Shackled by Deeds in My Jail Made of Choices
I have personally spent a great deal of time working
professionally with individuals who struggle with addictions,
more specifically addictions to controlled substances. I have
given presentations to many parent groups, school groups,
government entities and addicts. I have taken occasion to pick
their brain so to speak in an effort to understand how one
arrives at complete slavery to a particular drug. There is in
every case a string of choices, decisions that have led to other
decisions, which in turn led to other decisions, each choice
locking them into a pattern of conduct difficult to break.
Let me be more specific and use the life of an actual person,
who for our purposes we'll call Jim. Jim grew up in a typical
middle class Utah household and was raised by loving religious
parents who, no doubt did their best to give Jim the tools he
needed to make good decisions. Jim married a nice girl, and was
able as a young father to start his own business, which became
very successful. Eventually Jim was able to build a big house in
a nice neighborhood. He stayed active in church, in his
children's lives, and was always attentive to his wife. Jim at a
point in his life made the choice to use methamphetamine. No
doubt that this decision was reached through another string of
bad choices. The meth use at first seemed to help Jim cope with
his busy schedule. Each time Jim made the decision to use he
forged another iron bar for his personal prison cell. With each
use Jim's dependence on the drug grew making the next choice to
use or not use many times more difficult. In a short period of
time, his work began to suffer as his attentions turned toward
his new taskmaster. Jim's loving wife struggled as she watched
her once loving and attentive husband become abusive to her and
their children. She watched as he lost the business that they
had worked so hard to build up, then the house. Finally when the
ultimatum was given he chose the master that he was serving over
his family.
Jim spent the next couple of years in and out of jail as he
racked up several felony charges for possession of Meth and
theft, having been reduced to steeling construction tools and
pawning them to buy his next fix. Jim's string of choices
culminated in a jail cell. The reason I know so much detail
about Jim's life is because I read all of this in a suicide
letter as I was investigating Jim's death. Jim had hung himself
in his jail cell just one week before his release date. The last
sentence in the letter stated something like this " I have no
choice but to kill myself, when I get out I will use again".
Let us take a close look at Jim's level of personal freedom.
Before his decision to use meth, his options were almost without
limit. He could have decided to do a million different things
with his life. Jim's personal freedom left a myriad of doors
open to him, including the most important, the opportunity to
raise and have a positive impact on his children, not to mention
the opportunity of a loving and lasting relationship with his
wife.
Perhaps you can see where I am going with this story. Each time
Jim made that conscious decision to use he also gave up some of
his personal freedom literally enslaving himself. Like a
sinister game of chess, the pieces of Jim's life were given away
the loss of each piece making it that much harder for him to win
until Jim's prison cell was complete and emotionally he was
trapped in a cell forged of a million choices. Unfortunately Jim
used the only bit of freedom he felt he had left to perpetuate
all of the other bad choices, he chose to give up.