From Struggle To Strength: Parenting an Addict

Hey, today we're going to be talking about parenting children with addiction. And I am asked all of the time, why. Why do I, as the mom or the dad, why do I need to change? And it's weird because I always think, why do you not want to change? Like, do you like being angry and sad and mad and resentful and full with grief, angst, frustration? Like, do you like how you feel right now? Because I think if they could sort of understand that the change is going to be beneficial for how they feel and the way they interact in general, I. I think they wouldn't fight it so much. Most of us don't like to change. We have to sort of go through sort of internal struggles so that we can change ourselves. And in this instance, with addiction, it is imperative that we change ourselves, or else we don't begin the process for our children to start to change. And obviously that's what we want, is for our children to change. So this requires, you know, our own internal struggle, sort of our own balancing act, sort of like, how do we handle this? We tend to fight that. And we get stuck in this whole denial, bargaining process, the whole. We actually worry all the time. We catastrophize. We circle back our wagons to avoid. Like, we tighten up. We keep trying to do the wrong things. And this keeps us in what I call the reeling stage. And I'm going to refer to a couple of these stages later. And these things are really very important. And if you join our membership, then that's under the positive parenting group, where you can really learn how to identify where. What phase you are in with your child and his addiction or. Or her addiction, and then how to move forward so that you eventually get to the thriving phase, which is what we'll talk about tomorrow. So I highly recommend you guys think about that, because it was. It's been super helpful for a lot of people. And I think there's a link that you can click on to get into the membership for the discount, since we're at 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. So. All right, so what we have to do as parents to start this change is we have to do what I always tell kids, the person struggling with addiction that's imperative for them is we have to get humble and willing. If we're not humble and willing, we're going to keep fighting ourselves, and we're going to keep doing the same negative things that are not helping. And what I mean by that is what we do as parents is we inadvertently feed the disease. We think very Unhelpful thoughts like, how did this happen? What kind of did I screw up as a parent? Where did I go wrong? Why is my child doing this? We, we sort of. That's that catastrophizing I was talking about earlier. We just feed the problem. We over love. And I talk about this all the time. Like, lots of people, like kind of shake their head, like, can you really over love? And yes, you actually can over love. And what overloving means is that we solve their problems. We talk to their teachers, we talk to their counselors, we talk to the police. We. We figure out what their problems are and then we take over them. And this is sort of intuitive parenting, which is to make our children's lives easier, take the struggle out for them. But that's really, that's over loving. It's not good parenting. And it will not work with addiction at all. Just won't work. So we have to sort of figure out how to stop over loving. We have to definitely stop fighting and arguing and cajoling and begging and crying, because that's not going to work, obviously. And we have to stop punishing, taking things away, making deals, making bargains. I have so many parents who make bargains all the time. They're like, if you go to school, then you can go to the party and the kid will go to school, but they'll do just what mine did, which is they'll walk right on through the school to the back door, go out and do what they're going to do. But you just basically gave them the information they wanted, which is, I can go to the party. So this sort of trying to manage it, the circling the wagons that parents do, I did it. We all have done it, but it doesn't work. And it really just feeds the disease because that's what we're focusing on. So the tricky part of this, where really parents struggle on this, is that we have to allow the unmanageability in our children's lives. We have to be able to let them fail a class, let them get in trouble at school. We have to let them get into legal trouble. We have to let their life become unmanageable. And for a kid, unmanageability can come pretty quickly. For an adult, it's a longer process because adults really have what I call safety nets, like big jobs, good houses, cars, all kinds of things that keep them from seeing they have a problem. But for kids, these things go away pretty quickly. So, you know, obviously we talk about this all the time. Safety trumps everything. So you don't let your kid do, you know, is drinking or doing drugs, drive the car. It's just not smart. So then they don't have a car. Then they fail school. Then I don't even have school to go to. And eventually they were going to run out of friends. And sometimes we even have to say, hey, you can't live here because you're just out of control. Like, I can't live in this chaos anymore. When. When we allow this unmanageability, not necessarily those things, but