Parent of an addicted child shares the lessons he learned

Hey everybody, and welcome back to Qualified, the place where incredible people share their stories of overcoming great adversity and loss, to inspire you and give you hope. I'm Michelle Heaton. As parents, we always want the best for our kids. We teach them what we know and learn the rest as we go. We strive to pass along the right values and ethics, and we do our best to provide them with the best education, the best neighborhoods, and the best friends. And we want them to have a seamless life, free from poverty, pain, heartache, and when things go wrong, we hurt. And then we do our best to console and support and be present in any way needed. But was there ever a time in your life when you felt helpless to provide a solution for your child? When Try as you might, you simply didn't know what to do? Have you ever said or done something that you couldn't undo? Well, my guest today is a father who had the same aspirations for his kids. And he did everything in his power to save his oldest son from a life of drugs and drug addicted friends, only to lose the battle when he finally lost his son. His name is Darryl Rogers, and he's a bereaved father. But today, he's also an author, a speaker, and a family recovery coach. Darrell had to learn the hard way the proper responses in dealing with an addicted child. And today he helps others learn the lessons he wished he'd known then. Welcome to Qualified Darryl.

Thank you, Michelle. So good to be here.

Great. Well, Darryl, let's start by talking about Chase. Tell us a little bit about the young man he was and then also about the changes you saw that gave you a warning that something wasn't right.

Okay. Chase was a great kid growing up, never gotten any kind of trouble was quiet, easily going shy. He was diagnosed ADHD fairly early on, in Leslie translated to a few focus issues in the classroom. But, you know, I've worked with kids a lot in through ministry in church. And also I had a nonprofit for a while that was a camp for boys for about five years, and summer camp. And, you know, looked at the whole spectrum of add ADHD, and he was very, very much on the lower end of that spectrum. But like I said, a few focus issues, gave a kid a funny, a really interesting, different sense of humor. Had a lot of friends, everybody liked Chase, he could be the life of the party at time, so to speak. So great. Edie wouldn't tell a lie if he knew it was going to get him in trouble that matters. He was always very truthful with us, in a very athletic. Some of the things I think that went along with his, with his ADHD was that he was just his motor never quit. When the other kids playing on the teams against him would all get tired, he was just getting started good. And very good hand eye coordination, very agile, very quick. was really in about the middle of a 10th grade that Chase began to, for the first time he was failing a class he was failing Spanish. And his other grades were slipping, he was beginning to become a little bit rebellious at home. And there were just all sorts of warning signs like that I was seeing and I was trying to caught him in a few lies. And like I said earlier, I had never had never lied before. And I was struggling with how to handle that. tried talking to him and tried different approaches. Nothing seemed to be working. And that was probably really, that was the beginning of me knowing that something was right.

Well, that must have been so difficult for you and your wife as well to see the changes and chase. So what was going through your mind at that time about how this could be happening and why?

Well, you know, I tell people a lot of times that you know, we went through the terrible two's and all of that and and then we hit this phase where I started thinking, I think I got this parenting thing figured out. And then the teenage years came along, and then chase began having these struggles, and it was really a little bit later for him because it was really was already in high school, you know, before, like I said, 10th grade before, there were any warning signs that I recognized. And I was really grasping for straws and thinking, Well, where did this come from? I feel like I'm starting all over again, you know, and really scared, didn't know what I was going to do to solve this problem and just really digging deep trying to get some answers.

Yeah, I'll bet that is a scary feeling for a parent. So you told me you learned that he was actually running in a circle of friends that weren't the best influence on him. And that also worried to what happened next.

He did go to a military school. And he was there from the middle of his junior year through graduation that brought his grades up while he was there, and a really good year of senior year of football there. And then there was a school that was interested in the kind of play football for them. And so unfortunately, it wasn't long after he arrived there that he began to hang out with people who are abusing drugs and alcohol. And pretty soon he was he was doing the same thing. And I was snooping around, you know, spying on him a little bit. And definitely, I knew something was up, I already had my suspicions. While he was at the military school, I saw some other warning signs there. He really only lasted into early on the second semester of his freshman year of college, and then he dropped out and came back home.

