On today’s episode, Jerry Moe, the Executive Director of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s National Children’s Program, shares some of his story.
Jerry has such a passion for helping the children of this family disease.
The alarming statistics in the US show 5.7 million children under age 11 live in households with a parent who has a substance abuse disorder, and a third of those enter foster care as a result.
The need for children to receive education, support seems obvious. Yet, as Jerry shares, they are often the last to gain this vital help.
Find out more about The Children’s Program at
https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/treatment/family-children/childrens-program
Find your recovery community, or begin by reaching out to me at
https://embracefamilyrecovery.com/work-with-margaret/
See full transcript of the episode below.
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: Hi everyone I am back. We are back with season two of The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. I’m so thrilled to kick it off with one of my favorite people! I cannot wait to introduce you to Jerry Moe the Executive Director of the National Children’s Program at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. I call Jerry the children’s whisperer. He’s a man who has devoted his career to educating, supporting, and giving a voice to the youngest members of this family disease of addiction. Children ages 7 through 13. Today Jerry shares some of his personal story, and where his passion for the children began.
Meet Jerry Moe.
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast
Margaret: Let’s have a little toast with our coffee. To a good chat. Wet the whistle and it is so exciting I can’t even stand it I’ve had some of my favorite people come on already!
Margaret: But I’m so excited for you, Jerry
Jerry: Alright
Margaret: Today is a pretty exciting day to have you here Jerry Moe and I’ll say your name for everybody to know who you are. Jerry you are what I would call the children’s whisper around this illness, and you have been for a very long time. And I’m curious ’cause you’ve had an extensive professional career and now presently work and have worked with designing, implementing a Children’s Program at the Betty Ford Center which is now Hazelden Betty Ford. But how did you come to land in the role of children, working with the children, affected by this disease? How did that happen?
Jerry: What a story to tell about that Maggie, and thanks so much for having me here today. It’s nice to be with you.
Margaret: It’s my pleasure!
Jerry: So really it goes back to I grew up with this disease you know as so many people who work in this field. You know I was touched by it. Alcoholism both sides of my family, my mom’s side of the family is Irish my dad is Scandinavian, so you know very little risk for alcoholism on either side of those families. And I was blessed in an incredible way in that I got intervened on when I was 14 years old, due to some behaviors. So, some high-risk behavior and people who saw it, noticed it and were concerned. And that was the impetus to really begin my own healing, and the first way I did that was by going to Al-Ateen. And so at the age of 14 that was part of the process for me of getting well. You know it’s fascinating in that my mom would drive me to those meetings. I grew up in San Francisco and so she’d drive me to Holy Name Church, it would be on Tuesday nights, like so many 12 step meetings it was an hour in length and after a couple weeks my mom decided hey maybe I’ll go check out the Al-Anon meeting. And from her point of, not that she needed it.
Margaret: Yeah
Jerry: at all her mother died of alcoholism, so my grandmother died of alcoholism while my mom was still a teenager. And at that particular time, you know my dad was mired in his disease as well and so here’s my mom going and beginning to embrace the Al-Anon principles and then slowly her life is changing. The exciting thing for my mom and for myself is we had this shared experience of working the 12 steps, and incorporating the slogans, and living by the traditions, and we slowly began to change our behavior, especially in terms of how we how we dealt with my dad who, again was still active in his alcoholism. And as I’ve seen in my work in my older years what slowly began to happen is we shifted as a family, and it would be about a year later that my dad would once again ask for help and began a process of his own recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. And actually, for the last 38 years of his life was recovering
Margaret: Wonderful
Jerry: without any alcohol whatsoever, total abstinence.
And so, in my later teenage years with living in a recovery family which it was just it was magnificent. Now of course like so many people who are listening today, early recovery, Oh my!
Margaret: Oh yeah!
Jerry: Is it gonna last? And oh, the first time a dad was late for something and remember those, that we didn’t have cell phones then. And so, all of those things that we needed to begin to sort out and work through. We were doing that! We were doing that.
And Maggie I always knew that I wanted to work with kids. I mean
Margaret: Did you?
Jerry: I just loved it. Yeah, I just love kids, and had gone to school and studied to be a teacher. And then you know at the age of 22, I kid you not one morning in front of the mirror shaving, was you know this spiritual experience. I know people that go to 12 step meetings we hear about you having had that spiritual awakening of that spiritual experiences and how profound it could be. And for me it was really simple in that I thought for a moment I was finally old enough, and I guess mature enough, even at 22, if there is such a thing, (laughter) that what a gift I’ve been given. I have an older brother and sister and they both left as soon as they could to get married, when they were 18 or 19 years old, those were socially acceptable ways to get out of dodge. But you know, you get out of dodge but you carry all your baggage with you when you leave.
So, I realized what a gift I’ve been given. And it just hit me and I thought my goodness why didn’t my brother get this? Why didn’t my sister get this? Why did I get this? And so just this moment of a really profound gratitude. But it was bittersweet because the next thought was, wait a minute what if what if I would’ve got help when I was 7 or eight or nine. And then I was thinking about the ages of seven through 14 and all the pain and all the heartache. Feeling alone, feeling isolated, feeling like it was my fault and all of the things that go with that.
It’s like you know, wait a minute, we need to be working with kids at younger and younger ages. And what I came to see was that there wasn’t a lot out there, I couldn’t find a lot.
