Hope and Heartbreak with Addictions—Pam Lanhart (episode 49)

0:00 Well, welcome back. Welcome back to the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I hope you had an incredible Christmas time just rejoicing in our Savior, time with family, hopefully a good time with your prodigal and not a negative time. And that even as you look at a new year, there's hope for you. And if you love a prodigal and most people listening to you will discover help and hope for this wilderness journey that you're on right here on this podcast and especially today. You'll also find some help and hope for your own life journey. This isn't just about that prodigal. It's about you and how you keep going. And today I am confident that you are going to be so blessed and encouraged even through tears perhaps for yourself and your family and your prodigal. And especially if your prodigal struggles with addiction of any kind. And I think that our guest is going to be just what you need right now. I'm chatting with Pam Lanhart who says, I'm just a mom who's become a warrior.

1:36 Growing up with addictions in her family, she was determined to protect her children from that devastation. But it came anyway. Pam's long journey in battle for her son's freedom has benefited many families through her book, Praying Our Loved One Home, and through her ministry, Thrive Family Recovery Resources. And later when you want to look that up and maybe get some help from Pam, that information on her ministry and her book will be listed in the show notes of the podcast. As you listen, I encourage you to listen well to determine at least one truth that Pam shares will help you in your prodigal wilderness.

2:34 Be sure to write it down so you can look for ways to begin to live it out. So welcome Pam Lanhart. I am so grateful for this time with you. Tell us a little about yourself, where you live, your family, what you love to do together, because I know you don't like to do things by yourself. Well, no, you're right, Judy. I'm an extrovert, most definitely. I'm married to my wonderful husband, Paul, and we will have our 41st wedding anniversary this summer, which puts me at about 12. I understand that. But we were young, and by the grace of God, we've weathered pretty much every storm that a couple could. In fact, now I think with Jake's passing, it has been every storm. And yet through the grace of God and the determination of really loving each other well, we have made it through every single possible hardship and trial. I have four children. Our oldest, Diana, is 37 now I think, and she actually has 10 children. And so in this day and age where it's an average of two children per family, she has a really unusually large family. And we get to see

4:09 just the fulfillment of the generational legacy of our faith go into her family, which has been just an honor to watch. And her children just are amazing. They range from almost 16 down to little one-year-old twins. And so they're very busy raising their children. I was just visiting my daughter, my oldest daughter, who lives in Montana, and she has five children. And they are half of my grandchildren. And yeah, it's a very busy life. But what joy to be part of it. Yeah, and what an honor it is as grandparents to watch her raise little arrows for Christ and just really thinking about the verse and Proverbs, training up your children in the ways of the Lord. And they definitely have that foundation. And so Diana is just the sweetest woman, and she's a writer, also and a professional photographer. So she has this real creative bent in her. And my son, Andy, is 25, soon to be 26, is married, lives only two miles from us. And then of course, Jake was our prodigal who just passed away. And he's with Jesus. I believe that with all my heart. And then we have Nikki, who is 21.

5:37 And our family is an active family. For years, I was a runner. We enjoy mountain biking together. And one of the things that happened through Jake's addiction was that we got sort of addicted to climbing mountains. So Paul, when Jake was really struggling when he was a teenager, he would just scoop him up and take him out to Colorado. And even just in April, Jake shared that he felt most at peace and closest to God when he was in the mountains. So my husband has a ministry where we take women in recovery or just broken, you know, by the trials of life out to the wilderness. So we do backpack camping trips where we, yeah, we take men and women out to Colorado and we get them off grid for a week and they climb mountains and it's just a great ministry. So we've all summited. Our plan with Jake is to bring him up this summer to his favorite mountaintop. And which one is that? Well, it's Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado. He loved the water and it has a beautiful stream. And so, yeah, we'll all summit that this summer at some point. And that's where he'll rest. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Well, why don't we get into then a little

7:11 of your journey, starting back with how the addictions started with Jake and the journey that you've been on and the positive times and then the fallbacks and tell us a little about that. Well, yeah, definitely our life, you know, with him was never dull. And in fact, we, you know, both Paul and I are like, wow, things are kind of a little boring now. And we've had to adjust to that because he was a kid of extremes from the minute he came out of the womb. And I'm sure some of your listeners can relate to this. They're probably shaking their head. When we were around Jake, we never doubted we were alive. Because he was either, there's a nursery rhyme that says about the little girl with the curl in her forehead. And when she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid. And that was sort of our Jake, you know, he was came out of the womb, oppositional, active to the point where we would have to strap the stroller straps through his belt loops. So he wouldn't get out of the stroller. If you couldn't find him, all you had to do was look up and he was in the top of a tree or a place or climbing up the top of our basketball hoop. He didn't ever stop. And he was always, he loved the outdoors.

