How To Set Boundaries With An Addict or Alcoholic?

Hey, thank you so much for joining me on this live. I am going to be answering the big question. And that big question is, should you, if you have a loved one that has a drug or alcohol problem, ask them to leave, kick them out, however you want to put it, make yourself leave. But that is ultimately the big question, the one that we struggle with the most as loved ones of people that have substance abuse problems. And I'm going to give you a formula or a way to think about this so that you can make your decision, so that you can know if that's what you need to do and if so, when do you need to do it, how do you need to do it, you know, how do you enforce that boundary? All of those things are what we are going to answer on this live this evening. So if you're watching this, I bet you probably know someone else who needs this information as well. So take just a minute and go ahead and share this out. Our goal here at Put the Shovel down is to share or spread recovery faster than addiction is spreading. And for me to do that, I need your help. So go ahead, share this out. If you know a specific person, you can share it right from your phone. Just hit that share button. Or you can put it into a group if you belong to a family recovery group or that sort of thing. If you happen to be someone in recovery and you're watching this video, please keep watching because I really want to hear what you have to say about this. So definitely talk to me in the chat. This is, this is a live, so it is a discussion. And let me know, let me know what you think and you can write it down in the chat. If you say, amber, you're crazy, you know, you can put that in there and you can tell me if you think that family should kick the person out or not, or if so, under what circumstances and all that. You know, the worst thing about having a loved one with a drug or alcohol problem is that it puts you in a constant, constant position of having to make a difficult choice where there is no good answer. And no matter what you choose, you lose. And that's what makes you so sick about it. It's not about, well, I just need to make the right choice. It's like, what is the right choice? If you're a parent, is it the right choice to put your kid out on the street? I mean, that goes against every fiber of your being. There is nothing inside of a mom or a dad that says, put your kid out on the street? It's Just completely unnatural. And you may have to do that sometimes because sometimes that child is causing so much trouble in the house that you don't have much choice about it. And that leaves you in that really horrible feeling. You know, put them out on the street, worry about them constantly, feel sick every time the phone rings, all of those things. Or let them stay in the house and cause havoc and destroy your marriage and everybody else in the family. You're just stuck in a rock and a hard place. And if you have a spouse with a substance abuse problem, it's not any easier for you because you've got to make this decision. You know, is it better for me to stay married and raise my children in a two parent house or is that causing more damage and I should either ask them to leave or leave myself? These are the tough questions. These are the ones that we have to answer. And I can't answer that for you. But I can give you sort of some guidelines or some ways to think about this so that you can make this decision for yourself. Now, before I go into that, as we're waiting for people to join, I would say that I have stronger feelings about whether or not you should let someone come back home. Especially if it's a kid, let someone come back home outside of treatment. I have stronger feelings about that than I do about the should you kick them out once, you know, if they're currently in your house. So let's start with that because I think that is one that if you're not facing now, that you very well could be facing in the future. So if you've got a loved one in drug and alcohol treatment, either now or in the future, and they say, you don't like it here, I'm miserable, want to leave, come get me, come home. I can for sure tell you that's a bad idea. If they're not being successful in that kind of environment, they're not going to be successful at home. So the idea of taking someone out of treatment and bringing them back to your house like before treatment's done, seriously, that is like a crazy high risk decision to make. The chances that they're going to have havoc back in your house are about 99% and it's going to happen quickly. Now you may face this. If your loved one is your child, then you could be facing this decision not just if they want to leave treatment early, but what do you do after treatment? So this is if your kid, you know, you're dealing with your kid as a teenager or young adult or something. Do you bring them back into your house after treatment? I am pretty strongly against bringing a young person back into the house after treatment. It just never goes well. Because even when they're in a good state of mind, even when they're working a recovery program and trying really hard, it is so difficult to undo those long standing family dynamics that before you know it, them, you and everybody in the house is going to be sucked back into those old patterns and ways of being because you've been traumatized by this, which means you're going to be very, very hyper vigilant over everything that person does. It is so awful having a front row seat to this kind of train wreck, especially when it's your kid. So when you have that front row seat, the chances that you're going to make some bad decisions, that you're going to fall into controlling behavior and all that stuff, it's a lot higher. So usually when a young person goes to treatment, the treatment center will help you make some aftercare choice and they'll make some recommendations. If it's a young teenager, you may not have