Over the years, we have written many articles for ezines.
com and every month they send us a traffic report and our lifetime top performing article is "Freeing the Parents of Adult Alcoholics and Addicts".
This leads of to an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of parents out there searching for ways to extricate themselves from the manipulative clutches of their addicted adult children.
Granted, it's a difficult problem.
How does a loving parent actually help an addicted son or daughter? Should you continue to meet their unending demands or do you follow a "tough love" approach and cut them off until they straighten up? Neither works well, and both are nearly impossible to maintain, so what do you do? Try a middle path.
Offering to pay for treatment - assuming the treatment is one of the rare effective options rather than the usual ineffectual offering of the AA/12 Step/ Minnesota Model majority - is a good start.
Ceasing to protect them from the logical consequences of their choices is also necessary because they have been protected for a very long time, if you are currently supporting them.
Remembering that this lifestyle is their choice, not some mythical "disease", also helps you feel less guilty about ramping down financial support.
I watched my own parents go through this with one of my brothers.
He was bleeding them dry but they kept supporting him to the tune of $5000 a month.
They couldn't seem to understand why he wouldn't "get a grip", stop doing drugs, and get a job.
Come on now, if you want to give me $60,000 tax free a year tax for doing nothing...
Eventually, however, they decided to listen to Ed and me.
We put Ed in the middle between my parents and my brother and he had to do certain things each month in order to get his money, which he had to get from Ed, not my parents.
And he was given a schedule showing how the money was going to be decreased each month until it dwindled down to $0 over the course of a year.
This did infuriate my brother.
But it also worked and today he is self-supporting and not doing drugs.
I might also add, that because he is now working again, and not being supported by my parents, he has regained his self-respect and that is an important component in keeping him from going back to abusing drugs.
Obviously, this is not the only way out of this mess, but it is a way that worked because my parents had a lot of support from us, to stay strong and not cave-in, in the face of my brother's anger over his perceived mistreatment.
Since then, we have performed similar services for several other families in our area and those have turned out well.
If you have a situation with your addicted adult child and need help, please give us a call.
You can work your way out of it.
com and every month they send us a traffic report and our lifetime top performing article is "Freeing the Parents of Adult Alcoholics and Addicts".
This leads of to an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of parents out there searching for ways to extricate themselves from the manipulative clutches of their addicted adult children.
Granted, it's a difficult problem.
How does a loving parent actually help an addicted son or daughter? Should you continue to meet their unending demands or do you follow a "tough love" approach and cut them off until they straighten up? Neither works well, and both are nearly impossible to maintain, so what do you do? Try a middle path.
Offering to pay for treatment - assuming the treatment is one of the rare effective options rather than the usual ineffectual offering of the AA/12 Step/ Minnesota Model majority - is a good start.
Ceasing to protect them from the logical consequences of their choices is also necessary because they have been protected for a very long time, if you are currently supporting them.
Remembering that this lifestyle is their choice, not some mythical "disease", also helps you feel less guilty about ramping down financial support.
I watched my own parents go through this with one of my brothers.
He was bleeding them dry but they kept supporting him to the tune of $5000 a month.
They couldn't seem to understand why he wouldn't "get a grip", stop doing drugs, and get a job.
Come on now, if you want to give me $60,000 tax free a year tax for doing nothing...
Eventually, however, they decided to listen to Ed and me.
We put Ed in the middle between my parents and my brother and he had to do certain things each month in order to get his money, which he had to get from Ed, not my parents.
And he was given a schedule showing how the money was going to be decreased each month until it dwindled down to $0 over the course of a year.
This did infuriate my brother.
But it also worked and today he is self-supporting and not doing drugs.
I might also add, that because he is now working again, and not being supported by my parents, he has regained his self-respect and that is an important component in keeping him from going back to abusing drugs.
Obviously, this is not the only way out of this mess, but it is a way that worked because my parents had a lot of support from us, to stay strong and not cave-in, in the face of my brother's anger over his perceived mistreatment.
Since then, we have performed similar services for several other families in our area and those have turned out well.
If you have a situation with your addicted adult child and need help, please give us a call.
You can work your way out of it.
SHARE