Now what was happening with this is uh you know the late 1970s and, and what I came to find, oh maybe five years later that in different pockets of the country there were programs, but it was small. There was Children Are People Minneapolis, Saint Paul. There was a Project Rainbow in New York another children’s program. So, they were they were scattered around, we just didn’t know about each other. And so, it was like, you know I need to shift and so having had all those years of Al-Aateen. You know, incredibly helpful and then training as an educator how did kids learn? How do you make it engaging and interactive? Let’s incorporate different learning styles, ’cause everyone is so different. Building relationships, lesson plans I knew all of that, so I designed a Children’s Program and then went back to school while I was working on that Children’s Program to get a master’s degree in counseling and education.
So, it’s really and to this day people say how do you still, you know have a passion? How do you still have a heart for this after all this time? And I just think about all those kids out there today that are suffering and how unnecessary it is We say, all the time that addiction, substance use disorder is a family disease.
Margaret: Absolutely
Jerry: But way too often children are left out of the solution. Boy, are they mired in the problem, but there’s few and few opportunities for them to get help, even to this day?
Margaret: Absolutely! I could not agree more.
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Margaret: You know we’ve been in a parallel but different journey; in that I’ve been with the families and the 13- and 14-year-olds up. And you’ve been with the young ins 7 through 13 and 14.
And I think even on the family side as a whole, the resources for the person with the illness are plentiful, though we know lots don’t ever get to them. But the ones for all of the family members are much less available and so children even more so, and yet they intuitively feel everything, they experience in that home, without an understanding. Without the gift of something like your program.
Jerry: I heard someone say it one time, give an example of it, and certainly not the best example but yeah what they described is, here is a family on a Sunday afternoon driving in the car, going for a ride. They’re altogether and low and behold unfortunately they get into a car accident, and everybody is impacted. But everybody could be impacted a little differently.
Jerry: Like there could be you know folks in the front seat that have extensive internal injuries, there in the back seat there might be one of the kids might have a broken arm, one might you know be scratched up pretty bad, another one ankle hurts real bad. And so, they call for help and here rolls up an ambulance or a couple of ambulances. And it’s like they, so they assess everybody but then they take the driver, and they put the driver in the ambulance, and tell everybody else you know, it’s going to be OK, see you later.
And again, it’s not the best example, but it’s graphic. It’s visual enough for me to see that.
Margaret: Yeah
Jerry: And I think that’s what happens often in a in the way that we treat this disease.
Margaret: Agreed, and your story is an example of the power for lack of a better word. That your father was still using. You and your mother found your way into recovery before he ever found his way in, and that had, I’m sure a profound impact on his seeking recovery.
Jerry: No doubt, because what we had learned and done. My dad had starts and stops,
Margaret: Sure
Jerry: but never you know consistently focused on recovery as we see happen with so many people. The crazy thing about addiction it’s the one disease that tries to convince you that you don’t have it.
Margaret: Correct
Jerry: And so, the insanity there with that. Myself getting better, my mom getting better and learning to allow my dad to experience the consequences of his drinking, and not try to make excuses, not try to cover up, and not try to make things better. Was real helpful and, and Maggie we see this again and again in all my years the spouse or the partner that doesn’t have the disease or grandparents or an older brother and sister bring children to the Children’s Program.
And that’s the first step in the process, and as they begin to heal, again a change happens in the family system, and it’s not unusual six months, nine months, a year later. Here comes that same boy or girl to the Children’s Program but now they’re coming with the parent that’s in recovery.
And it’s funny I can remember, I was talking about this in an interview a couple weeks ago. I can remember being told, just when I was starting working in treatment and you know naive and inexperienced and people would say ”oh don’t worry about those kids now, you know they’ll be OK, they’re resilient.” Let’s focus on helping the person with the disease a substance use disorder. Let’s help them now and get better and then we’ll think about the kids down the road.
And it’s faulty for a number of reasons, think about how few people ever make it to treatment!
Margaret: True
Jerry: To begin with, and I believe that this disease is so powerful and so insidious that we need to be attacking it from every, every, and in every way. And so maybe you know we’ve had it wrong all those years, maybe we need to start with the kids.
Margaret: Well, here’s a question. If you played out your story and you had not had Al-Ateen and listen, that strategy was what it was. How long before your mom and yourself possibly even made it to the rooms if you had waited on Dad?
Jerry: Yeah, well you know what, I’m not sure if I ever would have made it. You just don’t know and it’s funny that, I think the longer you wait, like any kind of disease, the longer you wait and the more complicated it gets.
The unique thing about the Children Program, Maggie here that you know, and Mrs. Ford was real keen on this. Mrs. Ford used to tell me “you want to make a difference in a child’s life just don’t help the child, help who’s ever raising that child.” And what I see, just a ballpark figure I’d say 75% of the grownups who come, also grew up in families with addiction. I heard a dear friend some time ago say, call these people “yesterday’s children that no one helped” and so you just see it’s getting passed along.
Margaret: There’s no denying the generational impact of the illness, right? You can’t, and even if it skips a generation in outright behaviors, it’s still in there, in the way that people react and respond.
Jerry: No doubt
Outro: Isn’t he amazing! Stay tuned, in two weeks Jerry will be back and he will share about the phenomenal Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Children’s Program.
But next week I’m really excited to have Sandy Swenson back with us. She has something really exciting coming up, a in person retreat for moms of people with substance use disorder. She is a wonderful resource for any mother out there, give yourself the gift of learning more about this retreat and the possibility of attending with other mothers who have shared a similar journey to yourself.
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret Swift Thompson
Until next time, please take care of you.
