estions</li>
</ul>
<p>None of these things alone mean addiction. Taken together, over time, they are the shape of something worth paying attention to.</p>
<h3>The Loneliness of Seeing First</h3>
<p>Here is something Susan's account captures that I find deeply important: the isolation of being the first person in the room to know something that nobody else is ready to hear.</p>
<p>She knew before Gavin's father acknowledged it. She knew before other family members were willing to name it. She may have known, in some part of herself, before Gavin himself had fully articulated what he was doing and why.</p>
<p>And that is its own kind of unbearable.</p>
<p>Because you are carrying this knowledge alone. You cannot fully share it because the people you would share it with will tell you that you are overreacting, reading too much into it, being dramatic. You start to doubt your own perceptions. You wonder if the exhaustion and the worry are distorting your judgment. You wonder if you are the problem — ifThere is a book sitting on my desk right now that I cannot stop thinking about.
It is called The Devil: Diary of an Addict, and it was written by a man named Gavin Dixon — and his mum, Susan Laing. Together. Because Gavin understood, by the time he came to write it, that his story was not his alone.
Addiction is not an individual disease. It is a family disease. And Susan walked into hell with him, without ever taking a single hit.
I want to talk about Susan today. Because the mother's story — the story of the woman on the other side of the closed door, the woman who sees first and is believed last, the woman who loves in the face of something that does not respond to love the way love is supposed to work — that story does not get told often enough.
This is a four-week series. We are going to follow Susan's journey through Part One of Gavin's book: the descent. And along the way, I hope you will see yourself — or someone you love — in some of what she lived through.
A Mother Knows
There is a particular kind of knowing that mothers carry. It does not announce itself. It does not come with evidence or a diagnosis or a clear moment you can point to. It arrives as a feeling in your stomach at breakfast when your teenager says something and the words are right but something underneath them is wrong.
Susan Laing describes this in the early pages of the book. Not dramatic. Not a single terrible moment. A gradual accumulation of small things that each, individually, had an innocent explanation. He was tired. He was going through a phase. All teenagers are like this. She was reading too much into it.
Does any of that sound familiar?
The thing about knowing before you know is that you spend a great deal of energy managing the knowledge. Talking yourself out of it. Finding the other explanation. Because the alternative — the thing your gut is actually telling you — is too frightening to hold fully, and you are not ready yet, and you do not have the words yet, and maybe if you do not name it, it will not be real.
The problem is that it is already real. It has been real for a while. And the delay in naming it is not your fault — it is survival — but it does cost time.
What Does "Early" Actually Look Like?
Because I want to give language to something that parents in this situation often describe feeling in retrospect: the early signs that were there before the crisis, before the phone calls, before the undeniable.
They tend to look like this:
- A change in social circle — new friends you do not know, old friends disappearing
- Sleep pattern disruptions that do not have a clear cause
- Money going missing in small amounts, or unexplained financial requests
- A quality of distance that is different from normal teenage withdrawal — a flatness, a vacancy
- Heightened secrecy — not the normal "I need privacy" of adolescence, but something that feels more guarded
- Mood swings that seem disconnected from circumstances
- A story that keeps shifting slightly when you ask follow-up questions
None of these things alone mean addiction. Taken together, over time, they are the shape of something worth paying attention to.
The Loneliness of Seeing First
Here is something Susan's account captures that I find deeply important: the isolation of being the first person in the room to know something that nobody else is ready to hear.
She knew before Gavin's father acknowledged it. She knew before other family members were willing to name it. She may have known, in some part of herself, before Gavin himself had fully articulated what he was doing and why.
And that is its own kind of unbearable.
Because you are carrying this knowledge alone. You cannot fully share it because the people you would share it with will tell you that you are overreacting, reading too much into it, being dramatic. You start to doubt your own perceptions. You wonder if the exhaustion and the worry are distorting your judgment. You wonder if you are the problem — if your anxiety is making something out of nothing.
You are not making something out of nothing. And the self-doubt that isolation produces is one of the most insidious parts of this early stage.
π Mothers are often the first to know and the last to be believed. Your gut is not betraying you. It is doing its job. Trust it — and find one person who will listen without dismissing you.
What Susan Teaches Us About This Stage
What I find remarkable about Susan's voice in this book is how honestly she names her own participation in the early dynamics. Not to take blame — she is very clear that she did not cause this — but to show how the system of family works, how love and fear and hope can all conspire to slow down the acknowledgement of something that needs to be acknowledged.
She loved her son. Ferociously. And that love looked, in the early stages, a lot like making the other explanation work. Like smoothing things over. Like giving one more chance. Like believing the story that made things okay, because the story that did not was too frightening.
I think most of us, if we are honest, would do the same. And I think the measure of Susan's courage is not that she saw it coming from a mile off and handled it perfectly from the start. It is that she kept showing up, through everything, and eventually found her own way through.
This Week's Invitation
If you are in the early stage — the "something is wrong but I cannot name it" stage — here are three things I want you to do this week:
- Write it down. Not to prove anything to anyone. Just to give the knowledge somewhere to live that is not inside your head. What have you noticed? When? What was your gut reaction in the moment?
- Find one person who will hear you without dismissing you. A friend, a counsellor, a family doctor, a support line. Not someone who will fix it. Someone who will listen without telling you you're overreacting.
- Read the book. The Devil: Diary of an Addict by Gavin Dixon and Susan Laing is available now on Amazon. This is Part One — the descent. Part Two is coming.
Next week: we follow Susan into the middle of it — the part where the love starts to look like enabling, and where she has to figure out, in real time, how to hold on to both her son and herself.
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Let's Talk
What was the first moment you knew — really knew — that something was wrong? And what did you do with that knowledge when you had no words for it yet? Share in the comments. This community does not judge. It just shows up.
Disclaimer: Thrive Momma Coaching provides general education and coaching, not therapy, medical, or legal advice. If you or your child is in crisis, please contact a crisis line or emergency services. In Canada: Crisis Services Canada 1-833-456-4566 | ConnexOntario 1-866-531-2600.
