When Addicted Parents Come Back

As a Child Protective Services social worker, I encountered drug addicts whose behavior was so troubling it was hard to fathom they could ever be capable of helping their children whose childhoods they had seemingly destroyed.  When a mother is driving her child around in the backseat of a car with an active meth lab in the trunk, it’s a real challenge to believe she could ever contribute in a meaningful way.  We think kids are better off without the addict parent—and they are sometimes, especially if significant abuse occurred—but I’ve learned they aren’t always better off without the recovered addict parent.

The removal of children from their homes was sometimes unavoidable when I worked as a Child Protective Services (CPS) social worker.  When I realized that I never assessed a parent’s childhood in foster care as a positive part of their life story, I started asking myself why I would request a foster care placement for any child if I could come up with any other option.  But there was one issue that was very hard for me to work around: parental drug abuse. I’m not referring to casual and intermittent drug use here. Instead, I’m referencing significant hard-core addiction that results in severe neglect and child endangerment in various forms.

We talk a lot about if or when to terminate parental rights, but we don’t frequently discuss what happens when parents get clean and come back after the State has moved out of their lives. I work as a therapist in a children’s psychiatric facility now, and a phenomenon I’ve been lucky enough to witness is drug-addicted parents recovering and returning to the lives of the children they’ve lost either through termination of parental rights or other court-ordered restrictions on their ability to see them. 

It’s surprising how little children know about why they were taken from their parents.  They often know generalities but not specifics, and the gritty details are both what they need to understand and what we don’t want to tell them.  Instead, we say vague things like, “Your parents made bad choices” to save them from the painful truth without recognizing that they are already living the painful truth. In our valiant efforts to avoid hurting their feelings we’ve hurt their spirits. Our cryptic explanations often lead to a child’s imagination running wild before reaching the inevitable conclusion that it’s all their fault.  Kids want to know what anybody would want to know about their history: How did I get here? What exactly did my parents do that led to me not being able to see them?  Why did they make those choices? Did they ever want me back? Did they even try? Where are they now? Would they talk to me and answer these questions I have?

We’re hesitant to give addicted parents the opportunity to explain themselves because they’ve behaved badly once and we don’t want them to do it again.  We see the devastation that addiction has delivered onto the child—disorganized attachment styles, hypervigilance, extreme anger outbursts, confusion, abandonment, low-self-concept and self-worth, interpersonal relationship issues, no clue how to have their needs met—and our own fear and contempt prevents us from understanding that the people in the best position to fix the problem are the people who created it. 

I always work to give my clients the fullest access to their story.  If the option is available, my favorite therapeutic tool is to facilitate family therapy sessions where parents who have missed years of their children’s lives due to drug addiction explain the circumstances around the removal or lack of contact. This is more than just sobriety. If they are in a place to accept full responsibility and genuinely want to help their child heal, I ask that they give a true and honest account of what happened.  We lay it all on the table—the parent’s painful history, what led to addiction, why they lost contact with their child, what they regret–and it’s beautiful because children deserve the chance to know their story and parents deserve the chance to tell it.  The benefits for the child are immeasurable because the most healing words spoken can be, “What happened is not your fault.  It’s mine.”  Bravery is owning up to all the ways you wrecked your child’s life when you were high.

As a CPS worker, I met parents so lost to addiction that it seemed they had no earthly hope for redemption. As a therapist in a children’s psychiatric hospital, I’ve met recovered addicts who turned out to be the difference makers for their children.  The results can be so profound—both for the child and the parents–that I’m often left wondering how many biological parents would be willing to do this if given the chance.  Not every parent wants to and not every parent should, but what about the ones who can and will?  Even if they recover too late in the eyes of the law, what could happen if the possibility of reconciliation was available later? What if sober birth parents weren’t left to scour social media for some glimpse of their child but instead could trust the State to mediate their efforts when they have recovered? What if prospective adoptive parents understood that they might need the biological parent one day and were informed of the benefits and drawbacks of allowing this to happen? What if we stopped acting like adoption solves everything and start making allowances for the child to have access to all the chapters of their story when the time is right? What if we embraced the notion that the most lost among us are capable of change?

Too often adoptive parents are left to navigate the whitewater of their child’s mental health journey on their own with the help of whatever therapist takes their insurance, and this trek can become harrowing.  If the children are cycling through psychiatric hospitals because of their traumatic past but the biological parent has become stable, their reunion in a therapeutic setting is an option we have to consider.  The key words are therapeutic setting.  Casually meeting your bio family as allowed by your adoptive family but never being offered a solid explanation for what happened is benevolent on the surface but a mire of confusion underneath. 

Traumatized children can have a strong reaction to seeing the source of their discontent—their biological parents—and we tend to become almost punitive in our response.  In a kneejerk reaction, we view the outburst as a signal that contact with the biological parent is a wrong choice instead of seeing the child’s stress response as part of the grieving process.  Our discomfort as the child works through their pain and confusion isn’t the child’s problem, it’s ours.  And as we are navigating the child’s hurt, we are also wading through the parent’s guilt.   We have to facilitate these conversations with compassion and understanding because there is suffering on both sides.

An adoptive mother once told me, “We can’t pretend that biological parents do not exist.” But we can and we do, even if it’s not logical. There is no timeline for recovery and there’s also no guarantee it will occur. We don’t want to terminate parental rights prematurely, but we also don’t want children languishing in foster care for years waiting for sobriety that might never happen. We have to broaden our approach and provide holistic care that extends far past the courtroom into the wild expanse of life that happens after.