8:47 He was super active. But recently, what he said to us was he always felt like he had this, you know, missing part of him, sort of a hole in his spirit. And even though he was baptized when he was 11, and he, you know, really had this relationship with the Lord, he just always felt like not good enough. And, you know, maybe that was partially our fault. I don't know. I mean, I definitely feel like we tried our hardest and we made lots of mistakes raising our kids and don't we all like we all do. And so we don't, you know, blame ourselves, but we also when we know better, we do better. And so the good news about our story is that through the process of Jake's addiction, we learned to do things differently. So he started using when he was 12, he went to a new school and he wanted to fit in and he, you know, easily fit in with the kids in the bathroom that were smoking pot. And so his addiction started with marijuana. He went to his first treatment when he was just 15. And throughout his life, he passed away when he was 24. I think he went through about 13 or 14 residential treatments. And you know, one of the things that my son mentioned,

10:20 Andy mentioned that Jake's service was how determined Jake was, you know, he once he decided that he wanted to live a different life. He just kept trying. But what happened with his addiction is when he was 17 and he was he was in a drug court program. So we had two good years of when he was like 16 and 17 of him being mostly supervised by someone else. Yeah. And engaged in recovery and doing really well. And when he was a senior in high school, he was playing rugby and he broke his femur. And I remember him laying on the field that day. And then giving him fentanyl because he had to, you know, they had to like a femur break is literally the most painful thing that can ever happen to somebody. They say it's similar to falling off a seven story building, like the pain is you're in shock, you can't move. And I remember at that moment going, really, God, really, like, is this the way this is going to end? And, um, you know, it almost in that moment felt like God was starting to prepare me for the fact that Jake was going to live a short life. Um, but he did when he was 19, start activating his recovery and he really did want to get well.

11:58 So through, you know, opiates and methamphetamines, he did finally ask for help. And so he we sent him out to treatment in Arizona. And through the course of the time he was 19 till the time he was 24, you know, our family did a lot of healing work. We did a lot of changing. We did a lot of treatment work, which really helped us all heal, heal. But through that process, back when he was about 17 or 18, you know, we were told to go to a, go to a meeting. That was the only help that was available was to go to a meeting. And that meeting that we went to just did not align with our values because it told us, and he's like 16, 17, you know, it told us to do this, some sort of this tough love thing, like detach, disconnect, kick him out, you know, and we couldn't because he was a minor, but the messaging of this particular meeting did not seem to align with our values.

13:07 I would agree with that. It that's not our but my value is either. So, yeah. And, and so, you know, we sort of had to wrestle with like, what were our values? And how did we want to be in this? And how did we want to show up? And about that time we met with a pastor, and he said to us, this profound thing, and I still have it written on a piece of paper in my bedroom, and I look at it every day. And he said, Are you going to be right for the sake of justice? Or are you going to love for the sake of relationship?

13:50 Because love never fails. And justice was already paid for on the cross. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, pretty profound. And what we realized is that in through this process, it had become more about winning, or getting him sober, or being right, then it had been about just loving right. And now I call that loving well. And so I asked myself, during that time, if my son did get sober, would he want to have a relationship with me? If my son got sober, would he want to have a relationship with the God that I believed in? And if the worst thing happened, and he didn't make it, would I have regrets? Would I have lived my life in a way that honored my son and his intrinsic value? And that was the catalyst for the changes we made in regards to loving Jake and to loving our prodigal, which was just so many people use the story of the prodigal to almost justify detachment and disconnection. And I saw the story of the prodigal father in a way that

15:21 was the opposite, which was the father received his son with open arms, that he loved him well, and that he forgave him immediately. And so we started a ministry. I started a ministry back in 2016. And my whole purpose was to help families to learn the balance between allowing their loved one to make their own decisions, not controlling their life, not manipulating outcomes, setting boundaries, so that we could walk through this journey with unconditional positive regard for our loved one.

