Amber Hollingsworth answers a viewer question about being a stepparent to someone with a substance use disorder. She explains that stepparents often see the problem more clearly and therefore feel acute frustration, but advises they should step back and allow the biological parent to set boundaries and deliver consequences. She recommends being supportive when asked, avoiding confronting the biological parent uninvited, and not being the enforcer (to avoid being cast as the villain). The video also points viewers to a related series on parenting someone with an addiction for more detail.
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What do you do if you are the step parent of a child or young adult or plain old adult who has an addiction problem? Recently got this question, and I feel bad, but I forgot to write down the username of who asked this question. But here's the answer anyways. If you're the step parent of someone who has an addiction, you're really in a really crappy problem, a really crappy place, because you probably honestly see the problem, but more objectively than the biological parent does, because you don't have that, like, parent fuzzy lens that makes you not be able to see the whole truth. And that makes it 15 times harder to watch the addiction. And not only that, but probably what you're witnessing is that the addicted child is not treating the parent, the biological parent, your spouse, very well. And so you may feel angry and frustrated and upset with your spouse for not setting appropriate boundaries. And I know how hard that is. But even though that's super frustrating, here's the answer. You're gonna have to step back and let that parent figure that out for themselves. Now, you can be supportive when they come to you. If they ask you what you think you can tell them, but if you come talking about their kid really hard at them, then you're really probably gonna get a bad response because people are just wildly defensive about their kids. I mean, we just all are. And the other piece of that is you don't want to be the one that has to give the punishments or the consequences. The parent really has to be the one to do that, because no matter how right you are, no matter how justified it is, you're always going to be seen as the villain. If you're the step parent doling out the bad news, it has to be the parent. If you haven't seen my series on parenting someone with an addiction when watch that. Because we talk a ton in there about lining up and getting on the same page about parenting.
