The Broken Us

I am addicted (if you pardon the pun) to the show "Intervention." Intervention follows around an addict, alcoholic, cutter, or anorexic on the premise that they are filming a documentary on addiction. But in the end they have an "intervention" with family and friends and a therapist where they offer free rehab. The show not only follows the addict (it's usually a drug addict or an alcoholic), but they interview the family members.

I used to tell myself that I watched this show because I have a family member who struggles with addiction, but to be honest it's much more than that. I watch because it is a window into the pain and grief that so many people find in simply living. I watched it for the brokenness.

During the course of the interviews with family and friends and the interviews with the addicted person, a story emerges. It is the story of where this pain comes from. It's the usual suspects. Parent's divorce, physical abuse, parent's addiction, their own divorce, and sexual abuse.

If you have to ask why a person would go on a documentary like this, then you don't know a addicted person. Money is how they buy their drugs or drinks. There isn't anything, and I do mean anything, that is more important than getting their drug of choice. If exposing oneself as an addict to the world gets them the money they need, then so be it.

Usually I cry during these episodes. I cry for their pain, their loss, their hopelessness, and the pathetic addicted world they wallow in to try and forget.....everything.

The last part of the show is what I wait for. Usually, but not always, they show the addicted person 3 or 6 months later clean and sober. The outward appearance is usually startling. They look so much better sometimes they are hardly recognizable as the person they were before. They speak of how much better life is out of the dark hole of their addiction.

I love redemption. I love the person who overcomes all that they have suffered.

This is why I watch. All around me I see a broken world. I want a world intervention. I want a world that offers itself to be healed.

What intervention is really about is forcing a person to deal with their life in all it's dark places. It's forces that person to stop medicating the pain away.

At the root of every single addiction on this show is a childhood filled with heartache. It always comes back to our children.

We aren't taking very good care of them. I see an adult society that puts it's own selfish desires before the needs of children. We have reaped what we sowed.

Intervention is our children...... grown, showing us what we did to them.

They are the broken us.