16:15 And so, like I said, I call that loving well. And part of that was, where do we get our value from? Is our value in Christ, or is our value in outcomes? And that is such a, that is profound. We should know that. But we are so desperate for the outcome to be the way we want it to be, that it's easy to just focus on that. And that doesn't work all the time, a lot of times. And certainly the rejection, the pushing away.

17:02 When people say tough love to me, I say tough is a pretty negative word. It is a rejecting word. I said, you need the boundaries and the consequences that are clearly defined, but you need them in a loving, accepting, we want relationship with you. And I tell people, I say, your first priority is to keep that relationship, because if you lose it, you lose the ability to help them and to influence them. And those are exactly my words, right? They always say the opposite of addiction is connection. And the research and the data supports that family is the deepest connections that are imaginable. In fact, I do genogram work with families. And Pete's Cazaro has a great, a couple of great YouTube videos on the genograms and the power of family patterns and generational family, generational family issues. So like we gain great traits from our parents and sometimes we gain some not so great traits from our parents. So when we look at addiction, sometimes we can look historically back three and four and five generations and recognize that there has been addiction in the family. And so as I was walking through this, part

18:33 of, because of course we have that same family history, I really wanted to try to do my own work so that I could heal in an effort to start to break some of those generational family patterns that we had. And it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of focus on our own stuff, right? That we bring into our family and we, some of it is trauma. Like what I realized is my dad, for example, he didn't know how to be a dad because his dad died when he was 18 months old and his mom was very controlling. And he had a double abandonment because his stepdad left for the grocery store one day when he was about 10 and never came back. So my dad brought all of this trauma into my family and the way that he managed his trauma was to drink. And my mom filled that pattern that his mom had, which was to be sort of that caretaker and managing the family. And so while I did not suffer from substance use, I definitely brought patterns of control and overreaction and sometimes

20:08 really just manipulating my environment. And what I realized now is that that was what I needed to feel safe. And so I had to kind of work through some of that. So my son, when he started using sort of experienced that generational pattern of me wanting to feel safe and how that manifested in our family was by me controlling, manipulating, sometimes yelling, you know, and I had to learn how to break those patterns. And what helped you learn to do that? Well, you know, of course, first of all, it's our relationship with Jesus, right, Judy, I knew that I couldn't do it on my own. And I started asking for more from the Holy Spirit.

20:57 Like the Bible says, like, you don't have it because you don't ask. And so, you know, I just would wake up every morning, read my Bible and say, Lord, fill me with what I lack because I can't do this on my own. And I would ask for more love. I would ask for an anointing of love. And then, you know, I read a couple books and one book that really helped me was a book called The Anatomy of Peace. And it's a book I have all of my families read. It's not a Christian book, but it's a book about why sometimes we dehumanize people and what is behind the dehumanization of others. And sometimes it's rooted in our own insecurities and our need to be seen and our need to be valued. And so it gave me some great insights into my own lacking. And of course, I believe in therapy. I'm like, I have Jesus and I have a therapist. And so I did a lot of trauma work to help me work through my own stuff.

22:08 I also did some healing prayer work. Good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So I went and did some of some intercessory healing prayer. So I sort of attacked it on all, you know, fronts, right? So some of it was reading my Bible. I think the word of God is healing. The word of God is powerful. Some of it was prayer, intercessory prayer, anointing, having people pray over me. Some of it was secular therapeutic interventions. And I really believe in all of it. And through this, then you were able to love your son well and bring about the security of his being sure that he's loved.

23:00 And some of it was learning a new way of communicating, Judy. I did not grow up in a very safe, affirming, loving environment. And one of the things I had to learn was how to listen well, how to validate my person. You know, when they would say, you know, when Jake would say, well, you know, this isn't fair. And my natural instinct would be to say, well, of course, it's fair. You just you just don't like, you know, yeah, or you just broke the rules. So of course it's fair. And instead, I learned to just say, Wow, I it sounds like it, it feels really unfair to you. Can you tell me more about that? Can you talk about that?