I'm very sorry to hear that. Certainly No parent wants to learn that their child is using drugs and hanging out with others who do. So you said you learned about this new lifestyle by doing some snooping around. And that's how you were able to confirm it. Can you tell us just a little about the so called snooping you dead?

Oh, my goodness, I went way overboard. Okay. And I wouldn't recommend this snooping to any parents, I think you will discover things that you don't want to discover. And it's really an intrusion of their privacy, you know. So I sort of, I'm really good at finding things out that I want to find out when it comes to the internet. And when he was getting ready to go, I bought the laptop that he was going to use at college. And I said, Well, this is my laptop. So I put Keylogger software on the laptop, installed Keylogger software on his on his cell phone.

Can you tell us how Keylogger software works?

Well, you can see every keystroke, every keystroke I could, you know, you know, well, the software at the time, wouldn't show you everything. But you could put in certain key words for it to look for, you know, and it would it would alert you to those when those came up. And then you can see conversations, you could see a lot of things and like I said more information than you really wanted.

And you said he looked at his Facebook posts too. Is that right?

Yeah, the social media too. Yeah. I don't think I was logged into the back. I may have been because I've had the keylogger I've had some of his passwords, probably, uh, may have actually logged into the back of some of his and seen some of his conversations on social media. I know if I did that. It wasn't everything. It certainly was. I'm sure he had Snapchat and things like that, that I didn't see, you know, but but Yeah, way too much information.

And I think a lot of parents would be tempted to do those things just to try to find out what was going on thinking we might be able to put a stop to the behavior. Do you think Chase was aware of the snooping you were doing?

He never, he never said anything to me about it. But he's pretty. He was pretty tech savvy, too. And he he caught on somehow he figured it out. Yeah. Well, you know, it was selling is ADHD medication to some of the students there that didn't have, you know, because they felt like, oh, this will help me with my focus. And I said, and I confronted him on that he didn't know how I knew, at first, you know, and I said, Look, this is illegal, what you're doing is very illegal, you can get in some serious trouble for this. And I think it wasn't too long after that. And he basically reset his phone, you know, pulled the SIM card or whatever, he did something and reset his phone and I lost access to, to all of that.

Wow. Okay. So you said it got to the point where he was in real trouble, and you knew you needed to do something. What was the first step that you took in trying to help Chase overcome his addiction?

Well, you know, I got involved a little bit while he was still at college because he had dropped out, but he was staying on the campus still with friends. And I reached out to the dean and I wasn't getting any action right off and had to kind of put a little pressure on her like, okay, you know, this is a serious problem in they did eventually take some action to get him off campus. And he came back home immediately gravitated to a really rough crowd here at home that he was very short period of time, and moved out a bench late and I was keeping up with him online. And just, you know, not snooping anymore, just watching his posts. And he, you know, I could tell he was very thin. I mean, he wasn't a real big kid to begin with. And now he's Railton pale, glassy eyed, I would see some pictures that he would pose to it, like he and a lot of his friends were holed up in a hotel room that like they're all strung out on drugs. And that was my perception. And I'm pretty sure it was accurate. And you know, so I was really, really, really scared at that point, like, he's going to end up in prison, or did you know, and I began to search the internet for intervention companies, didn't know anything about interventions had run across the TV show a few times never really watched it, just just enough to get the idea knew what it was. And an interventionist came here to our house and did an intervention poor Chase. And that was a really, really scary thing, I'm just gonna tell you, but we were able to get him into treatment through that intervention.

Good, good. What was the program like, and how long was his stay there?

