Someone recently said to me, “My family thinks I’m enabling my loved one by taking your program.”
I can see why your family might think that. Our programs here at Tipping Point Recovery go against a lot of common messages surrounding addiction. Messages like “They have to want it,” or “There is nothing you can do.”
There’s a whole chapter in my book that dives into why I disagree with these messages, and I urge you to read it because I know from experience that you don’t have to wait for your loved one to “want it” in order to help them, and there is something you can do.
And no, those things don’t count as enabling.
What is enabling?
At its core, enabling is how we show love.
Many of the things that are labeled enabling when it comes to addiction are things that we would intuitively do to support someone we love through any other illness or hardship. Things like making sure they have money for food, letting them stay at your house, helping them make their doctor’s appointments, and taking whatever else we could off their plate until they got back on their feet.
We’d extend a hand to help them because we love them.
The problem is the things that help with other illnesses are almost never helpful when it comes to addiction. In fact, a lot of the time those gestures of love serve to help the addiction more than your loved one.
You don’t have to stop expressing your love in order to stop enabling.
The answer is to learn to show your love in a new way that does not support the addiction. We can learn to love your loved one unconditionally but support them conditionally (as my mentor Earl Hightower says).
That’s what we teach you how to do at Tipping Point Recovery.
From the outside looking in, it may look the same as enabling because you’re not shutting your loved one out completely. You’re not practicing “tough love.”
In my experience, “tough love” doesn’t work. Detaching with love—detaching from your loved one’s addiction and connecting with who they are underneath their addiction—does.
For those who do not yet understand addiction, they may not notice the difference. Your loved one will.
It’s why families send me text messages from their actively addicted loved ones calling Tipping Point Recovery a cult or calling me a fraud. It’s why your loved one doesn’t like me when you first start working with us, because the manipulation their addiction used to get away with stops working.
Their addiction doesn’t like me teaching you all its tricks. And in the process, I’m teaching you a new way to connect with your loved one.
It is nuanced and not at all intuitive. And it is the best possible thing you can do for your loved one and your family as a whole.
And if your family doesn’t yet understand…
It’s natural to want the endorsement of others when you are doing something new. What do you think about suspending the need to get others to understand? I invite you to walk your own path. What we find is when you begin the change, more change follows. In time, others will see that what you’re doing is not enabling, it’s actually healthy helping.
If you’re ready to learn a new way of showing your love, here’s how we recommend you start:
- Get my book, Dear Family, Why Your Loved One Won’t Accept Help and How To Help Them Anyway. It’s a comprehensive outline of our Dear Family Framework.
- Take our Stop the Chaos training to help you integrate the teachings into your own practice.
- Book a connection call to explore how we might help your family.
Share with me in the comments, what new ways have you learned to show your love to the people in your life?
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