Moving Out of a Cycle of Despair with Lorraine Davis

Being that you that one time that child that was struggling it first starts with you know the mental your mental piece of how you’re thinking about life how you’re deciding how you want to respond to what you’re feeling and thinking and you know it’s such a quiet place that no one can tap not even your own parents you can have the upbringing that stable that’s they’re not even teaching you how to be an addict I grew up in a healthy home it was a single-parent home but looking back at it now of course I have more insight and there was issues of anger and resentment because I didn’t have my father in my life so you know there’s a lot of youth organizations that are focusing on such big bigger issues you know the world the abuse sexual abuse child abuse child abuse things like that but it really goes down to the very smaller things that are very big things to us as a child and so looking back when my mom left my father because of he was he wasn’t even Native American he’s Hispanic and we lived in Los Angeles and my mom assist in Wahpeton Dakota and my dad is Hispanic and so we I actually was born out there and then we left and we came back to Sisseton South Dakota when I was 8 and you know I had a lot of anger issues towards my mother and I was angry for her leaving my dad and not understanding the relationship and that she really did that for the best of our interest and he was abusive to her and of course the addiction that he had going on there but and so I was angry at her for the longest time and then when I got to be about 12 ish and above then I was angry at him so then it turned because then I felt like you should be here you know I was then I was just angry at everything because he wasn’t there for me to be angry about so really what was happening is that nobody was talking to me about this there wasn’t any intervention and it should have been my mother and my father that were talking to me even if it was separately talking to me about it trying to explain that to me you know by the time I was 12 I think I would have understood at least some of the basics you know and so I grew up angry I felt more so cheated I would say cheated first then it turned into anger so I was really resentful at life I had a chip on my shoulder there’s a victimhood that kicks in I start feeling like you know when you’re cheated you feel like then a victim and so you use that as a crutch going through life then that’s your excuse to drink see that’s your excuse to use you know nobody cares why should I care and that’s where it starts and so then you start taking off you start leaving and you know you run from home and you know you just don’t even want to be there because you just think that no one cares and when really it was like my mom was a loving very loving meek mild mother didn’t have a drinking any kind of addiction issue and it was just that she didn’t know how to deal with that she didn’t know how to handle that and you know we didn’t have psychology like we do now you know and even well today it’s expanded so much from when I was a child to the issues today there’s not it there’s not enough demand I mean excuse me the demand is higher than the actual psychologists that we can provide and so there’s not enough to go around and so that’s why I say that this is spiritual warfare because it’s in our mind we’re talking about issues when we talk about behavioral health while substance abuse is separate from mental health issues but a lot of them are coincided every individual is different but a lot of the times they are cold mingled and so when you hear all of these different issues you know they’re they’re labeling them you know we’ve always heard of schizophrenia we’ve heard of you know bipolar and I’m just trying to think of some of the other ones you know but they’re starting to create new diagnoses and I don’t delve into that too much but I need to understand the science but the strategies that we want to bring are actually spiritual and cultural and we know that there’s not enough experts psychiatrists psychologists counselors and all of this and plus it’s not affordable and the people that we’re dealing with how these issues can’t afford those services and so you know I just believe in peer support and that’s what we’re creating that’s what we’re creating by creating these environments were creating a peer support environment so in education so bringing in those that are you know knowledgeable the experts in these fields to talk about the science the evidence that we know but then also bringing in the peer support who’ve actually been there and figured out some way to either manage it or overcome it and so then that’s where we start finding our own path of how to navigate through life and life is too complex and it’s such in little boxes it’s so segregate segregated into all of these different arenas and so by bringing in peer support whether we focus on you know we focus on addiction recovery we just got asked for suicide prevention we actually just got an opportunity so we’ll be starting that we have some young adults Native American young adults who actually want to lead that effort they’re they’re fed up with this happening to their friends and their relatives you know they’re that are younger than them and so they’re only in their early 20s and there’s like four of them and they came to meet me meet with me here last week and I just found some funding for them and called the state office and sort of make an exception because the deadline was today and so it seems like that I could see how God is really bringing opportunities opening doors for us giving us support and because it’s really hard it’s hard to come and be something new because we’ve been always either tribal government you know a tribal government program or school or either we’ve been you know at a tribal college and so creating something new like this is difficult more amongst our own people and so it’s it takes time and it’s it’s improving but you know the support is all there state agencies they they know that the identity and the relationship is vital for this to be successful