Transcript

Julie: Welcome everybody! It’s so nice to see you all tonight. We have a really neat lineup of guests tonight, I’m really excited about this. So we’re going to do introductions first and then this episode is going to be a little bit different than our usual. But we’ll let everybody tell you about themselves first, and then I will explain.

We’re going to go ahead and start with Derrick, who has been here a couple times before. How are you doing tonight?

Derrick: I am doing good. My name is Derrick, I am 39 years old, I’m just over 3 years sober, in recovery. I work in a residential treatment at Mile High Recovery Center here in Denver, Colorado. I peer coach, I’m a personal trainer. Yeah. I love recovery. If you ever want to check out my Instagram, it’s ddeidelsoberfit I do a lot of advocacy and reels about hope, laughter, and recovery. Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

Julie: Yeah, Derrick’s Instagram is amazing. I will include a link for that in our show notes and you guys should definitely check him out. There’s some really inspiring stuff, and definitely some good laughs. Next we’re going to go with Ann.

Ann: Hi, I’m Ann. I’m from Pennsylvania. I’m a wife, I’m a mom of an adult son. I’m a professional writer and I play the bagpipes. That’s a little different. I’ve been sober for 702 days and I’ll be two years sober the first week of May. So that’s really something that means a lot to me. I consider myself a work in progress. I’m a recovering perfectionist as the saying goes. I’ve really come to believe that the most important thing I’ve learned on this journey is that obstacles are put in our way for growth and working through them and over them is really part of the journey and I’m learning to embrace it. I’m really happy to be here and be talking about this topic, so thanks for having me.

Steve: Thanks for being here Ann.

Julie: Yeah, thank you for being here. It means a lot to us. And next we’re going to go with Jenn.

Jenn: Hi everyone, I’m Jenn. I am from Arizona. It’s beautiful out here, 82 degrees. I have been sober for one year, 10 months, and 20 days. I’m about to hit my two year mark in May, May 17. I’m a mom, I’m a wife. I have two adult sons. This has been quite a journey. I have to say, I’ve been met up with a lot of obstacles coming my way and I’ve persevered through every one. It’s been challenging, but I am good. Sobriety has been the best thing for me, and what an adventure it’s been, that’s for sure. So thanks for having me, I’m glad to be here!

Steve: Thanks for being here, Jenn.

Julie: Glad to have you too. And last but not least is Raul.

Raul: Hello everyone. Thanks for inviting me. I’m really flattered and grateful for this opportunity. So my name is Raul. I’m from Seattle, Washington, the Pacific Northwest. I work in industrial distribution. I’ve been sober for a little bit over 39 months. On the 28^th of this month I’ll be at 40 months, which is kind of crazy. My journey started because my son was getting in a lot of trouble with the police and the last incident, which set everything in motion was that he had two other incidents coming in. He was supposed to stay out of trouble, but he got a DUI and almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident. He was really stressed out, and I was at the hospital because he had broken his arm. I said, “You know, you can get out of this. All you need to do is stop drinking. You’re a good kid, most of your troubles come when you’re getting loaded.” He said, “I agree with you Dad. Why don’t you help me?” And that’s what set this thing in motion. He recently went back out last April. It’ll be a year this April. And I can just see him struggling. His light has just gone out. It’s been one of the most challenging things in my recovery to date. I’m a Central Washington University graduate I’m a Wildcat, and I’m looking forward to this union. Thanks for having me.

Julie: Thanks for being here. This should be a really good conversation. So many of us that in are in recovery also have family members that are struggling with addiction and that brings a unique set of challenges to our sobriety. I know not everyone is going to be able to relate to this podcast episode but Steve and I think it’s really important that we make space for this discussion because for those of you that have the added dynamic of a family member in addiction, getting some support and gleaning wisdom from others is imperative. So please share with us – what are the difficulties that you’re faced? How have you learned to work through them in a healthy way? Or, what are you still struggling to work through?

So Steve and I are going to take a step back tonight and we are going to let these four have this conversation and share with you some of their struggles and some of the things they’ve learned about having a family member that is active in addiction.

Raul: Thank you Julie.

Ann: Thank you. Who would like to start?

Derrick: I’ll go first. I’ll kick it off. My whole family from both of my brothers, my sister, my mom, my dad. They’re all addicts. When I’m working with people in addiction, I usually lead them to that healthy side of Al-Anon or something, because we are not… most of us have a loved one that is an addict. That doesn’t have to be family. It could be friends, it could be a girlfriend. It could be someone else you know in the rooms. As I’ve come into my recovery, I’ve really learned, it brought me to awareness of how much my addiction affected everyone else. Especially family members. Watching them watch me be like an F5 tornado, just tearing everything up. I finally stopped, I got sober and I looked back. Everyone’s trying to pick up the pieces and put their lives together because my addiction affected them that way.

