Tough Love
Tough Love - Making Tough Decisions
My dear friend Barbara once said, “Tough love isn’t about kicking them out, it’s about making tough decisions.” I loved this reframing. It’s not about being tough on them, our addicted kids. It’s about making the tough decisions about how much we are willing to allow their disease to ruin our own lives. And about how much we are going to aid their disease by doing things that support their disease instead of their recovery. It’s about loving them. Deciding to kick a child out is a TOUGH decision, and in many ways, it’s not even personal. If we do decide to kick them out it’s never to punish them. It’s usually part of a desperate attempt to salvage what’s left of our own lives and hope that it will force them to get help. Even if we feel angry or frustrated at the time, if the guilt and second guessing start to kick in we have to remember this. We always did the best we could. When we start to work on ourselves our good can get better.
When addiction takes hold of our kids, they can’t make healthy decisions. Addiction is a disease of unhealthy decisions. Our kids become self destructive and wreak havoc around everything they touch. That IS the disease. Sometimes WE have to make the tough decisions, like calling the cops on them, letting them sit in jail overnight, or longer, taking their car, not paying their bills, kicking them out. When we make these tough decisions we do it with their best interest in mind because we realize that what we are currently doing isn’t helping. And because we love them. We don’t know if these decisions will help, but we know we have to change something. And even if sometimes we feel almost ambivalent toward them and do make decisions for self preservation, that’s ok too! If someone was coming at you with a knife you’d defend yourself. When our kid’s addiction is coming at us armed, it’s ok for us to defend ourselves.
Dealing with the disease of addiction in our kids’ lives is incredibly tough. It’s not like we can just hand them over to a team of doctors who can find a cure. We often find we can only hand them over to themselves and pray that they decide to seek out treatment. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and as we all know, doesn’t always end well. If our child had cancer and passed away, we would be heartbroken but chances are we wouldn’t hold a lot of feelings of guilt or shame or responsibility. How sad for us parents of addicts to add these unnecessary emotions to what is already a life crushing event? We did not cause this disease. We could not and cannot control this disease. We cannot and could not cure this disease. We are parents who love our kids and do the best we can for them under incredibly difficult circumstances. That’s all we can do. The results are out of our hands.
My love to all of you who have made and continue to make these tough decisions. I challenge you to one more tough decision. Decide to love yourself and forgive yourself and embrace any joy you still have in life, and if you can’t find a lot of joy, then I challenge you to go and seek it out. We can be heartbroken over our child AND still feel peace and joy in our own lives. That’s what we want for our kids isn’t it? We want them to get their act together and have a good life! Walk the talk! We as parents have the same right to a good life and we should hold ourselves to the same standards we want to hold our kids to. It’s ok to make tough decisions so that our lives aren’t ruined by addiction as well. It’s not easy. It’s really tough, but we can do it.