struggles with addiction or any major mental health issue, to recognize that you don’t have to wait for your loved one to get better. Even if they don’t get better, you working on your recovery can improve that relationship, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with them. Even if they never get to that point, even if their disease does take them, things can still be better if you’re willing to work on your recovery. You’re one of the number of people that I’ve talked to over the years, some of my favorite people in recovery have been people who say, “Oh, I came into the program because I have a loved one who struggles.” Or a loved one who got sober, maybe they were sober 30 years. I’m still going to the program. They’ve passed away of natural causes a couple years ago. My first thought would be, well, why do you keep coming back? Well, in fact, is my life keeps getting better. I know, as a parent, and I'm going to ask you as a father if you feel the same way. If I knew that I was going to go down in flames but my daughter would be okay and she would be okay long after I was gone, and that’s what it would take, I would go for that deal. I would rather not go down in flames, of course. Just to know your kids are going to be okay is such a blessing. I wonder if maybe your mom was able to pick some of that up from you towards the end, to recognize that maybe you were going to be okay.

Christopher Morris: I hope so, yeah. I would do the same for my kids for sure. I know my mom even asked me, why the change? I was telling her about Al-Anon, adult children of alcoholics. Yeah, it led to so many good conversations. It also got me thinking about my grandma who lived to be 91. As I’m writing the book and stuff, similarly, she saw a change in me. I said, “Well, have you ever heard of Al-Anon?” She’s like, “Well.” She literally pulled out of her side chairs – she had one of the Daily Readers from Al-Anon. It was this weathered, [38:23] copy. She’s like, “Oh yeah.” She’s like, “I read this book every day.” I’m like, “Nana, I can’t believe it.” She starts telling me about Al-Anon. She’s like, “Well yeah, of course.” My mom’s dad, her ex-husband, was an alcoholic. I was just like, wow. To have that full circle moment with her was pretty beautiful, too. I was just like, of course. Because she was the most happy, cheery person. I think Al-Anon recovery gave her a little bit of that happiness and joy again.

Casey Arrillaga: I love that story. That is just beautiful. I guess I’d ask, as we’re maybe moving towards the runway a little bit here, what is something that you’d really want family members to take away from hearing you here and from reading your book?

Christopher Morris: Well, the biggest thing for sure is the thing that I wish I knew when I was a teenager going through this. Whether you’re a teenager, again, 30, 40, 50 and older, you’re not alone. I get choked up thinking about it. It felt so isolating to be in this “normal” suburban environment going through this chaos. Going to high school, everyone else is just complaining about oh, my dad didn’t give me gas money for this and that. I felt so alone. It took me 20 years until my first Al-Anon meeting to sit in a room with people, basically, telling my story. Gosh, it’s just the most profound experience to be like, “Wow, there’s all of these other people that are basically telling different versions of my story.” Just know you’re not alone. Whether it's therapy, Al-Anon, adult children of alcoholics, there’s so many groups and people out there that are just ready to help. I think about the first few meetings and all the people that would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s my phone number. Give me a call. If you’re having a rough day, give me a call. I was like, “I don’t even know you, what?” Sure enough, pretty soon you start calling people. They’re calling you. The support system that I’ve gained, I wish I had that when I was in the thick of this. I go to Al-Anon now. Again, I have no active addiction in my life, but I have this long list of people that I can call or I can go to a meeting. It’s a long way of saying, I think, just knowing that you’re not alone. There’s so many other people that have their version of your story and want to help you, or just [40:38] when you need it.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s so beautiful. Chris, where can people find you, find your book and contact you if they wanted to?

Christopher Morris: Well, the book is out, ‘We Are All Made of Scars’. You can go to weareallmadeofscars.com. It’s on Amazon. If people want to find me on social media, I’m just @morrischris. Yeah, I’d love to hear from folks. That's the coolest thing since the book has come out, because I work in the financial industry, there’s not a lot of people writing about these vulnerable stories about growing up with addiction. It’s been great the last few months to have just so many people I know and don’t know, basically sharing, again, like we were talking about, sharing their story and connecting with them in a way that I never would have a chance to before.

Casey Arrillaga: Great stuff, well, Chris, it has been fantastic having you on the show. Really enjoyed reading your book. Again, not in the sense of gee, neat that that happened to you, but so well written and being able to, like you said, just draw people into the story. Highly recommend it, ‘We Are All Made of Scars’, and hopefully we’ll have a chance to have you back on the show sometime.

Christopher Morris: Yeah, thank you so much.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you.

Casey Arrillaga: 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 all 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 that 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.