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LoveWithBoundaries

Loving Someone with an Addiction: A Life of Chaos

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Loving an Addict, A Life of Chaos

Whether your addicted loved one is a parent, a child, a partner, friend, or colleague, loving someone who is actively engaging in addictive behaviours is one of the most difficult ways to live. This is because addicts who continue to be involved with their own self-destructive patterns typically experience many emotional highs and lows, creating a virtual roller coaster of fantasy followed by severe despondency, remorse, and self-loathing, with every conceivable emotion in between.

Addicts often develop physical and financial problems as well, which usually result from long periods of a variety of stresses as well as their failure to take good care of themselves holistically. Unfortunately, if you love an addict, you are likely to experience many of these emotional, physical, and financial issues as well.

The Three Stages of Addiction

In the beginning stage of addiction, people generally feel they can take or leave the potentially problematic substance or behaviour. For example, a person considers himself to be a “social” user or drinker, able to indulge in alcohol and/or other drugs only recreationally. Or, a woman may tell herself she simply enjoys going to the mall or to the casino now and then—no harm in that, is there?

Later, in the progressive stage, people feel the need to engage more and more in the preferred substances or behaviours, but they remain in denial about how far the addiction has progressed. This is seen in situations where a person will be imbibing whatever is in sight, sometimes to the point of blacking out or engaging in other dangerous behaviours. Or a gambler has increased her visits to the casino—and often her spending limit—and may even stop on the way home from work several nights in a row.

In the advanced stage of addiction, the consequences are much more evident for the addict, such as more and more of the mind-altering substances are now required to achieve the same effect, and methods of procuring the drugs and alcohol are becoming more frequent and dangerous. Health and financial problems increase and the addict may lose his job. For a gambling addict, weekend trips to the casino have increased to at least once a day with far more losses than wins to show for it. The addict’s financial difficulties are now overwhelming. When you love an addict, it’s important to acknowledge what is truly going on with them in order to begin the process of releasing yourself from the life of chaos you are undoubtedly living. Ask yourself where on this continuum is the addict you love, and how long has this been the case?

Are You Isolating Yourself Because of the Addict in Your Life?

If you are in a significant relationship with an addict, you probably don’t talk in depth with others about what you are going through because of the shame and guilt you may be feeling about your situation.

You may also feel a sense of isolation, not realizing that there are other people who are in exactly the same predicaments, experiencing exactly the same feelings you are. It may be difficult for you to maintain some of your relationships because you do not want anyone to know what is really going on in your life.

Be honest with yourself, are there folks you are no longer in contact with because of an addicted loved one? Are there things you once enjoyed doing that you no longer do? Isolation is a slippery slope and will only increase the chaos you are living with every day, and using it as a means of emotional self-protection is a strategy that rarely works. If you find that you have been doing this, you may want to begin to reach out, because your secrets will only continue to keep you sick.

It’s Not That Bad, Is It? Yes, It Is!

A practicing addict’s denial can often be a mirror for a loved one’s denial—in fact, you may have become an expert in convincing yourself that things aren’t as bad as they are, simply to justify staying in such a difficult and draining relationship.

Perhaps you have lived this way for so long that it seems normal to you. It’s possible that you may already be so used to the lies, the deception, the manipulation, and the self-absorption of your addicted loved one that living like this has become, in effect, your comfort zone.

To eventually be able to come out of your comfort zone of denial, you will first need to identify and acknowledge what has become the dysfunctional “norm” that you now live with. Do you routinely put up with raging, threats and manipulation from the addict in your life? If you’re like the loved ones I regularly see in my practice when I begin to work with them, the answer is yes.  And no one should have to live like that.

Helping versus Enabling

If you’re like most people who find themselves in relationships with practicing addicts, you no longer understand what a “healthy normal” is, nor do you have the tools to make that your reality. And because of this lack of tools, you have likely made some missteps that have inadvertently allowed the addict in your life to continue his or her unhealthy behaviours.

For example, do you shield the addict from things he or she doesn’t want to face about themselves? Do you walk on eggshells for fear of setting off the addict’s anger? Do you make excuses or cover up for them? Do you lie to them to avoid an argument? Those are all enabling behaviours.