It was a 30 day program. And, you know, this is the thing I would tell parents about that. There are different ways you can go here, but I would really look for longer term programs, because 30 days are really just getting to the point where their brain is healing, and they're getting kind of beginning to get a foundation, but they really need a year long program, or longer to unpack some of the problems that are going on underneath the surface, you know, to try to try to get everything straightened out to give them a foothold and a good chance to, to avoid a relapse. Now, insurance companies, a lot of times will only pay for a 30 day program, there are some programs that are less expensive, that still think are good programs, you know, if you're doing a year long program, that's that's, you know, not a ministry or something like that is probably it's going to be expensive. And in insurance, there's a good chance they won't, they will only, you know, pay for part of it, or maybe none of it. So, but in the long run, if you're going to pay for treatment, you need to really look that he came out of that he came out of that 30 Day Program. And what they have is there's some stock, get things that you can do and insurance will sometimes pay for some of that. And so what he did, he went into a halfway house. And he bounced around the several different ones in South Florida, where he was in over a period of about nine months. And most of them were poorly managed. The last one he was at was really seemed like a pretty good house. And he was there for a while, but he came back home. And when he got back home, he was doing a lot better. We felt like we had the old Chase back in when I say we you know, he was good friends, us other family members, this food chase that we knew. And he got a job. He was going IOP intensive outpatient care two nights a week. So things were looking good. But, you know, I knew there were times when he was bored, and especially being ADHD, and I just felt this weight on my shoulders to keep trying to keep him entertained. And I couldn't do it because I had things I had to do to you know, as I couldn't entertain him, you know, all the time. And I was I was trying to look for you know, like, Okay, what do you want to do career wise? You know, I can help you get into, you know, you could go the military route, and he wasn't interested in that. And I said, Well, you know, there's there are other options. I can help you get into the community college here. You can learn a tray. There's a lot of different things you could do. But so eventually, it was probably another eight or nine months he eventually he realized he relapsed. I didn't know anything about addiction. At the time. I didn't understand anything about relapse. I didn't understand my proper role in the recovery process as a parent. And in hindsight letting him move back in was not a good, not a good plan. And anyway, he he came to me one day and said, Dad, you know, I'm headed in a bad direction again. So I know I can tell. I mean, I could just sense it, you know. And he said, I'm hanging around a rough crowd. Again, I don't know how to get away from these people. But I know I need to their bad influence on me. And so I've taken a job transfer to Florida back to the area where I was in treatment, and told me when he was planning to leave, and, and I told my wife, Kim, she made him promise he would come by and have a meal as

well, so hard, he was doing better. And then your gut told you things were going in the wrong direction again, and now he wants to leave. I must have been so hard on your family and you knowing that everything was completely out of your control. So that was the evening of May 29 2014. Tell us what happened at night.

Well, that's a day I'll never forget. You know, that's that date is just burned into my mind. Because, you know, like I said, Kim and my wife Kim had made his promise he would come by and eat with us. And before leaving for Florida when he didn't show up. It was getting late in the afternoon. Kim was getting upset thinking that Chase had left for Florida without even stopping by, say goodbye. And we had all moved to the living room. Kim and I and our younger son Justin, Justin was in the eighth grade at the time. Yeah, we're just kind of hanging out chatting a little bit. sharpen our phones, and I had a phone call from one of my friends. And I decided to go outside to have my phone conversations. I wouldn't disturb them. And so I'm standing out in the front lawn. It was like it said May 29 2014 Beautiful day. I'm standing out there talking to my friend on the phone when a police cruiser pulled up to the curb in primary house. The officer got out of his car, I noticed he had a clipboard in his car and he started up our driveway. And I told my friend a better go apparently chases him some kind of trouble he'd never been any trouble with the law. But he was headed in a dark direction and so I went to meet that officer there in our driveway and that's where he told me um this Roger has been a bad wreck count on i 40 And your son Chase died at the same so you know, right there where we were standing many many many times almost in that exact same spot I had thrown chase the football you know, with throw it just out of reach just to watch him use his athleticism make diving catches and you know we had right there in the front yard kick the ball around. And all that's kind of coming back to you in the moment, you know, is kind of how it was, for me at least and and there was a little bit of confusion in the beginning as to which house he was at because there were several people in the car. And he thought I was one of the other periods and then we got all that straightened out. But now. Now my mind is like racing like once he told me Chase was dead. Now I'm thinking back to that confusion. And I'm thinking he made a mistake. You know, I didn't hear him, right. And so I asked him, Is he dead? And he just kind of dropped? He said, Yes, sir. He asked me if there was any family inside that I would like for him to notified and I told him, I believe that's my job. Let me do that. And, and he asked me if he could go in with me for support. And it wasn't looking forward to it, obviously. But I just felt like that responsibility fell on my shoulder. So we went in through the front door and he followed me came in behind me and I told Kim and Justin are younger son, of course we all cried for a long time. And once we got settled down a little bit, we began to ask the officer questions about what had happened. He get he didn't have a lot of details that day. As the weeks went by, we began to get a little bit more information.

