Free Fearless by Eric Blehm

brother in sports and cared for my sister very much.” He recounted his earliest attitude about alcoholism or chemical dependency by stating, “Only losers let it happen to them.”
    While Adam was working through these questions, Manda visited him. “He was so sad,” she says, “and just lost.” She put her arms around her brother and hugged him. He started to cry. She hugged him harder when he told her that he hated himself. “Adam, you can get through this,” she said, offering him the same advice their mom had once given her, the shy and quiet sister in Adam’s shadow who wondered if people liked her or if she even liked herself. “First of all, you need to get over this,” she said, repeating Janice’s words. “You are a likable person, and you need to like yourself. Remember who you are.”
    For months Manda had been praying for Adam. However, she never told him shehad been praying for him, because she knew it would have had little or no impact, but “it was what got me through and gave me hope,” she says. “I prayed for my mom and dad too, because they were carrying such a weight on their shoulders with Adam. It was eating them up inside.”
    When her parents would tell her “Only Adam can help Adam,” she inwardly believed that what Adam was up against was too big for even him. Leaving the hospital that day, she thanked the Lord for getting Adam off the street and prayed that he would continue to watch over her brother.
    Grandma Brown and Larry’s sister, Becky, had begun taking Adam and Manda to church on Sundays when they’d moved back to Hot Springs after those years living on the road, and as young teenagers both of them had accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior and been baptized. Manda had stayed on the path, but somewhere Adam had veered off.
    The questions in the autobiography forced Adam to examine each stage of his life. Regarding his relationship with his parents and siblings before his drug additction, he answered “good” every time. Asked what major values his parents had passed on to him, he wrote, “Be the best you can be. You can be anything you want to be. Hard work will overcome anything.”
    He perceived himself to be “very shy” with girls, but felt he had had lots of close guy and girl friends in high school. He felt he was a “good person” during the high school phase of his life, which was when he began to experiment with alcohol, “so I could feel at ease with myself,” he wrote. On the subject of his current life, he wrote that for the first time ever, he had let his parents down and taken advantage of them. As for Shawn, “I lost my relationship with my brother.”
    “I can’t be depended on anymore,” he continued. “I was once a crazy, unique, hard-working person, but now I’m a miserable drug addict that hurts other people. I feel very alone, but I have many, many people that really care about me.”
    Most of the twenty-two-year-old’s answers were a barrage of self-deprecation without an ounce of hope. Only the very last line in the workbook allowed a sliver of light to penetrate the dark storm of self-hatred: “But I will climb out of this hole and be somebody.”

    Fighting shivers, sweats, and the severe shaking of physical drug withdrawal, Adam worked his way through the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous. He sat in group sessions, met daily with a counselor, and made it his goal to return to college. Fourteen days later, Janice and Larry paid the six-thousand-dollar bill and were told by doctors that Adam was ready to go as long as he continued the twelve-step program.
    “Really?” said Janice incredulously. “You think he’s okay to go out into the world this soon? Can he go back to college?”
    “We’ve provided him with the tools,” said one of the program’s counselors, and Adam agreed, saying, “I’m ready to get back on track.”
    Skepticism overshadowed Janice and Larry’s hope: expensive as the hospital had been, two weeks