My dad, he was out there using fentanyl, he’s homeless, using methamphetamine. We got him into a treatment center recently, but that was really hard on me. It made me realize what kind of position I put my dad, my mom, my brothers, my sister in when they saw me go to prison. When I was homeless. When I couldn’t stop using, when I wanted to commit suicide. How that really hurt them. And I found myself grieving for my father, even though he wasn’t dead. That’s how serious this addiction stuff is. It put a whole new perspective on me and what I needed to to do for self care and self worth, and setting boundaries and not to be co-dependent or co-enmeshed with my father and think that I’m going to save him. Everything in me wanted to save my father. I wanted to help him but I felt so hopeless and helpless. I almost feel like it’s harder on this side of things than it is being the addict. Now that I’m on this side, and I’m watching my family members all struggle with this. Now I have to live life and love them at a safe distance while they’re going through this.

It woke me up to the awareness to realize my addiction played a lot bigger part in people’s lives than I ever thought. It’s really hard to watch someone you love struggle with alcohol or addiction. That’s where I’ll kick it off, that’s where I’m at with it. I look forward to sharing different ways that I’ve learned with boundaries and how to set those, and how it’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to grieve someone that’s not dead yet. I don’t know. I don’t know what the day is that could take my father. And how do you do that in a healthy way? I’m excited to hear what people have to say about this because this subject – addiction is so much more than just the addict.

Jenn: As a child of alcoholics when I was growing up, I didn’t really know there was an issue back then. It was always just having that absent mother around. It wasn’t until that I was an adult that I really knew exactly what was going on. It wasn’t just alcohol. I stem from a family of alcoholics growing up. My grandfather was an alcoholic, my mother is an alcoholic, my father was an alcoholic. But my kids, I have a 29 and a 30 year old, and it’s Saturday night and we’re all having family dinner and my youngest son says to me, “Mom, I’m just like you.” And he says, “If there’s a bottle sitting there on the counter, I just keep going, I don’t know when to stop.” And right there, that was my decision to finally get my act together. Because it was only family, my husband and my children, that knew that when I did drink, it was excessive. It was at that moment that I knew that my son was in trouble, and I’m setting this example and I need to get my act together because he is asking me for help. I was already trying to quit at that point, going a whole week and then maybe just the weekend. I was toying with moderating my alcohol and we all know how that is, when you have a big problem. But that was my defining moment to get my act together. That moment changed my life. I’ve been sober for almost two years. Because of me making that change, my adult children have come to me and shared with me their problem. They are doozies. But we’ll get into that as we go along. But I have a big job at my house right now, getting my kids back on track. I opened that door for them to come back home. I would not have been able to do that had I not been sober today. So I’m grateful.

Ann: I have a similar situation with adult son who is back home. He tends to bounce back. He has been to rehab, relapsed within 24 hours after a 30-day. He has mental health challenges. His drinking is in secret. He is his friends’ designated driver, he’s not a social drinker, but he is a secret, middle of the night, calm himself down drinker. Eventually it’s caused him to lose most of the jobs he’s had or be unable to keep them. He’s quit before they told him to go. He always ends up bouncing back. So the situation for me was that my drinking had gotten out of control in my mind. I didn’t have a rock bottom like other people describe, no seminal incident that was the turning point. I just, as the saying goes, got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I didn’t like something controlling me and it was taking over more and more of my life, so a few years ago I started looking into how to quit. One of the biggest, most inspiring things for me was that, in a strange way, right around the time that I came to the realization, alcohol kind of turned on me in a good way. I started to hate it. I started to not love it anymore. I’d look at it when I would be drinking – also in secret, like when I tell people I don’t drink and they ask why, you didn’t have a problem. Well, yeah I did. You didn’t see it but I really did. But as my son’s condition progressed and it became more debilitating for me, I started looking at alcohol myself and started despising it, but I couldn’t put it down. It was like, this is the thing that’s killing my son. It’s killing his future, it’s hurting him. What am I doing? And besides the example I was probably setting, again, I was doing it in secrecy. I feel like my son wasn’t seeing me, like “Oh if Mom can do it, I can do it.” But I started looking at it with a whole different lens. It was very difficult to stop drinking, I’m not going to lie. But knowing this was the poison my son was putting in his body and was the thing I was looking at and seeing in his room, when he was collapsed on his bed or staggering around in the middle of the night. I just couldn’t drink it anymore. It took me a year of readings and meditations and everything to truly get to the point where I felt it was playing less of a role in my life. It took a long time. But it helped… weirdly his problems helped me step away from it and be done. But it’s hard to have somebody who is actively drinking in the house. We now have an alcohol free home. That was something me agreed to. In the beginning, my husband – he’s not sober but he doesn’t drink like almost ever – so he had no problem removing everything. But our son brings it in. So the smell, when we take it out of his room. I’ve chosen to have an alcohol free home but I have to empty wine boxes and liquor bottles on a daily basis, and smell booze, it’s hard. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m going back to drinking, but it’s hard to have made that decision and have it be under my nose again. The results of it. I would have to say, having my son drinking was a huge reason that I stopped drinking myself.

