Jen's Story: A Mom On A Mission

When addiction entered her home, Jen McCutcheon did what mothers do. 

She fixed. 
She researched treatment centres.
She planned interventions. 
Held the family together with whatever she could find. 

And she kept going until her body shut down.

Then came a night on the living room couch, crying in front of a blank wall, when something inside her said: you are the common denominator.

This is a story:

...about a woman who watched her son disappear and did not notice she had disappeared too. 

...about being told her story was not hers to tell. 

...about standing in a backyard with her nails cutting into her palms, realizing she had stopped breathing. 

...and about what she built once she stopped trying to fix and started going first.

It does not end tidy. Her son relapsed four weeks before this conversation. She is still in it, and so is he, and she will tell you that is part of it.

Jen is a recovery, trauma healing and personal power coach and the founder of Enable No More — changing the conversation around addiction, one family at a time.

CONNECT WITH JENNIFER MCCUTCHEON

Website: Enable No More

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Need to find YOUR Next Step through a hard thing you're facing? Have a simple conversation with the Tiny Brave Steps Generator AI:  www.tinybravesteps.com.

Connect with Bernice:  

Email: bernice@bernicemcdonald.com
Website: www.tinybravesteps.com

Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/

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Do YOU have a Courage Story you'd like to share? Send Bernice a message. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Jen would hang up the phone with her son and wonder whether she had just heard his voice for the last time. How do you put the phone down and carry on with your day? He was her son. She wanted him safe, and she had spent years searching for something that would help him get his life back. But as she watched what addiction was doing to him, something was happening to her too.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

It's awful to witness your loved one slowly disappear in front of your eyes, but to also recognize that I was disappearing in front of my own eyes.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

When Jen talks about her son, she speaks about his huge heart, how people are drawn to him, how he keeps getting up and trying again. I want you to know that about him before we go any further. And I want you to know the woman who loves him. The mother who kept searching for help until she was so unwell herself that she could barely keep going. Could she let her own life matter while his was still so uncertain? I'm Bernice McDonald. This is Jen's herd story. We'll walk through it in four acts, following how she learned to see her fear, embrace who she was, stand up for herself, and lastly, to use what she'd learned to help others. Act one, wake up your courage. Wake up your courage begins with recognizing the fear you're living with. For Jen, the fear of losing her son was tangled up with what she believed a good mother should be able to do. She had spent his childhood protecting him, as we all do, helping when he got hurt, being there when he needed her. She believed she was responsible for getting him through whatever life threw at him.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

It was a belief that I believed that it was my responsibility to take care of my son, to keep himself safe, to protect him, to nurture him, to get him through it, to fix it. That's what a mother does. We fix it, right? We put a bandage on their on their boo-boos when they fall down and they have a scraped knee. We catch them before they fall off their bike when they're learning to ride without training wheels for the first time.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

He was 15 when addiction entered their lives. 15. She was still raising him, still helping him grow up. And suddenly she was facing something she couldn't make better for him.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

And it came to a point where, you know, addiction entered our world, and all the things that I believed myself to be as a mother very clearly and rapidly were no longer true. I had no ability to protect. I had no ability to nurture. I had no ability to fix what every parent wants to fix. It's like your worst nightmare.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

So she went looking, a place he could go, someone who would know what to do, something that would help her son regain his life.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

I was a seeker of truth. I was a seeker for resources. I sought out everything, tried to plan everything. You know, what detox center we could get him to, what treatment center we could get him to, what therapist, what psychiatrist, what, you know, you know, all the things, you know, right? Like I was, I was active in trying to find the thing to fix it. Not necessarily fix him, but fix this problem and help him to regain his life. I mean, 15 years old. It was so fast and so rapid.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And after every crisis, there was a family trying to recover. People she loved were hurting. Jen wanted to help all of them.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

The destruction of our family as a unit, the other siblings that were impacted, my parents, you know, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles. Like it is a ripple effect that is happening in the family dynamic. And here's me trying to like put the pieces together and glue it with like gorilla glue, and then it just be shattered again. So like there's this cycle of repair and regrowth and healing and recovery. And then all of a sudden, addiction comes in in its in its force and like breaks the whole thing apart. And it happens over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

That hope was real. And so was the pain when another crisis would hit. Jan kept trying. By then the toll on her own health was becoming impossible to live with.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

I like to refer it to like the computer and the spinning ball of death, right? When you've got a virus or you've got too many tabs open. It's like the whole my whole body is just like done.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Jen was careful to tell me that there had been many turning points, years of them. Looking back, she could see how each one had helped her understand something she hadn't seen before. One of them happened in her own living room.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

There's one moment where I was sitting in my living room and I had been crying for hours, completely heartbroken, feeling so powerless, helpless, hopeless, feeling victimized by addiction and angry at it. And I was staring at a blank wall, exhausted to my core. And I had this moment, I get emotional because I can still feel the moment. It was such a profound voice in my head. Was on my higher power, it was my higher self, it was my truth. It was like you are the common denominator. Jen, you're you're the common denominator. You have been in every experience, every crisis, every traumatic event. You have been there.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

