HOW TO WRITE ABOUT LIVING IN A HOME WHERE THERE IS SUBSTANCE ABUSE

The process of writing about living in a home where there is substance abuse is a delicate task especially because you are dealing with real live characters in your story. The writing process is personal for everyone, however, one thing is for certain, living under the same roof as someone with a strong addiction can shape the way you see life.
There are many aspects to write about here. I am going to use a young boy named Jamie, the victim of an alcoholic father, as an example to describe some of the areas to explore as you write about these difficult times.
1.                  Predictability - In your writing you can use a catch phrase to indicate when you knew things were going to go haywire. Every time Jamie’s dad, who was posted in Italy during WW1, started singing ‘Arrivederci Roma’ the family knew they were in for one hellova weekend. Every time you introduce your catch phrase your reader will be drawn into your anxiety as they feel the tension that you felt.  ‘The door slammed!’ ‘The bottle clinked!’
2.                  Deceit - Here you can write about i) The substance user’s denial and deceit ‘I promise to...’, ‘It will never happen again...’ ‘I have stopped ...’ and ii) Your own lies - to cover up, to pretend, to save face, to avoid shame. You can also describe the barriers built from the lies within the family and lies that saved or destroyed. ‘Jamie told his friends his father was dead.’
3.                  Neglect and Abandonment - I will sum that up by a profound statement made by Jamie as a grown-up. ‘I used to run away and hide in the storm drain at the bottom of the garden hoping someone would come and look for me. No one ever did. Sometimes I feel like I’m still sitting in that storm drain.’
4.                  The Waiting – An interesting way to describe this is by using a poetic style; e.g. an anaphora, starting each sentence with the same word or phrase. Waiting for the explosions ... Waiting for storms to blow over ... Waiting to have prayers answered ... Waiting to grow up and leave.
5.                  Solace – Write about your place of solace; a secret place, with friends, in church, in mood changing drugs, in nature, in the arms of someone.
6.                  If you had Faith, what was it? Faith in your ‘healthy’ parent? Your God?
7.                  Explore your love in your writing – Was there something deep down in the alcoholic that you loved?
8.                  And lastly, write a letter to the alcoholic describing a) how you saw them with the substance abuse and what you observed as the alcoholic fought his secret war and b) how you saw them without the substance abuse.
Writing about this difficult period in your life can be very challenging but at the same time your prose and poetry may become a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’ A. Einstein.