Kyle: Before your daughters were using heavy drugs like black tar heroin, they were experimenting with other drugs like pot or drinking and whatnot, and you were aware of that?
Andrea: Yes.
Kyle: Why didn’t you say, “Hey, you can’t do that?”
Andrea: For a couple of reasons. One, I’d started using when I was 12 and don’t ask me why I had this opinion, but I didn’t think I had any problems at that time when my daughters were using. I was like, I’ve been doing it off and on since I was 12 and I’m fine.
Which looking back, I was so not fine, but they were doing okay in school and they had a set of friends that I felt comfortable with. I liked their families.
And I was like, you know what? If they’re gonna use, I’d rather know they were using than having them hide it. And by the way, I was smoking weed myself at that time. And of course drinking wine with dinner and so forth. So it was like, I get it. I’m not going to be shaming, and as long as they’re keeping up with the other parts of their life I felt like it was okay.
Kyle: Did you discourage it?
Andrea: No. No, not at all. Looking back, I wish I would have, but I didn’t.
Kyle: Sure.
Andrea: Yeah.
Kyle: So when did you realize that they were actually using hard drugs and this was a problem?
Andrea: There were these signs that started to show up. And like I was saying in our last segment, my daughter Alexis had moved out with Tess right after she turned 18 and we actually ended up getting an offer with E Entertainment to do our own reality show.
I had been asked by the girls if I would write them an affirmation that they would be successful in the entertainment industry. And I really believed in the power of the law of attraction.
So I had said I would, and at the time I was in acting classes because I thought as an older woman I could probably get some good work in commercial acting. So then I wrote them this affirmation and within two months they’d gotten their first major motion film. And the producer on that film was like, tell me about yourselves.
And the girls were like, oh, the only reason we got this major motion film is because my mom wrote us an affirmation because she believes in the law of attraction.
Kyle: And how old are they at this point?
Andrea: 18 and 19. No, 17, excuse me. And 18. And so the producer called me and he was like, would you ever consider doing a reality show?
And I said, absolutely not. And he said I understand though that you’re in school to be a minister and that you believe in the law of attraction and would you love to be able to teach people to use the law of attraction on national and even international television so that it could help them improve their lives?
And that felt good to me. So I said, okay, I’d be willing to shoot a sizzle reel. So we shot the sizzle reel and it was so funny actually, that A&E and E! went into a bidding war over our sizzle reel. And the premise was that I was this mom with three daughters, two of whom wanted to make it in the film industry.
And I was homeschooling them, teaching the law of attraction. But on the second day of filming, the police showed up at our door at eight o’clock in the morning and said, is Alexis Neiers home? And I’m thinking in the back of my mind, oh, this is something that E! is doing for a reaction, so I was a little bit nonchalant about it, and I was yelling upstairs for Alexis and Tes to come down, and they had actually just gotten home at five o’clock in the morning.
As a matter of fact, they had been out filming with film crew the night before, and that was the first night that Alexis and Tess ever did IV heroin it turns out. But when the police were knocking at the door and Alexis came down, it became very clear to me that this was not a joke. They actually took everybody outside. They handcuffed Alexis. She was facing the garage door. My former spouse was facing the garage door handcuffed because they didn’t know who he was.
Tess, my foster daughter and her friend Gabby were standing there facing the garage door. They weren’t handcuffed and the entire neighborhood was walking their young children past my driveway because they had to do that in order to get out the gate to walk their kids to school.
And it’s so humiliating and so embarrassing and it turned out that one of the detectives started to interview Alexis and I didn’t know anything about Miranda rights. She wasn’t read Miranda rights, although they insisted that they had read them to her. And she ends up sharing about a night where she was in the back of a car, passed out on Oxy, had been drinking in Hollywood with this young man, and all of a sudden she woke up and she’s in the backseat of this car and she’s on a property which belonged to Orlando Bloom.
And she ran up. She didn’t know it belonged to Orlando Bloom. She was the only person there, but she saw lights on in the house and she had to go to the bathroom. So she walked up to the door and started knocking on the door and she saw these kids ransacking the house and like shoving stuff in bags.
