If you found yourself at this page, most likely you’ve already been sand blasted with the reality that there is an addict in your family, and you were caught like a deer in head lights, not knowing what to do or where to go for help.  How do I know this? I have walked this painful path. I write in the hopes that what I have learned, and what I am still learning, will help families everywhere who discover that they have a loved one who is an addict. First of all, there is no need to own the guilt and shame that you might feel. As you read on, you will see what part you have played in this dance called addiction, but you need to realize from the start that you did not cause this.

Parents are famous for feeling that they are somehow to blame for all of their children’s short comings. Even when that “child” becomes an adult. Logically, you have to know this is not true. So now that you know that you have a loved one that is an addict, what should you do? I think the most important step is to start educating yourself by reading all that you can on the mechanics of addiction. I highly recommend a book that I was referred to titled “Freeing Someone You Love from Alcohol and Other Drugs.” It’s written by Ronald L. Rogers and Chandler Scott McMillin. You can even buy this book second-hand online at one of the major book retailers at a fraction of the new book price. This book will help you face the facts, recognize addiction, learn how to stage an intervention, and employ keys to finding good treatment centers.  It also gives both the family and addict ten tasks to work through toward recovery, teaches how to cope with relapse, gives a guide to the different addictive drugs and the effects they cause, plus so much more helpful information.

The friend that recommended the above mentioned book is also the one who enlightened me to a concept that, as a mother, was so completely foreign to me.  I asked the friend, who is a counselor to drug addicts and alcoholics, “What can I do? I feel so lost. I have no idea how to help this person.” His advice? “STOP HELPING.” I didn’t understand at the time, that all of my “helping”( to pick up the slack for the addict in my life) was really only allowing the addict to go without suffering any of the consequences that might bring about the addict’s recovery. As long as the addict’s life is running smoothly, and everyone else is cleaning up the troubles, pulling in the slack, paying his or her bills, and making excuses for the behavior, the addict can remain in denial as to the seriousness and extent of the addiction. As far as the addict is concerned, his or her life is just fine, and he or she doesn’t have a problem. 

As the parent of the addict, you certainly do have a problem, but the biggest problem is something known as “enabling”, and that’s the part you play in the addict’s life. It’s also something that you must stop doing if your loved one is ever to break from the addiction. It will probably be the hardest thing you will ever do. It’s hard for  parents to discern at times whether they are helping or enabling. The following was written by an author that is unknown to me, but it does define the boundaries of enabling quite well and explains how to lovingly detach. It’s titled “Helping.”

“My role as helper is not to do things for the person I am trying to help, but to “be” things, not trying to control and change his or her actions, but through understanding an awareness to change my reactions.

I will change my negatives to positive; fear to faith; contempt for what he or she may do to respect for the potential within him or her; hostility to understanding; and manipulation or over protectiveness to release with love, not trying to make him or her fit a standard or image, but giving him or her an opportunity to pursue his or her own destiny, regardless of what that choice may be.

I will change my dominance to encouragement; my panic to serenity; the inertia of despair to the energy of my own personal growth; and self-justification to self-understanding.

Self pity blocks effective action. The more I indulge in it, the more I feel that the answer to my problems is a change in others and society, not in myself. Thus, I become a hopeless case.

Exhaustion is the result when I use my energy in mulling over the past with regret or trying to figure ways to escape a future that has yet to arrive.

Projecting an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it, for fear that it will or it won’t come true, uses all of my energy and leaves me unable to live today. Yet living today is the only way to have a life.

I will have no thought for the future actions of others, neither expecting them to be better or worse as time goes on, for in such expectations, I am really trying to create. I will love and let be. All people are always changing. If I try to judge them, I do so only on what I think I know of them, failing to realize that there is much I do not know. I will give others the credit for attempts at progress and for having had many victories which are unknown to me. I too am always changing, and I can make that change a constructive one if I am willing. I CAN ONLY CHANGE MYSELF, others I can only love.” (If anyone knows who wrote the above piece, please let me know, so that I may give due credit.)

I will write more on the mechanics of addiction later, but for now, it’s enough that you begin to educate yourself, find a support system like Al-Anon (for family and loved ones of an addict), or NA or AA (for the addicts themselves), and most of all, detach from the addict’s problems with love and….STOP HELPING.