Caregiving for a youth who is impacted by parental substance use

PTSD trauma is very often behind a substance abuser’s debilitating addiction. The lasting mental pain resulting from the trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one's head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others.

It all can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is ‘medicated’.

Typically societally overlooked is that intense addiction usually doesn’t originate from a bout of boredom, where a person consumed recreationally but became heavily hooked on a (self-)medicating substance that eventually destroyed their life and even those of loved-ones.

Though always sympathetic, I used to look down on those who had ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and/or illicit ‘hard’ drugs. But I, though not in the 'hard-drug' category, have indeed suffered enough unrelenting PTSD-related hyper-anxiety to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.

It's a most tragic fact that many chronically addicted people won't miss this world if they never wake up. It's not that they necessarily want to die; it's that they want their [seemingly] pointless corporeal suffering to end.

Since part of the Iroquois Confederacy exIsted in what is now Canada, and their constitution (noted in 1988 U.S. Congressional Resolution #331) made provision for "Generational Review", one might wonder how many generations of youth endured a 'substance-abusing parent'... -while the Iroquois Confederacy included parts of what is now Canada--I share this in hopes of further commentary.