And she started to scream. Get me out of here. She was talking to the boy that she was with. She didn’t know the other people that were in there. And so he comes running outside and everybody’s telling him to get her out of there because it’s two o’clock in the morning up in Hollywood Hills.
And she’s screaming. And so they walk. They go down this driveway and they have to get through this chain link fence. And the duffle bag that he had on his back with items in it got caught on the fence. And Alexis told the detective that she helped him pull it off the fence so that they could get in the car and drive away.
That made her an accessory to burglary and yeah, so things went downhill from there. And the reality show – they asked…are you still gonna do the reality show?
And I actually had heard from the girls that they knew this boy was doing this. They actually had called, and I had both of the girls phone records showing a three-way call to the Hollywood Police station. On the night that Lindsay Lohan’s burglary was announced on the news that requested – if anybody has any information, call the Hollywood Police Station – and that’s what my daughters did.
And I was there when they did it. And so I had proof that she was in fact somebody who told the police who this was. And there was a seven minute call. And so the show became called, “Pretty Wild” very quickly, but we agreed to continue because I thought it was gonna get thrown out of court right away. And we would just be able to continue with a less, horrific outcome.
Kyle: So those signs are big signs. Police show up. You’re at Orlando Bloom’s house. I wanna rewind a little bit. Were there any signs from your daughters that you wrote off as not severe? Not as a warning sign…that, looking back you should have said, “Man, if I would’ve known what I know today, I could have seen that was a sign and I could have taken action.”
Andrea: Yeah. It was the black lines on the tinfoil. The smell of the burnt coconut. The fact that they would be lying on the bathroom floor crying in pain because of the withdrawal syndrome from opioids.
Kyle: And what did you think it was?
Andrea: Oh, they were telling me that it was severe menstrual cramps and that they had migraines and Alexis had migraines off and on since she was in middle school, so that was kind of normal. But she had never ever referred to having severe menstrual cramps.
But Tess hadn’t been living with us for a few years. She had just been bouncing in and out and so I didn’t really know much about her menstrual cycle, so I was like, oh my gosh. That’s incredible. I’ve never seen anybody in so much pain, but I believed that it was possible. But that’s not what was going on though.
They were both having withdrawal symptoms and so yeah, I ignored those. And then when they weren’t coming home, I was like – I did some of that myself. Like I’d sneak out and stuff like that as a kid, and I never got into this kind of trouble.
And most people don’t. But they do these behaviors to some degree. So I was like, okay, we’re gonna get through this. It’s not the end of the world. Let’s have a conversation about it. That’s gonna make a difference.
Kyle: So let’s talk about what you did that didn’t work. Like having a conversation about it.
Andrea: So I was like saying this is bad behavior. That’s what I was thinking in my mind. They’re being rebellious. They’re just being stupid teenagers. And so my reaction was like my dad did to me – shaming the you know what out of them.
Are you kidding me? How could you do this to me? Talking to my foster daughter – we’ve given you everything. How could you do this? And when they’d come home in the middle of the night – early morning hours, I’d be like, I’ve been up all night. Where have you been?
Just shaming, blaming…and the second they walked in the door as soon as I knew I was gonna have their face in front of mine, I was just on them like shooting daggers outta my eyes, hoping that if they just knew how angry I was and how hurt I was and how disturbing this was…
But they would be like, oh God, we can’t do this. Like that was so far from even reasonable because, and now that I know this, their brains had been completely taken over. By that point, they were fully addicted to opioids.
And so looking back – the shaming, the blaming, the guilting, the ostracizing, making them feel like they were just the worst people on the face of this planet and that they were blowing this opportunity to be successful in the entertainment industry, which is what they had been begging for and wanted so badly. They were gonna blow it if they continued.
And none of that worked. That’s not what works, period. Shaming, blaming, guilting, ostracizing, that leads to a sense of more isolation, more alienation, more shame. And the studies show that shame is highly correlated with addiction.
Kyle: Why do you think so many people take that approach? That’s the approach we hear about, right? The yelling, the shaming, the blaming.
