Our 20-year-old son had been a weekly abuser of alcohol and pot since age 17. When sober, he regularly turned the home upside down with defiance, physical damage to the home, and total disrespect for parents and siblings. When, as a family, we visited other family members at their homes, he secretly raided liquor supplies, until caught when drunk, just as he had done numerous times at our home, even with all liquor under lock and key. Our son was not allowed to attend any high school graduation functions, having been caught on campus with a small amount of pot two weeks before school graduation. Later, he was arrested as an adult with pot possession, and later had a DUI. He will enroll soon in a PC-1000 program (drug diversion) ordered by the court. The DMV recently revoked his driver license for a year, and we await the court’s fee and rehabilitation punishment for the offense.
Yet in the four months we’ve been attending the BILY program, there has been remarkable improvement in our
son’s behavior . . .
significantly reducing his incidents of breaking the law, and, most importantly, restoring peace to our home. How far my wife and I have come from being at first BILY non-believers, desperate, to seeing the positive impact the BILY program has made for all family members in four short months.
BILY taught my wife and I to work together, to be in agreement on how to deal with our son’s behavior and bad choices, and how to follow through daily with consequences. Our desperation was actually an advantage in that we immediately implemented the ten BILY principles. Attending weekly meetings guided us through implementing the program at home, but more importantly, gave us healing therapy. We were with others who were living through similar problems, no longer alone, getting valuable input how to better cope and to make changes for the better. We have a long way yet to go with our son, but we are again in control and have peace in our home. He now knows any crisis he is experiencing is his doing, and there are undesirable consequences for causing them. He drinks less, smokes less, and rarely attempts to break house rules at home. He knows he’ll get busted if he comes home with suspicious behavior because we test on the spot for liquor and pot. His grades are good at community college (a first since he was a teenager), and he shows much more self-control and respect for his parents. His behavior improvement is partly because he’s tired of being a screw-up, having no money and few good career choices. Yet it’s also because he knows we will now follow through with consequences, and he will no longer have the option of living in our home but instead will be in a much less comfortable living environment. He knows, with his currently limited job skills, that he can’t support an irresponsible lifestyle for long. There are still weekly issues and consequences we deal with, but the bedlam is gone, replaced with peace. BILY has been our savior.
