Makes me angry that we do not focus on the secondary victims of drug addiction. We as parents often feel alone, isolated and misunderstood. In the beginning we are ignorant to the effect this can have on them and in denial of what it will do to us. We are confident we can fight this. Our love will FIX them. We will rally and it will be a learning experience of the pros of love and cons of drug use. As they progress our own progression into the world of codependency and enabling deepens. Just as they don’t we do not recognize the disease strengthening its hold. We are the silent soldiers fighting for their lives with no thought to ours as we slip farther away with them. We stop thinking about ourselves. We forget we exist. We hardly see us without them. Our survival becomes supporting their disease. Our lives take less and less meaning and they become the only thing that matters.

How did this happen? You ask yourself daily. You don’t realize the answer lies within you. It wasn’t your addict or the disease. It is our instinct to protect but when that need supersedes teaching, boundaries and sacrifices our own well being we have only added to the problem. We have become the difference in recovery and relapse.

We have to realize in our own way we suffer the same disease as them. We are addicted to them as they are the drug. The withdrawals are just as powerful as we watch them struggle and flounder. The relapse just as devastating as we give all to comfort and fix. We give up our world for theirs and we often lose relationships, finances and emotionally we become unavailable to ourselves. Angry and fragile to everyone else. We are suffering as bad or more than our child because there is no way for us to escape the torment.  We receive no moments of gratification or relief. Shame and guilt keep us silent. Fear holds us hostage.

This will not change until we start to value ourselves a much as we do our child. We must make ourselves a priority in order to make their recovery possible.  In that we have to see by keeping them comfortable in their disease we are damaging them in sobriety. We have to stop loving them to death!!!

We have to let them make choices to learn responsibility. Let them fall to learn to stand and let them see we value us in order to love them. TO HANG ON WE MUST LET GO!

I struggle daily with this and fight the urge to parent my child to death every second of everyday that he fights. I know I am not alone and in numbers we will break the silence of what addiction does not only to the addict but to the parents who suffer as much as they do. Together we can learn and they can recover but we must stop!!!