She had been waiting for something to change outside her. A treatment that worked, her son getting well, a day when she could stop being afraid. Now she was looking at what she could change in herself, her own thoughts, her own responses, the way she was living. There was a woman in that living room who needed care too. She could begin there. For Jen, embrace who you are meant learning to see herself with a compassion she had always offered other people. She began to recognize a pattern that reached back into her childhood. Being useful, being good, keeping people happy had helped her feel loved. Somewhere along the way, she had come to believe that was who she had to be. I call that protective voice, Fred. That's how we look at him here at Tiny Brave Steps. He's a well-meaning protector who actually lives in our brains. He remembers every hurt we've been through. And so he warns us every time he thinks we might experience that hurt again. In Jen's story, you can hear the fear of not being loved underneath all that effort to be good enough.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Disconnected me from my true authentic self. I was living in a false identity that was a mask, that was a survival response. It was my way of protecting myself. It was a, it was patterns that were built from when I was a little girl where I felt not supported. I felt not good enough. I always say my inner child, she's a beautiful, smart, intelligent, brilliant little girl who knew exactly what she had to do to protect herself and build a little bubble around her to feel loved and accepted and that she belonged. But what happened was it didn't, it ended up creating such a shell around me that I forgot who I really truly was.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

She began to recognize the way she tried to earn that feeling of being loved. They had been so familiar that she'd mistaken them for her own personality.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Well, 100% people please her. I mean, from a little girl, it was again those messages: family, society, culture, you know, that little girls should just be good little girls, right? Don't don't speak back, don't have a voice, don't you look like that. You should be different than you are. So I created this who do you need me to be? And I'll be it so that I can be loved, that I can feel accepted and belong. So I like call it the three Ps: people pleasing, perfectionism, and performance. And again, these were survival responses. I didn't sit there and go, oh, I'm gonna like, I'm gonna do everything right, and I'm going to perform to get your it was all subconscious belief systems and patterns that I thought was just who I was.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Now she was facing something, those habits couldn't help her control. She could do everything she thought was right and still be frightened for her son. What did that mean about her?

SPEAKER_00 10:43

When I couldn't fix, right? Perf like um, people pleasing, I couldn't fix it, perfectionism, I couldn't control it. And performance, I mean, I could, I I couldn't hide, I couldn't hide anymore from anything. I was I was exposed. It's like stripping your clothes off. It was so vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Alongside the fear for her son came a recognition that hurt in a different way. She could barely see herself anymore.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

It's awful to witness your loved one slowly disappear in front of your eyes, but to also recognize that I was disappearing in front of my own eyes.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

And yet, when I asked who she was, Jen could tell me. She spoke about compassion, the way people felt safe with her. Listen to how she describes herself here. There's affection in these words. She can see a woman she likes.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

I am a safe place for people. People are drawn to me, and I love it because I have created a safe place within myself, and I've always been that safe place. And I have a I have a gift of compassion. It's like the the lighthouse, like it's like I'm a lighthouse. People come because they know they feel safe, and in safety we can begin to heal.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Act three, stand up for you. Stand up for you is where that recognition becomes a choice. For Jen, one of those choices was to begin speaking about what she had lived through. She was learning that her feelings deserved to be heard. Saying that out loud meant risking the disapproval she'd spent so much of her life trying to avoid. And it came from people close to her.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

When I started to talk about my story and share my story, I got a lot of flack. I got a lot of criticism from people very close to me that it wasn't my story to share.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

You can hear how that would reach that old fear. Am I allowed to speak up if someone else doesn't want me to? Jen had lived through those years too. She needed to be able to talk about how much it had hurt.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

And I started to again say, but wait a minute, it's not just their story, it's my story too. And the silence was what was breeding the toxicity. Somehow my life didn't matter as much as theirs. I believed that I wasn't worthy to talk about my feelings, to express the hardship that I was enduring, that it wasn't really about me. As a mom, I sacrificed myself for the for the name of love, for the name of love for my child, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

And there were choices no one else could see. Like what she did after hanging up the phone with her son when her mind went straight to the possibility of losing him.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

You know, that thought that you're thinking right now, like I'm never gonna hear, I'm never gonna see my son again. You know, I'm never gonna hear from him again. Get off the phone after not hearing from him for weeks or months at a time, and hanging up the phone and thinking that's the last conversation I'm ever gonna have with him. I'd have to stop myself in that moment and say, that's not true, Jen, because you said that the last time you talked to him and you just had another conversation with him. That is not true. That is a lie. That is not helping you or your child. So let's disrupt that pattern, let's disrupt that thought.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

She couldn't know what would happen, but she could notice that she had just heard his voice. She could bring herself back to that conversation, to what was true in that moment. There were days when coming back to the moment meant something as basic as realizing that she just needed to breathe. Jen remembers standing in her backyard after a crisis.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

There was a time where I recognized I wasn't breathing. I was standing outside of my backyard after a crisis, staring like at a fence that was like a foot in front of me, like just again, so disconnected, disassociated. And I was squeezing my hands so tight that I drew blood. My nails went into my into my palms. And I recognized I wasn't breathing. I literally stopped breathing. And it was a moment where I was like, holy crap, like, Jen, breathe, breathe.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Her own body needed her attention. She began practicing ways to come back to where she was. One of them was to wrap her arms around herself and say a few words to herself out loud.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

