Ep 150 - Learn How Jaclyn Turns Grief and Social Stigma into Advocacy and Education.

Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Jaclyn Brown who at the end of last episode shared the social media reactions and comments to her brother’s death and today we begin with a public service announcement of suggestions of a few does and don'ts when people are grieving. 

Jaclyn dives into processing social stigma and highlights the need for education around harm reduction.

Jaclyn works as the Family Advisory Committee Liaison for Mobilize Recovery. She owns Stay Golden Coaching & Consultingand Jaclyn Kane Creations Recovery. 

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Transcript

00:01

You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast, a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.

Intro:  Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. At the end of last episode, Jaclyn shared the challenges of social media and the reactions and comments to her brother’s death. 

Today, we begin with a public service announcement, some suggestions of do’s and don’ts when people are grieving. Jaclyn also dives into processing social stigma and highlights the need for education around harm reduction. Let’s get back to Jaclyn.

00:51

The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast

Margaret  01:08

Let’s do a PR public service announcement. You’ve lived it, you’ve gone through what I cannot imagine going through of other people who’ve never addressed this with me never had the courage to talk to me are now writing their opinions, their perspectives on a social platform, and not being kind at times, maybe thinking they’re being kind. But wow. So, if you could give people suggestions on how to support people through a traumatic loss around substance use disorder, whether it was direct result or not, right, not knowing the details? 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yes. 

Margaret:  What would you give them for a suggestion on how to be supportive of the family who are living through this nightmare? 

Jaclyn Brown  01:58

That is an amazing question. And I’m glad you asked that. The biggest thing is that if a family has not openly disclosed the way that their person died, for example, the next day I posted we unexpectedly lost my brother. 

My parents were also still clinging to this autopsy and hopes, like, as if the manner of death would have changed anything, you know, that’s when fentanyl really started to rise up. And so, my dad was almost like secretly hoping like I hope it’s laced with fentanyl, because like he knows his dose, like how could this have happened? Like I don’t understand. So, we said it unexpectedly occurred, and people still pushed. And I get that as humans, we are curious about how things happen, why things happen. But if the family is not disclosing that, don’t ask, because they may still be processing that or they may not truly know, like we knew. But we were, I don’t know, hoping like, maybe there was some other thing to say instead of this.

Margaret  03:12

Yeah, but also, sorry, but who gives a damn why or why not? You’re saying that it’s your family. And it’s no one’s business to assert assumed to push to? Sorry, I get a little hot about this. 

Jaclyn Brown  03:28

Oh no, weddings and funerals are like the two things where people like their personalities come out. And it was wild to me. How many people felt that they were owed all the details? Like, I saw people in comments like, well, what happened? We all deserve to know, I’m like, I don’t even know you. Like, how do you deserve to know? But even if you knew, how does that change what happened? 

Another big thing is, people would say to me, and I know it was with the best of intentions, let me know if you need something the family doesn’t know what to do. So, the best thing you can do is just show up and do something or say, what do you need right now? Because when people put the onus back on the family to say, let me know, I’m never going to let you know, especially me being the eldest. I would rather, I would rather eat lint than call you and go, I haven’t eaten in days, can you pick me up a pizza? Like, I’m just not going to do that? Because I don’t want to bother you with my problems. And I feel that a lot of families are similar, where, like, we’re not going to push more out there. But just the simple fact of what do you need in this moment because I couldn’t anticipate how I was going to feel 45 minutes from now. 

We’re all sleep deprived. We were all just honestly zombies trying to get this funeral, planned and trying to handle all this stuff. 

But I think another big thing for families is not only showing up for them. I think a lot of times people are afraid to ask about the person 

Margaret:  Yes

Jaclyn Brown:  in question. I still and at the time, no matter what I will always love if someone asked me about my brother, I will always love telling a story about him. I will always love that. Can I say that’s going to be the same for everyone across the board? No. And I think a lot of people sometimes think, well, I don’t want to set you off, I don’t want to trigger you. 

It is so comforting when someone else remembers my brother and I don’t have to bring him up. Like that’s such a nice thing to hear. 

Margaret:  Yeah. 

