by Nicole Baptist

Created on: November 24, 2008   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Living with an addict is not easy. You often are wondering what will happen next, will you receive that dreaded phone call in the middle of the night or will you be asked for money to support the person's addiction or will your personal belongings fall victim to the disease. However, when you are a child of an addict, dealing with addiction is much more difficult than many can understand and for most to believe. Only someone that has experienced the emotional, mental and physical scars of addiction delivered by the hands of a parent can truly sympathize with you. For many years, I dealt with a parent battling addiction to drugs and alcohol. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /

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I never had a childhood because I was forced to become an adult and make adult decisions at the age of 8. Instead of jumping rope and playing jacks with my friends, I was begging drug dealers not to beat my addicted parent for debts owed or attempting to protect myself from predators seeking to take away my innocents while waiting in a drug house for my parent to get the much needed "fix". Although, sobriety has been a revolving door and any person dealing with addiction and those dealing with a person in recovery understand-many years of sobriety can go up in smoke easily and you are always haunted by situations that happen in your life and that of the addict's that may send them back into the destructive, downward spiral of this crippling disease.

One thing that many "normal" people (those that have never used drugs or had problems with addiction) do not understand are the emotional, mental and sometimes physical scars that are left behind when you experience addiction at the hands of a parent. For years, many of my relationships have suffered because of the emotional baggage that I've carried around inside of me as a result of emotions that I felt and the things that I saw at such a young age. Trust and love become distorted; respect and determination take on new meanings; compassion becomes non-existant. How do you get those things back? How do you learn to love? How do you believe in yourself and then in others? These questions are very difficult to answer but the first thing you have to do is start with the person that you see in the mirror everyday-you!

I could not figure out why I was always skeptical about everything and everyone that I met in my life and then I started going to co-dependency support groups and teens with addictive parent's

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