Healing Addiction in the Family: Stop Enabling
Patricia tells us how she helped her son by "letting him fall." When she stopped enabling, she saved her son's life.
As the parent of someone who struggles with addiction, Pat had some difficult choices to make. Here she recounts how she stopped enabling to help her son….and herself.
For me, I went to some meeting some on Nor-Anon meetings about seven years ago and I picked up some stuff for sure from the other parents. But I still had to go though it and I not think that I was going to control this or I was going to make it better. Everybody has their process to go through as parents.
How did she learn to deal with her son’s addiction? She stopped enabling him.
My advice would be to nip this thing as quickly as possible. Get them in a long enough program and not let it go by without dealing with it. Because before you know it, you are dealing with devastation and “how are we going to take care of this?” Catch it right away if you can and to get them help. A lot of times with my son I got in the way instead of letting him hit his bottom. I’ve kept letting him back in the house and finally after the seven years, now another three years have gone by. I went back to the meetings with my daughter and somebody said why don’t you just try giving it a shot and try something different? Just stand aside and let him fall, you know? He’ll figure it out that’s what they told me. He’ll figure it out and he did. It’s scary when they’re figuring it out and it’s hard as a parent to go through that that’s where the prayers came in. My church, my pastor, I called him at 3 o’clock in the morning and he talked to me and helped me stay calm. I’d say that the best thing to do is to let them fall and get out of their way and because you’re not going to cure this thing. They need help and Darren needed it more than 90 days. With the Ventura Recovery Center, he had a great support system. The staff was good. He was seeing a therapist. His mind was, oh I could tell after first month that Darren was starting to really come around. He was coming back. I am just so thankful to the Ventura Recovery Center for everything that they’ve done for my son.