Detachment Debunked
DETACHMENT DEBUNKED
Detachment is one of those words that’s always thrown around with an expectation that people understand what it means and it’s easy to do. “Just detach.” What does that even mean? How can I detach from my child? What kind of parent does that make me if I just kick him out or cut him off? We hear that we need to detach with love. What does that mean? Detach from what??? Misunderstandings around detachment cause confusion and resistance and often keep us stuck in the destructive tornado of our child’s disease. I’m going to present a view of detachment that will explain not only what you have to detach from, but gentle ways to start practicing it.
The dictionary offers two different definitions for detachment, both of which are very applicable to parenting an addict. The first is “the state of being objective”. The second is “a group of troops sent away on a separate mission”. Wow… this is perfect. That’s what detachment means to us as parents. It’s a call to action to do two things, start removing our heightened emotions and looking at the situation we are in objectively, and to start a separate mission to get our own lives back on track. It’s pretty simple but not easy!
In order to start to look at things more objectively, first we have to practice radical acceptance around the fact that our child is an addict and we cannot control anything around them or their disease. We really can’t fix it. We’ve tried. We’ve done everything and nothing has worked. Not being able to control it doesn’t mean that how we respond to the disease won’t have any influence over them. It may. More importantly, when we learn to respond in healthier ways, we feel better. In order to make changes though, we have to radically accept that everything we have tried, probably multiple times, has not worked and we have to accept defeat in this area so that we can strategize a better way to approach it.
The first thing we can start to detach is our child from their disease, and then ourselves from our child’s disease. Our child is more than their disease. They have a disease that makes them do terrible, harmful, destructive things. They behave in terrible ways, but they are still our child and they have a terrible disease, and all of that behavior is the disease. Being able to detach our child from the disease enables us to make decisions based on whether we are supporting the disease or supporting our child. For example, if the disease makes our child spend all their money on drugs and they can’t pay their rent, us paying their rent is supporting their disease. If the disease makes them fight with us and yell at us, if we engage with them and allow it, we are supporting the disease. When we learn to set healthy boundaries, we can protect ourselves from their behaviors and do things like maybe take them for a meal, without getting into an argument, even if they are not doing what we wish they would do.
Just as our child is more than their disease, we are more than our child’s disease. We need to detach ourselves from their disease. Think about it, we are not shooting heroin and yet we stay up all night thinking about our child shooting heroin. Is our quality of life any better than theirs even though we’re not drug addicts?? We end up inserting ourselves into the addict's world, emotionally, even though being in that world doesn’t help either them or us! It’s insane. We need to detach emotionally from our child’s disease. We can love our child and have compassion for their struggle without taking responsibility. We can be sad about our child AND take care of ourselves and find joy in our own lives. We can acknowledge that our child is engaging in really risky behavior AND accept that there is nothing we can do about it. We can choose to find balance between caring for them and obsessing over them. We can love them AND make decisions based on what’s best for us, not for them.
Learning how to practice detachment is just learning how to live with the reality that our child is sick, and making sure that we are not helping their disease, or allowing ourselves to get sick from their disease. This is where our separate mission comes in. Instead of trying to focus on fixing our addicted child, we must focus on fixing ourselves. Our child has their journey through their disease and recovery and we have no control over that. We need to embark on our own journey, a separate mission where we not only learn how to recover from the effects that the disease has had on us, but where we actually learn how to embrace and enjoy our own lives, even if our child is still struggling. Detachment simply allows us to put things into proper perspective so that we can show up in ways that will have the most powerful positive impact in our lives.