My favorite book about addiction is Beyond Addiction by Wilkens, Foote, and Kosanke. It’s for people who care about someone who is struggling. A book that gives you actual advice, and doesn’t tell you to just detach if things get hard. Close to the beginning, they have a note titled This Is Really Hard! which acknowledges that the struggle is difficult and scary and that it takes time and practice to get on the right track. I take no real issue with it. In fact I think it was a great thing to include.
Still, I’d like to fix that phrase. It should have been, This is Fucking Terrible! Look, I get why they didn’t call it that. They’re trying not to invite people to catastrophize, to see the problem as worse than it is. I write the fucking Stall Seat Journal, so I’m perfectly familiar with the reasons for avoiding catastrophic language and using positive psychology-approved words instead. And they expect a variety of different folks to be reading their book. It’s not just people whose loved ones are at death’s door. Their book is there for people whose kids are out on the streets, but also parents whose kids smoke a little too much weed on the weekends, and husbands whose wives drink a bottle of wine at night and go to work in the morning. There’s no reason to inspire panic in these people. In fact there’s every reason to inspire optimism and keep them going.
But what if your person is at death’s door? What if you haven’t slept in a week because one moment of relaxation means they could stumble outside and get hit by a car? What if you can’t really use the time tested strategy of catching them at a sober moment because they’re literally never sober?
There’s still hope for people in that situation. There’s still optimism. But we can’t reach that optimism until we know that someone truly gets how fucking scared we are and how every day risks our loved one’s death, and then still says there’s hope. Which is why I want to say it. Your life right now is a goddamn dumpster fire. You don’t know what to hold onto. Your loved one is a holy terror. Their other family members have pushed you away. Therapists have pushed you away. Support groups seem full of fake bullshit and harmful ideas. You can’t seem to latch onto any good behaviors to reinforce because there are no good behaviors and when there are you’re too traumatized to recognize them. You scream at your loved one. You do worse than scream. You are alone, or at least you sure as hell feel that way.
There is still hope. Not just abstract hope that you’ll get over their existence someday and move on. There is actual hope that you can help them recover. There is hope until the moment your loved one is dead. There’s never a guarantee, but there is always a chance, and there are almost always things you can do to increase it. Even though I lost my loved one, I’ve never felt more sure of this in my life.