I live here. I live here. And like grabbing my arms, almost giving myself a hug. I live here now. I live here now. I am safe. I am safe. I lived in fear every single day, from the minute I woke up till the minute my eyes closed at night. And I recognized it wasn't serving me. So that's a simple thing. I live, I let go of fear and I live in love.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Jen repeated those words for years. The change came through practicing, noticing when she'd slip into an old habit, and then choosing again. And it began to change the way she related to her son. She started paying attention to what she could take responsibility for in her own life, including how she responded to him.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

But slowly over time, I started to, instead of manage my son, I started to mentor him by living by example, by being the thing, the person that shows what love looks like, self-love looks like, self-worth looks like, what a boundary looks like, and holding to it because I recognized why I was doing it. It wasn't for my son, it was for me, because that was the only thing I really ever had control over was me, how I reacted to the situation or responded.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Create your impact began when Jen shared what she was learning with her own healing still underway. Jen understood how lonely it could be to love someone in addiction and feel that you had no right to talk about it. She had spent years there. She wanted people living through that to have somewhere to turn. The woman who had been crying in her living room was helping other families find support. She had trained, gathered tools, and built Enable No More from work she'd had to practice in her own life. But when I asked about her son, Jen brought us straight back to where she was living.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

I'm in the trenches with every other parent and loved one who's got who's loving a loved one addiction. I'm still in it. And it's okay, it's part of the journey.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

When we spoke, her son had just turned 27. He had put a great deal of work into his recovery. Jen told me about treatment, recovery groups, and the communities that he'd reached out to. She was so proud of him. And she was also living through something that had happened just weeks before our conversation.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

My son, well, about four weeks ago, relapsed after a year and a half uh of sobriety and recovery. He just turned 27 years old. It's the longest time that he has been uh in recovery. So super proud of him. And he had one night that he returned to use and he went into a drug-induced psychosis and he had a near-death experience. It again was incredibly difficult. You know, I flew across the country to be with him. He was on life support for three days.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

The first day he was able to go outside, Jen sat with him in the hospital courtyard. She'd come across a kind of support they hadn't tried.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

I had met somebody through an event that I was at who trained service dogs to support people with PTSD and addictions and mental health. He started to cry and he said, Yes, I would love that. Within three weeks, we not only he not only did we get him a service dog, he shared his story through a GoFundMe because to try to get to to raise money for him. And we've got he's got a service dog, the training has already started, and he's already feeling the benefits and the impact of this resource and tool.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

That part of their story really stays with me. Jen had something she could offer. Her son could say what he wanted, they could take that step together. There was something else he'd said to her in those days. Something about the life he still had ahead of him.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

One of the first things he said to me was, God has uh has plans for me. And I said, Yeah, he does, because you wouldn't be here if if there wasn't a reason.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

And he was beginning to speak for himself about what he'd been through.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

And he for the first time began to share his story. Like this is a huge shift because he recognizes that he's worthy. That was he literally was like, I am ready to receive the help.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Jen told me really clearly, she takes no credit for his recovery. He has done that work. She also told me there are things that he has lived through that she can't begin to know from her own experience. She can love him and offer support. His story belongs to him. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked what she'd say to a mother living through this. She answered by talking about love and about wrapping that mother in it.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

I think that I would speak to her in a in the most loving and compassionate way to say there's nothing to fix. There's nothing broken. There's love that needs to be held, seen, and heard for yourself and your loved one. And it begins with loving yourself, seeing yourself, and hearing yourself. That's where you become the ripple effect, where you're no longer trying to manage them, but you're mentoring them through living as a mirror or a mentor for them.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

I keep thinking about Jen's arms around herself. After years of trying to hold everybody else together, she was learning to include herself in that care. She had begun to recognize the fear that was shaping her days. She could name the compassion that was hers. And she was practicing how to live from being that woman, speaking about her own life, pausing when fear took over, choosing how she would respond. Those are tiny brave steps that you can see. They took practice. There were times when she caught an old habit after it had happened, and she had to begin again. But she kept learning. She trained to help others. And the woman who had felt invisible began helping other people find their voices. That is the impact Jen wants to have.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

It's to help others become visible in their own eyes again. It's to help others remember that they are worthy, even if they can't help their loved ones to where they believe they need to be.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

If you've been listening with someone you love in mind, take a moment before you move on. What do you need today? Tell one person that you trust the answer to that. Let someone hear how you're doing too. Jennifer McCutcheon is a recovery, trauma healing, and personal power coach and the founder of Enable No More. You'll find her work with families affected by addiction at enable nomore.ca. She gave us some links that she thinks will be really valuable to you, and you'll find them in the show notes. Also, you can find more stories and support for your own Tiny Brave Steps at tinybravesteps.com. Jen, thank you for letting us hear your story and for helping us see the sun that you love. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for spending this time with us. Remember, you are brave enough. You always have been.