Focusing on Yourself

When you begin to take positive action to remedy the situation, you become part of the solution rather than being part of the problem. The most important thing you will need to do is learn how to focus on yourself. As the loved one of a person with addictive behaviours, most of your energy has been spent worrying about and placating someone else, perhaps trying to solve their increasing emotional, financial, and physical health problems. This may feel like the path of least resistance, but in reality you are helping to keep the addiction going.

Focusing more on others than you do on yourself is a form of codependency. Your own recovery from participating in dysfunctional behaviours will truly begin when you start to focus your attention and energy away from the addicted person and onto yourself.

If you are like most people who are in relationships with addicts, looking after yourself first will be a novel concept for you. But as you start taking better care of yourself and treating yourself with more respect, you will experience the ripple effect of other people in your life respecting you more as well. Remember—you are teaching others how to treat you by showing them how you are treating yourself. As well, as you begin to live your own best life, you will begin to role-model for your addicted loved ones how to live in healthier ways—a win-win situation for all who are involved.

“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The Dilemma of Addiction

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In the early 1980s, a musical group called The Clash released a song whose title went on to become almost an anthem for many people in a variety of situations. The song was called “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and it truly sums up the multitude of dilemmas that people experience in life.

Today we will be looking at how this simple question presents itself when focusing on addiction – both for the addicts and for their loved ones.

Is Addiction Actually a Disease?

As many of you know, I am an addict. I have been in active recovery for the last 32 years, with no relapses and no time off for good behavior. I have also been working as an Addiction Therapist exclusively with addicts and their families for approximately 27 years – and I am the loved one of addicts, so I know addiction from all different angles. As a result, I have moved away from believing that addiction is a disease – also known as the “medical model,” which is espoused by the 12-Step programs I attended for many years (such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, CODA, and Al-Anon), and still widely believed by a variety of addiction doctors.

The people who believe in the medical model also call addiction a “brain disease” – perhaps an apt description because all addictive behaviors affect our brain chemistry, especially mind-altering addictions like alcohol or drugs. But I also know that if I raise my little pinky and move it up or down, there is brain involvement in that too. That’s how we’re wired as human beings – there is brain involvement in everything we do.

I have difficulty seeing addiction as a disease for two simple reasons:

1.   I have a medical disease. Diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease in 1973, I was told that it is incurable and that I’d have it my whole life. Although this has basically been true, after many years of being in active recovery from addiction and learning how to take really good care of myself, I’m happy to say that some days I forget I have Crohn’s – that’s how much better it is much of the time.

But I can’t just say to myself “I think I won’t have Crohn’s anymore.” People with medical diseases like cancer, diabetes, and many others can’t just decide not to have them anymore. It doesn’t work that way.

However, as I found out early into my recovery, we can do that with addiction.

2.   In my considerable experience in working with those struggling with addiction, what I know to be true is that when we tell an addict they have a “disease,” we generally get one of two responses. One response is that they say, usually with a lot of aggressive and arrogant attitude, “I have a disease, I can’t help it – get out of my face and leave me alone!” The other is that they say basically the same thing, but in a much more whiny tone of voice displaying much more of a victim mentality: “I have a disease, I can’t help it, stop bothering me.”

Either way, they feel like they are giving up all their personal power and have no other choice than to continue the addiction.

Contrary to the belief that we are “powerless over our addiction” – which is what we are told in Step 1 of the 12 Steps, I see it differently and have for a long time: I see addiction as a choice. Let me explain what I mean.

I don’t think that anyone chooses to become an addict – I know I didn’t. In fact, most people think they can handle whatever addictive behavior they are regularly using. “It’s not me who will become addicted,” they convince themselves, “because I’m special and unique.” They believe it’s the other guy who’ll have a problem – not themselves. That is, until they find themselves floundering right in the middle of that very insidious problem.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Like the caterpillar who intuitively knows it must change into that spectacular butterfly or die, there comes a point in every addict’s life when they know that there is something very wrong in their lives. They see other people living what they consider to be better, more productive, more successful lives than the ones they, as addicts in active addiction, are living. They know their relationships are suffering, their health issues are getting worse, they can’t hold down a job – and can’t seem to go a day without using the addictive behavior, even though in some cases it could very easily kill them.

