You can't stop a loved one's addiction in its tracks or even help an addict into treatment unless they, too, are ready, but you can stop engaging in behaviors that perpetuate the addiction or make it worse. What do you need to know?
Addiction doesn't just impact the addict's life. It draws whole families in. Anyone from partners, children, and siblings to parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles may worry about an addict, try to help them recover, an make efforts to keep them employed and out of trouble with the law. Addicts' families can, then, suffer financially, socially, and psychologically as they try to help the addict get their life back on track — often fruitlessly.
Addiction is a chronic brain disease. Though someone with a substance or behavioral addiction likely chose to start using or engaging the behavior, once it reaches a state of addiction, the nature of a mental and sometimes physical dependence means it's hard for addicts to break free even if they want to. And they don't always do. What then?
The things we do to support an addict often, in fact, serve to perpetuate the status quo, something often referred to as "enabling" the addict in their addiction. Relatives and other loved ones who want to help are often powerless when it comes to convincing the addict to get professional help to achieve long-term abstention, but they can, at the very least, commit to not doing things that directly or indirectly keep the addiction going.
How do families enable addicts?
One study investigated and ended out with a giant list of behaviors families often engage in to help their addicted relative but that don't turn out to be helpful at all. It includes:
- Giving the addict money, sometimes after borrowing it — either specifically to fund their addiction, or to pay utility bills, food, or court fees — or actually directly buying drugs or alcohol for the addict. It's pretty obvious that this behavior is enabling.
- Enabling can also take less obvious forms, and one is to take on the household chores that the addict neglects to do.
- Relatives, especially partners and others living with the addict, may also cover for the addict, minimizing the extent of their problem, explaining their behavior away, or canceling events when the addict is under the influence or recovering from substance abuse.
- Relatives may ask other relatives to stay silent about the addict's problems and behaviors. Talking to an addict who is still in denial about their problem often creates drama, after all, for everyone involved.
- When the addict gets themselves into trouble with law enforcement, social services, or other government agencies or medical institutions, relatives may go to great lengths to try to get them out of the situation. This can include lying about the extent of the addiction.
- Relatives may physically care for the addict, trying to get them up for work or cleaning up addiction-related messes.
- Relatives may tell the addict that their substance abuse problem isn't that bad — even when they know otherwise.
Does this sound familiar to you? If so, what should be next?
You may be completely aware that these behaviors aren't going to help your loved one step on the path towards recovery from their addiction, but have no idea what you should do instead. Sure, giving the addict money or covering for them won't help them get clean or sober, but it may prevent them from sliding further into despair. You'll also know from experience that anything you do to try to get your loved one professional help will only be met with denial or aggression on the addict's part, or with the addict cutting you from their life.
Here are some tips:
- Seek therapy for yourself, or attend a peer-support group for relatives and partners of people suffering from addictions. Encourage your other relatives to do the same thing.
- Be straight with the addict about how you view their addiction. Don't tell them it's not that bad. Don't minimize the impact their addiction has on your life and the life of others, even if they aren't ready to hear it.
- Don't try to bail your addicted loved one out of situations they may get themselves into with law enforcement or other agencies — this may be how your relative finally gets the help they need.
- Don't minimize the extent of the addiction or make excuses for the addict. Don't give them money to fuel their addiction. Don't buy them drugs or alcohol.
- Do emotionally support others impacted by your loved one's addiction where you can. This will help keep your family together, and in a place where you can be there for the addict should they decide to seek treatment.
- Do encourage your addicted loved one to seek treatment. Do tell them you'll be there for them if they do seek treatment, if that is something you can realistically offer.
- Do help your loved one investigate treatment options if they say they are ready. Do encourage and remind them to attend peer-support group meetings or therapy sessions.
- Do recognize your own emotional needs and do the things you need to do to keep yourself sane, whether this means refusing to be sucked into drama or attending groups designed for the relatives of addicts.
As hard as this is to realize, you can really only help the addict reach remission from their addiction once they, too, have this goal. Whether you are an addict's mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter, it is not your sole responsibility to keep an addict from steering their life towards disaster — and you can't do that. You can, however, stop engaging in behaviors that make things worse, look after your own mental health, and support the addict's other loved ones.
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- Photo courtesy of SteadyHealth