Jaclyn Brown:  And then on top of it, to have people. And this sounds awful to say, but I have date saved on my phone of when my people when my friend’s son’s, daughter’s, whatever have passed. And I save that on my phone, and I reach out to them every year. I don’t care how long it’s been 

Margaret:  not awful. It’s wonderful. 

Jaclyn Brown:  And it’s something where, after the funeral happens, all the sports gone. Like everyone goes back to normal life. And you have a family that’s left like, this is not a normal life anymore. What do we do? And I think even checking in. I get that sometimes it’s a lot for people to check in. But throughout the year, like just throughout life, like there are times that I’m not okay. But I think putting anything back on that grieving family to have them be the catalyst for help, is extremely, extremely hard for them to even comprehend.

Margaret  06:46

Great suggestions, great input, I think that it doesn’t have to be around substance use disorder 

Jaclyn Brown:  No

Margaret:   or mental issues. It can be around any loss to have that. And I appreciate that very much. You shared earlier, Jaclyn, that you were left with a lot of anger. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yeah, 

Margaret:  and I know that’s common. I know that’s common around this illness because it is so baffling, confusing, frustrating, enraging, and helpless to watch someone have a train wreck in front of our face and not be able to stop it. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Mm hmm. 

Margaret:  What were you the most angry? And when you go back pre getting help to look at this, what do you think angered you the most? Where were you struggling with anger the most?

Jaclyn Brown  07:35

I’m just going to be very candid; I was really angry with how other people didn’t try to help. And that’s my perception. Now, I understand now, people might have been helping in their own ways, or they or they look like they didn’t care. They just left my brother out to dry. 

However, the other part that I was very angry about was my brother died on November 16. The last time I spoke to him was on Father’s Day. And that was June, I want to say was like June 16, or something of that year. And we didn’t talk because we were mad at each other. He would get into these kind of, I call them now for myself depression dips, where I just don’t reply to texts. I don’t want to talk to anyone. But that was not uncommon for us. And so, when he passed, I hadn’t spoke to him in months, I had no idea what was currently going on in his life. So, I got really angry at the people who had talked to him or had been conversing with him still, to not be like how did you not see this coming? Like how? And that’s me just I think being angry. That was a projection of the fact that I wasn’t present for him at that time.

Margaret  09:02

Do you think because human nature is what it is right? There are so many emotions flooding us when we lose someone, let alone unexpectedly, let alone to such a I’m gonna say preventable. And I don’t mean that as a judgment on your brother, but preventable. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Absolutely. 

Margaret:  Part of a journey. And yet, I would think if I were in your shoes, and please push back if I’m wrong, I wouldn’t want it to blame someone as a way of coping, because I would feel, I would probably just knowing me start blaming myself if I didn’t, because I wasn’t there. And by no means do I think that’s accurate, right? Like it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. But I wonder if that’s part of human nature for all of us.

Jaclyn Brown  09:49

Yeah, I find that blaming myself for a lot of things was number one, like I’m the number one person to blame because guess what I was like the liaison for this situation. And so, I was definitely number one person to blame. 

If my parents hear this, I mean this in the nicest way, but I blame them too. Because you’re living with him, how did you not see this, and they are from a generation that you don’t really like poke and prod about these details. And sadly, ignorance is bliss. You know, like, if you can’t see it, is it really there. But then there was that anger towards just everyone for, and again, this goes back to what I thought they should have been doing. And I realize now that none of that was in my control. And a lot of my anger came from these expectations I had of other people’s actions, yet, no one is going to act the way I would act. I get that now. But it’s grief.

Like anger is my favorite emotion, it’s so easy to be angry. I was angry at his drug dealer, I was angry at his friends that he used with, I was angry at my family, I was angry at his friends who told me about it, but then didn’t like kind of let him stay in that. You know, I was angry at all these people because it’s so easy to be angry, to I carry any of that anger anymore. There are times where it comes up. 

Margaret:  Sure, 

Jaclyn Brown:  not gonna lie, but I’m not going to be mad. Like, for example, I think a lot of people can take their grief and stay angry with it. That was a very bad place for me to be in. Because then I went into my own depression, because it got to like year two. And I’m thinking this doesn’t feel like grief anymore. Because you know, like grief has a very just dark, heavy, just solemn missing type of feeling. But then a lot of my thoughts turn to, I shouldn’t be here, like, I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t deserve to be here. I hope I get into a car accident; I hope, it started to get really dark. Because when you’re holding on to all this anger and sadness, it’s just going to infest you, eventually. So that kind of backfired on me, holding on to all of that.

