5 Outstanding Tips for Parents Who Want to Help

This is a guest post by Joe Koelzer, CEO of The Clearing, who shares some tips for parents.

Let’s get this out in the open right away: It’s not easy to be a parent whose child abuses substances.

It’s hard to watch the person you love more than life itself make choices that harm their health and well-being.

You might be feeling powerless, angry, and frightened … probably all of the above.

As the CEO of a residential rehab program, I’m constantly interacting with families of individuals struggling with addiction. I see the toll it takes on loved ones, and how sometimes it all feels overwhelming and hopeless.

Yet I also see a tremendous reason for hope. When a person is really committed to healing the underlying core issues that drive their drug use, they can alter their patterns and transform their lives. I’ve seen healing happen, and it is beautiful to witness.

In this post, I’ll share five tips for parents to effectively manage their relationship with a young adult dealing with addiction. I’ll discuss what really helps to promote recovery and a healthy relational dynamic between you and your loved one as well.

1. They have to do the work; you cannot do it for them.

This is perhaps the most important truth to remember as you seek to help your loved one dealing with addiction. It’s also the hardest one to swallow because it reminds you of your own limits.

As a parent, you can offer support and encouragement and all the love in your heart, but at the end of the day, your child’s recovery will be their choice. You cannot do the work for your loved one. You cannot control their recovery … and you’ll only drive yourself and your loved one crazy if you try.

If a person is going to address their addiction issues, it will be because they want to heal, not because you want them to change.

It’s all too easy to blur the boundaries between you and your child, but remember that an essential component of real love is letting another person walk their own path.

Allow people the privilege of their own journeys. There are lessons that they need to learn firsthand. And if you try to force your loved one into healing before they are ready, you are just going to waste your hope, your energy, and your financial resources too.

As Dr. Martha Beck says, “Real love always seeks to set the beloved free.” So know that when you set your child free of your own expectations and desires for their lives, you are acting out of love.

2. Let go of the past.

Many of us spend a great deal of time reliving things that went wrong in the past. We stress over what might have been, or what we could have done differently (see Tip #4).

Yet the past is not nearly as important as the present moment. Why? Because the past is done. What happened happened. It’s over. The essential question isn’t, “How can I change the past?” but rather, “What will I do going forward?”

One of the best choices you can make as a parent is to release your hold on the past. Has your child made some poor decisions in the midst of their addiction? Almost certainly. But remember that your loved one’s addiction is just one aspect of who they are. It’s not the entirety of their being.

Plus, clinging to an image of your child as an addict does not promote recovery. All it does is keep them mired in shame and guilt (see Tip #3).

At The Clearing, we often remind our Participants that no amount of feeling bad can change what happened in the past. People can spend years punishing themselves for poor choices they made, but all of that negative feeling doesn’t do a thing to alter the reality of life.

Addressing the underlying core issues that drive addiction is what makes a difference.  Once an individual tends to their innermost emotional hurts, they are empowered to make better choices going forward.

3. Eliminate shame and guilt.

Researchers have found that shame and guilt are actually the most toxic of human emotions in recent years. They’re the first to manifest in physical illness, and they literally change the structure of our cells for the worse. As it turns out, self-blame can literally make you sick. 

You may think that if you don’t shame and guilt your loved one about their addiction, they won’t have the incentive to change. However, shame and guilt are not effective, motivators! All they do is bring people down and make them ill on every level.

A much better choice is to simply be with your family member while holding love in your heart. You don’t need to use shame and guilt to “correct” another person’s course. Instead, you can trust that the natural consequences of their actions will have much more of an effect than your words ever could.

As Anne Lamott stated in her book, Some Assembly Required, “Life is the correction.”

4. Your loved one’s addiction isn’t about what you did or didn’t do.

As a parent, you may be wondering whether your loved one’s addiction arose because of something you did (or neglected to do) in times past. If that’s the case, it may help you learn about the nature of psychological trauma. 

The definition of psychological trauma is subjective. This means that an event that was barely a blip on the radar for one person may have been intensely shocking and painful to another.

As I shared in a recent interview, “[Trauma] means that the event was traumatic to you …. We all have issues that were shocking to us. It doesn’t mean we didn’t have a good childhood …. It just means that we all had things that happened to us that were shocking to us and have shaped us emotionally. And some of that stuff needs attention.”

We now know that there’s a strong link between past trauma and present-day addiction. At some point, your loved one chose to cope with the pain of his or her past hurts by using substances.

That choice wasn’t about what you did or didn’t do; instead, it was an attempt to manage the mental and emotional pain they felt. 

5. Take care of yourself.

It’s easy to forget to take care of yourself when someone you love is in crisis. However, the very best choice you can make to help your loved one is to take good care of yourself.

If you tend to your own needs, you can be a grounded, centered, loving presence in the lives of others. But if you go the martyr route, you’ll soon start showing up as frustrated, resentful, and frantic. That doesn’t help anyone!

It may help to remind yourself that every person has all the resources they need to heal inside of them. Your loved one doesn’t actually need you to heal them. They need to heal themselves, and you need to heal yourself.

When we get honest, we know that dealing with our own issues is work enough for a lifetime – there’s no need for us to take on other people’s too!

A Parent’s Job: Loving the Pumpkin

At The Clearing, one of the things we tell our Participants’ parents is this: Your job as a parent is to fertilize and nurture and water the “seed” that is your child. It’s your responsibility to make sure that the seed has a great environment to grow.

But you don’t know what that seed will be for a long, long time. It may be a pumpkin or a turnip or a radish. You don’t know, and it’s none of your business.

If you want a tulip and you don’t get one, then that is something you need to deal with, because that seed is becoming exactly what it’s supposed to be.

Our job as parents is to take what we get and to love it. We have to find a way to be delighted and happy that we got an acorn squash instead of a potato.

It’s really moving for parents to hear that, and it sticks in our Participants’ minds too.

When one of them had a conflict with her father about the kind of boots she’d chosen to wear, she pointed at her chest and said, “You know, I’m a pumpkin!”

Since her Dad had learned the lesson too, he said, “You know, you’re right, I’m sorry. Enjoy your boots.”

Joe Koelzer holds a master’s degree in spiritual psychology and is the founder of The Clearing. In the creation of this extraordinary program, Joe realizes his long-held dream of teaching the Principles of Spiritual Psychology to others.

---

Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to sign up for the Sunday newsletter with information and inspiration to help parents. Sign up now.