Q&A with Catherine Chadwick
Q: Can you start by telling us a little about yourself? (Background, profession, personal journey)
A: My brother and I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, we both went to catholic school starting in kindergarten, I attended Catholic school until high school, James lasted until 6th grade.
After high school I proceeded onto UMass Lowell for psychology, James went to the tech for plumbing and became a plumber after he graduated high school. I have been working in mental health for 10 years now, I mentor and coach troubled youth and teens working to empower them to take control of their mental health and healing journeys as they move into young adulthood.
I have always been very curious and passionate about psychology and health and healing in general which has lead me to my profession and my entrepreneurial endeavors over the years; starting a podcast on the topic of sibling loss, becoming a certified yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and soon to be fully certified breathwork facilitator.
My passion for these topics supported me immensely through the years of grief after losing my brother to addiction, and ultimately these interests are what supported me to get sober before losing him and to stay sober after we lost him.
Q: Could you share how addiction has personally impacted your life or the life of someone close to you?
A: Addiction and mental health, like for most of us who have struggled with it, runs in my family. I struggled when I was younger in my college years, at that point in my life my mental health and depression hit rock bottom after a traumatic experience at college compounded on by a devastating loss.
My drinking and partying got out of control and created a lot of problems for me, socially, financially, familial, etc. The ugly truth is I am lucky I never killed anyone or myself driving drunk and to this day I am embarrassed by this truth but I’ve learned we must face our ugly truths to heal them.
For all the ways I struggled it seemed my brother had that predisposition for hell raising even more than I did. My brother was a typical ADHD boy, very sweet and compassionate and nearly always getting into some kind of trouble; usually doing something impulsive and a little reckless he thought was hilarious.
As we both got older that predisposition for depression and impulsive decisions translated into social drinking/drugging and then into self medicating. Like many, it started with weed in adolescence, eventually drinking got added into the mix as he got into junior high and high school, and before any of us really knew what was happening he was struggling with pills, Xanax primarily.
I started experimenting with substances later than my brother, but I need to stress that didn’t matter, I still developed a problem due to my biological disposition. I watched my parents desperately try to save my brothers life for 5-6 years, forcing him into a program, pleading with him to stop due to the increase in deaths due to fentanyl poisoning, you name it they tried it; years of watching him slowly kill himself and dilute himself into thinking “not me.”
Addiction took my brother from me long before he died though; not because he was soulless or dead inside, which you do see with some people struggling with addiction, no James was always his sweet kind hearted self, and I know that’s why he used. Self medicating the demons he struggled with in his heart and mind, we did not have the easiest childhood (by no stretch was it the worst either) but this world was not made for soft compassionate people, especially not soft compassionate little boys.
So I say addiction took my brother from me before he died because it just about destroyed our relationship; I loved and will always love my brother unconditionally, but the contempt and hatred I had for his addiction and the man it was making him (a man I know he did not truly in his heart want to be) made it really hard for me to be around him.
The dangerous situations he was putting himself, his girlfriend, my parents, and myself in made it hard for me to balance the love and hope I had for him and the disdain I had for the way his addiction controlled him and was beginning to control my family. Being around him the last few years he was here was bitter sweet, the good moments were a gift and they were really good, but the bad moments were traumatic and heart shattering until all of our worst earth shattering fear came true and he died from fentanyl, from a fake pill sold to him by a childhood friend.
It’s taken me years to get to a point where I finally feel like I have my feet back under me, I think of James every day since losing him I try to live for him and use the pain as fuel. Fuel to take care of myself deeply and unwaveringly, fuel to take care of my community and family, fuel to speak on the things I know factored into my brothers addiction and ultimately his death that we do not talk enough about in our society.
To boil it down I would say addiction controlled most of my 20s, destroyed my finances and many friendships, it has broken my family we will all be forever missing a piece of our hearts, and lastly addiction has empowered me. I would like to stress you do not need to go through addiction yourself or with a loved one to become empowered, but if you have the misfortune of dancing with addiction in your life you have a choice to stand up and fight back.
Q: What advice would you give to mothers who are struggling with their own addiction or are supporting a loved one through theirs?
A: If you’re struggling the most straight forward advice I have is seek help, know your family and true friends love you, and lastly please believe in yourself; I know how deep addiction can get its claws in, but you can win this fight if you really want to. For supporting a loved one I will ask you to remember balance, I understand you want to “save them,” but all we can do as their support system is empower them to save themselves.
Moreover, you cannot do that if you are making yourself sick with worry or over extending yourself; some of this journey is there’s to face alone. Families, please lean on each other, your community and the resources available to you, and lastly I would highly encourage all parties to seek your own therapy for unbiased support that is focused (even if only for one hour a week), on YOUR needs.
Sometimes a good cry or scream is necessary; whether working towards recovery or supporting a loved one please know you do not have to have it together all the time, the breakthroughs usually are birthed from the breakdowns.
Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during your journey with addiction, either personally or as a supporter?
A: Personally when I was struggling the biggest challenge was looking at myself in the mirror and realizing this behavior of self medicating was all coming from a place of very low self worth, and then being willing to keep looking at that day in and day out; pushing through how uncomfortable it was, to heal from the inside out.
