Why Is Knowing Never Enough?

Sometimes it takes something terrible to make us change what we already knew needed changing.

For the last several months, I have been working at a behavioral health outpatient center with people who have finally had enough of the way they were living and finally made it to treatment. Every day I hear stories from people who have known for a long time that something in their life needed to change. Most stories are filled with tragedies of overdoses, jail sentences, stress induced psychosis, ruined marriages and many other horrific outcomes. However, knowing they needed to make a change wasn’t enough to actually do something about it. It often took something painful, frightening or simply impossible to ignore before they finally decided to do something differently.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and what it actually takes to make us change. Why is it that most people can’t make a change by simply knowing they need to? Why is knowing the potential consequences of our actions not enough to want to prevent them? Why does that knowledge so often fail to motivate us until the consequences of our actions stop being theoretical and become reality? Why does something bad have to happen to change the direction of our lives because we weren’t changing on our own

It made me start thinking about how often I’ve seen the same thing happen to people I know, including myself. I’m not talking about addiction alone. I see it in neglected relationships, long term work stress, poor eating habits, or never going for annual medical check ups.

There are things that have happened in my life that I would have given anything to undo at the time, but I now look back on with gratitude because things may have never changed otherwise. I do believe the things we would never choose can teach us something or take us somewhere we might not have gone otherwise.

When I see some of my patients and hear their stories, it reminds me of what happened to my son 6 years ago when he was in high school. I hear how far down a dark road they have gone and I can imagine that Dylan would be somewhere on that road too, if one major consequence hadn’t yanked him out of it.

Dylan started smoking marijuana his junior year in high school during COVID. What started out as occasionally smoking it a few times a month with friends became an all day, daily habit. Just like most teenagers during COVID he was stuck at home with no social life, bored to tears with way too much time on his hands. He is that kid with ADHD that needs to have human interaction, sports, and changing scenery to keep him happy. At first he tried to hide it from me, but he was so incredibly high all the time, anyone with half a brain would have figured it out. He kept saying, “It’s just weed mom. It’s harmless and legal now.” I kept telling him it wasn’t legal for him and that a developing brain shouldn’t be exposed to it, he definitely wasn’t listening.

As his marijuana use increased, I had to watch my silly, carefree, class-clown kid become unbelievably paranoid, bat shit crazy and kind of an asshole. I remember one night he came to me angry, talking about needing to break up with his girlfriend because he was convinced she was in a porn video. I was like, Dylan, why in the world would you think that? Apparently, in a video he saw online, there was a white wall in it and there was the exact same white wall at his girlfriend’s house. I was waiting for more detail, but that was it, that was his evidence…a white wall. I tried telling him that the majority of houses in the world have white walls, but there was no reasoning with him. In his pot fueled mind, he had cracked the case.

Many nights I would wake up at 2 am with the feeling something was wrong and would find that he and his car were gone. He would shut off his ‘find my iphone and his phone so I couldn’t locate or call him. One day I had enough and I got angry with him and took his car away. He told me I didn’t love him and dramatically sulked out to our swimming pool and said he was going to drown himself. Of course I went in after him, my 125 lbs self tried to drag my soaking-wet, hoodie-wearing, 225-pound son out of the pool. It was absolutely ridiculous and I couldn’t stop asking myself how this was my life now. I had been talking to my kids about drugs and what they can do to you since they were little, after they watched me deal with my alcohol problem. I guess I convinced myself they would never do any of it.

I can laugh at the absurdity of these situations now, but I wasn’t laughing then. This wasn’t the Dylan I knew anymore, and it was obvious his marijuana use was getting out of control.

The original Dylan

I spent hours going through his room, watching and warning him, trying to explain where this could lead him. When that didn’t work, I made him start going to see two therapists, I figured I would cover all the bases. One was my therapist, who I hoped would be able to help him look at the bigger picture and how he was coping with life or rather, not coping. The other specialized in addiction and focused specifically on his marijuana and now mushroom use.

