I Sent My 24 Y.O. Son to Rehab Twice and He's Still Using. Should I Kick Him Out?

Okay, so today we're going to be looking at a post I think a lot of you are going to be relate to. The title of it is, "I've sent my son to rehab twice, but nothing is working, and my whole family's falling apart." Let's take a look at this post. It says, "Looking for some straight talk here because I don't know what to do next, and I honestly don't know how much longer I can hold my family together. My son is 24 years old. He lives with us, and we told him when he moved back in here that." He had to have a job to live here. And at first he did, he got a job, but it only lasted for about a month. We don't even know why he lost the job. He won't tell us. Now all he does is stay in his room all day, every day. We smell weed coming from his room day and night. We sent him to detox in the spring for his drinking. He basically flunked out of college because he was drinking so much he wasn't even going to class. Then after he got out of that treatment, I'd say he lasted about 10 days or so, and then eventually he went back to the drinking. But I don't even think he ever stopped the weed the whole time. He doesn't see the weed as a problem. The thing that gets me the most is that he doesn't even go out anymore, doesn't see friends, hasn't dated in more than 2 years. When I was 24, you couldn't have tied me down and made me stay home on the weekends. But this kid, he doesn't go anywhere. He doesn't do anything. He just stays home. Stays in his room, looks at his phone, and smokes weed. My wife and I fight about it all the time. She's just done with it. And I can see why, because anytime our son does come out of his room, the two of them just go at it. They're fighting nonstop. She thinks we need to throw him out. She says we're enabling him and that we're just letting him rot in there, that nothing's ever going to change as long as he has a place to hide out. And there's a big part of me that knows she's right, but I just don't know what to do because I don't think I have it in me to throw him out. If I do put him out, then what? He's not equipped to survive out there. I'm not being dramatic. He genuinely doesn't know how to function. He can't keep a job. He can't manage money. He can't do the basic things that any 24-year-old would know how to do. If I throw him out, I feel like it's not teaching him a lesson. I'm just moving the problem somewhere else and his addictions are just going to get worse. I don't even think he has enough friends left to do the couch surfing thing. My wife thinks I'm choosing him over her and I'm I'm not, at least I'm not trying to. I'm just terrified of both options. I can keep him here and watch my marriage fall apart, or I can put him out on the street and live with constant anxiety and fear, wondering what's happening. I just feel like there's no good door here. Oh yeah. And his younger brother won't even speak to him. In fact, he avoids coming home because he's just so sick of all the chaos and the fighting and the drama. He won't even be in the same room with him. That's what kills me. I'm basically losing everyone in my family, both my sons and my wife, and it doesn't feel like there's anything I can do about it. I look at my son and I don't even recognize him anymore. I'm sad. I'm scared. I'm angry. I'm confused. I feel like he just doesn't even know how to do the basic things in life, like things he was doing when he was 12 years old. He's not even doing those things now. I don't know if it's the addiction that's causing that, if there's some sort of Bigger mental health problem here. All I know is whatever's happening is not working. I've paid to send him to rehabs and that didn't work. He's 24 years old and doesn't know how to live. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that, and I'm running out of time to figure it out. All right, so I know a lot of you are relating to the dad in this story, or maybe you relate to the kid, or maybe you relate to the brother or to the mom. Before we talk about what this dad should do, let's talk about why the things they've tried, which are the normal things, right? Why those things didn't work. Research says that young adults relapse at twice the rate of regular adults. Even 11 years out, that's still the case. And we're talking about young adults and kids that have actually been to treatment, that have gotten help. The problem is that most addiction treatment really just isn't equipped, or they just don't have the right thing. They just don't have the right services to help young adults specifically. I spent a lot of time working with young people. I've done teenage treatment, I've done adult treatment, but young adults, even though they're officially adults, They should have their own category. They really are a separate category, young adults, right? Like they're old enough to be out on their own. They get to make all their decisions. They can walk out of treatment, they can do whatever they want, but for the most part, they're just not able to take care of themselves. Yeah, you can put a 24-year-old and a 50-year-old in the same treatment center, and it's not the worst idea to have a 24-year-old and a 50-year-old together. The problem is, is that a 24-year-old brain and a 50-year-old brain or even 45-year-old brain. They're just not the same situation because a 24-year-old, even though they're technically old enough to be an adult, most of the time when you're dealing with a young adult who has an addiction problem, that problem probably started in their teenage years, which means all those developmental milestones where you learn how to adult and be responsible for yourself and live outside your house and do all the things, they never really met those milestones. Which means when you're dealing with a young adult who's addicted, not only do you have to help them with their addiction, like the whole sobriety thing, building a recovery network, all the regular stuff, but you also have to help them learn how to be independent adult people. And so if you're putting your young adult son or daughter in a treatment center that doesn't specifically address those things, that's a big reason why it just doesn't stick. A lot of those treatment programs are just not long enough