When Helping is Harmful–The Fine Line Between Helping and Hurting
If you have ever loved an addict, it’s likely you’ve heard the word “enabling” before. Maybe friends, family, or even professionals have criticized you for doing what feels like the most natural thing for a loving parent, spouse, or sibling to do when someone you care about is struggling. This compassion and desire to see one-another succeed is a beautiful thing, and it’s what makes us fully human. But, when someone you love is suffering with addiction, our natural reactions as compassionate human beings can actually be hurting those we are trying so desperately to help. The good news is you actually don’t have to change them at all. The scarier news is that you are going to have to change yourself.
Now, I will never tell a family member that they need to turn their backs on their loved one because it just simply isn’t necessary.
What a relief…
What is necessary is a fundamental shift in how love is understood and expressed in our relationship to self and those suffering with addiction. Traditional forms of “enabling”—including paying debts, allowing addiction into your home or the myriad of other things you’ve done that were completely out of your comfort zone—are not actually expressions of love, but rather expressions of control fueled by fear and guilt.
Sound familiar?
Even though we are constantly told that this type of “helping” is actually harmful and, even though our addict’s behaviour seems to only get more destructive, we continue to use these same old strategies on repeat.
Everyone’s heard the definition of insanity right?
Which brings me back to the scary part, when we are in the center of the chaos of addiction everything we have ever been taught about love needs to be reevaluated. To truly support our loved ones in this disease we need to reimagine everything we thought we knew about love and then love fiercely.
To love an addict is to take a most intimate journey into the self. And although this is not a journey that we have asked to go on, this part is no longer a choice. The choice now becomes whether we decide to get started embracing change or whether we keep doing the same things on repeat with the expectation of a different result.
Below, I have outlined seven examples of what it means to reimagine love:
- Love is letting go.
- Love is understanding that your loved one is sick and that you are not a doctor. This might mean helping them find appropriate support, but knowing that you are not it.
- Love is finding a group of people who understand what it feels like to love someone that’s sick and communicating your feelings to these people as often as necessary.
- Love is working with professionals to learn different coping strategies for your emotional state that don’t involve attempts to micromanage another person’s behaviour.
- Love is taking responsibility for your own mental health by nurturing your spirit and getting back to what used to make your heart sing.
- Love is giving only what is in your means to give emotionally, physically, financially or otherwise.
- Love is finding that same compassion for yourself that you so freely give to others. Remind yourself that this is hard, and that you are doing the best you can.
Because, the truth is that it isn’t working. It’s never been working. In fact, it’s only getting worse, and you are beginning to lose yourself, your life and your spirit in the process. So if no one has ever told you, please know now that addiction is bigger than any one person and abandoning yourself is not love.