"If only you died": what are the relatives of drug addicts actually experiencing

A person with addiction - it does not matter, alcohol or drug - always leaves an imprint on all members of his family. Those who live closer to him fall into co -dependent relationships, which either leave them in the end with an injury that need to be healed or changed irrevocably. In almost all cases, loved ones see two different people: a monster and a native person, although this transformation can have minimal intervals. Within the framework of the last head of the study of the place of heroin in the world and Russia, Samizdat studied several stories of those who lived under the same roof with drug addicts.

Loaders and dumps in the side fly one by one, and at some point I stop reacting to them, but simply studying the environment. On the wall, drawings drawn by my brother for her daughter, my niece: Disney Heroes, reproduced with amazing accuracy, gray wallpapers, in the corner lies a dusty plush panda-shed. A woolen blanket smells interesting - the smells of dachshunds living here and washing powder mixed here. The room is illuminated only by a strip of light from the ajar door to the living room. Obupuhi continues to fly into the head, fists in the stomach.

Everything changed quite quickly this evening: my brother and his wife walked all day in the summer Moscow, walked through a large stone bridge, where my brother sat on the parapet, and I did not dare to come closer, because I was afraid of heights. I am twelve years old, today I will stay at my brother and we will look, it seems, the first “call”. On the way home, we capture several bottles of beer under the grunting of his wife. Brother drinks them at home, while his wife and I cut tomatoes into the salad.

It looks sober, but something has changed in it. The tongue is not braided, the eyes do not glass, just something is wrong. When his wife once again releases some kind of critical replica, he suddenly jumps up and waves at her. Everything happens quite quickly: for some reason it seems to me that I can stop it, so I'm trying to grab my brother's hand. Of course, I am mistaken: my wife gets a slap in the face, and after a second I find myself in the room of my niece, on her bed, and I get a lesson in respect for the elders. I don’t know how much beating lasts, but after it he clearly cools, and I take it and fall asleep there, squiring with a broken nose.

No less vile scenes I will observe all subsequent years until we practically stop communicating. During this time, the whole family will not even have one or even ten times to blame himself for what is happening to him, give the second, third, one hundred and fifty -third a chance, sincerely believing at every specific moment, that now they are accurately hearing the truth and all this was a kind of indulgence. But all this is the law of the genre. The same for any family where there is an alcohol or drug addict.

Ellis

In 2014, a study was published in the journal Medical Psychology in Russia, which was conducted by Viktor Bocharov and Alexander Shishkov from the laboratory of clinical psychology and psychodiagnostics of the St. Petersburg Scientific and Research Institute named after V. M. Bekhtereva. They tried to describe the basic psychological characteristics of relatives of heroin -dependent. For this, the institute staff studied the behavior of 152 parents (104 mothers and 48 fathers) of people with heroin addiction. As Bocharov and Shishkova write, a difficult life situation that develops with such families, ultimately involves everyone in the destructive relationship of everyone, and so -dependence becomes the final - and it doesn’t matter whether he drinks his native or use drugs. Depending on what place a person in such a family occupies, the form of co -dependent relationships also varies.

The photographer Ellis Gerggedava is exactly the twenty years that her father used heroin was afraid to leave the house and start living alone. “I was dependent on the situation in the family, until the last I was afraid to leave and start living my life. I was sure that one night they would call me from the police and asked to come home for identification, ”she recalls. It seemed to her that while she was at home, nothing would ultimately happen to her or her mother.

Now Ellis is 26 years old, in her Instagram, filled with studio shootings, it is written: “Yes, I shoot, yes, expensive”; She has a husband and daughter onion. She still can’t say for sure, because of which her father, who owned his own business to transport vegetables and fruits, as well as a textile factory in the Tver region, sat on heroin. “As I understand it, I just got into a very unsuccessful company,” she shrugs and begins to remember. So she wakes up from the ringing of broken glass: her father in frenzy split the window and chases her and her mother (her brother and sister began to live separately as soon as they hit eighteen) throughout the house. Here she does not sleep until morning: in the living room, father in the middle of the night suddenly begins to wash the floors and scream, as he loves and hates his wife. It is necessary to guess the moment when it goes from screams to strikes, and intervene in time.

