Personal Essay: The Effects Of Addiction And Substance Abuse

When I first experienced the effects of addiction I was overwhelmed, it was like a wave of emotions crashed down on my shoulders and swept me into a void of fear and frustration. I watched my mother try everything in her power to stop it and yet our loved one still continues with that dangerous dependency. The fixation on substances caused the destruction of family and psychological impair.

Guilt, worry, and anger were reactions of my cousins when they found out about their mother's addiction. They have cried, yelled, and begged their loved one to seek help, but nothing could curb her craving. My aunt like many other addicts had reversed roles with her three older children and when they were younger, put them in risky situations for narcotics. Like most children with an addict parent, my cousins were ignored, their needs were rarely met, and they were constantly left at home without adult supervision. Today, they still struggle with her addiction and the youngest of the three has gotten in trouble with …show more content…
Their addiction has taken up their entire thought process; there would be no love nor compassion, just the longing for narcotics or alcohol. Most addictions start because the person was a victim of a tragedy or they didn’t want to deal with something. At the age of sixteen, my aunt had her first child after a classmate got her intoxicated and then forced himself on her. From then on she struggled with men in her life, at one point her boyfriend at the time constantly injected meth into her body. However, having experienced like these trails, didn’t give her an excuse to continue her drug abuse. In the past, my mother has tried to explain the pain her has caused her children to have, but similar to the fair share of addicts, she shifted the blame to her parents and my mother. If she had known a better way to cope, my aunt would have improved and had been a better mother to her