Dylan only went because I threatened to have him committed to a psych ward otherwise, At the time, it didn’t seem to make much difference, but looking back maybe some of what they said sank in and planted ideas he wasn’t ready to act on yet. But knowing something isn’t good for you and being ready to change it are two very different things, after all. He didn’t care what any of us ‘old’ people said and continued getting high nonstop.

One day he asked me if he could sell his motorcycle and use the money to buy an old Mustang. One thing he loves to do is work on cars and he wanted one he could fix up. I agreed, believing it would keep him busy and focused on the car and hopefully get him away from marijuana.

But instead, the day after he bought it the transmission blew, costing me another $3,000. Then a few days later, he proceeded to lose the title before we ever got a chance to register it in our names. We couldn’t get the guy who sold it to us to call us back, probably because he knew he sold us a lemon, and I had no idea how to get another one. And because we had too many cars at the house, he parked it on the street and I started getting notices and fines from the homeowners association. It was one annoyance after another since the day he bought it.

Then something that I never imagined any human could do, happened. He lost the entire car! He had driven somewhere to meet friends and had gotten so high that he couldn’t remember where he had parked it. We drove around in places he thought he left it for days and still couldn’t find it. And due to the lost title situation, we couldn’t call the police and ask them to help us find it. At that point I was so sick of that car and all the nonsense that came with it, I didn’t care anymore. I think I may have actually been a little relieved it was gone, even if it meant losing the $8,000 it cost. Wherever it was, as far as I was concerned, it could live there now. I wanted to forget about the whole situation. After he lost his car, he kept saying he was going to quit smoking, that he knew he needed to, but he still wasn’t ready.

Nowadays, it is one of our favorite family stories, mine and Lexi’s at least. Whenever my kids are arguing and they call each other stupid, all Lexi has to say is, “You lost an entire car.” Dylan’s only response is, “Yep, true. Touché.”

As funny as it is now, it was the opposite back then. Underneath the lost car and the ridiculous stories, I was terrified of what was happening to my son. By this time, he also started experimenting with mushrooms with his friends and becoming more distant to his family. I had tried everything I knew to do: talking to him, reasoning with him, getting him professional help, even giving him something else to focus on. But, none of them were making him want to stop.

I was beginning to understand that you can give someone every reason in the world to change, but until they have their own reason, they won’t.

One of Dylan’s friends had parents who owned a dispensary and he would steal from his parents to sell to underage users. He made a deal with Dylan that he would give him free weed if Dylan drove him around to make the deals. Dylan told me later that he didn’t think it was a big deal because weed isn’t a dangerous drug and it was legal. He assumed everyone who smoked weed was “chill.” Besides, getting marijuana for free just for driving was an insanely good deal.

Then came the night that his friend asked him to make a deal for him because he was going to be busy. It was going to be a big sale and the buyers were driving in from an hour and a half away to buy from him. Dylan of course said no problem and made a decision that still makes me shake my head and cringe just thinking about it. He gave them our address and told them he would meet them at the end of our street.

When they arrived, four men all got out of the car. They immediately pulled a gun on him and demanded that he give them all of his drugs and money. Dylan tried to explain that he was only doing this for a friend and that he didn’t have anything else. He even offered them his Xbox, which I can laugh about now because it’s so Dylan, being held at gunpoint and somehow trying to negotiate his way out of it with an Xbox.

Eventually they must have believed him. But before they left, one of them walked up to him and hit him as hard as he could in the back of the head. The guy used the butt of the gun, which dropped Dylan to the ground. Then the guy held the gun on him once more, making Dylan think he was going to die, then they all got in their car and drove away.

Somehow, Dylan got up and walked home. He didn’t want to tell me what happened, so he told his sister. The back of his head was gushing blood, she walked him into my room as I was getting ready for bed and made him tell me what had happened.

Lexi and Dylan

I immediately took him to the nearest emergency room and we spent that night at the hospital while they watched him for a possible brainbleed. While I sat next to his hospital bed my mind kept going somewhere I didn’t want it to go, “What if they had pulled the trigger?”

