As the mother of an active addict/alcoholic, I am sharing some suggestions on moving YOURSELF forward when your ADULT child is an addict or alcoholic that is actively using. Why? Well, I have found a way out of the insanity of being controlled by my daughter's addiction, and if you are going through anything that I went through, then I would like to share the knowledge that I have obtained with you because I believe every family member should be educated in knowing that YOUR life does not need to cease to exist because your loved one's addiction is destroying THEIR life and it doesn't have to destroy yours.
1. Get support for YOU by attending Al-anon Meetings.
2. Don’t give up after going to your 1st Al-anon meeting. Try a few and give it a month.
3. Stop enabling
a. Stop making excuses for their behavior.
b. Let them clean up their own messes (that includes getting bailed out of jail due to being under the influence)
c. If they are back living in your home due to finances, give them a timeline and follow through with it.
i. Get a job
ii. Seek out the help of a professional and get counseling
iii. You’re the “land-lord” of your home to them, which should not include doing their laundry, washing their dishes, making their bed, and fixing them their meals.
d. Have them SIGN an agreement to live in your home listing the rules to follow. Include in the rules that if they want to live in your home, they need to attend meetings with an AA /NA Group, Outpatient Treatment for their addiction including follow-up, and/or seeking the help of a therapist that specializes in addiction that can provide professional counseling for their addiction as well as other mental disorders that need to be addressed. Have a bottom line. If they do not follow through to get help for their addiction and their addictive behavior continues to stay active, let them know they have a limited time period to find alternative living arrangements and stick to it.
4. If they are attending meetings and living a sober life-style and you are also getting the support you need through Al-anon or a family counselor, then you should not be taking their inventory. If you are…STOP.
a. Don’t ask them if they are going to meetings.
b. Don’t ask them when they are going to quit smoking. They gave up drinking or drugs….one thing at a time.
c. Don’t advise them on what they should be doing in their recovery program. It’s THEIR program….just focus on yours.
5. If they refuse to get help and continue to choose to live a destructive lifestyle using drugs or alcohol then you need to give them bottom lines. Some examples include:
a. “If you do not get help for your addiction, you must leave this home and find somewhere else to live.”
b. “If you do not get help for your addiction, the car that I am making payments for that you drive will no longer be accessible to you.”
c. “If you do not get help for your addiction, the cell phone that I am paying for will be shut off.”
d. “If you do not get help for your addiction, you will no longer be welcome in our home.”
e. “If you do not get help for your addiction, when you call me I will not speak to you unless you want to talk about getting help.”
6. Once a loved one agrees to get help, your support can kick in 100%. Don’t support the addiction, only the recovery. Until we get support and help in seeing that our own enabling and co-dependent behavior needs to also change, we are unable to see that full blown enabling is not helping them; it is a way in which we love them to death. You can’t love them back to sobriety. You can’t fix this. You can’t control it. Addiction is a disease. When someone is an addict, deep down inside they know they need help but the addiction is so strong it craves that fix; that drink, that food, that ultimate HIGH of whatever it is that will provide them with euphoria. The addict is slick, it can let you see your loved one as that loving beautiful vulnerable child that needs your love and will beg for you to give them one more chance promising they will change. You let them stay, or you allow them back in. Nothing changes. No meetings, no counseling, same old lifestyle. You fell for it. The cycle continues. This is what is known as loving them to death. You refuse to label your loved one with the disease of addiction. In your mind you believe you can fix them by just LOVING them. That’s all they need right? WRONG. The addict knows your weakness and you will fall prey to them over and over again. How’s that working for you?
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| Get this image out of your head! While they are partying up a storm somehow someone orders some pizza, they crash and everyone wakes up the next day and it starts all over until the money runs out. Then they call you because they know you are going to fall for their bullshit story. |
7. Don’t live in fear of Letting them Go. So many parents feel that by giving their “ADULT” child that is an alcoholic or addict the bottom lines when they do not get help for their addiction that it will kill them. How will they survive? Where will they live? What will they eat? How will they get money? Are you kidding me? If they need a drink or fix bad enough, believe me they get it. If they are slick enough to get their “high”, why do you not think it possible for them to survive? Crashing on couches on crack houses, or on the floor passed out in some strangers’ apartment after drinking all night, sleeping in their car because that is all they have are some possibilities. Horrifying right? What would you choose for them? A comfy room and freedom to come and go through your front door anytime they feel like just so you have them in your life! Pretty selfish of you, isn’t it. They need consequences not comfortability. Again…your choosing to love them to death is something you need to clearly accept as an attribute of strengthening their addiction.
OKAY, so I am wrong about all of this right? Your way is the right way. They just need love. They have mental issues and dual disorders that led them to become addicts or alcoholics and they need love and acceptance. They will get help when they are ready. You can’t force someone to get help, they have to want it. “I am not going to turn my back on my own child and throw them out when they are at their lowest!” “I will love them so they do not feel abandoned!” “They will do this when they are ready!” “Twelve step programs are too organized and bogus, and their structure is intimidating! I will just pray the addiction away my way!”