23:44 Like, what what do you think would be a way to get through this? How can you resolve this conflict? You know, and so instead of jumping in to give advice, or solve a problem, I, which is my, you know, unfortunately, God gifted me to be a problem solver. And I'm, you know, I'm very skilled at that. And I'm sure it's because I grew up with, you know, alcoholism in my family, and I had to figure things out. But when we do that, as a parent, it really disables our children from learning how to stretch their own problem solving muscles. That's good. That. Yeah, we get we try to step in so much and solve their problems that they don't have, aren't forced to love to try that themselves to, to make the effort.

24:40 Some aren't willing. But we can sure make a difference in encouraging them toward their own help their own recovery. And you know, it's a it's our we're wired to fix, you know, for moms. And Brene Brown had a podcast, a little short clip the other day that I saw that was so good. And what she said is that, you know, when we jump in to fix, we're not, usually we're not trying to fix the problem as much as we're trying to fix the pain. And we don't want our children to feel pain. And yet it's through pain, that we learn how to solve our own problems. And it's through pain, that we learn how to change. And so we we look at pain in our society as a bad thing, as a negative thing. And yet I know that it's been only through my pain, and maybe some natural consequences of my own negative choices and decisions that I have actually been motivated to change. And so when we want to create the motivation to make changes in our loved one, we have to allow them to feel some of that pain. Now, I always caveat with this idea that in this day and age, where we live in

26:12 a society that has a poisoned drug supply, and you can smoke marijuana, and it can be laced with fentanyl, and you can use cocaine and die from it, we do have to sort of think about reducing harm or, you know, making sure that our person is not in imminent, you know, at an imminent risk for death, right? And so I'm also sort of in that camp as a Christian that I believe people should carry naloxone. And I believe that, you know, if a person has opiate use disorder, maybe they need to be on medications for that. So I'm, I try to balance everything with the culture that we live in right now, which is, you know, overdose deaths are have doubled in the last year. Suicide has almost doubled in the last year, our our children are suffering. And I think that my philosophy is as family members, I say first do no harm, we don't want to add to the suffering, because they're probably already miserable. That's really, again, a profound thought, don't add to their harm.

27:33 Things are hard. And we can do our part to help them know how to move forward, perhaps. And again, they won't always go that way. But they will, if we can keep them in a feeling safe within our relationship, then they're much more likely to be able to break free from the things that are controlling them. Can you speak just briefly about the role of trauma and loss and leading to possible addiction?

28:18 You know, there's a expert called, his name is Gabor Matein, you know, we see a lot of work and his philosophy is that, and you know, that every person begins to use because they have some pain in their life. And I believe that's true. Now, when we talk about trauma, sometimes it will rub parents the wrong way, because they will think, well, my person didn't have any trauma, right? Like they weren't raped, they weren't abused, they had a great home. And I want to validate you, as a parent, you, I'm sure you did provide a safe environment. The trauma can look really different for different people. So trauma could be I was bullied on the school playground. Trauma could be the boy sitting next to me touched me inappropriately.

29:10 Trauma can be I had ADHD, and they put me in a special class in school, and I felt like I didn't fit in. Trauma could just be my brain doesn't work like everybody else's. And because of that, I'm labeled as, you know, unreachable, unteachable learning differences. So when we what I like to say, and I asked parents to consider is that we know from an evidentiary standpoint that behaviors make sense. So when a person starts to use, it's the solution to the problem. So the problem, whether it's trauma or pain, or it could be physical pain, but substances are always the solution. So short term, what happens is I feel like I don't fit in. And that's my trauma. And when I use all of a sudden, I feel like I'm the life of the party. Right. And so, you know, it's hard, I don't want to label. I don't want to talk about trauma in a way that sort of puts it on parents and No, I agree.

30:27 Yeah, every, every person and in this day and age, you know, because of COVID. You know, we are seeing some trauma just in losses. You know, people are losing their family members or you know, I've heard my I started my addiction when my grandma died, because I was very close to my grandmother, or maybe it's I was in college, and everything shut down and I lost my community and I was isolated. And it was just easy for me to smoke pot and my anxiety. Right. So there's a broader definition to trauma. Maybe it, you know, for some families, it's more of a trauma of neglect, maybe that person didn't feel like they fit in. Or maybe they, they're, you know, there was an environment where they felt invalidated, or, you know, and again, I say these things not to blame, I, I acknowledge that we probably created some trauma for Jay, because we didn't respond in a loving way. When he first started using and, and so we worked very hard to sort of rectify that down the road.

