Governor Christie: Recovery Is Not Easy, It's Hard Work

Statement

Daytop Student: Using heroin in the morning just in order to get out of bed is no life. It's not a life for me, it was pain and it was hurtful and I was involved in criminal activity that was draining me that I thought was normal and I convinced myself that this is a normal life and Daytop showed me that's not even one third of the life I could have. Now I'm a brother, I have siblings, now I'm a son, I'm an uncle, I'm a cousin, I'm everything that I wanted, I get to be that loved that one and I get to love my family and I get to have the silliest memories of sitting on the couch, watching the Super Bowl, laughing with my entire family, making jokes and that means the world to me and I get to be a part of it. So I'm just truly grateful to be hear and thank you for all the work that you've done.

Governor Christie: It's good to hear from people who talk about how hard this is. It's not easy. It's one of the most difficult things that folks will ever have to go through because there's not some pill or medicine that you can take to make you better. There's not some hypnosis that you can go through that will snap you out of it. It's just really hard work. And the fact that you mentioned your family so many times just in the little bit you talked is it's so instructive I think to people if they listen because this is a family disease. It is a disease whether each member of the family has it or not. If one member of the family has it the whole family has it because they feel the downstream effects of what's going on in your life, and the pain, and the guilt, and the anger, and the upset, and the mystery of it to them. Because as you know now if you're not an addict it's hard to understand the actions and the conduct of an addict, and so that's why what you said before about the education being so important for the members of the family, too, who want to be helpful and supportive to you. They would do anything to make you better, but they just don't know and that's why places like this are so important because they not only help you they help the family to understand that it's not their fault. And that's the other thing that families feel all the time and that's part of the shame and the stigma of it is that somehow if you're a parent and you say that your child has the disease of drug abuse you think that people look at you and judge that, well what did you do wrong? Were you an absentee parent? Did you not care? Were you not focused? Are you an addict, what's going on here? And sometimes there are answers to those questions but most of the time I found there are not. But I'm glad that you spent the time here that you needed to spend, because like you said in the beginning you didn't want to. And the choice then is leave or hang in there until you are ready, I'm glad you hung in there. It's great.

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