Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2023

Document Type

Research Paper

Abstract

In this researched memoir, I will be writing about my childhood growing up with my father being incarcerated and a drug addict. I’m writing about my story to let everyone know it isn’t easy but you can get through it and there are a lot more children and families that go through this too. I’m also going to bring in my dad’s perspective a little bit while throwing in research on the recovery process and the stages, the brain, and the justice system. I chose to write about my experience and emotional struggles to show readers that addiction and the subsequent consequences are much more common than people think. As a means of demonstrating the reality of addiction, I go in depth about my father’s addiction and how it affected my life and what I experienced with certain experiences. Some things I will be writing about are the differences between visiting my dad in jail, in prison, or in a rehabilitation center and how I feel within all of them and any differences between these systems.

As I write about these experiences I will bring in statistics about certain experiences in my story and also research on certain things like the steps needed for the recovery process for an addict. I also describe how my dad has a cycle of abstinence and relapse he tends to follow every time he gets out from being incarcerated and I found research that writes about what kind of signs to look out for when a recovering addict is close to relapsing or already relapsed. I start from the very beginning when I was born to present day experiences and things I was told by my grandparents when I was too young to remember. Therefore, my researched auto-ethnography is written in a way that tells my story and I input research to either back up my story or to give more knowledge on certain things that I don’t know a lot on. As far as my research nothing was really different from my own experiences there were some parts where I strongly agree or disagree with authors and you will see what it is in my paper. All my sources are peer reviewed or otherwise reliable due to editorial oversight or industry review.

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