Jenn: Ann, do you find that the problem that your son has is very similar to one of my children? Has made you despise everything about alcohol and addiction altogether because I also have a son that’s been back and forth. He had a professional job, he worked in the corporate world as a mortgage broker, loan officer, he was making good money. And he kept getting fired for drinking on the job. He was just losing himself to this disease. It took last year, he’s been to two outpatient programs, he’s had a seizure from withdrawals that put him in the hospital, and he’s been to detox a couple of times. Just when you think it’s going to scare them enough, they still go back. The worry, the constant worry about the future of your kids and where they’re going to be has just given me more fuel for my fight to stay sober. I hate everything about it. I hate everything about this addiction and this disease when it comes to my family, and what it’s doing to my kids. Both of my sons, as of last week, have moved back home because of alcohol. My son can’t get it together. He just left detox last week, didn’t sign his lease for his lease for his apartment. It ended in April and he decided he needed to come home, he needs his parents, he can’t get it together without them. But then went through a complete binge right before it was time to leave here. So he went to detox, leaving Dad and I to pick up the pieces of his apartment and pack it up, clean it up, and the extent of what I had to deal with there was horrifying. Sad. Having to sweep up all of these liquor bottles under his bed. Shooter bottles in drawers. You name it, it was everywhere.

Raul: How old is your son?

Jenn: He just turned 29. And to walk into his apartment and see this nightmare of how he’s been living, it was devastating. So now we’re all together under one roof as a family, and we’re going to try to help them the best way we can to get on their feet. Support them in any way we can, and I hope it helps. For me, I’ve been dealing with so much for the last couple of years with these boys, and also death in the family, just trying to get over all these humps in life that could be triggers in a sense. I’ve worked through them, I’ve been able to work through them in a healthy way. But this here is the most challenging one and it just started. So if anyone has any advice on how to do that, having addiction in your house when it’s a sober home, we’re going to have our challenges. They’re not drinking so far.

Steve: Raul has something to say here, Jenn.

Raul: I was just going to say, I’m really glad you shared that. It just reminds me, when my son went back out in April, I wanted to take over his decision making process. I wanted to stop it and badger him and start to yell at him. When he was 18, I was going through a divorce because of my drinking, and that couldn’t stop me. When he was working, I knew he was going to drink and smoke weed, and I let him do it in our place instead of going out and about. We’ve been living together now since… he’s going to be 29 this year, he’s 28 now. He met a girl and wanted to be on his own. And he started drinking, as soon as he started drinking – he’s a blackout drinker. So he gets into a lot of trouble. He wants to drive, he wants to run out in the neighborhood and he’s got all these pending cases. And it used to drive me insane. I wanted to control it. I wanted to take charge of his recovery. I had to talk to a lot of people in my recovery and my sponsor. I go through the traditional AA program, it’s worked really well for me. And I talked to my sponsor and he said, “Raul, what are you going to do? Are you going to be there every time? Are you going to enable him to avoid that inevitable crash that he has to fall on his face?” And I said yeah, but it’s super hard for me. I can’t stand to watch him. What if he’s going to be homeless? What if he’s going to be this or what if he’s going to be that? And he said, “Raul, him being homeless might be part of his story. Him going to jail might be part of his story.” It was really hard for me to come to that place of acceptance to realize that I cannot control his recovery. No matter how much I try, no matter how many words I tell him, no matter how many safety nets I give him, I’m only prolonging the inevitable. If they have a safety net to fall back to, it comes around to the other side where I’m stifling his growth. Like we talked about just a minute ago. We have to go through the hardship before they can experience any kind of growth. And listening to you – no offense – I’m glad I’m not doing that for my son because I’ve actually seen some evidence that he’s starting to pan down himself. I’ve made a hard boundary with him. Look, this is it. Whatever you do, I’ll help you, give you some food, but I’m not going to help you with paying your rent, doing the things that normal people are supposed to do, like be responsible with your money. When he gets off the trail, off the reins, he doesn’t know how to stop. He goes hard and he doesn’t manage any of his life. Since I’ve stopped since I’ve set that boundary, he’s actually blossoming. But I know now that it’s his recovery, and not mine. And anything like, if I get overwhelmed with anxiety, I talk to people, I pray about it, and I realize I have zero control over it. I’m going to love him like a dad, and I’ll be there for him under the right set of circumstances, but he’s going to have to fend for himself. That was a hard thing for me to learn, it took me a really long time.