whatever the child will determine is unmanageable, then they can sooner or later turn around and say, this isn't working for me. Now they will test you on that. One of mine tested me for months on that living Covid, God knows where, doing God knows what. But even he did tap out and say, I can't function like this anymore. Can I please come home? Can I please go to treatment? Can I. Can you please help me? So that means we got to stop fixing, solving. I call it snowplowing. We can't snowplow their. Their life to prevent the problems. We have to let them. So what I. What I like to use as a metaphor here of stop pouring into what is a colander. So we're pouring ourselves with all these things I've talked about is we're pouring our energy, our emotions, our time, our mood, the whole way our house is running, our. Our ability to function, our jobs. We're pouring us into what's just a colander. And you guys know, a colander just has a billion holes, and everything just goes right through it. That's liquid. And we have to start pouring into our bowl. And by what I mean by that is that we will now sort of by pointing it to our bull, is I kind of think it's. Now we'll move into what I call the learning and the planning phases of parenting someone with addiction. And I have the question is, what do we do with adult children or addicts? So I'll go back and answer that question, Scarlett. But anybody who lives in the home with you or has you have financial input over, they can. They can. This kind of stuff that I'm talking about right now can work for that too. Okay, so let's go on to these next two phases. And basically, what. There's a great quote that I found the other day, and it says sometimes loving is. Is an art, not an action. And that supports kind of what I've been talking about, which is sort of this intuitive parenting of solving, fixing, snow, plowing, and we're not going to do that anymore. Now we're going to move into the art of loving. And by that we're going to talk about us learning, figuring out like, what is addiction, what are treatment options, what is the money going to look like? You know, what's going on, what's happening in the brain, why is he doing this? What resources are available to me? Who's out there, like sort of begin that form of learning so that, that can take you into planning. Let me go back for just a second to sort of this not solving their problems, not snowplowing their lives. There's two types of wisdom. There's explicit wisdom, which is one plus one is two. The capital of South Carolina is Columbia. These are things we can teach children. Anybody. Explicit wisdom can absolutely be taught. The other type of wisdom is called tacit wisdom. And tacit wisdom cannot be taught. It's sort of the hows and the winds and the whys. It's the, it's the consequential part of living that we cannot teach. And good God, you guys, as parents, we spend thousands and thousands and thousands of hours trying to teach tacit wisdom to no avail. I remember very clearly, like it was yesterday, being 17, getting ready to leave for college, and my dad sitting down and saying, campbell, the way to succeed college is to take your classes at 8, 9 and 10 in the morning all week long. Meet your friends for lunch, then say goodbye to your friends, go back to the library and study, or go to the library and study from 1:30 to 5. Then you can go to your dorm and you can play and you can have meet your friends for dinner and you can what you want to do. You can stay up late, you can play backgammon, go to parties, but you will have your day so defined that you will succeed in college. That's tacit wisdom right there. Perfect example of it. How to go to college. Did I listen to that man? No. What did I think? I thought, oh my God, how old are you? How do you even remember what it's like to go to college? Like you're like 40. Like, good God, Jim didn't listen to him, went to college, did the opposite of that, didn't I don't even think I knew where the library was for half the semester. Absolutely did not take an 8 o' clock class. And my grades reflected my choices and my, my study plan, which was not as good as my dad's. But then I learned by the hard way, by the struggle, that I should probably take an 8 o', clock, 8 o', clock, 9 o', clock, 10 o'. Clock. Class, meet some friends for lunch, go to Libra steady, go back to the dorm. And guess what? My grades were way up. Everything, just like dad said it. But I had to learn it the hard way. If you can lock this into your head, it will really help you. Parenting all your children, parenting anything. Niece and nephews, friends, you cannot teach tacit wisdom. Not possible. So bear that in mind. And that sort of does help you sort of give the permission to. Now we're going to move into the art form versus the action form. Less talking. So we talked for a second about the learning, which is gathering information about addiction and treatment in general. But it's also learning different ways to interact with our children, trying new patterns of relationship with them so that it involves less talking and less tacitization, information, effort. When we interact with them differently, we can keep the connection, which we talk about all the time and mean we didn't make it up. But the opposite of addiction is connection. So this sort of does allow us to keep that connection. And whether they're