She almost overcame her co -dependence and consequences of children's trauma, although until recently she was ready to attach to a person for a joke about heroin or any other drugs. “I have extremely high requests for relationships between me and other people, because my parents did not give up, because it was once. It was hard to wake up at night and stick at the kitchen table, looking at one point and digging in past fragments and screams, ”she says, but adds that today she became much easier. True, not so long ago, unexpectedly for herself, she was very angry, having read the news about the appendix, designed to help the victims of domestic violence launched by the singer Manizh. “I tried to formulate that I was so infuriated, and then I realized: I was terribly angry that all this was today, and in my time there was nothing like that,” she admits.

In her time, there were only police officers, whom Ellis caused at the most critical moments when it seemed that his father would kill the whole family. They arrived, slowly entered the apartment, good -naturedly poured their hands and took him to their car. Half an hour later he returned, and the rage with which he carried the house could be multiplied by three.

Unhappy families sometimes attract their own. At some point, similar couples began to appear around the Ellis family, but there, co-dependence came to the next stage-literal: “I saw how the same age as my mother, beautiful and strong women, sit on heroin after her husbands. Someone thought of despair that the husband would see from the side, how terrible it was, and stop, someone thought that he would understand his man better and find out how to pull him out of this. They all burned, alone at the end of life could not even get out of bed, and their husbands did not even see what was happening. ” According to Ellis, she and her mother at some point began to suspect of something like that: she began to look at one point more and more, she faded her eyes. The alarm was false, just the mother began to break and burn out from the fact that she could not fit two different people in the head. “This was two different people. I wouldn’t miss my father so - that insanely kind and modest dad who helped everyone he could, who in this sense was an example for me, ”Ellis explains.

Vika and Kurt

One of the warmest conversations and my brother and I happened the next morning after beating. He apologized non -stop and fluttered my head, gave a blue baseball cap with the UCLA logo, we laughed together and fooling around, brushing my fingals with tonal cream so that I would go home to my parents. I was then absolutely sure that there was some absurdity and I, as a good younger brother, must prevent my mother and dad suspectly suspect something. After all, he is an excellent older brother: from him inherited I got the cassettes of Doors, Depeche Mode and Beka. It was he who taught me to catch fish. Before moving out of the room in which we lived together and move to a separate apartment, he drew for me a huge Batman and a female woman, as well as an Indian from the album of the artist Remington. It’s just that sometimes something strange happens to him, but I can’t betray it, so the next day after beating I will go to the blue cap of UCla even at home, before my parents-they say, I like it too much to shoot. It was hardly my disguise that had some sense, and for sure they immediately called my brother, but I was sure that my mission was not to lay. The concept also fits perfectly in my head that the night before and this morning there were two completely different people in front of me. One can poison you with jokes and play Grebenshchikov on the guitar, and the other - to spread the apartment to hell and scream you and your common relatives terrible words full of hatred. But as soon as the second begins to inflict physical harm to the first, you will go to both your family to their help, no matter what he does the day before.

So it works. In another study by Bocharov and Shishkova, dedicated to emotional burnout in co -dependent relations, it is said that the destructive consequences of stress in relatives in terms of severity are comparable with what can be observed in refugees. It’s just that the basis here is a completely different approach: they see their sick relatives as those who should fight for and whom they should be saved - no matter what.

For three and a half years, the journalist Vika Arakelyan was engaged in the salvation of his young man. She was fifteen when they met. Her family - mother, grandmother and cat, her everyday life at that time - the road from Western Degunino to Krasnoselskaya to a private linguistic lyceum five days a week. Her leisure - parties near the Metropolis shopping center and parties in FM Club on the occasion of the birthday of participants in the Placebo's favorite group. Favorite Placebo song - Protect Me from What I Want. She met her future young man at one of these parties: she was fifteen, he was twenty -three.

He is on the stage with a bass gitar, she is in the hall, they are superficially familiar-they saw each other earlier in the same FMClub. She has red hair and sneakers from the AC/DC logo on his tongues, he is sure that she looks like Kurt Cobain (and those around him share this confidence), it seems to her inaccessfully beautiful, and today he has AIDS with him. “When at that party he himself approached me at some point and offered to leave the toilet to sniff a couple of roads, he seemed to me literally a prince on a white horse. In general, we held this party together: sniffed, danced, then sniffed again, then I jumped with him on stage. For me, it was something unreal: my life became like a real Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N'Roll-and it was very captured, ”recalls Vika. In the morning, he kissed her, and then took the number of her phone. After that, they did not see each other for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, until he once called to ask: "Is there anything?"

