You can make your love stronger with healthy boundaries

In families affected by addiction, boundaries are a tool of self-care. When you have boundaries, love toughens up and becomes stronger.

You may have heard the term “tough love” when talking about leveraging a person to enter recovery from addiction.

Boundaries are “tough love” and key to improving the family unit when faced with addiction.

Often, this type of boundary and tough love are used in conjunction with a decision that involves asking a person with an addiction to leave their family home.

When conducted with support and intervention from professionals in the addiction field, this can be a strategy that’s the turning point for a person to decide to enter a treatment program.

Often these events occur after continuous stress, which a family experiences when living with a person actively using drugs.

Addiction is chronic

People face challenges in loving someone who struggles with a chronic, relapsing brain disorder. The nature of the illness sometimes prevents the person who has the addiction from acknowledging their behaviors are out of the healthy range.

The unknown risk is how entrenched the addiction is for an individual. If s/he continues in a state of denial and refuses, you may have to work through the emotional dilemma of this individual becoming homeless.

Yet, when family members become distressed to the point where they seek counseling for themselves, they learn about a concept called boundaries. Boundaries are a form of love, and they are tough to implement. A pattern of behavior that crosses societal norms demands a boundary.

Love is blind. Somewhat true, but more realistically, people can be blind to love, especially when others make a tough decision to step back to allow the natural order of things to occur.

Families have the right to safety.

Families frequently are placed in double (love) blind experiences when they are trying to find their way in helping someone recover from drug addiction.

A family’s first function is to support its members in learning skills, morals, and values. When addiction strikes a family member, standard approaches to building a thriving family unit can be affected. Often, a family member’s addiction will drive the individual to decisions that do not fall within the societal norms of morals or values.

Unknowingly, non-addicted family members can perpetuate fueling the addiction through co-dependent choices.

• A family member needs a ride somewhere, and what caring family member wouldn’t give one?
• Or can s/he borrow a few bucks until s/he gets paid?

Saying no to simple requests seems petty and punitive. But within the illness of addiction, keeping the affected individual comfortable may be “loving them to death.” People are only as sick as their own and other people’s secrets, and addiction is sneaky and secretive. Family members who love someone with an addiction don’t know what they don’t know.

Addiction is the number 1 cause of divorces.

Addiction’s constant conflict and anxiety have begun to break down the family unit before families realize what is happening. Substance abuse is a leading reason married couples seek a divorce. When a child suffers from addiction, families frequently cope with a degree of grief and anguish that only other families battling life-threatening diseases, such as cancer, can understand.

Consequently, all family members become blind to love. Underneath the person suffering from addiction is the valuable human being God created. But the manipulation and deceit of addiction destroy trust.

In periods of sobriety, the restored family member resurfaces, and others within the family welcome them but are confused about how they can so harshly judge a relative.

Eventually, family members may begin to see that trying to fix the consequences for their loved one’s addiction worsens for them and the person with the addiction. Yet, it is scary to relinquish control. The illusion for the non-addict family member is they make better decisions because they are sober. However, if the consequences of some bad choices aren’t experienced, then no motivation exists to change.

Addiction can and does kill. Addiction can’t be cured but can be managed.

Just as a family wouldn’t treat a loved one’s cancer, family’s ought not to endeavor to manage another’s addiction. Working with professionals is as essential for the family members who don’t suffer from addiction as it is for those with the illness. Joining a mutual support group, such as Al-Anon or Nar-Anon, can also assist the family in recovery.

When a family suffers from the illness of addiction, boundaries are “tough love” and challenging to implement. Yet, boundaries, as love demands, may be the highest form of love one can offer another.

And when a family sees this, addiction can no longer blind people to love.