It is when that realization strikes, that the addict is in the throes of making a choice. Am I going to stay in active addiction and feel awful about myself, or am I going to shift into active recovery and develop some self-respect? That is the choice point. Do I stay or do I go?

The good news and the bad news are the same: no one else can make that decision for an addict.

The Same is True for Loved Ones of Addicts

Family and other loved ones of people struggling with addiction are essentially in the same boat as the addict. Many loved ones “enable” the addicts they love because they don’t know what else to do. They often feel like they’ve tried everything – to no avail – and they don’t have a clue what to try next.

If you’re the loved one of an addict, there will come a time in your life when you know that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. In the midst of your frustration, anger, fear and resentment, you may wonder whether you even want to continue being in relationship with them at all – or if it’s best to just cut them off. This kind of decision is extremely difficult and often heartbreaking for families – and it usually presents itself after all other avenues they can think of have been tried.

What generally happens for most loved ones, early on, is that they begin to work harder than their addict is working – trying to make things better just so that this nightmare will end. But what they don’t understand is that, as they enable the addict, they actually contribute to the addiction continuing.

Learning how to set and maintain self-respectful boundaries is the best thing families can do when dealing with an addicted person – that kind of “helping” (instead of enabling) is what assists the addiction to stop. But until families learn this – and how to actually do this – they keep trying to change and control people and situations that they simply can’t change or control.

Think about it: if loved ones could control their addicts, they would be doing that already. Instead, they waste a lot of their precious energy until their own vitally important self-care becomes depleted. That is generally the time when they begin to ask themselves – in response to their relationships with the addicts they so dearly love – “Should I stay or should I go?”

Remaining in any kind of active addiction, whether to drugs, alcohol, or to another person, is never a good idea. Poisoning ourselves with toxic substances, or hurting ourselves with other addictive behaviors such as overspending, internet addiction, gaming, sex addiction, disordered eating, or codependency is never a healthy, self-respecting choice.

And enabling an addict – contributing to keeping the addiction going – is NEVER a loving act.

Whether as an addict still entrenched in addiction or as the loved one of someone struggling with this issue, when asking yourself “Should I stay or should I go?” it is important to remember that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. However the choice point shows up in your life, if you’ll be doing what needs to be done in order for you and those you love to be healthy, then that is the gauge you’ll want to follow.

And if you’re not sure how to follow a different and better path – whether as an addict or a loved one – please be sure to find a professional like myself who can help you through this process.

Asking yourself “Should I stay or should I go?” could ultimately be the best question you could pose to yourself – it shows that you’re tired of the same-old, same-old actions you’ve been doing and that you want a change. Be sure to listen to your inner answer carefully and to take action in as positive a way as you can – and as soon as you can.

This article was first published on Recovery.org.

The Secret to Stopping Addiction in Your Family—Forever

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Stop enabling to stop addiction in your family forever.
Stopping addiction in your family forever.

Early on in my work with addictive behaviours, I noticed that most addicts struggle with addiction their whole lives, while a smaller group seemed to be able to completely recover.

At that time, I was about three years clean and sober—and I was intrigued because I wanted to be part of the group that stayed in recovery. So I dedicated my life’s work to figuring out what made the difference between the few that decided to remain in recovery while the rest chose to relapse time and again.

What I discovered helped me to maintain sobriety for 32 years—and it has also helped the hundreds of addicts and their families I’ve worked with as clients. Today, I’m going to share that secret with you.

Loved Ones Actually Have More Leverage Than They Know

What loved ones of people struggling with addiction need to understand is that they can be the key to changing their addict’s behaviour, thus reclaiming health and happiness for their families. In fact—they ARE the key.

Most loved ones feel as if their addict is running their lives, and they have no idea what to do to stop the vicious cycle they find themselves in. They feel increasingly frustrated because they have spent so much time and money trying everything they can think of, but nothing has worked long-term. They’re desperate to know how to fix this problem so that their families can have peace again.

If you are the loved one of an addict who is still in active addiction, you know the kind of pain this can cause in a family. You know the intense guilt and shame of wondering whether you are to blame for causing this to have happened—those toxic thoughts that keep you awake at 3 o’clock in the morning. “Is it really my fault?” “Am I truly a terrible mother / father / sibling…?” “What should I have done differently?”