doing drugs or not, they'll recognize that we're not trying to take teach them every time. We're not trying to punish. We're not trying to ask questions that they're going to lie about. We're just saying, hey, I saw this really good show. Hey, I thought you might be interested in this book. Hey, do you want to go watch a movie? Would you like to go golfing? We're going to just do those things so that we keep the relationship as intact as we as we can. Then the planning is a very important step too. And planning is first to identify our goal. Like, what is it we want to achieve here? Are we trying to get them to stop smoking weed? Are we trying to get them to drink less? Are we trying to get them to treatment? Are we trying to get them to sober living? Are we trying to get them to graduate from high school, identify our goal, and then be able to implement it? And that sort of is, again, we got to get everybody on the same page. We have to make sure mom and dad both have the same goal, both understand why we're going to the goal. And then we have to sort of, can we implement this goal? And that's lots of people come in here or talk to us in general. And you know, we can sell all kinds of great plans. But then they're like, well, I'm not spending that kind of money, or I don't have that money. Or I don't want to. I'm mad, and I'm not going to do anything you're asking me to do. So we sort of have to, as the parents, is be able to identify our goal and the implementation possibility of the goal, which is important to do. We also. I talk about this all the time, and we address this a lot in the content, in the membership every month, as well as sort of what's behind that in the positive parenting group or Kim's living with addiction group that's available is we have to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, but we have to work with our hearts. Okay. Some. It's usually the dad has a softer heart. I don't know why this is, But I. About 90% of the couples I work with, the dad just has a softer heart. And they're like, maybe a little bit of boys will be boys. It's not that bad. It'll be okay. And maybe it's because men like to fix things, and if you can't fix this, you just kind of don't want to deal with it, or it's maybe because you turned out all right and you kind of were a little crazy yourself there for a minute. We always work to the lower, softer heart. The lowest common denominator is what I say. So moms usually are like, he's going. He's got to get like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm exhausted. I'm tired of living in this chaos. And the dad's like, it's not that bad. Like, simmer down. You're. You're insane. I've had people sit on the sofa and look off the opposite direction. I've been that Frank was definitely the softer heart in our formula. So much so I have to do sometimes a lot of work with the parent, the mom, to say, you got to simmer. You got to hold. Because if we. If you plow ahead and do something that maybe has a negative outcome here and your husband's not on board or whichever your spouse is not on board, then there's going to be a problem in the marriage, there's going to be a problem in the relationship. And you guys, you know, this addiction takes everything. It doesn't stop. It's like lava. It doesn't stop. It will take your mental health, your money, your relationships, your jobs, their health. It just keeps taking. So one of the things that in this sort of struggle to strength is I really want you guys to think about do. How much do you want to give it. I don't. I frankly, I'm tired of feeding that damn disease. I don't want to give it anymore. So I always say just be together. Okay. Someone said, I don't think the dads want to rock the boat. Yeah, that's a, that's a nice way to put it. Okay, so what I want to do for a second to see what questions are up here and see if I can answer some of those. Of course my tiny technology brain is not going to be as good as Amber at this. So give me a second. Okay. We have an 18 year old son who graduated, thank God. Now he just sleeps in, uses marijuana and hangs out with younger friends. How do we get him to get a job and go to a therapist or something? Fabulous question. So you're not going to get this by talking. You're not going to say you need to get a job. You're not going to get any of that. You're going to get it by putting some boundaries down. You can start with little boundaries. You can go to the big boundary. Like I tend to go to the big boundaries because I'm way ahead of y' all and I'm also just very self pres. Just don't like to live in any kind of chaos. But you can say you can live here just like you're doing for another couple weeks, three weeks. But August 4th, I'm making updates here. August 4th, you need to be paying rent to live here and you want to make it enough rent so that the kid actually has to go get a job. You don't want to make it a little tiny amount that the kid can actually find in the sofa cushions or by mowing two people's lawn wants. You want to sort of. You have to create a need for these kids to change. They have to get the message of tag I met and they have to understand that this is not a sustainable lifestyle. If I could sustain it on my own, then fine. But at this house it's not sustainable. Therefore you have to set up hurdles for him to come to that conclusion. I love to say you