32:00 So we're going to do another interview in a while. So because there's more I want you to be able to share, but I'd like for you to take a minute now, or a few minutes and bring us to the point where Jake was doing well, and you had hope for his future, and then you lost him. And tell us as much as you can comfortably do about that. Well, and I'll tell you, I call it our Lazarus time. And the reason I use that term is because, you know, Lazarus died, and four days he was dead, before they got word to Jesus, and Jesus got back to Lazarus and healed him. And so they don't really talk about this in the Bible, but from the time Lazarus was healed, he, he did die, ultimately, he died for eternity, right. But the time between the time he was healed and the time he died, you know, I call Lazarus time, right, this was this gift that his family got, where he had been healed, and the family was able to spend time with him until he left for eternity. And we got this Lazarus time with Jake. So, you know, it was probably in 2017 that he decided he

33:37 wanted to get well. And it was a struggle for him. He went to treatment, he had great months, you know, even nine up to nine months, and then he would have a reoccurrence of use. And he would go back in treatment, and then we'd have another great six months or nine months. And the last time he relapsed, we had two really great years. And so during that time, we had, you know, our family had really been able to sort of interact with him and heal. And I think we did not carry resentments. And we were really careful not to blame our sons for his addiction, you know. And the other thing we didn't do is we didn't push Jesus on him. We knew that, you know, he had some, you know, just biases towards the religion. But he definitely embraced God. He worked the 12-step program. I know that he was saved. I just think that he felt a lot of shame because of his addiction. So we just loved him like Jesus. And we just, you know, we just let go of resentments. We let go of outcomes. And even when he had relapses, we were like, okay, you know, it's just a blip. What do you want to do? And so he would reactivate recovery. And in April, he had

35:08 a very bad relapse. And just like with, you know, what they say, every relapse was a little worse. And he had ended up using heroin and fentanyl. But in April, he wanted to go to a wilderness program. And so he went to this wilderness program. And we did the family program. And we sat knees to knees with him. And it was the most healing thing you can imagine, you know, what sharing, we couldn't even think of resentments, but, you know, just sharing our regrets, asking for forgiveness, talking about what we respected about each other, you know, what we we had this part of it, which was requests, which were, you know, sort of the dreams for the future. And then he went into a sober home and he was doing really well. Like he was, he had a job, he was climbing, he had an amazing girlfriend that he's had for two and a half years. She was very supportive. In fact, we've looked back at messages and there was no shaming, no blaming, nothing. But unfortunately, the tentacles of opioid addiction go very, very, very deep. And he had been on Vivitrol, which is a medication that prevents overdose. And he had stopped taking it. We're not sure when or why. But on on October 22. Well, it was actually on October 21. He had a really good

36:45 friend who was living in the sober house who, who relapsed. And Jake, while did this boy Danny, and he went after Danny. And one of the one of the things that has given us so much assurance through this is that in Jake's big book, multiple times, he wrote in there faith without works is dead. And he underlined it faith without works is dead. And, and I think that he wanted to help Danny. He knew Danny was a very ill person and felt like, you know, Dick felt like he was Danny's only friend. So he left the safety of the sober home and the safety of his program to do what I believe Jesus would have done. And that was to help Danny. But in that process, you know, Danny, he had bought a lot of drugs and Jake, it was too much temptation for Jake. And on Friday night, they were in Danny's apartment and and Danny overdosed. So Jake saved his life from with naloxone. And they took Danny to the hospital, they lined up a program for Danny. In the meantime, Jake

38:16 had used. So they were kind of talking that night, him and Maddie about what Jake's plan was going to be to reactivate his recovery and to get, you know, back on track. And that night, after he went back home, Jake used and Maddie found him dead the next morning. Yeah, so, you know, we. I'm so sorry. Yeah, it's so hard. It's it's so painful. And I know others who have gone through it. And it's it's such a terrible loss. And I'm have prayed for you ever since I heard about it and continue to. Why don't you wrap up our time just kind of sharing what God has been to you in this these couple of months? Well, you know that how we've gotten through this and you know, people ask us, we spoke at the funeral. How do we how do you get through something like that? And, you know, of course, the foundation of all of it is our faith and the promises of God. And, you know, part of