to let their brain heal, to let them get back to functioning, to help them learn how to take care of themselves and be responsible. Be accountable for things, pay bills, get up, go to work consistently, cook food for themselves. All those little things, it really matters because just the sober thing doesn't mean that they're capable of living on their own. Which leads me to the other part that's really important for young adults that most addiction treatment just doesn't deal with is the whole identity thing. When you've spent your teens and 20s drinking and using, you don't have any idea who you are without that. You've built your whole life around it. Your friends, everywhere you go, That's what you're known for. Your whole life is organized around the addiction. So that's very different than like, let's say a 50-year-old who has a job, a wife, a kid who has an alcohol problem. Yeah, they need to learn to get sober, but for the most part, they know who they are. They're capable of being responsible for themselves if they just get the drinking problem under control. But that's not the case when you're dealing with a young person. It's just different. Most of the time they're not going to tell you this, but deep down inside, they feel really ashamed. They realize that all of their peers are off Like getting married, building careers, and they know that they're really behind. They feel like even if they did get sober and turn their life around, that they'll never be able to catch up. And when they think about the idea of getting on the straight and narrow, they think that it's going to be miserable, that they won't have any friends, that they won't enjoy anything anymore. Those things may seem unimportant in the big picture when you're an adult and you have a lot of things going on, but they're really important when you're a young adult, which is why young adults They just need a different kind of help. They need more hands-on help with responsibilities, help developing an identity, figuring out who they are. And you got to keep them sober and engaged long enough for their brain to heal, for their dopamine to regulate so that they can have some experiences and figure out that, hey, they can actually have fun and enjoy things again. If you don't do these things, if you simply just detox them, send them to a few meetings, And then hand them the keys to their life, you're wasting a lot of time and money because you're handing them keys to a life that they don't know how to live. And chances are they're going to wind up back in the parents' house in the same old cycles, which is what happened in the story. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to help a person build a life that they feel good about. Yes, the bad things, the consequences, a lot of times those are the things that make someone decide that they need to get sober. But they're not the things that keep someone sober. If you get sober and your life is miserable and you don't have a job and you don't have any friends and you're not having any fun, how long do you think that's going to last? Not, not very long at all. Coming across this post really inspired me to do this video because this situation is the norm. I can't tell you how many families we see spend so much time and money and energy And they just don't even get anywhere. Like most of these young people don't stay sober for a month when they get out. So if you're a parent and you're in this situation, it's important to be really strategic. The things that are important here are timing, right? You have to wait for the right conditions to set up before you even put someone in treatment. And then when you do get them into treatment, you want to make sure they're in the right place. So I want to take a pause right here and say thank you to Greenville Transitions for sponsoring this video. I only wish this dad from this post could have found Greenville Transitions because this is the kind of situation that they're built for. Because the situation he described is exactly the kind of situation that Greenville Transitions deals with. Their whole specialty is helping young men just like the one in the story. They help with the whole picture, not just the sobriety thing, but all the things, like all of the life skills, the adulting stuff. When you go to Greenville Transitions, you have responsibilities that you have to do. You have to Be up at a certain time. You have to go to so many meetings. You have chores to do. You have a night you got to cook. All those things might seem like small details, but I feel like they're super intentional, important part of young adult treatment because most of the young adults start using when they're in their teens and they just never develop these skills. When you're not good at these things, when you don't take responsibility for things, you actually suffer. Your self-esteem suffers. Like, you don't feel good about yourself. The only way to start feeling good about yourself is to keep your word to yourself. So all these little Responsibilities that they have—they really matter. It's part of the recovery process. They do a great job of dealing with identity issues, and they do an excellent job of helping these young men build a new identity. They do jiu-jitsu. Am I saying that right? They do rock climbing. They do paintball. Last year they did snowboarding. All these physical things I think really help young men to not only just like heal their brain chemicals because the physical movement really actually helps with healing your body, but it also creates that room for connection. and community and doing something together and feeling good about yourself. When a 24-year-old does something hard, it becomes part of their identity, their self-worth. I've worked with a lot of programs. In fact, the whole first half of my career was spent dealing with young people. I think the reason why Greenville Transitions is, is so good at this is because it wasn't built by some big corporation, some big facility that owns 100 hospitals. Greenville Transitions was built by 2 young men who were exactly like the kid in this story. David, that's one of the owners, he got so bad addicted to it, he got to the point where he was like, wouldn't leave the house. He was having suicidal thoughts. He even