But because few families talk about these feelings, they are not aware that so many other people also experience these thoughts—and as a result, most loved ones often feel as if they are all alone in this. Here are two truths you may not know:

  • Virtually everyone today, regardless of where they live, is in some way negatively affected by either their own addiction or somebody else’s—or they know someone who is.
  • Another person’s addiction is NOT your fault. You did not cause this to happen. The addict is at choice about whether to be in active addiction or in active recovery of some kind, regardless of anyone else’s actions.

How do I know this?

I know this because my life was not a picnic in the family I grew up in. There was addiction, there was heavy emotional abuse and trauma, and there were some devastating secrets that were wrapped up in pretty pink bows so that no one would know what was going on behind our closed doors.

And yes, even though my addiction began due to a chronic illness (Crohn’s Disease) that doctors didn’t know how to treat in the early 1970s—except to throw plenty of addictive medications at it—it was entirely my decision to stay in addiction for as long as I did.

The very moment I made a different choice—to stop using and stay alive—is when my recovery began. No other person could make that decision for me; we simply can’t do that for anyone else.

And now, one day at a time, one second at a time sometimes, I am 32 years clean and sober. What I know to be true is that my choice to remain in recovery is entirely up to me and no one else. The moment I decide to stop practicing holistically healthy self-care—the moment my Sobriety-Loses-Its-Priority (S.L.I.P)—that is the moment I will be choosing to set myself up for a relapse.

That’s how it works.

Enabling vs. Helping

This is a planet of free will, and we all have the right and freedom to make our own choices. I am totally responsible for the consequences of the choices I make, and I understand today that I cannot blame anyone else for any of that.

However, that being said, until we learn this vitally important lesson about free will, there is a pretty good chance that as loved ones of addicts, we’ve been contributing to the addiction—especially if those unhealthy addictive dynamics are still going on.

But here is the great news: If you’ve been part of the problem, that also means you can be part of the solution. And if you want things to change, you’ll have to discover what that solution actually is. If you truly want your addict’s addiction to stop, then you’ll need to learn the difference between helping and enabling—and act accordingly.

When we do anything to contribute to the addiction continuing—such as giving an addict money when we know full well where that money will be spent—we are enabling the addict. Conversely, when we end our enabling and start offering behaviours that assist the addiction to stop, we are helping the addict.

This is a simple definition, but it says so much. Some of us, as loved ones, are actually addicted to enabling behaviours in order to meet our own needs, such as being liked or avoiding confrontation.

But if you really think about it, enabling an addict is never a loving act. How could it be? If you’re enabling instead of helping, then you’re colluding with the addict and making it easier for them to continue the addiction—and to ultimately live a life with no self-respect and no real future, except for more and more addiction as the condition progresses.

If this is what you’ve been doing with your addict, please know that you’re not the only one. But it’s imperative to understand that in order for their addiction to stop, it is very likely that you will have to do your own inner work around why you’ve chosen that course of action.

It will be essential for you to discover why you feel as if you always have to please other people, to never say no, perhaps to feel excessively responsible for others—especially when you know that your own needs and wants have been languishing on the back burner for far too long.

When new clients come to me for the first time, they invariably—and courageously—admit “I know I’m enabling, but…” They often then go on to rationalize why they’ve been doing that. Most of the time it’s because they haven’t known what else to do, because they’ve never really sought out help or talked about it before.

But think about it this way: If you know you’ve been enabling and you know that hasn’t been a good thing to do, aren’t you an addict of sorts too? How can you be asking the addict in your life to change what they’re doing if you’re not prepared to change what you’re doing?

We Need to Stop Enabling Our Addicts

It’s definitely time for us to stop enabling addicts—in our families, in our societies, and even globally—and start doing things that will actually help them. That is virtually the only way to end addiction. Anything else is like putting a bandage on a heart attack.

At the beginning of this article, I said I was going to share the “secret” of why some addicts make the decision to recover while others continue to choose active addiction for a very long time. In case you’re still wondering what that secret is, I’ll make it very clear:

An enabled addict does not stop using.