Margaret  12:23

One of the things that I say a lot, and I’m curious, your feedback on this is, I get angry, personally. And this is my language, the disease gets off scott frickin free and we beat each other up. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yup.

Margaret:  And I know it’s hard to get angry at the object of an addiction. That is hard, because it’s coming out of the same mouth. It’s coming out of this person’s body. It’s this person we love underneath all of that. And yet, when we’re in it, we get so angry at them, at us, at other family members, at society. And there’s a lot to be angry about. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yeah. 

Margaret:  The disease is going yeah, that’s good. Keep going, get angry at everybody else. 

Jaclyn Brown  13:11

Bickering. Yeah.

Margaret  13:14

Yeah. And I wonder if that’s something that you got to a place of being able to do, is actually allow yourself to be angry at the illness? That took your brother. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yeah. 

Margaret:  And that twirled, your family into upside down knots trying to figure this all out?

Jaclyn Brown  13:31

Yeah, I look at it a little bit different in the sense of why was my brother using and what led to that. And there is a lot of trauma that he went through, not only in his accident, but when he was in high school when he was a senior. He had four of his friends die within a month, unexpectedly and not related to substances. Like one I believe was an ATV accident. And then the other two were the girlfriends of these of these two, and I was not living at home at the time I was living in Tucson going to school and not understanding how unhealed or trauma that hasn’t been dealt with is what will eventually start digging that hole inside of you. 

Because, you know, there was a point where you know, me, I didn’t have a good relationship with alcohol. I binge drink a lot and a lot of it had to do with the fact that as the oldest child, I had the most responsibilities. So, I had no idea how to not be responsible. I had no idea how to let go of control. So, when I moved to Tucson, and now I’m 21 cause I didn’t do any high school drinking because I’m the oldest if you’re going to be home at midnight, my dad’s outside at 12:01 in his robe waiting for me wondering where I am. So, I moved to Tucson, and I felt like, oh my god, like alcohol allows me to enjoy myself, I can actually loosen up a bit. But then it eventually got to a point where I was no longer living with roommates, I was now living by myself. I’d always live with my family or roommates and living alone, post college, you know, I worked at enterprise and so I worked ridiculous hours, like 50 to 60 hours a week, how am I going to cope with being alone, working ridiculous hours, not getting paid well.

I don’t have a boyfriend, whoever in my life, my family’s away from me, I’m going to drink. And I still drink to this day. However, for me, I ended up again, unknowingly utilizing harm reduction to figure out my relationship with substances and figure out why am I drinking? Why am I doing anything that I’m doing? Why do I have to do this? And I think while the disease itself and people, there’s so many people just don’t understand how it affects the receptors and how it affects you know, the things in the brain, they don’t understand the science behind it. That was a big piece for me once my brother passed before I got into advocacy, I’m like, I need to educate myself on this and, and understand the science because you I’m sure you’ve heard the big debate of addiction is not a disease. It’s a you know, a moral failing. It’s a choice. It’s a whatever 

Margaret:  Heard it all. 

Jaclyn Brown:  And it’s not your brain is changed and, but the other thing too is trauma changes your brain. And so, understanding the correlation between substance use and trauma, I think has been the bigger eye opener for me. 

17:00

This podcast is made possible by listeners like you.

Bumper:  When I reflect on my decades of work with families of people with the disease of addiction, I have seen few siblings get the same resources provided to partners, parents or even children. Numerous siblings have told me they felt they couldn’t share in traditional Al-Anon or Nar-Anon meetings as the parents and partners pain seems so much more significant. 

The Embrace Family Recovery Coaching Group for Siblings will meet for six group sessions this summer, including education on the no fault disease, connecting with other siblings, so feeling less alone, strategizing together regarding communication, boundary setting and more.

The summer course for siblings begins Tuesday, the 16th of July, the group is for people 16 years and up. And the total cost for the six sessions is $180. 

To find out more, head to my website, 

embracefamilyrecovery.com and click the Work with Margaret Page. Go down to coaching groups, and you will find sibling groups. Click on that to learn more about this group, and how to register.