Addiction is biological, yes, but in my personal experience as well as professional, addiction needs something meaty to dig its claws into; like low self worth birthed from unresolved trauma. So while it is one of the biggest hurdles, I would encourage anyone struggling with addiction to sit with the idea of doing the deep emotional heavy lifting as I like to call it. For myself, I got a therapist and started where I was comfortable, I knew 12 step programs were not for me, and I built myself and my healthy practices and routines up from there.
As a loved one, the hardest challenge is knowing and accepting you can’t fight this battle for them, much as you want to. You can stand in battle behind them, weapons drawn, but those struggling with addiction need to lead the charge.
I’ll be honest I never quite found a real balance with this one, I was still a kid myself when it really started getting serious with James, I was a 19 year old sophomore in college struggling in silence. When my brother was heading to his first rehab at 16 years old on New Year’s Eve, I was passed on the floor of some collage party house after sobbing all night about my parents call to inform me he was heading to rehab.
I woke up the next morning all too aware of my cringe worthy moments from the night prior and the fact that James was locked up alone in a rehab and I didn’t even get to say goodbye or tell him I loved him. By the time I got my shit together James was pretty far down the path of addiction, drinking every day at work (which is a statement in and of itself about the types of men/business whom employed him and the culture they allowed and participated in the work place) and partying most nights, I did my best showing up when I could and when I didn’t have the capacity to I tried to honor that knowing I couldn’t pour from an empty cup, and if I did it would create resentment, not something I wanted to fester in my relationship with my baby brother.
And I’ll be honest, that in itself was a huge challenge, learning my boundaries and how to balance my boundaries and needs with my desire to show up as a big sister. I leaned on my friends, my partner at the time, my therapist, and my health and spiritual practices/routines. And though it is very hard, I just want to name that setting boundaries is ok, that doesn’t make you a bad sibling/mom/family member.
Q: How did you find the strength and resources to keep going during the toughest moments?
A: Well as a daughter I wanting to support my parents both while he was alive and in our grieving processes, I saw the devastation and heartbreak in my parents and still to this day do. While James was alive the strength came from A. Not wanting to be another reason for my parents/family to worry, that’s what helped me clean up my act as well as being sick of my own crap, but B. I wanted to be the support for all of them like they were for me my whole life, while we were all navigating his addiction/healing best we could. Once we lost James I would say my driving force wasn’t so much strength as it was pure blind rage.
I was enraged at the systems that failed my brother (and so many) repeatedly, enraged at my brother and his foolish choices, enraged at the world for continuing to spin when my and my families entire worlds were falling apart and lastly I was deeply enraged that there were minimal resources for siblings specifically. I survived because I endeavored on a deeper self healing journey than I ever expected simply out of spite for the broken systems and powers that be, if there weren’t many resources for me to help myself then I was damn well determined to figure it out and carve out my own answers and truth.
There were and still are few resources for siblings dealing with loss, but that is changing, and I’ve been lucky enough to create a resource with one of my very good friends and I aspire to continue on that path carving out spaces for those of us often forgotten about in the after math of loss. And I want to name that I actually think it is ok, if in those first few months or year of grief your driving force is not love or strength.
I think it is very normal to struggle to access those emotional vibrations of being while grieving, so its ok if rage, or desperation to just survive or help another like yourself or your loved on is your driving force at any point in your grieving journey; because it is all apart of the healing process, we need to feel it to heal it to let it go.
My strength was born of my Irish stubbornness, knowing I would not lay down and let this disease take me down too, much as I wanted to just lie down and die with him. And daily I draw my strength from my brother, knowing I want to always make him proud, because I was and am so proud to be his big sister.
Q: What message would you like to share with mothers who feel isolated or hopeless in their battle against addiction?
A: For my fellow siblings dealing with a sibling struggling with addiction just know that you are not responsible for saving your sibling, we are wired biologically for this, especially us older siblings, and it is beautiful but can be a detrimental belief to embody while supporting a loved one through addiction; as my supervisor used to tell me, take your cape off.
Take care of yourself, and do what you can, support them where you can and love them deeply because we never know how life will play out. For my siblings going through grief, I am sorry there are so few resources out there for us, it can feel isolating when there are countless books on grief and loss for other familial relations but so very few for us siblings; when that is one of the most formative connections and relationships in our lives, even more than our parents perhaps because we often assume (or like James and I were always told) we will have our siblings with us long after our parents leave us.
Know you are not alone, and as I have mentioned there are some resources out there for siblings and that pool is growing, I encourage you to look into those I have listed. My last bit of advice for anyone is to let yourself feel what is coming up for you, whether your loved one is alive or has passed.
Feel your feelings and know that healing, and that also means the stages of grief, are not linear or consecutive; you will have up days and you will have down days and you will never stop missing them. They will forever be with you in your heart, and in my experience if you can open your heart and mind to the possibility of it, your loved one might just send you a little sign they are ok and with you always, guiding and protecting you now the way you tried to do for them in their life.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience with addiction or your journey through recovery?
A: I would love to touch on two things, one we are all so much resilient than we know or believe, I
learned this truly only through losing James.
And second, I would like to spend some time talking about how siblings get forgotten in this process, while the sibling is alive and after they pass.