I am so very very sorry for your loss, Darrell. And I know you'll never forget that sad moment for the rest of your life. You recount a lot of details in your book. But one of the things that stood out to me is that only a month later, it was Father's Day. And you sadly spent that afternoon at chases grave. Something no parent should ever have to do. Can you tell us a little bit about your grief at that time and the emotions you experienced following such a traumatic loss?

Oh, well, I'll tell you, you know, I can certainly look back and see a lot of parenting mistakes I made both my boys, but there's no doubt and you know, both of them knew that I loved them. And I spent a lot of time with him growing up doing a ton of things outdoor who are outdoorsman, you know, and, and both boys, Eagle Scout, so you know, scouting, camping, you know, fishing, hiking, all that sort of thing. And so we were close in, you know, just being here on father's day like that is just there's a there's like a hole in my heart, you know, like a part of me is missing and life will never be the same.

Yeah, I get that. And thank you for sharing that. When you and I talked before I shared that Shawn pathway in April. And so the next month, I had a similar experience on Mother's Day. And you and I also experienced dreams after the loss of our kids that were somewhat comforting when we really needed peace. Do you still remember that early dream about Chase?

Yeah, you know, not as vivid as it once was. But, you know, it was it was more like, I would describe it as a wall of water. But not what I could penetrate is very, very hard to describe this, like a plasma type material, you know, but translucent, and I could see through there and I could see him, you know, he's his face right up there to that in. I don't know, like we were separated by a foot or so. I couldn't hear him. He couldn't hear me, you know, but we could sort of communicate. Yeah. And you know, what was he trying to do? I don't know. Exactly. And I believe that he was trying to let me know he was okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And many people that I've talked to have shared similar dreams and those early days that served as reassurance for them that their kids were safe. And okay. Well, let's talk about the aftermath of all this because we know that loss of any kind has an impact on more than just the parents, siblings and friends suffer deeply from the passing. And you told me about the young girl who was driving chases car, the night of the accident, that, sadly, she ended up taking her own life. Only seven months after chases death. That story was just so tragic. Can you share your thoughts about what you described as the fallout caused by this type of loss?

You know, when we had the visitation purchase, so many people, there were people I heard that came to the funeral home that came in the line was so long, they you know, especially people who are elderly couldn't stand for that long line and turn around and laugh. But so many people impacted by his death, there would be every so often scattered throughout the line, you know, the line kind of wrapped around, and I could see people a long time before they would get to me. And there were these teenagers, young adults in their 20s. And I could see them, you know, in the line and just, you know, faces beet red tears streaming down their cheeks. And these were people I didn't even know, I had never met didn't know that they were friends with Chase. And one of them. Probably less than a year ago, my wife and I were out at the cemetery. And there was a young girl out there with with her little girl and she was visiting chases gray. And I approached her and talked to her and she told me who she was. And yeah, still, after all these years, she's going and visiting his grave and his unusually was, but it's not someone that I got to know that well, and is just is really had the impact, not just on the family, but also a lot of prayers and just a very wide reaching type of impact.