need to pay rent. You can also say take over your car payment. You can also say pay for your car insurance. You can do anything, but you have to be able to hold that boundary. Do people say all the time you have to take over your car payment in three weeks and, and if you don't take your car then pay for your car, then we're going to sell the car? Then they sell the car. But guess what? They do. They Drive the kid to work, or they drive the kid to their friend's house, or they drive the kid wherever they want to go. If you're going to hold something like that, then you don't fix it. That goes back to what we talked about earlier, is you don't fix the problems that they have or that they develop. You let them struggle and you let them suffer through the problem. That's the way to get him to get a job, Getting him to go to a therapist. You're not. I don't. I mean, I obviously love therapists, but you're not going to get him to go by saying, you need to go. And I don't want you to make a deal and bargain. And if you see a therapist, then that's all you need to do because he'll just go to the therapist and blow smoke up that person's nose or not listen to a thing they say. But he's technically, check the box. You don't put anything into play where they can just check the box and keep going and doing what they want to do. If they say, ma', am, I'm really struggling, I don't know what to do. Like, I can't find a job I like, or I'm not motivated, then you can say, well, if you'd like to talk to someone about that, we'd be happy to pay for you to go to a therapist. But you really want to wait and let that be really more. More their call. I hate it when people, like, make appointments for their kids here where they. They just don't do well and they don't want to be here, and it's just. They're not ready. So wait till they're ready and then, then offer it if you want to. But you got to be able to sort of create the need for them to have to change. And the job is. One of the basic ways to, to make that happen is, well, I can't live here. And you know what if the kid doesn't have a problem, like, if he's just smoking some weed and hanging out with his friends, he's going to figure out pretty darn quickly that if he has to pay rent, he'd really rather pay rent and live on his own. And that's great, too, because then he's launched and he's gone out to his own, his own dwelling. If he figures out then. So this is very important, you guys, don't pay, don't, don't get on that lease. Don't pay the rent, don't you might want to say, we'll pay the first month's rent. If you want to, don't get on the lease, because if your child just relocates but hasn't really learned the tag I met message, they're just going to go smoke weed over there and hang out with your younger friends and not be able to. To pay the rent, and you're going to get stuck with that. So never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever get on someone's lease that you aren't 100 million percent positive is going to pay the rent. I mean, I'm not even on my daughter's lease, and she's a, she's a resident. Like, she's on her own. But, but. So that's. That's sort of my long answer for that question. Huh? So this person says that the. Their experiences. The mom has this softer heart. And I think moms in general have a softer heart, like, toward kids, like, like maybe skinning their knees, you know, struggling in school, struggling with friends. I think moms have softer hearts for this. But when it comes to addiction, mom's intuition has been on to this a little longer than the dads, in my opinion. And so they get. Their fatigue grows way faster than the dads. The dad's sort of leaving this one to the moment for the beginning because the mom's like, something's not right. And the dad hasn't even noticed that there's smoke, let alone a fire. And the mom's already, like, you know, putting on her fireman outfit. So that's why I think the mom's hearts are, are. They're just tired. They're done with it way before meds. All right, what else do we have going on over? All right, the problem we have is we want him to go to inpatient. He'll go live with his other family. That lets anything go. You're right. That is a constant problem. We had it in our, in our family as well. I said, you can't live here. I can't live in this chaos. Like, either go see Amber, be an Iop or be going to high school or be working, do something productive. And he was like, well, that's not going to work. And he did. He went to live with his friend whose mom was, I think, using drugs with them, to be honest. Like, she was definitely supplying them with weed. She tolerated it for longer than I would have, but she tolerated. And then eventually even that didn't work out. So then he went to friends and sofa surf for a while, but eventually they do Run out of steam. The problem for us though is that this pushes on our giant fear button. Because what if something terrible, what if the untenable happens? And it could. And to be honest, most of the overdoses we've watched in this practice have been at home. We've had a couple not at home, but a lot of them have been at home. So if you get to this place, it doesn't really matter, like if they're going to overdose, they're going to overdose at home or out, but you just have to wait for them to circle back around and say, okay, now I need help. Because you can't