like lost touch with reality. It was bad. It was really bad. It took a long time, but eventually his mom was able to talk him into going to treatment. But once he got there, pretty much did every single thing possible, pulled every manipulation tactic he could think of To try to get out of there, and when he couldn't figure out how to get out of there, then he went to trying to figure out how to not go to sober living after the fact. And he kind of threw out there to his mom. He said, "Well, I'm not going to go unless they have snowboarding now," because he thought like she'll never be able to find a place that does snowboarding. But she did, and so she kind of called his bluff on that, and he ended up going to the sober living that had the snowboarding. And the other owner, Lucas, his story is like. Wild, crazy, tragic. I mean, all the things. He started doing serious drugs as a young, early teen. I'm not talking about like going to a party on the weekend. I'm talking about hardcore drugs. He lost friends to overdose, not just once, but multiple times. He was in and out of treatment centers. And you would think any one of those bad things should have been a bottom for him. It should have made him want recovery. But the truth of it was, is Lucas just didn't want recovery. And you may think a situation like that is hopeless. Like, what are you going to do when someone doesn't want it? Well, the thing of it is, is most people, no matter what their age is, don't want recovery. And young people especially, they don't want to be sober. So waiting for them to somehow miraculously decide that they want it, that's a dicey call to make. You just can't expect young people to be motivated the same way adults are. They don't have nearly as much to lose. Their brain isn't functioning the same way. They've spent years and years and years avoiding consequences, manipulating their parents out of things, manipulating their parents, getting out of trouble, all the things. Which is why you can't just deal with a young adult with that standard addiction treatment attitude of, well, come back when you want it. And if they don't want it, they're just not humble enough. And there's just this sort of attitude of, we're here to help you if you want it, but you're going to have to come get it. And if we get any kind of pushback from you, Or hesitancy or ambivalence, they basically just sort of like wash their hands of it and say, "Well, you can't change anyone else. You're going to do what you're going to do." But young people especially, they just need more handholding. They need more encouragement because I can pretty much guarantee you at some point in the treatment recovery process, even with the ones that are like really trying, there's going to be a point where they want to run, where they change their mind. They're they're going to want to leave treatment. They're going to want to pick you up, beg you to come pick them up. They're going to do all the things like David and Lucas. Lucas did. It's just part of the process. Most of the time that happens upfront in the first week or two, but sometimes they do okay at first and then they hit a wall and they could have been there for weeks or months and then they're going to have that run reflex. And if you just approach that with the, well, okay, you're going to do what you're going to do, every single one of those young adults would leave treatment. Like no one would finish. I've personally seen David and Lucas do this more times than I can count. The reason I know so much about Greenville Transitions is because When they first opened up, we were sort of partnered with them. So we did the counseling part. We were very involved with these families, which is why I know that at some point, young people always want to give up. They always want to leave. Like, at some point, it's going to get hard, and you want your son or daughter to be at a place where they're going to at least make the effort to keep them engaged, to help them stay motivated, to help them solve whatever problem it is or get through whatever trigger that they're having. Of course, in the end, you can't make a young adult do anything. I mean, they legally can just walk out of treatment. Like, you can't physically hold them there, but there's a lot you can do to try to help them through whatever hard moment that they're having and keep them engaged long enough for their brain to heal, for them to build a life that they actually feel hopeful for and excited for, develop those adulting skills so that when they do finish the program, they have a fighting chance of getting out there and launching out as young adults and being successful. All right, now I don't want to close up this video without going back to the original Post because some of you probably want to know what do I think that this dad in the story should do? I'm not going to tell you because I want you to tell me what would you do? I can promise you there's no easy answer in that situation. I don't even know that there is a right or wrong answer. It's so painful to be a family member stuck in that rock and a hard place thing. You feel guilty and terrible if you make them leave. You feel guilty and terrible if you let them stay. There's just no easy answer to this. I know a lot of you have been in a similar situation. Maybe. were the kid. Maybe you felt like the mom. Maybe you felt like the dad, but I know you can relate. So let me know in the comments how you would handle that situation. What advice would you give this dad? Because it's possible he'd come back and read these comments. So really think this through and tell us what you would really do in the situation. And if you related to this story and you want more help on what to do in these situations and advice about how to help a son or a daughter or a husband or a wife or anything, You're in the right place. That's what we do here on this channel. So if you're not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe. It's free. It doesn't cost you anything. And I'll make sure that you always stay 5 steps ahead of addiction because that's the only way you're ever going to beat it. You got to outsmart it. You got to have strategy. And that's what we talk about on this channel. All right, everybody, I'll see you in the next one.