The question to ask yourself shouldn’t be “Why don’t enabled addicts stop?” Instead, the question needs to be “Why on earth would an enabled addict stop?”

If you are the loved one of an addict who continues to choose active addiction, please become willing to look at how you might be contributing to that decision.

Remember: Enabling an addict is never a loving act.

If you need assistance to learn how to stop enabling, please reach out as soon as possible to someone like myself, who can help you with this. Because the truth is—if nothing changes, nothing changes—and it doesn’t have to be that way.

This article was first published on Recovery.org on October 9, 2017.

“A Star Is Born” and “Beautiful Boy”: Two New Films about Addiction are Released

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SPOILER ALERT!

Read no further is you haven’t seen these movies—but are planning to do so.

But—for all of you who have seen them both . . . keep reading!

MY OPINIONS (aka “I’m just sayin’ . . . ”)

I’ll begin by saying that these are my opinions and I understand that yours may be different. That’s okay with me—it’s fine for us to have our own points of view, and to agree to disagree. Addiction is a subject that triggers a lot of people and can cause many rifts, and I believe that there are as many ways to work a program of recovery from any addiction as there are people working those programs. So, as the saying goes, if you do have a different opinion from mine, let’s do our best to disagree without being disagreeable.

The truth is that I rarely choose to see movies about addiction. Not only do I work with addicted clients and their families almost every day in some capacity, I also have the responsibility to keep my own addiction at bay—which I’m happy to do one day at a time. Those days have rolled into a total of 30+ years clean and sober, long enough for me to be clear about how I view addiction. But I felt like it was important for me to see these films—and now I’m really glad I did.

“A Star is Born”

I saw these two films a week apart, starting with “A Star is Born.” I had seen the version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in 1976, long before I realized that I, myself, was at that time in the throes of my own opioid addiction from the prescription drugs being given to me for my Crohn’s Disease. I don’t remember much about that movie, but being a Streisand fan, I’m sure I enjoyed it.

I’m also a fan of both Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, and I’d heard good reviews about “ASIB”, so I was looking forward to seeing it. It’s not that I didn’t like the movie—it was glossy, professional, and easy to watch. The acting was as good as I expected it would be, and the music was great. But—by the time the film was over and the credits rolled, I had quite a few mixed feelings about it, overall.

In my opinion, this movie could have been a lot more powerful in terms of the story it was telling about addiction—but it missed the point several times. By the time Cooper’s character goes into rehab, he has already dangerously relapsed several times, and yet there is little shown to us about what actually transpired in that treatment process. Basically, we see him at a very posh, expensive, country-club style rehab centre, swimming in the beautiful pool, telling stories to the person I assumed was his therapist there, only to see them laughing together at his past antics. When he arrives home, with no aftercare treatment plan that we are privy to, he predictably relapses yet again—and is told by his wife, “It’s your disease, honey, it’s not your fault.”

This, to me, is a very dangerous message to give any addict—and certainly not a healthy one to purport in a film that millions of people will see all over the world. I know that a lot of people think that this is a romantic love story—the friends I saw this movie with thought exactly that. But in my opinion the message she gives to the man she loves is anything but loving, as it gives them both a free pass on personal responsibility. She sets virtually no boundaries, and does not say anything about either of them having a choice to do things differently—a choice that every addict has, both in active addiction and in recovery.

Choosing to stay clean and sober one day at a time is the only way any of us accumulate any sobriety—and deep down, I believe we all know this despite what we’re told by any other source. And although I will not give away the ending, I was increasingly disappointed by the choices this character continued to make. Maybe he thought he was indeed “powerless”—which perhaps he’d been taught while in treatment. He certainly acted as if this is what he believed.

As Hollywood-slick as this movie was, and as good as Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper both were in it, I found the premise predictable and disappointing.

Beautiful Boy

“Beautiful Boy”

“Beautiful Boy,” on the other hand, shows the realistic story of what happens in a family that is negatively affected by addiction—over and over again. Based on a true story, the father (amazingly portrayed by Steve Carell) courageously shows us the terror he feels about his beloved son (flawlessly played by Timothée Chalamet), who continues to use crystal meth and other drugs and alcohol way past the point of ‘insanity’—as often happens until the bottom is finally reached.