prohibit that. All right. Yeah. Nancy. Her son was homeless, stabbed, and still uses. So being homeless and being stabbed is apparently not unmanageable for him, which is like really kind of scary because obviously their definition of unmanageable is way lower than ours. Like we, we all probably look at our kids and think, your life is not manageable now. But their, their definition of unmanageable is way below ours. And unfortunately you just have to wait for that to hit. It is hard. I'm so sorry too. This person says, as a single parent, I flip back and forth between being soft and supportive and hard as nails, like get better or get out. Yeah. I mean as a single parent it would be, it would be tough on one hand because you're the only person who's, you've got nowhere to go with all this grief and confusion and fear. And so I could see where you would flip. But if you can sort of find somewhere in the middle, Mary, you might be like able to stay in that consistently so that you don't at least look schizophrenic. You can just stick in the middle. I think supportive with boundaries is a really good middle. Place is I love you dearly. And if you are contributing, reliable, honest, you can live here. I'm as would be the base. And if you can't, then unfortunately living here is not an option. I don't know who this person is. A 31 year old son, second round of rehab, second round of sober living, very passive, doesn't really communicate. We have stuck together as parents to let them know we won't get into the cycle of him drinking and us helping into detox again and again. It's hard to know how to stay connected in, but not getting in that cycle back again. I have lots of clients, not lots, four or five clients right now who are really stuck and I don't have any way to get them unstuck because their kid uses them for detox, and they're terrified that he's going to have a seizure or die or die driving while he's going to get more. That they sort of are emotionally blackmailed into this cycle of detox. I. I don't know that I could break that either, to be super honest. I have one. One client, particularly, who's just struggled with this. My. My heart hurts for her because I don't have. I don't have the answer. I don't know what to tell her. Like, you. Fear is a. Is the thing we cannot. If you thought your child could die if you didn't help them, I think we would all help them. So I think if you get into that, like, you can have a boundary that we won't, but you have to live that with a fear. And that's like, everybody has a different place on their seesaw for that ability to live with fear. If you don't have it, that's fine. If you do have it, that's also fine. So I don't think there's a wrong or right. I just don't think there's a, like a golden. I don't have the golden words to. To fix the problem. All right. Got like, four more minutes. Let me see here. Kind of address that. My adult son is 32 and struggling for 15 years through hell and back. Struggle to not provide clothes at times and end up spending so much. I want him to know that he is loved, you know, clothes and food. I'm not really gonna split hairs about those kind of things. Like, I think if you hand them a bunch of money, you're making a mistake. But if you want to put clothes on their back or food in their stomachs every now and then, I think that's completely fine. We are their parents, you guys. So I wouldn't spend a ton of clothes. Money on clothes, though, just because he's probably gonna sell them. But if you want to do these little things for your kids, whether they're using or not, it's okay. You know, my son would every now and then just show back at home and want to make Thai food. And I let him, and we enjoyed the night when he would show back up and want to make Thai food. It was like, maybe twice in four or five months, but it wasn't. We weren't feeding the addiction by letting him come home and make Thai food. You're not feeding the addiction by buying your kids some clothes or even buying them lunch every now and then. If you get into the habit of here's 300 a week for food you are paying for. You are buying the addiction. All right, we are running out of time for today. Tomorrow I'll be back, and we are going to talk about thriving, which is the fourth phase of parenting. And it's going to be like a whole look at redefining parenting and redefining ourselves as adults, which I think will be really good. I think that this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, near and dear to lots and lots of clients, is that we're tired and we're ready to go on. And so today is a little bit about how to go on and why you need to go on. And tomorrow we'll do it a more a deeper dive into what are some specific, some things to do forget. Click on the link below. The membership is 30 off. That's a pretty good deal. I tried to talk Amber into 20, to be honest, and she was like, second with 30. So that's. I think for this week. There's a code at celebrate 100k all in caps, like, you know, those things are. But it should be down below for you guys. So thanks very much. It was great to spend some time with you. I'm sorry I didn't get to answer all the questions, but 30 minutes just flies. I'll leave. Try to leave a little bit more time tomorrow. So anyway, thanks a bunch. It was nice, and I will hopefully see all of you again tomorrow. All righty. Bye. Bye.