One of the hardest things for those who have not experienced addiction to comprehend is why anyone would choose to keep using, even when doing so destroyed their physical and mental health, caused untold pain to their loved ones and led to imprisonment.
The first thing to acknowledge is that, for a true addict, it isn’t a choice at all. “I kept hoping she would just stop -I didn’t understand addiction,” Tina Holley, a West Virginia mother whose daughter has sacrificed everything to fuel her heroin habit, told local publication The Journal.
Holley’s daughter, Tiffany, a mother herself at 19 years old, had been using heroin for over two years when her mother reached out to A&E’s “Intervention” series for drug intervention help. The young user had already been thrown out of the house and incarcerated because of her habit, but that had not stopped Tiffany from returning to heroin again and again.
Through the course of the filming, Holley explains that she came to learn more about the extent of her daughter’s substance abuse, as well as some of the underlying causes that drove it.
“I used to look at [addicts] like they were a piece of trash,” said Holley, who is a registered nurse at a local hospital. “I look at them now and I feel sorry for them because there’s a reason they did it.”
While Holley had tried her own tough love approach to try and curb her daughter’s habit, she ultimately needed the help of professional interventionists to fully understand and combat Tiffany’s substance abuse. If someone you love is using and you feel powerless to prevent it, an intervention service may be able to help.