18:45

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Margaret  18:58

You’ve mentioned harm reduction now a couple of times, and advocacy. So, I really would love to have you again educate the listeners about what harm reduction means to you. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Yeah, 

Margaret:  What it is. And also, let’s talk about the advocacy you continue to do. 

Jaclyn Brown  19:15

Yeah, so harm reduction. For me, the very basic definition that I really love to say is just like unconditional love, and meeting someone where they’re at in their relationship to substances. 

So, like I had mentioned, when my brother died, I got super, I jumped in advocacy because I was all about let’s talk about the stigma. Let’s talk about why more people don’t talk about this. And my big focus was stigma but then I kind of ran myself into the ground and that is one big thing about advocacy is that I see a lot of people who jump into advocacy after they lose their son, daughter, whatever it may be. Not only does it keep you busy, which is great. But it can also really drain you. And that’s what ended up happening to me like people don’t really understand how grief can manifest in your body physically. And it got to the point where not only did I develop asthma, but then I got an autoimmune disease, and I ended up in the hospital. And finally, like the universe was like, you need to stop and like, take care of yourself. And so, in that time, I educated myself, and I learned about harm reduction. So, imagine being like, think it was 2019. And I’m hearing about Naloxone for the first time. I never heard of it. When looking up heroin addiction, anything, naloxone is never mentioned. So, I had to sit with the idea that wait, there’s something that existed that we could have had in our home for this, and he could still be here, that took a lot for me to really process. Because there’s one thing to feel like, I don’t have control over this, like, what could I have done? 

Margaret:  Right? 

Jaclyn Brown:  We could have had naloxone in the home. You know, and potentially, am I saying that would have changed anything? No.

Margaret  21:11

It might have given a chance for him to get the next thing. You know, my saying, and I don’t mean this tritely, as, as long as someone’s breathing, there’s hope. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Exactly. 

Margaret:  And that offers them the ability to keep breathing if you have it around.

Jaclyn Brown  21:25

And there was, you know, initially, when I was first reading about Naloxone, people were like, oh, well, that’s just enabling them to use more. And I’m like, it’s just enabling them to breathe, like, from the basic level, you’re just enabling them to breathe. And so, I started to learn more about the idea of harm reduction. 

And so, if we think about harm reduction in our everyday world, we see it all the time. We see it in seatbelts, we see it with sunscreen, like driving in a car is a very dangerous thing. So, what did they implement seatbelts? And there was such a huge backlash when they try to first bring in seatbelts are like, we don’t need this, why would we need this. Now, the idea of you to bring up oh, my car doesn’t have seatbelts won’t be like, are you nuts, like, your car has seatbelts. But thinking about sunscreen, thinking about a helmet when you ride a bike or a motorcycle. So, these are all versions of reducing harm. 

And then harm reduction in general has the concept like the bigger social justice concept has a lot of different facets to it in regard to just in terms of equality, in terms of race, you know, all the all the things that it goes into. The piece that I really dove into the syringe service programs, and here in Arizona, there are a couple of syringe service program organizations, and I started working with shot in the dark. And so, for about three years, I started in 2020. And up until this past March, I was doing street outreach. And so, what I would do is, not only did we have Naloxone, but we would have syringes, we would have tourniquets, we would have alcohol wipes, we would have condoms. So, you hear all these things, and everyone’s like, aren’t you just enabling them. 

So, here’s where harm reduction comes in is, okay, I’m going to encounter someone who is still using substances, I can either go, hey, you need to stop doing that. And then they go on their way, 

Margaret:  Which we know does not work. 

Jaclyn Brown:  Exactly. Or I can help reduce the harm in the other areas that would be created by sharing supplies. So, for example, if someone has sterile syringes, alcohol wipes to make sure the areas clean. So, people don’t have to share, you’re reducing the Hep C transmission, you’re reducing HIV transmission. But then on top of it, having things available like fentanyl, test strips, and kind of providing that autonomy back to people who use drugs and to be like, hey, here are tools that you should use, and honestly to prevent abscesses or whatever it may be. 

