I was in a session with a mom and a dad a while back. Their son had relapsed. Again. Things had actually been going well, which made it even more confusing for them.
I was trying to explain something about the disease. How many people in addiction don’t know how to hold life when it’s going well. How both the brain and the psyche don’t know what to do with good news. How there’s this built-in forgetter that makes the last time feel like it never happened, and the delusion that creeps in that says, maybe this time will be different.
The dad was shaking his head.
And then he said: “I will never understand this.”
I smiled.
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
But here’s why that moment made me genuinely happy.
Most families come in gripping their need to understand. If they can just figure out the why, they can find the right argument. The right approach. The right words that will finally land. They spend years trying to logic their way into something that has no logic. Trying to comprehend something that, unless you’ve lived it from the inside, you simply cannot comprehend. (And even those of us who lived it have a hard time understanding it intellectually.)
And that effort, that exhausting, relentless effort to understand and figure it out, keeps them stuck.
Because when you believe that understanding leads to fixing, you never stop trying to figure it out. You replay conversations. You research. You ask why in every direction. And while you’re doing all of that, you are not doing the one thing that could actually create change: your own recovery.
When this dad said “I’ll never understand this,” he wasn’t giving up.
He was surrendering the wrong job.
He was finally, maybe for the first time, acknowledging that his experience and his son’s experience are fundamentally different. That he does not have this disease. That his brain does not work this way. And that trying to understand addiction from the inside is not his job, has never been his job, and was never going to be the thing that helped his son.
Confusion, in this context, is healthy.
It is a boundary. It is intellectual honesty. It is the beginning of getting into your own lane.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: from a place of “I don’t understand this,” you can get curious without needing to control. You can learn about the disease without believing you need to become an expert to fix it. You can stop taking the behavior personally, because behavior that makes no sense to you stops feeling like a message directed at you.
And you can start asking a different question.
Not “why does he do this?” But “what is mine to do here?”
That dad thought he needed to understand his son’s addiction to help him. He didn’t. He needed to understand how he was tangled in it. His own feelings. His own responses. His own recovery. That was his lane. That was where his power actually lived.
So if you’ve been spinning trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense, I want to say this directly: you won’t understand your way out. And that’s not a failure. That’s just the truth of how complex, cunning and baffling this disease is.
The question is what you do from here.
If you’re ready to stop trying to figure out the disease from a place of “that will fix it” and start figuring out yourself and how your response can change things, that’s exactly where we start with families. A connection call is free and it’s where we figure out together what your next step looks like.
Talk soon,
Kate
P.S. Next week I want to tell you about the first time someone called me an alcoholic, and the last time. Same word. Completely different experience. What changed in between is the whole point.
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