much choice but to bring them back home. And if that's the case, then there's some other videos on my channel. I want you to check those out. If you're watching the replay, I'll try to link them up here. Because you, you basically don't have much choice if you're dealing with a young adult. Find some way, let them do recovery, I mean, sober living house, recovery house, that sort of thing is my strongest suggestion. I've actually got some videos coming up on in the next couple weeks. Some brand new ones that you haven't seen yet. So definitely check those out. Now if it's a spouse and they're away at treatment, then they're probably coming back home. So you know the idea. Well, I guess unless you told them like you can't come back home, then they're probably coming back home. And that's a little different than if it's a young adult child, but still very complex. So let's move into whether or not you should ask someone to leave. Here's the way I figure that out. Most families think about that. They think about, well, if I let them stay here, then I'm enabling. I mean, aren't I enabling? Like, isn't that what that is? Well, it may be. I mean, I guess it kind of is. But you know, those of you who follow a lot of my videos, you know that I feel like the playing the bad guy role is the most enabling Thing more than letting them stay in your house. So I, I don't want you to make that decision based on whether or not you feel like you're enabling. I don't want you to make the decision about whether or not to let someone stay in the house or kick them out or whatever based on what you think is going to make them change. Okay, so that's the reason most families do it. Most families feel like I have to kick them out or else they're never going to change. Well, I guess there are some cases where maybe that's true. If you're in recovery and you're watching this video, let me know, let me know what you think. Have you ever been kicked out of your house? Do you think you absolutely had to be kicked out? What do you think? It's just that my experience is addiction keeps on doing its thing no matter the consequence. I can't tell you how many people, young people especially, or even adults, alcoholics, addicts, doesn't matter. Once they're out, the dam really breaks and the drinking and the using and escalates like big time. They move into like end stage addiction because there's nothing there anymore to hold back that floodgate. And so I don't want you to make the decision to think, okay, if I kick them out, then they're gonna hit bottom really quickly and they're gonna turn it around because I can't promise you that's gonna happen. In fact, in most cases it's likely to get much worse before that were to happen. And so don't make the decision about putting someone out based on your thinking that it's gonna make them stop doing what they're doing. What you need to make that decision based on is about how much chaos is it causing in your house if having that person in your house is absolutely destroying your house. Let's say you have kids and it's traumatizing them and it's traumatizing you and it's running the show. It's been doing this for a long time. You make the decision to ask someone to leave based on your needs and the family's needs, not necessarily what you think the addict or the alcoholic needs. Does that make sense to you? So it's kind of like this is how you make the decision. Don't do it because you think I gotta do it for them. Make that decision for you based on your house. Because either which way it's just gonna suck for you because you gotta be the bad guy here because you either have to leave them in your house and think, I'm making the wrong decision. It's not the right thing to do for them. I'm enabling. You know, I've got chaos in the house. You got that side or you got this other side, which is like, oh, let me throw them out and then I have to worry about them. And then, you know, what if my, you know, what if it's your, if it's your husband? What if he's out there on the street and he dies and your children don't have a dad? I mean, it's complicated. And that's what is so crappy about this whole dang thing is that no matter, you have a bad choice to make. Now, if you're watching this because you're a parent of a young person with substance use problem and you're married, listen to me, this is very important. Getting real close to you. Listen to me, you need to be on the same page when you ask that person to leave. Do not ask your child to leave if your spouse is not on board because if something were to happen, your marriage will never survive it because the one that really resisted it will always blame the one that wanted to make it happen. And that will destroy the family. So if you're going to ask a young person to leave and you have married parents, whether it's the biological parents or the step parent and the regular parent, whatever, both parents must be on the same page because I'm telling you, your marriage probably won't survive it if not because one of you is going to be holding such grief, such resentment against the other. You've got to get lined up so that you got to be at that place where it's like, no matter what happens, you and I are in this. We made this decision together and we're not going to blame each other. We made the best decision we know how to make at the time. So hopefully that helps clear that up for you if you are a parent. Let me look at my notes right quick, make sure I'm not missing anything. Let's see. Oh, I know I did miss this thing. How do you do that? If you're going to ask them to leave? I generally would encourage you if you're going to ask someone to leave, to sort of set up the situation where it's kind of like they kick themselves out. And let me explain what I mean by that. Basically, it's like instead of you saying, that's it, you gotta go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what you need to say is, you know, to be Here, this