Expecting the addict in your life to change if you’re not willing to do the same is not only unfair – but it also won’t work well. Although your addict is responsible for his or her own choices and behaviours, as the loved one you bear some responsibility for any ways that you have contributed to these dysfunctional patterns – and you must be willing to change those first, before the addict you love so dearly will be willing to change what they have been doing.
The Serenity Prayer tells us that we need to “accept the things we cannot change” and to have “the courage to change the things we can.” First and foremost, we need to understand that we cannot change another person, even though we want to believe we can. Although we might be able to influence other people, the only person we can ever really change is ourselves – and we need to develop the courage to do that when our thoughts and our actions aren’t serving us well.
It’s so hard for loved ones of people struggling with addiction to understand that until the addicts themselves are willing to shift and change, nothing much will change. When addicts are enabled and feel too comfortable in their addiction, the chances of them doing anything differently are slim to none. That’s why boundaries and consequences are important – so that we can help the addicts we love become less and less comfortable staying in active addiction.
I am a proud Canadian and an even prouder Vancouverite. But when I heard that our government was going to “help” drug addicts by making possession of a small amount of opiates and other street drugs legal – ostensibly so that addicts would use together instead of in isolation and somehow, someway, protect each other from overdosing – I felt absolutely enraged.
My immediate question for them was “Is this the best you’ve got?” THIS is their solution to the toxic drug overdose epidemic we’ve been battling for far too many years?
These “leaders” (who WE elect and whose salaries WE pay) have continued to try everything – everything, this is, except to do what will actually work. In order for addiction to stop, we need to get underneath it, to determine why people feel the need to blotto out their lives, and then provide some help for THAT! It isn’t going to help to make possession of small amounts of drugs okay so that addicts don’t feel the ‘stigma’ and will hopefully use together more often, so there are fewer isolated deaths. [Read more…]