Despite the desperation that follows the film from start to finish, the messages in this movie are much more realistic, healthy, and empowering. Here are a few examples:

  • Although Nic attends Narcotics Anonymous as well as several 12-Step based rehabs, he himself says this about his addiction: “It was a choice. I got myself here.”
  • Nic’s sponsor asks him what his problem is, and Nic says “I’m an addict and an alcoholic.” The sponsor tells him, “That isn’t the problem. That’s what you’re telling yourself the problem is—that’s only how you’re defining it. The problem is deeper.”
  • After Nic is allowed by his parents to come back home several times, only to relapse again and again, he behaves obnoxiously by continuously lying, stealing money from his younger sibling, physically shoving his family members around, and using very foul language when speaking to them. After being kicked out of the family home yet again, Nic calls his father to once again beg to come back. The father’s response this time? “That’s not going to happen.” After doing the same things over and over and expecting different results, David finally decides to try something different—and that boundary veers the family into a whole new direction.

I think it’s very interesting that these two distinctly different films about the same subject are being shown in theatres at the same time. I’m not sure what the reasoning was for that, but I’m very glad that “Beautiful Boy” was made and released. My hope is that everyone involved will be validated for their contributions, and that as many loved ones of addicts as possible will make the choice to see it.

And by the way—be sure to stay for the credits—they warmed my heart.

How to Help the Addict You Love to Become Healthy: The Family’s Role in Addiction Recovery

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Addiction is so rampant now in our society. We all know that more and more people are dying from the ravages of this horrific situation, especially due to drugs like fentanyl that take the lives of drug users in a split second. We simply don’t have the luxury of treading lightly around addiction anymore. We each need to do all we can to shift this and get the results that all families of addicts are looking for.

It IS possible.

STOP ENABLING AND MAKE THE SHIFT

So how do we make that shift? Many of you are probably wondering how that can happen. I’d like to tell you what I think – and about what is working wonders for my clients.

In terms of recovery from addiction, it is critical for loved ones of addicts to understand the concept of enabling – because until the enabling stops, there is little hope that the addiction will stop.

There is a huge difference between enabling and helping, and the faster we all learn about that, the faster we can halt addiction in its tracks. And yes, it is that simple – even though it isn’t always easy to change one’s ways. The ‘simple’ way is not always the ‘easy’ way. Most families who are involved with addiction know a lot about enabling, even if they have never heard that term – because they have unwittingly been doing just that with the addicts they love – and many have been doing it consistently for a long time, as they witnessed the addiction continuing.

Let me give you a very brief definition: An enabling behaviour is one that keeps the addiction going. A helping behaviour assists the addiction to stop.

When we enable addiction, we’re doing things like giving money to an addict, even though we know exactly where that money will go – or we allow an addict in active addiction to live in our homes even when they contribute nothing positive to the household and in fact do things like punch holes in walls, call us terrible names, push and shove us, bring illegal substances into our homes, sleep all day and party all night… The list of disrespectful ways an enabled addict behaves goes on and on.

And it doesn’t stop until the enabling stops.

LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENABLING AND HELPING

By the time a family comes to see me, they are usually at the end of their rope – in fact, the very first thing many of them say is “I know I’m enabling but…” They then go on to tell me why they are doing exactly that, citing plenty of reasons. What I know to be true today is that loved ones enable because no one has shown them any other way to deal with this horrific situation they’ve found themselves in. Once they learn the difference between an enabling behaviour and a helping behaviour, change begins to happen – often very quickly.

Helping behaviours consist of setting and maintaining healthy boundaries and developing our all-important self-respect. If you’re a loved one wanting to help instead of enable, you’ll need to take your own needs off the back burner and start taking care of yourself. In most cases, you’ll need to do this first so that you can role-model this for the addict in your life. You see, addicts who are still using are not going to come up to you and say “Please set healthy boundaries for me!” No – those addicts are going to try whatever they can to manipulate you to give them whatever they want in that moment. Addicts want what they want when they want it, and they want it right now. Delayed gratification isn’t the name of the game for an addict – especially one still in active addiction – and they see their job as doing whatever they have to do in order to have their desire met – right now. [Read more…]