“And I, completely suddenly, was. He came to me at six in the morning, we went to sniff the roads to the fifth floor of my house, and my grandmother understood where and why I was going. Then they walked around Moscow, then went to him in the suburbs, where he played The Cure on the guitar, then fell asleep together. I thought he was such a typical nightingor - he sniffs on weekends. ” The fact that her new young man is sitting on the heroin system, Vika learned on the way from the same shopping center Metropolis: she was traveling on a minibus from the Topshop store with a freshly cooled pink dress when he sent her SMS, in which he was strange and confusedly explained that he was now meeting with a friend and mentioned something under the abbreviation of H. Vicki realized that she meets the drug addict, there would be a record in her diary: “Fuck, just not Ger. Ah, no! It is Ger. Interestingly, immediately shoot or cut the veins? "

Relatives and friends of people with dependence on alcohol or drugs are often sure that they are able to pull them out of the disease, and what is happening with people dear to them is to blame for the encirclement. Vika, too, had no thought to immediately part with his young man, on the contrary, they came together when she entered an unloved university. Grandmother and mother were at first against, but she stated that she would leave her studies otherwise. Those surrendered, and Vika began her mission by healing love, which a month laid on.

The first thing she encountered, plunged into the experience of daily life-dependent life, is a constant lie, as for and without: “For some reason he lied that his girlfriend was pregnant, lied that he was an interview, that he wrote a verse for me, but the verse was googling for one or two, and he did not lie about the money, occupying 500 rubles for cat food.” The worst of all, according to her, was not physical violence, which also soon began, but the fact that he could disappear. Once they agreed to meet at the station to go home on the train, but Vicki’s guy did not show up either at the appointed time, nor in an hour or in the morning: “I am going to his apartment alone, I call him an hour, the second, the third. There are already five in the morning at the clock, there is no answer, I hear only something slurred in the tube. I don’t sleep all night, I smoke and shake with fear, and then he comes at ten in the morning absolutely killed and tells ridiculous fairy tales. ”

Believe what a person tells with dependence, and explain to himself that his promises are true, and in temporary enlightenment to see unusual heroism is characteristic of the vast majority of relatives and relatives. The study by Bocharov and Shishkova says that mothers are usually inclined to such a great enthusiasm during the “pure” periods. At the same time, fathers usually begin to ask the question before, what they did wrong, then experience anger and try to break any connections with their son or daughter.

My mother began to wonder what she did not so, relatively recently: after hectolitras of droppers, endless coding and thousands of promises to get a new job and immediately return the money. Father, it seems, always knew that all this was nonsense, but it was part of this process: sometimes I heard him once again cursing in the kitchen or sending his brother on the phone. True, a month later, we still found ourselves on one family dinner, where the father pretended that everything was fine, and his brother drank fruit drinks and joked perfectly, and everyone was not so shy about talking about the past - rather rejoiced that now life would improve.

“At some point, I convinced myself that he was just a hero: sometimes he doesn’t prick at all, and this is such a willpower. Trading and self -deception were endless. After a couple of months of tin, he had to set the table for the New Year, cut the salad himself - this was a hundred percent guarantee that a new life began, ”Vika continues. Sometimes drug addicts are convincing in their desire to break with heroin even for themselves, but all the more painfully, for all relatives and loved ones, breakdowns are. All a week in front of a home dinner with a friend, the young man Vicki made an orange fresh for himself and told how much he feels better. Outside the window is the winter of 2011, on the appointed day they bake chicken together and buy a bottle of red wine. He drinks a glass, and after an hour a girlfriend composes an excuse in order to quickly leave and not see how the young man Vicki transports more and more ugly. A girlfriend leaves, and Vika watches how a lover document a jamb and pours a pack of phenazepam, then to call a friend to bring something. Family dinner ends with tears and a body lying in the middle of the kitchen.

“You yourself see everything, get away from him,” her young man told Vika. She either brought in packs the products to their home, then, stumbled upon the syringes hidden in the kitchen, she left a frustrated and put a cross on her son, then to return. At some point, Vika did so: she collected things and went back to her grandmother with her mother. He says that she was simply not enough- psychologists call it emotional burnout, and this is what almost all living next to the alcohol-dependent encounter at some point.