Andrea: I think it’s the stigma that has been around addiction for decades. A lot of people didn’t know much about addiction other than alcoholism. And there were these groups that formed…an organization that formed that really just said, this is just bad behavior. You should detach emotionally.
You should let them hit bottom. Eventually they’ll get it. And so that’s been the go-to place for doctors to send family members, wives, mothers for a long time. You go there, go listen to those laymen. They’ll tell you how to save your daughter’s life who’s shooting heroin into her arms.
And that’s what people were doing. And the message there is take care of yourself and detach emotionally and let them hit bottom and don’t give them anything when actually, if you detach, you have no influence over them. Shame just exacerbates them wanting to use and self-medicate.
Kyle: And you bring up an interesting point with alcohol being the correlation most people have with addiction. You and I could go have a drink right now and the chances of us dying are very low.
But if you and I go take fentanyl, the chances of one of us dying go up.
Andrea: Skyrocketing.
Kyle: Skyrocket. So it’s harder for people to say, let them go hit rock bottom.
Andrea: That’s underground for a lot of these kids. I can’t tell you how many of my daughter’s friends are underground from opioids, from heroin. Sometimes heroin that wasn’t cut with fentanyl, sometimes heroin that was
Kyle: Wow.
Andrea: Yeah, and we see we’re seeing 200 people a day die of overdose, and about 150 of them are from opioid overdoses. In our country 150 a day. And that’s last year we lost more people to opioid overdoses than we did in the entire Vietnam War.
Kyle: When you had these conversations with your daughters…
Andrea: They weren’t conversations, they were monologues
Kyle: When you were practicing your monologue…when you were yelling at your kids, what did they respond with?
Andrea: It depended on how much pain they were in from their withdrawal or how high they were under the influence. Sometimes it was really just when they feel shamed, their protective shield is to fight back, to shame back.
If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be using, if it weren’t for you and dad screwing up my entire life, I would be, this, that, and the other thing. And or they would acquiesce and say, you’re right, mom. We’ll never do it again. And they’d smile at me with these beautiful faces and try to get me to calm down.
And there was a part of me that just felt so hopeful because I felt hopeless most of the time, that in those moments I was like, oh, thank God. Thank God they’re listening. But they weren’t listening. It’s not that they weren’t listening, it’s that the addiction had taken over completely.
Kyle: Did you ever say, we’re going to rehab?
Andrea: When we were filming the show is when I found out that they were doing heroin, and I said to the producers, “:ook, you either get them into treatment or some sort of help, or the show is over.” So we talked about putting them in rehab.
And that wouldn’t have been good for the show. But we ended up agreeing that they would go work with a Suboxone doctor while we were filming. And then after the season was over, and I think we had five episodes left, that they would go to treatment.
If we could get them to go. That’s not, a given.
But when they went to see the Suboxone doctor, I felt so much hope because this Suboxone takes away the craving for the heroin, but there was nobody in their life at that time that could monitor them because they weren’t living with me. They were living in some skanky hotel in Hollywood.
And they were over 18 so there was nothing I could do about them not living at home. And so there was nobody to monitor them, whether they were taking the medication or not. And they just, obviously they weren’t. Because they just went partying. It just got worse and worse.
Kyle: Looking back, what would you tell yourself during this tumultuous time?
Andrea: To find a therapist who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a therapy that teaches people how to analyze the results of their thought processes and belief systems. And one who not only worked with cognitive behavioral therapy, but was also somebody who had experienced addiction issues in their own family or in themselves, and specialized in family system work where there was dysfunction and addiction in the whole family system, like from generations back, or at least the family of origin.
I went to a therapist who was just this general therapist and knew nothing about how to guide me under these circumstances.
And then on top of that, I would hire an expert in family recovery who could coach me on a day-to-day basis. In real time…this is what happened right now. How do I deal with it? Because there are family recovery coaches that will do that in real time with you.
They will be available to you in ways that you can just call them pretty much twenty four seven when you’re dealing with a crisis, and they will have answers and solutions for you because they’ve both lived through it themselves and they’ve been educated and trained and accredited with family recovery certifications and motivational communication strategies and stuff like that.
So you can really get help.