Margaret:  Right, 

Jaclyn Brown:  you should just come back to us. We always have resources available. So, if they wanted to start that conversation, and they would say, hey, I’m thinking about wanting to do detox, or I want to try rehab again, do you have places we would provide that. But the whole point is that we are not lecturing you telling you what to do with your substance use or what to do with your body. Because in reality, if I went to your, if you really loved coffee, and I said hey, I need you to stop drinking coffee, no more coffee for you. You’d be like who the hell are you like to tell me to stop drinking coffee. It’s a similar situation where and it’s hard, and I get that that’s the hard flip. It’s taken me years to make that flip where I’ve had someone say, you’re really going to compare drugs to coffee. I’m like, well, caffeine is a drug. So is alcohol, all these things? Exactly. And so, it’s the idea that you are going to meet people where they’re at, and that these are still humans, like, I am no better than them because I don’t use substances. And I know smarter, they know what’s best for them and their body. And perhaps their goal is abstinence, maybe it’s not, maybe they want to cut their use from seven times a week to three times a week, that’s still an improvement. And in other facets of our life, we applaud that. If someone says, I eat fast food every single day, and I want to start cooking at home, we would applaud that any situation where we’re trying to do moderation, we would applaud that. 

And so, harm reduction, for me, has been a way to see it, almost from like my brother’s perspective, which I could never see. Because while I do use substances, I use cannabis and alcohol myself, I have never gone to the streets and had to like, pull from an unregulated supply, you know, and that’s the scary thing, too, is that people love alcohol, people also abuse alcohol. And people, sometimes they’ll still say alcohol and drugs, and I’m like, alcohol is a drug. 

So, you have to also think about the way that society and media and everyone’s portrayed these different drugs, because having a cocktail is glamorous, and having, you know, back in the day, tobacco, you know, like, you have to think about how it’s being spun to us. And unfortunately, we’ve always lived in a culture where people who use drugs, or anyone who uses illicit drugs, bad people they are all bad people. And in reality, a lot of times it can be self-medication, it can be whatever it might be. But harm reduction has been a very big piece that I’m trying to introduce to family members. And it’s a hard pill to swallow. And I absolutely get that because it’s almost the antithesis of what we were taught, which is let them hit rock bottom, don’t help them. Don’t do this, don’t do that. But all these things, now, rock bottom is death with the supply that is out there. Like we’re not at a point where we can trust really anything in the illicit supplies. So going at it from the approach of okay, how can I educate other family members, but not like really jar them. So, I really have to kind of like slowly inch family members and I’m currently the chair for the Mobilize Recovery Family Caucus and being a sibling, in a group full of parents, I would set but again, being a parentified sibling, like I get it. So, I see it from that point of view, and I get like, look, I get that from this parent authority point of view, like this doesn’t click, but then taking the time and patience to educate and going the here’s the science that shows this. People who go into harm reduction programs are more likely to enter into treatment, they’re more likely to enter into any sort of medical attention. Because they’re treated like humans, you know, like, that’s where you can form a relationship with people and build that trust with whoever might be coming to your site. 

And another big thing with family members that I do, especially around education is education around misinformation, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. But especially around the idea that we have stories that we can tell, that can ideally help make change, because if more of us speak up about things, it gets harder to ignore. So really wanting to like empower family members to not live in that dark space. And to live in a space of kind of like unconditional love, what are better ways you can communicate. And I feel like, we may have talked about this or but CRAFT is like a big piece on our end, which is community reinforcement and family training. And that’s really just a set of techniques to discuss, or to have a relationship with your person who uses drugs and how to better communicate with them and how to better foster that relationship. So, it’s not that constant like every time you see each other things are just tense. And it’s like are you still using, you know, it’s just a way to bring more love in and I really think that’s just kind of been my big piece is that you can do a lot more with love than you can with all the anger and hate.

Outro:  Jaclyn offers such insight into the journey of grief and the evolution of her advocacy, leading to a passion for teaching families about harm reduction and sharing their voice. Come back next time when we dive into Jaclyn’s recovery journey and the impact that has had on her marriage and life in general.

Margaret  30:39

I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability and sharing parts of their story. 

Please find resources on my website, 

https://embracefamilyrecovery.com/resources/embracefamilyrecovery.com

This is Margaret Swift Thompson. 

Until next time, please take care of you!