"If only you died"

Alina Belobrova’s parents met in 1995 in Udmurtia, where her future father, “sediment from all the ways”, sent another completely burnt woman - his mother to serve in the army and get off the khanka. “Dad fled from the unit to some acquaintances, to whom my mother came for an overlock, and that’s it. As my mother later said, he fascinated her when he fled behind her barefoot on the March ice and prickly snow to find out the phone number. It spun, they got married, moved to the mines, and only there my mother found out that he was sticking tightly and sometimes jumping on Sink. How he was in the groin. How he took away and did not bring his mother’s leather coat and a table lamp - my mother called it “went through Vienna,” she recalls.

Anna, like many others, speaks of a father as two different people, but having the same quality: with the same ease with which he fascinated others and forced to substitute the stomach of the most aggressive courtyard dogs, he fled from the hospital, parted with property, found new doses and beaten his three women - two daughters and wife. When he was clean, it was the best father in the world: he played with his daughters, taught them to train max max, and sometimes mother prepared a carrot cake - and everyone went to the picnic for the reservoir. «Нам казалось само собой разумеющимся, что папа хороший, а вот он пропадает, тащит в дом странных людей, и по квартире расползается запах уксуса и ацетона. Такая аксиома: солнце встаёт на востоке, заходит на западе, а папа бывает в двух состояниях: хороший — и когда надо защищать от него маму и сестру».

Почти каждый близкий или родственник человека, страдающего зависимостью, иногда произносит одну и ту же фразу: «Вот бы ты сел или уже умер». Я слышал, как это говорила моя мама, я слышал это от отца, когда на его телефон в очередной раз приходил град смс с проклятьями и угрозами. Герои этого текста тоже признаются, что если не произносили вслух, то думали то же самое. Например: «Когда он пил или торчал, мы ненавидели его так, что плевали в суп и желали, чтоб он умер». Только даже смерть или разрыв отношений с алко- или наркозависимым не всегда помогают.

Когда отец Алины Белобровой умер, случайно передознувшись, её мать выла и билась головой об стену, об отце в семье вообще не говорят, а сама Алина теперь перебирается из одной клиники неврозов в другую и точно знает, что всё это связано с папой.

Отец Эллис, как и любой человек с подобной болезнью, был склонен к картинным жестам, поэтому в последнюю неделю своей жизни, когда понял, что у него начинают отказывать ноги, пересел на крокодил. «Помню, что я, как обычно, присела около него, стала шутить шутки, которые он любит, чтобы рассмешить его, а он как-то безучастно смотрел, будто что-то задумал», — говорит фотограф. В выходные, пока Эллис не было дома, он попросил жену сходить за водой, а сам в это время покончил с собой, введя себе тройную дозу «крокодила».

«Я благодарна ему за то, что он позаботился о нас всех и сделал так, чтобы никто из нас этого не видел», — признаётся она. По словам Эллис, только совсем недавно она перестала вздрагивать, когда заговаривает об отце, но впереди ещё не один сеанс терапии.

Относительно безболезненно из своих отношений с наркозависимым вышла, по её же словам, только Вика: она замужем, бывший парень до сих пор в друзьях во «ВКонтакте», иногда просит занять 500 рублей. Пару лет назад она даже оказалась в гостях у его новой девушки из старой общей компании. На стене в её комнате висел листок со стихами: «Это были стихи, которые писала ему я, и захотелось её как-то предостеречь. Она ответила, что это он ей написал, потом выяснилось, что с ней происходит то же самое, что со мной, вплоть до точных цитат». Новая подруга бывшего в итоге пополнила список тех женщин, что окружали семью фотографа Эллис, тоже сев на героин.

Я дописываю этот текст, будучи 31-летним взрослым мужчиной, моему брату скоро пятьдесят, вместе с уже третьей семьёй он переехал за Урал, сдав свою московскую квартиру. Последний раз мы общались в прошлом году на поминках по отцу. Я ума не приложу, где там голубая кепка, Бэтмен и индеец закрыты несколькими слоями краски и обоев. Последний раз фингал мне ставили на спаррингах, на которых я стараюсь бывать не реже двух раз в неделю, — с тренировками приходит осознание, что получать в лицо не так уж страшно, особенно когда можешь и знаешь, как отвечать.

Однако когда я в очередной раз смотрю на архив голосовых сообщений, пришедших в Whats'app, в которых слышны те же бессвязные слова об уважении к старшему брату и угрозы, которые я слышал, когда он мутузил меня на кровати, то чувствую ужасную гадливость и злость от того, что они всё ещё заставляют меня вспоминать те же страх и беспомощность, что я чувствовал в тот вечер.