Yeah, yeah. It's so sad and so traumatic for everyone involved. So in your book, you also talk about the feelings you had following the accident and you share specifically about how you struggled with the reality that no criminal charges would be filed against the driver of the car. You said my anger was growing and I just wanted to take matters into my own hands. I was growing more and more impatient with God, how could he let this injustice stand? So knowing what I know about you, the son of a Baptist preacher having grown up in church and raising your family in church, can you talk a little bit about that lapse in your faith? That out moment and then contrast it to where you are now in your faith walk.

Yeah, I will say this Never in all of this and anything that's ever happened in my life, I've never been mad at God. In in, I wasn't disappointed in God. But I was like, I don't know, I think if you read some of David's writings, you know, there were times when he was saying, God, where are you? You know, come on, you know, when did you go into hold these people accountable for what they've done, that I am at such a different place now. And I look back on that, and I go, I was not thinking that way, you know, because in hindsight, you know, Chase bore the lion's share of the responsibility. It's not that she didn't bear any responsibility. And I'll say she the driver, but he was his car, he was the oldest one there. You know, he let her drive, he knew they had all this smoke marijuana. So you know, I have a different perspective. You know, when you're in that situation, everybody grieves differently. And in the very, very initial stages, I didn't have any anger. But once it came on, it's not rational. And you just want to take that loss out on someone. And so the people that Chase had surrounded himself with, I felt were a bad influence. You know, I didn't know anything about addiction at the time, and drug addiction in particular. So I didn't have a lot of empathy for them. And so that's where a lot of my anger was focused in on her and she was 18 years old. She didn't she didn't understand much about life at that point, a very intelligent girl, but she didn't have any life experience. So I went through that phase, it took me a while to get past that. And then, you know, in hindsight, I look back and I go, wow, I wish I wish I could have handled things differently. I don't know if it would have made a difference in how things turned out. But yeah, it's this a difficult part of grieving, and everybody goes through their own own grief journey.

Yeah, that's for sure. And would you say that your faith played a role at all in the healing process?

Oh, definitely. Yes, definitely. I don't know how anyone gets through losing a child, not only how people get through a lot of things they get through without, without a, or a lot of things that come into their life without without a relationship with God, through Jesus, because you know, it's just, it's devastating when you have this type of a loss, to be able to come back in and keep going with your life that that's that's a difficult thing to do, and to try to make something positive out of it. And without God, there's no way I could have done it.

Right. Right. And you know, I think about people that are listening now that may not be in a place where they even have a relationship with God or never had, and they're grieving. And I don't profess that a relationship with God is the answer to all of this in the grief process, but it's the comfort in at all Wouldn't you agree?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Foundation for sure.

So Darrell, given everything you've been through, watching Chase struggle, and then ultimately losing him as a result of the choices he made. What lessons did you learn that you can share with listeners who may be going through something similar with one of their children right now?

Wow, so many mistakes. I made him an adult. You know, I'm not I'm not reluctant to share those at all. In fact, I think it helps people helps me to talk about Okay, so the first thing I would say is, I think like most parents, I had a night most parents, I had a knee jerk reaction. You know, when I found out he was using drugs, and just alarmism and you know, just a little over the top. And it's understandable especially today because things have changed since I went through this. With Chase. It's even more deadly. Now. You know, with how much fentanyl is out there. 108,000 people died of fentanyl overdose or not fentanyl overdose but died of overdoses last year. But fentanyl probably accounted for, I don't know close to 40% of that. And so and you know, they can take something they think is legitimate pill that has fentanyl in it that's been laced with fentanyl. And that may be accidental, but there's a lot of different reasons for that, but then they have a fatal overdose. So So you know, understand parents having that knee jerk reaction, but you have to dial it back. And because the first thing they'll do is put up a wall, you know, and put up their defense mechanisms in, you can't have a conversation, then it gets more and more difficult to get that wall back down. So that's probably the first mistake. Even before that, I would say, Chase when he had an issue with go to his mother. And then she would come to me because I was more of the disciplinarian. So going back, you know, if I could could do that over would be to find a way to make sure he felt more comfortable in coming to me with things and be more open with things. Yeah, just a lot of a lot of things that were really just came down, you know, with an iron fist, like, you're going to do this, and you're going to do that well, that it doesn't work that way, you know, you have to, you have to influence you have no control, really, I think control over a teenager, in particular, a teenager or young adult child is an illusion, you don't really have any control? Well, you have as influence. And you have to use that carefully.