Addiction has been around forever. Today there are professionals around the world that have done all the studies and agree on what works. I compare this to all the diets out there. You can try any one of them, but if you are not committed to changing your lifestyle of eating and exercising to live a healthier life then of course you are not going to lose weight. You can’t sit on the sofa all day with a bag of “low fat” potato chips and a diet soda and watch an exercise video and expect to lose weight. If you are not making a life changing commitment each day of your life to stay healthy, then it will fail. You could be all gung ho for three or four months and loose ten or twenty pounds, but if you wake up one morning and feel really lazy and say “Oh hell, I am so hungry for a big stack of pancakes with lots of butter and syrup today. Can’t hurt to cheat a little!” You make your big stack and smear them will butter and syrup to the point where you are drooling it looks so good. You sit and place that first big forkful of that hot, buttery and sweet delight in your mouth and savor the deliciousness as you chew, not realizing your eyes are rolling into the back of your head. Within minutes you are strapping the butter and syrup left on your plate with your finger and then sticking that finger into your mouth so you complete the memory of that meal with the smile of…euphoria. What is a proven fact is that to lose weight and to keep it off, it requires more than watching what you eat. You need to stay active as well as finding out what may be the underlying reason you are overeating. Seeking the help from a professional that can help you determine that, can assist a person in achieving success in overcoming the barrier that was preventing them from living a the healthiest life they were meant to be living. Why the cravings are there and how to deal with them.
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| Nothing really can be successful unless hard work is the driver behind it. |
Cravings are always there for the addict. Not changing their lifestyle and staying committed to a sober lifestyle is short-lived and doomed for relapse. NO matter how one chooses to obtain sobriety, if they do not have a commitment to staying sober EACH and EVERY day, relapse is inevitable. Support is key. AA/NA meetings, having a sponsor, and knowing what to do and where to go when they are weakened by cravings.
Some people can just quit cold turkey. DONE! “I said no more drinking and that was fifteen years ago. I did it without AA! My family supported, prayed and loved me and never abandoned me. I did it!”
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| Without tools on how to cope, is this really possible? |
Congratulations for you! Do me a favor though, process what you want to convey first before you type your mantra for the World Wide Web to read? How are you really staying sober? Did you pray the addiction away? Did your family love it away? Or, are you making a commitment each day to yourself? What else is involved? Have YOU changed your lifestyle? Are you comfortable sitting in a nightclub watching a crowd of people drink? Does being there smelling the alcohol not make you uncomfortable? OR…do you no longer frequent bars and clubs because you made that commitment to yourself? Do you still hang out with the same friends that you got high with? Are you comfortable being with them as they sit around and get high? OR, have you moved on and made new friends? Your loved ones praying for you or continuing to love you are all wonderful and encouraged, but what is really responsible for the addict/alcoholic STAYING sober?
Some people are able to do it without treatment or help. That is great. It still takes a personal commitment on their part to stay sober each day.
No you can’t force anyone to go to treatment. Yes, they do have to want it for them for it to work. BUT…don’t shoot down advice on this process unless you have a clinical license or credentials after your name on which you can prove that intervening on an individual and getting them into treatment may not be a lifesaving experience. Should this not be the case, treatment centers would not exist. Treatment centers would not support the thousands of dedicated interventionists that devote their lives to helping families get their loved one help for their life destroying addiction. When a family is broken down and doesn’t have any idea on how to help their loved one get sober, they seek help because they realize what they have been doing is not working. Getting the help from a professional to assist families to move in a healthy direction for themselves and also to get their loved one help is the most loving act a family can do.
The loved one might not go. They may not be ready to go. They may refuse to get help. What does happen though is the right professional will have educated the family on how to move forward with the process that will not continue to weaken them, and if they follow the advice that is provided, results will occur. If they do not and retreat back to letting the addict or alcoholic run the show, that power is in control and the addiction remains active and continues to destroy not only the addict, but the family.
Everyone that struggles or whose life is impacted by addiction should seek help. Al-anon, AA, NA and/or family counseling that specializing in addiction are avenues that can provide that support to move YOU out of an unhealthy lifestyle and back to enjoying the life you are meant to be living.
I am NOT a professional. I do NOT have clinical credentials after my name. My daughter IS an active drug user and alcoholic and has been for almost twelve years. What I do know is that before seeking the help of Al-anon, I was loving my daughter to death by enabling her. She knows I love her, but more importantly she knows I do NOT support her addiction.
I have also seen my daughter when she was sober and working the 12 step program and she knows too what works to achieve sobriety. We discuss this and at times she reflects back to when she was healthy and how she wishes she could get that back again, but want is holding her back is the knowing that achieving that will take hard work on her part and that is what is holding her back now. She is living in a warm home with her boyfriend and getting all her needs met. Sleeping all day, using all night and no worries. This lifestyle feeds the addiction and allows it to stay in control. What weakens the addiction? When she calls me and tells me how much she misses her family. When she calls and asks for money and I say I do not have any. When she calls and says she is lonely and I talk to her and give her resources of getting help and that I am there if she wants to get it. Yes, it is sad and breaks my heart that she is not accepting help for her addiction, but I will not let her back into our lives as an active drug addict. Allowing her to be hear her young daughter knowing she used. Some may say that all she may need is to feel loved again and just need the support of her family around to change. If that worked, wouldn’t that be the way to go people? Wouldn’t that be publicized as the cure? Why isn’t it then? It isn’t because it has been proven not to work and last. Short lived. Addiction is a disease and you can’t love it away.
They say that Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. I describe insanity as when you do the same thing over and over again and it prevents you from living YOUR full life the way it is meant to be lived.
I am not a professional. I am not criticizing to be hurtful to anyone that may have obtained success in another way. I am only offering guidance to move someone from an unhealthy place in their life to a healthier place that can provide tools to allow that healthy lifestyle to endure and continue each day. I was working harder than my daughter was on her addiction. She had to do this for her. I have to do what I need to do for me.
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