The Gift of Love

When you’re dealing with a loved one who is struggling with chemical dependency issues you often forget about the word love. The late nights, the constant fear, the gut wrenching awareness of human suffering and mainly the horror that death is attached to this disease. This cycle of madness somehow becomes daily living. It becomes life because we accept it. We become willing partners in this tango of insanity. Why do we do it? Why are we so willing to put our lives on hold and allow the walls of anxiety to build? Love. Deep, deep down the root to the madness, to living life on hold, to losing countless nights of sleep is connected to love. Love meaning, we would do anything to help them, to fight this disease even when they do not want to or they don’t have any fight left in them. Love meaning, we learn behaviors that in our inner core we fight because we feel we are ‘saving’ them. These behaviors also become a part of the madness, a part of daily living. Before we know it we are not only fixing problems, paying off debts, co-signing garbage, but we are not being true to our authentic self. The voice of reason attempts to intervene. The little raspy voice that says, “This isn’t right.” This is the voice that is often ignored- but in many ways is the beginning of the road to recovery for anyone addicted to an addict.

The true gift of loving an addict is when you learn to love yourself enough to stop the madness. To stop saying yes to the raging monster of addiction that has pillaged our loved one. Love in recovery becomes about filling our own voids- and knowing how to love one’s self. It is not an overnight process. We do not instantly learn new behaviors- we can relapse into old patterns quickly if we do not practice daily self-acts of recovery such as attending some form of 12-Step recovery or family support, self-care and acknowledging our own needs. But if we can fight hard enough for our loved one’s to become an enabled shell of a former adult- we can also fight for our own recovery.

I encourage you to seek help if you are still in the continued cycle of insanity. I encourage you to find out why you starting dancing the tango- we all have our core reasons. But ultimately when you start the path to healing it also helps the one we love. We start using this magical foreign term called, “No.” No with a solid period at the end. It’s powerful to the addiction and the process of recovery can bloom. We have a choice every day, just like our loved ones- to choose health, happiness and how we devote our time. We can make the conscious effort to seek recovery and to seek support. How will you set your intention for today? Is today the day?