Jenn: I completely agree with everything you just said. In fact over the past month I have been talking to my husband about how much more are we going to do? He needs to hit the bottom. And we’ve been talking just this last week and I do feel like we’ve always fixed the boo-boos. We’re always fixing everything to try to help him along and this week, after everything, and him going to detox, I’m like, when are we going to stop coming in to fix it. Because we are, it took me this long to realize we are, and we have been, enabling. And he’s always said I don’t know what I would do without you guys, I would be screwed. Yeah, he would. But what would he do without us? I’m sure he’d find a way. It might have been a hard way. So you lost your car? You take the bus. You’ve lost your home?… It’s been hard, because you want to do everything you can to protect them. It’s like, at what point do you say Okay, I need to stop. You need to get this together on your own. I’m here to support you, I’m here to advise you, but I can’t keep fixing your boo boos. He’s had us for the last two years and no matter what, it hasn’t made a difference. He went to two programs and it told me that – I kept thinking to myself, why, why is he not getting this? How come I can do this and he can’t? What is the problem here? And I kept talking to other people in recovery, and they’re like Jenn, this is not your journey, this is his journey. He has to figure it out on his own. And that’s what I’m learning. It’s been a slow process but I’m learning it now and it’s really hard to struggle to separate those boundaries. But we’re working on it.

Steve: It’s definitely really hard to not take responsibility when it’s your own kid. Derrick?

Derrick: Yeah, it’s like, you love your kids. I have two kids. I hope they never become addicts, but I’ll be prepared for that if they do, in a different way. But anyone you love, a father and myself… guilt and shame creeps in like there’s something more I should be doing. My sponsor and my mentors in my life, helped me understand that one, when I start doing stuff for my dad – picking him up, taking him in, doing this, I’m taking his humanity away, his dignity to do things for himself. Number two, he helped me understand that I’m killing my father by enabling him. My life didn’t start to change on my own, I’ve gone through prison, I’ve been homeless, and that didn’t stop me. But my mom? She’d always save me because she felt so guilty about what happened in my childhood. Her cheating, me seeing it, the divorce… so she’d save me. It didn’t matter what program I went through, it didn’t matter how much, because I knew in the back of my mind that my mom was always going to take care of me. And I continued to live in my toxic behaviors, I continued not to learn to heal or deal with mental health, trauma, abuse. I didn’t understand any of that because I didn’t want to get help, because I had a safety net. That was really hard to hear from my sponsor. What do you mean, I’m killing my father? And he said, “How many times have you gone and gotten him and said, ‘Hey, do you want help?’ And you help him with something or you get him a hotel room. What does he do with that hotel room? He ends up using fentanyl and meth and you’re lucky he’s not dead.” So that was really hard for me to set a boundary for my own care and my own self worth as a loved one. To see my father, or not know where he’s at. But to tell him, hey, when you’re ready to go to rehab or you’re ready to get help, I’m going to be there for you. But I can’t be a part of this sickness. And I remind him, when you guys cut me off, and you said to go get help, and we can’t be a part of this, is when I started to heal. I started to face my trauma, I started to face abuse, I started to say I had a problem. And then I started these things myself. My first year of recovery, I didn’t talk to my mom at all because we were so co-dependent, so enmeshed. She wanted to save me so bad, and then she would save me and send me off on my way and couldn’t wait for me to fail again because she was just as sick as I was in this codependent relationship. She relied on me being sick. She liked having to save me. So once I got better and I’m starting to break the chains in my family and I’m starting to see the dysfunction, but I’m also understanding that I can not save my father. There’s no choice other than to say I’m going to be here for when you’re ready and I will walk with you then, but I can’t walk with you on this path. And if you’re going to die, and you might die. That’s a sad thing, that’s hard to say out loud because people die from addiction every day. Way too many. I mean, I don’t want that for my father, but I’m not God. All I can do is set that boundary for myself. Because my recovery is important and I’m not going to go out every night at 3 am looking for him, wondering where he’s at. That’s doing nothing. When he’s ready to make a choice to actually change, but if he knows he has that safety net? Guess what my father is going to keep doing? He’s going to fall into the net we’re going to save him, then he’s going to back out in a month or two, maybe three months, right back on the streets. Once he has enough money saved or his car doesn’t get repossessed, or whatever it is.