My brain kept replaying all the ways that night could have ended differently, “What if my son had walked to the end of our street and never walked back?” I couldn’t stop thinking about how close my family had come to an irreversible tragedy, from a situation he never should have put himself in in the first place. I’d spent months trying to wake him up, trying to scare him with all the things that could happen someday if he continued this path. And then, out of nowhere, someday did show up and met him at the end of our street, holding a gun.

That night scared the shit out of Dylan in a way that nothing I said ever could. After that happened, he was immediately done and hasn’t touched a single substance since. No Marijuana, alcohol, vape or anything else, he decided he no longer wanted any part of that in his life. In fact he decided to watch over everyone else and became a designated driver for his friends, refusing to let any of them go to a party with their car.

And as strange as it probably sounds, one of the scariest nights of Dylan’s life is also something he and I can look back on with a certain amount of gratitude. I’m not grateful that someone pointed a gun at my son or hit him over the head with it, but I am grateful that he came home alive and that something changed in him afterward. Whenever he goes with me to walk the dogs he will point to the spot and say “that’s the spot where I could have died” and when I ask him if we can not talk about it, he says “why not? I’m glad it happened because it woke me up.”

And it is true, I don’t know what would have happened to him otherwise. Maybe he would have eventually grown out of it and stopped on his own. But, with our family history of being easily prone to addiction, it probably would have gotten worse and possibly for many years, ultimately almost ruining his life.

One thing I have learned from some of the hardest things that have happened to us, is that we don’t have to be grateful for the terrible thing itself. Sometimes we just need to be grateful for the lesson we learned and for the person who walked out the other side of it.

I had my own version of knowing something needed to change and still not changing it years before Dylan had his. I only drank for about eleven months after my divorce, but it became a problem pretty quickly. I knew it was getting bad, but alcohol was the one thing I’d found that could shut my brain off and numb pain I didn’t know how to deal with. At the time, I wasn’t ready to give that up.

Eventually, I had a night that I drank so much I almost died. I stopped breathing and my boyfriend at the time had to perform CPR on me. I ended up in the hospital with a blood alcohol level of .39, people tend to die at a level of 0.40. The next day I was transferred to a psychiatric facility because they needed to make sure I wasn’t a danger to myself or anyone else. I remember sitting in a room with brown lounge chairs, listening to a 70 year old lady trying to escape and yelling that she had to leave because she was about to have a baby. Soon after that I was forced to go to rehab for 30 days. I didn’t go because I’d had some great moment of clarity and decided I was ready to change my life. The choice was basically made for me and I’m still grateful for those that told me I had to go.

My mom once told me that of all her children, I was the last person she ever would have expected to become an alcoholic. She used to say she wished it hadn’t happened and she would blame my ex-husband for the things he put me through and getting me to that point. But I never saw it that way, I don’t blame him for me becoming an alcoholic. Sure, the things he said and did after his stroke and leading up to the divorce may have been the reason I turned to drinking so I didn’t have to feel it, but I only have myself to blame for how I chose to cope. I could have gone to therapy, but instead I chose to numb myself, I couldn’t blame somebody else for me making that choice

And the truth is, I wouldn’t change it and I am actually grateful for what I learned. I’m also grateful that my drinking didn’t continue for years, causing far more damage to myself and my kids. I might feel very differently if it had. But I’m also incredibly grateful that those eleven months brought me into recovery, not because I’m grateful for the things that happened while I was drinking, but because recovery changed me in ways that are hard to explain.

I sometimes joke that everybody on the planet should join a 12-step program or at least see a therapist on a regular basis, whether they have an addiction or not. Not because everyone needs treatment, but because I wish everyone had something that made them look as closely at themselves as recovery makes one look at themselves. You start figuring out why you react the way you do, what you’re trying to control, what you’re afraid of, what you need to take responsibility for and what you need to let go of. You sit in rooms with people who have made every kind of mistake imaginable, and somewhere along the way you become a lot less interested in judging other people. It also makes you more compassionate to other people’s suffering. There’s also something incredibly powerful about having people around you who understand what you’ve been through, what you’re trying to do and they want to help you do it.

