People want to help their loved ones in need. And it’s hard to think of someone more in need of help than a person struggling with substance abuse. It is natural to reach out to an addict in your life and seek to help them, but it is important that you offer the right sort of help. It is all too easy to feel you’re offering help, only to find that you are, instead, only making the problem worse by seemingly endorsing their addictive behavior or allowing their substance abuse to persist or even grow.
To truly help an addict in your life, you must begin by setting healthy boundaries with love, navigating the opposite poles of enabling vs. empowering to find the right approach for your loved one.
In helping someone with addiction, we want to empower them to find a way out of their substance abuse and find the help they need. But it is all too easy to, instead, enable their current predicament, allowing them to continue making poor decisions that only further entrenches their addiction in their life.
Much of it comes down to what help you try to offer and how.
For instance, one of the common ways we often seek to help anyone is financially. We like to offer money to people in need in hopes that it will help them find a way out of the problem. But offering money to an addict is never a good approach. The entrenched addict bases all their decisions on how it feeds their addiction. Money given to an addict will only go to buy more drugs or alcohol.
This isn’t to say financial assistance isn’t possible. But if they need help with rent or groceries, you’ll need to pay that rent for them or buy them food outright. Giving them any funds directly will only enable them, rather than empower them.
Spending time with your friend or loved one struggling with addiction can be important, but how you spend time with them matters. Taking an alcoholic to a bar and sharing drinks only seems to condone their behavior. Sitting at home with a friend taking drugs can only get worse if you take drugs with them. You don’t have to lecture them — save that for an intervention, if needed, down the line — as those are rarely taken well. But you do need to make your loved one understand you disapprove of their substance abuse, even if you’re not going to call it out.
But it’s important to be there for them, to talk with them and listen to their problems. They need to know you support them, even if you don’t support their addiction. This can mean walking a fine line at times, between enabling and empowering, but falling on the right side of that balance is important to maintain their trust while not further endorsing their substance abuse.
At Good Landing Recovery, empowering patients rather than enabling them is an important part of the treatment process. By reinforcing good practices over the negative aspects of substance abuse, the recovering addict can maintain their sobriety and avoid relapse.
It is vital that the addict’s friends and loved ones take the same care in recovery to ensure that the recovering addict can keep away from triggers and cravings and find a more lasting recovery.