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Snagged this little meme from a friend because, yeah. It’s not just alcohol but any drug.
I hate addiction so much. It’s like a thief that comes to only to steal, kill, and destroy, and there is no future there, there is nothing at the end of it but death. But it doesn’t just steal your life, it steals the lives of those who care about you, those who need you.
Somebody smart once told me that those who love addicts get to go through the whole addiction process, just without the anesthesia. We get to feel every little thing you don’t even remember. It’s excruciatingly painful.
Addicts don’t care. They can’t care, they are too consumed by their own suffering to see anybody else’s pain, the pain they have caused. It really is a disease that makes you too selfish too see the destruction you’ve caused, the lives you’ve shattered.
I’ve had a bit too much experience with others people’s addiction, been shattered into a million pieces one too many times. It’s not fair and most of us are completely powerless to stop it. We get to try live through something we didn’t ask for, something we can’t fix, we can’t accept, and can’t adapt to.
That’s how people survive, they change it, accept it, or adapt to it. When someone you love is trapped in addiction, you can’t really do any of those things. You’re just trapped in it with them. Your only means of escape is to stop caring and walk away.
I’m such an optimist, a hope monger. There is always hope, right? The thing is, hope becomes the enemy when it comes to addiction. Addicts keep using because they just hope that next time they use it will all turn out different. Those of us who love them, hope they’ll get better. All that hope is just like pouring fuel on a brush fire. It feeds the whole cycle.
I just need to yell, to rant, to lament the sheer frustration of it all. So many of us, the casualties of other people’s decisions, are forgotten, left behind, not seen, or worse, judged, while everyone else bleeds for the homeless, for addicts, for all these sad people who are perceived as just being the helpless victims of a disease.
I just want to just slap some sense into all them, every last one of them, but I know it doesn’t work because that’s been tried. Someone who isn’t afraid of dying on the street choking to death on their own vomit is not likely to care about how they have made you feel.
There’s a saying, hurt people hurt people. People who are bleeding out, will get blood all over everyone else. Perhaps that’s true, but you know what? It’s way past time for those hurt people to become healed people who heal people.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
Reblogged this on Madison Elizabeth Baylis.
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I have a saying too: Desperate people make desperate choices.
For most of my life, I didn’t really understand that. I saw it (I’m embarrassed to say) as more of a moral issue, an indication of weak character. “If you would just make better choices…” – that’s kind of how I viewed addiction, through a “behavioural” model.
It was not until I came to experience real desperation in my own life that I realized that sometimes there *are* no good choices, only varying degrees of desperate ones.
But I don’t buy into the “addiction is disease” model either. Addiction is a *symptom*, not the disease itself. It’s our desperate attempt to cope with desperation. It’s not the addiction, it’s the desperation underneath it that needs to be healed.
It’s not easy to give hope to the hopeless. Hope is a foreign concept, perhaps even a dangerous one, because it requires seeing things as they really are, and then envisioning what they *could* be.
We have a Healer who has come for such as these – the broken, the hopeless, the unredeemable. They are not beyond his compassion, so they are not beyond ours.
As a reforming “co-dependent”, I’m getting ever better at setting boundaries. It’s not about attempting to boundary (control) my addict, it’s about not allowing her to put me in a position where I would have to step out of my own boundaries to accommodate her. Sometimes she gets mad and walks away – her choice. She is free to come back at any time she likes and she can even attempt to get me to move my boundary as many times as she likes until she finally clues in that this isn’t about exercising control over her life, it’s about taking back full control of *mine*.
The addict will not like it when you reassert full authority over your integrity and self-respect. But is it really fair to expect self-respect and integrity from our addict if we’re not willing to model it ourselves?
I’ve never had so destructive a relationship that I had to walk away, but it’s not hard for me to imagine situations where that is the best of all choices.
But even then, we can still pray for them, for hope to return to their lives, for their desperation to be healed.
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