and this and this, and this needs to happen. If that can't happen, then I cannot have you in the house because it's too much chaos. Like, it's causing him trouble. Like, got to go. And so you want to set that situation up where they're like, fine, that's ridiculous. Like, I don't want to follow these rules or whatever. And then they leave. That's the best way, if possible, to get someone to leave because they're less. They have less of an ability to make you the bad guy. Not that they won't, because they will no matter what you do, but they have less of an ability to make you the bad guy because it's basically making them make the choice versus just purely, you know, like throwing their stuff on the street one day. It's gonna. It's gonna have to be, you know, you decide you want to do this or you want to do that, and then they can't. Like I said, they can't come back and blame you so much if you are. And then this kind of goes into the category of how you do this. One thing to know is that if someone's living in your house legally, I guess, at least in this state, I'm guessing in most states, you can't just throw someone out. Legally you can't because they're a resident. And if you're gonna put them out, you like have to go like to the courthouse and get an eviction notice. Like it were a tenant or a renter or something. And you have to do like a 30 day thing. Now I have seen parents do this. Like, I have literally seen them go down, file the eviction notice and let the 30 day ticker or whatever it is, start counting down to it and say, dude, you got three days, you're out. But that's a really hard thing to do that way, to sort of say, I'm evicting you. So think about this. Even though you legally can't do that, I'm getting myself in trouble here. Is this. Does this person gonna have the ability to fight you on it? Do they know that? Like, if this is your child, whether it's like a young adult, they may not know that. Like, you know, we don't necessarily tell them that. Sometimes they know that because they're pretty savvy and sometimes they don't. So sometimes they'll turn around and look at the parent and be like, you can't throw me out. Like, I live here. And they'll call the cops on the parent, which hold on one second. I got little kids in here. Oops. Little kids came home playing with my son and his friends. So they may call the cops on you. If it's a spouse, then they probably do know that you can't just throw them out like that. So you may have to speak to someone in the family court system and find out what your options are. I know here in South Carolina, parents can file something. I feel like. I don't know if this is the exact words, but it's like. It's like charging your kid with incorrigible behavior. Especially if you tried everything over and over and over and just not helping you. You can do that as a way to either help sort of put the pathway in place for them to get to treatment or to give you some legal justification to do some things. Because as much as it sucks, like you as the family member have a lot less rights than your loved one does. And you're like, are you kidding me? Like, it feels like that. The ag, the alcoholic, they have all the rights. And it is so true, you know, you can't make them go to treatment. You can't kick them out of your house. I mean, it's like you're literally really, really, really held hostage in your own house. And any which way you go, you know, the medical professionals aren't going to talk to you, the police will tell you, like, you got nothing here and all that kind of stuff. So you need to, as Amber always says, like, have a strategy, think this through, have some consultation with someone, whether that's legal consultation or with a family addiction specialist or something like that, so that you know what the rules of the game are and have a strategy about how you're gonn. Do not, I repeat, do not throw someone out of the house on a whim. You know why? Because you're not going to stick to it. Because if you do it on a whim, that means you're doing it in a moment where you're just mad and you can't take it and you're saying that's it, you're out. When that mad goes away, they're going to be back in. And that's the worst thing is to be like, you gotta leave, then come back. You gotta leave, then come back. Definitely don't do that. If you're gonna do it, you need to have thought this process through. You need to think about how you're going to do it. You need to think about how you're going to have that conversation, legal aspects and all of those things. Be smart about the decision. Let me think if there's anything else. If you're watching, let me know what you think. Do you have a. Do you. Have you had any experience with this? Have you ever had to ask a loved one to leave? How did that go? Are you glad you did it? Do you regret it? If you're a person in recovery, have you ever been asked to leave? Do you feel like it was helpful? Not helpful? There's no clear answer to this question about whether any particular person should or shouldn't, but there are definite guidelines to it. So if you are struggling with this and you feel like you really are on the verge of this and you're not sure what to do and you need a consultation, then feel free. I've got some links in the description below about how you can get a consultation with a specialist just to have. It's not even like commitment to counseling or anything. It's literally a consultation. Like, what should I do in this situation? Is it time? If it is time, how do I go about doing that? So if you feel like you need that, if you're on the verge of this, if you're struggling with it, like I said, don't make the decision on a whim. Think it through, talk it over. If you need that link, use it. Talk to one of our family specialists. Talk to someone if you have an Al Anon sponsor, but definitely get strategic about it. Thank you guys so much for joining the Live, and I will see you next time.