: John Chupka, Joyce Chupka, Jamie Chupka
: It Went Without Saying A Family's Journey from Addiction to Recovery
: The Troy Book Makers
: 9781614681298
: 1
: CHF 4.60
:
: Angewandte Psychologie
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
It Went Without Saying invites the reader into a riveting story told by a mother, father and daughter-a story of their struggle with the roots of addiction. The reader discovers, along with the authors, how the addiction begins to take hold of each of them and grows into a threat so ominous that it almost destroys them.

ONE

The Beast Is Real

JOYCE: On the day Jamie was born, I promised her I would protect her from the evils of the world. I would be her shield from harm. What I came to realize was that I could never protect her from the demons she created in her mind—the demons that became real and almost consumed her.

When Jamie was ten, she became enthralled with the moviePoltergeist, a horror movie about a beast who took a little girl, Carol Ann, from her living room while she watched TV. Jamie loved that movie. She watched it over and over. She was particularly taken by the strange little psychic who helped the parents rescue their daughter from the beast. The woman had a voice so peculiar that one had to strain to understand what she was saying. Jamie could do a perfect imitation of that voice and she loved to tease me by mimicking one of the psychic’s speeches.

She would say,“I don’t know whatever’s over this house, but it’s strong enough to punch a hole in this world and take your daughter away from you. It keeps Carol Ann close to it and away from the spectral light. It lies to her, it tells her things only a child would understand. It has been using her to restrain the others. To her, it is simply another child. To us, it is the beast.”

“Stop, Jamie,” I’d say.“It’s horrible and scary.” But it was a little prank she loved to play. And we could laugh and dismiss it because, after all, it was just a movie. It wasn’t real. But something extremely powerful and terrifying really did reach into our lives and take our daughter away from us. And there was no way to dismiss it. When Jamie was 14, a beast took hold of her life—and it was real, very, very real.

The Beast had a name. Its name was Addiction.

As I look at Jamie now, I can hardly believe how close The Beast came to taking her forever, how it almost destroyed her. It is painful to acknowledge how she lied and stole and cheated and hurt everyone around her. Mostly, it’s painful to remember how often she hurt herself while we tried in vain to save her. And while it’s almost unbearable to reveal this, I must admit that at the end, we started to plan her funeral.

I always believed that love was powerful enough to cure anything. I thought that if you loved someone with all your heart, that love would be reason enough to want to live. I deeply believed my love was strong enough to keep my daughter alive. But I was wrong. The Beast that was consuming her didn’t respond to that love. In fact, it was repelled by our love, as a vampire is repelled by light. At the height of Jamie’s struggle with The Beast, she told us our love was killing her. The more we told her how much we cared for her, the louder The Beast spoke to her of unworthiness.

So we came to the point of surrender. The strongest to