39:48 our comfort comes from knowing that we had loved Jake well. And I can look through every text message for the last five years and there was never an accusation. There was never shame. There was never blame. There wasn't anything ever about us and what was important to us. It was always about Jake and what he wanted for his life and and trying to support what he wanted. And so, you know, asking that question, like if he died, would we have regrets? And we can truly say no, that we don't. I mean, little ones, right? Like little ones. Sometimes it feels like the universe conspired and everything fell into place for Jake to die. And, you know, we don't know why, right? Because people die 100 percent. You guys are going to suffer a loss in your life at some point. And you're going to wonder, like, why didn't God stop it? Right? Because I don't believe God causes death. God wanted us to live. And the enemy comes to kill, steal and destroy. And John 10 says, I came, Jesus came, for us to have life in all of its fullness. And so thinking in terms of what sometimes I would say addiction

41:20 stole our son, but we weren't going to give it the two for one special. And we're determined that while this is hard and we're filled with grief and every day I go through a box of clinics that God's intention is for us to live, to thrive. We will not ever get over Jake's death, but we will learn to live with Jake's death and we will continue our ministries in honor of our son and his life. And so, you know, I think part of it is just that determination that we're not going to let the enemy steal what God intended for us.

42:06 And that is joy and peace and love. And, you know, knowing God's character, I think, has really been the primary thing that has helped us through this, that God's intention is always good and that Jake truly is in a much better place right now than we are. You know, we're sad and we're suffering and we're, you know, grieving deeply, but Jake is climbing mountains, you know, he's with Jesus. And I know that can feel right, but like for us...

42:53 But it's true. Yeah, it is the truth, right? It is. It's the truth. I think I'd like to pray for you right now. Thank you. And I would invite listeners to just join in and pray for Pam and anyone else, you know, who's walking through a very dark time. So, Father, I lift up my sister and her husband and the children and even Jake's girlfriend, people who are struggling at this loss because there's this big emptiness inside them now. And one day love is no longer tangible for them to show that love and to receive it. And I pray that you would continue to provide comfort and bring healing. You promised that you can do that. You're the healer. And I thank you for Pam's perspective that Jake is with Jesus and he's in a great place. And he's now no longer struggling with his addiction. Ten years is a long time. And Father, I just pray for the family to be at peace, to allow the grief, to recognize that's part of what

44:25 happens when you lose is that you grieve and to not feel pressured to get over it. But I also thank you for the willingness to share with the rest of us this hard journey. And I just keep asking that you would strengthen them with your spirit and wrap your loving arms around them and give them peace within because you are the God of peace. And I do pray that you would also keep letting them touch other lives as they've seen you be so faithful to them in this hard journey. So thank you, Father. I pray just ultimate, awesome, wonderful blessing even as they go through a time of grieving and experiencing their loss. Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.

45:28 Amen. So two things. One, I really would like it probably be a month or two to talk with you again and learn a lot more about what you do in your ministry and how that could be helpful to our listeners. And second, we're going to give away three of your books to listeners. If you go to the show notes, you'll see her book and her resources listed, but you see mine and there's one that has my website. And if you click on that, there is on my website a place that says contact. And you can contact me and say, I would love to be in the drawing for one of Pam's books. So before we sign off, I wanted to tell you that the next week I am following up this wonderful conversation with a very personal one. My guest next week in celebration of my 50th episode of When You Love a Prodigal podcast will be my son Josh. And he's the one responsible for my wilderness journey that I think has benefited a lot of people. And it's been a while before he came to a place to say, yes, I would like

47:01 to talk about it. So I'm looking forward to that and I hope my listeners will not only come and listen, but tell others as well because Josh has a hard but wonderful story. So I'll see you then. And don't forget, did you write down something you heard Pam say that will encourage you and help you as you go forward in your journey? And choose at least one of those that you're going to seek to apply. So thank you, Lord, for this time. I am grateful for Pam and look forward to talking to her again and look forward to being with you who are listening next week as we talk to Josh. God bless you.