I think there are too many people who go through their whole lives unhappy, angry, anxious, judgmental, controlling or just dissatisfied with life and nothing ever forces them to stop and ask themselves why. Recovery didn’t allow me that option, and I am very grateful for that. The hard things in life don’t get to me the way they used to. I don’t worry nearly as much and I have learned to laugh at the inconveniences. I don’t let people upset me anymore, no matter how angry they get and I don’t feel the same need to control how everything turns out. It isn’t that I’ve become some permanently peaceful person who never gets annoyed, my kids would be happy to clear that up but, it turns out that most things aren’t important enough to ruin my day anymore.

So when my mom says she wishes I never had to go through that period of my life, I understand why. She’s my mother, of course she does. But I don’t wish that.

I’m grateful it didn’t last longer and I’m grateful it happened, because I don’t think I would be the person I am now without what recovery taught me. I still have emotions and immediate reactions like anyone else, but I’m much more likely now to stop, think things through and pay attention to what I already know before I act.

I’ve done the same thing in other parts of my life. I spent years in a job that was slowly draining the life out of me. Working 15 hour shifts with little to no break and being hounded to work 70 to 80 hours a week. Having upper management come in and list everything we were doing wrong in their eyes and getting no appreciation. What they expected from us was nearly impossible to achieve without staying longer on your own dime. Not to mention patients coming in and yelling at me all day because I didn’t control the horrible health care in the United States.

I had been dreaming of pursuing other interests for years, but it is hard to leave a job when you are making really good money and you went to 10 years of college for it. Plus, I had been a Pharmacist for so long, I didn’t know if I had a clue how to do anything else. However unhappy I was, I was too afraid to make a change. If I hadn’t eventually lost my job during another difficult period in my life, with the suicide of my ex husband, an unthinkable situation within my family, and being pressured to work too many hours on no sleep, I honestly don’t know if I would have ever found the courage to leave and start over. Getting fired forced me to do something I’d been talking about doing for years, and looking back now, I haven’t missed pharmacy for one second. I’m being given an opportunity to find work that is meaningful to me and isn’t trying to kill me.

People do the same thing in relationships. How many times does one person tell the other, I’m unhappy, I need more from you, I don’t feel like you care anymore, and nothing ever really changes? They ask, they explain, they give a million chances and spend years trying to fix it. Maybe the saddest part is how easy it can be to stop appreciating someone while they’re still there trying and still hoping. We get used to their presence, their effort, even their forgiveness, and somehow assume they’ll just keep giving it.

Then one day they can’t anymore and they stop trying. They say they’re done and that they are leaving, and suddenly the other person sees everything they hadn’t been paying attention to. All of a sudden they are willing to go to counseling, to do better and they beg, “Just don’t leave.”. Why does it sometimes take the possibility of actually losing someone before we appreciate the person we had all along?

I’ve seen it over and over in healthcare too. Over the years, I’ve watched people become seriously ill from things they knew were hurting them and beg for another chance. They start promising that if someone can just make them better, they will stop drinking, stop smoking or finally take better care of themselves. They didn’t suddenly learn that those things could hurt them, they had known for years. What changed was that the consequence was no longer something that might happen someday, it was happening to them now.

Maybe that’s the strange thing about change. We would like to think knowing something is wrong should be enough to make us do something differently, but sometimes it isn’t. The familiar thing we are doing can still feel safer and more enjoyable than the unfamiliar thing that might make us happy and healthy. Or maybe sometimes we just keep telling ourselves we will deal with it later and later becomes further and further away. Suddenly, life doesn’t give us that choice anymore. I don’t know whether everything happens for a reason or not. Maybe it does, but I do believe that even the things we would never choose can change us, teach us something, or push us somewhere we weren’t brave enough to go on our own.

There are things in my life I once would have erased if someone had given me the chance. Now, some of them are the very things I am now grateful they happened.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that we should be grateful for terrible things, maybe it is that we should learn to listen to what we already know before life has to scream it at us.