Well, I said in the intro, that you are now a family recovery coach, and you have services that you've studied and learned about so that you can help other people. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes so that people could look into that and reach out to you if need be. But I want to talk right now about two different types of parents that may be listening to this. The first one is the parent who's struggling with the addicted child, what's the most important thing you could impart to that parent?

I would say, Don't overreact. But don't hesitate to reach out and get help find some expert help in when it really comes down to having to make some difficult decisions. You need some guidance with that. But you don't need to be indecisive need to go ahead and make those decisions in move forward. I see a lot of parents get hung up early on in the decision making process because they're afraid that they will make the wrong decision and they won't be able to live with the consequences. But the truth of the matter is, no matter what you do, things may not turn out the way you would hope. It's a matter of managing risks. And you put the odds in your favor, when you do your homework to the best of your ability within a short period of time and then take action. So a lot of times they, they their decision, ultimately is to not take any action. And that's the worst decision you can make.

And Darryl, what about the parent like you who unfortunately lost a child due to addiction, what's the most important thing you can tell them

see it as an opportunity for spiritual and personal growth. And that's a hard thing to hear, especially in the early stages. But as you get through, I would say in the early stages in a very, very early going to just let the emotions come it's going to be an emotional roller coaster, you're going to have waves of emotion, and they're uncontrollable. And it's okay. Don't worry about that. Just let those come and just and just, you know, lean into it. And that could last days, weeks, probably weeks or months, maybe even for the first year on and off. And you never know what's going to trigger that. You know, I do public speaking I have done drug prevention, speaking and impaired driving prevention speaking for years, I got started in it early on. And in the beginning, it was very difficult to get through a speech and still today, every now and then I look out at somebody in the audience in just a look they give me or something will trigger me and boom, all those emotions come back and I have to take a moment. So you know those emotions are going to be there, it's okay. But if you can find a way to take your loss and use it to help other people, not everybody will want to be a speaker like me. That's not for everyone. And not everyone will want to write a book. But find your thing. whatever your thing is, it may be there's a lot of great organizations you could volunteer for in a lot of different roles, volunteer roles, and I would I would suggest when you're ready, do that. One more tip early on is to get into a program like grief share. My wife went to grief Share we had, we didn't grieve. Our grief journeys went in different directions in the beginning. And later, she went without me to grief share twice she went through, it's a 12 week program. It's a lot of different churches hosted around the country, just go to their websites and find one in your area. And really good program is important because you connect with other people who are going through are also grieving may not be the loss of a child, but they're grieving. And you connect with those people, and it helps with the healing process early on.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I'm familiar with that program. And it is really good. Well, Darryl, like I said, I'm gonna put a link to your website in the show notes to make it easy to find for listeners. And I just want to say thank you so much for your openness and willingness to share about everything that you went through and chases life. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Michelle.

So for those of you listening, if you're the parent of a child who's struggling with addiction, there are resources available to you. Darryl founded his coaching program with the belief that parents deserve to see their child grow up and be who they were created to be. And that every child who is suffering from drug or alcohol addiction, deserves to have parents who are willing to work on a family solution to that addiction. So if you find yourself in this difficult situation, don't lose hope. Reach out today. And if you're a parent who has lost their child to addiction, my heart goes out to you. But please know that there's also help for you, as Darrell mentioned, grief, share a great program to provide comfort in grief. So reach out for support, and know that you're not alone. And like Darrell said, when we lose a child, it's an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth, although it won't feel like that right away. So don't run away from God, but run to Him in your pain. Psalm 34 Verse 18 says, He's near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. I can attest to that. So keep the faith my friend, and reach out to me if you want to connect. I'm here for you too. Thanks for listening.