Raul: I don’t even think that’s on a conscious level, do you think? It’s like in a subconscious part that there’s a safety net. Like in the back of the head, it’s not even in the forefront. You know what I mean?

Derrick: I think it’s just part of the cycle that family diseases create. I didn’t know any different until I stepped out of my family. Until I learned that maybe my whole family is dysfunctional, maybe I’m not the only one struggling. And I need to heal first. But when you’re in that cycle, and this is a family disease, whether you like to say it or not, alcoholism, addiction affects the family core. And when you’re in that cycle, the rest of the world – you don’t know anything different. It’s just routine almost. When you really love someone like a kid or a father, you want to help them in any way you can, whether it’s toxic or healthy. You maybe don’t know the difference yet. And until you step up and realize that you’re banging your face on the wall, trying to save them, and hurting yourself, it’s almost like the drinking has to become – well, and the codependency and the enmeshment and the unhealthy behaviors on the other end start to hit you and beat you up enough to where you’re like “Okay, maybe I need to protect myself, and learn how to take care of myself, as being a loved one of an addict.” Making boundaries, being able to stand firm with them and say, I want to help you, but I can’t help you that way. And that’s really hard. I get that. I want to save my family too, ya know?

Steve: It’s really hard because you know what it’s like being in it, so you know you’re like, I have the solution. I’m like a walking talking version of that solution. How can you not see that, let me try to impart my knowledge. It’s the greatest thing! Like, really it is.

Derrick: Everyone’s bottom is different. My dad’s journey, my sister’s, my brothers’, they’re not going to get sober the same way I did. And they’re not going to get sober til they’re ready. So I don’t know what that looks like for them, but when they’re ready to get sober, guess where I’ll be? I’ll be standing right next to them. I’m not going to enable them anymore. I know the difference. And I know enabling is going to hurt me in the long run. In the end, my sponsor was right. He said in the end, that could kill them. And I go, wow, that’s a really harsh way to put it. But it kind of hit home for me that my actions of saving them all the time is giving them another opportunity to maybe kill themselves. And that just hit home for me. Especially with fentanyl out there right now. It could take minutes and people are dead. But they could die anyways. This isn’t an easy subject, it’s your loved one. You don’t want them to go through this pain, you don’t want them to be stuck in this addiction, you want them to be okay. And you want to squeeze them and… sometimes letting go of the reins, so they know what it’s like to take the reins themselves is what you’ve got to do. And then you get to enjoy the ride and ride with them in recovery.

Raul: I agree with you with the elements of codependency. Just hearing other people when they talk about it, you can see like, are they doing it for their kid? Or are they doing it to provide some sort of comfort in themselves. Now I’m going to cuddle my babies, they’re going to be at home, I’m going to protect them and I’m going to show them what it’s like. I’m like you Derrick. I’m letting it go. Letting it go. It’s not my story, it’s not my fish to fry. And when I started to recognize that I was doing that to make myself feel better, that I was going to control his situation. I realized I was stifling his growth, now I’m impeding his potential recovery. And I started to realize, wow, this is really eye opening. I started to let go. If they’re going to get it, they’re going to have to do it on their own. If we could do that, bottle it up, we’d make a fortune. But we can’t do that.

Jenn: It’s just so hard. It’s not easy when it’s your kids. You just want to help them. And when you’re think you’re helping them and you’re really not. You’re just enabling the situation. It’s even harder. It’s like, how do you do the whole tough love, but still be able to support them and let them know? It’s hard for me to navigate through that. Now I have two adults at my house, and they’re not just working, coming home. They chose to come home because they wanted help with their sobriety, and they also want to get back to where they used to be.

Steve: I think that’s going to start with their sobriety. We’re getting back to.. there’s the getting back to where they used to be. Until you allow them to take the ownership of it, then you’re taking responsibility for some of that. I think that’s just really freaking hard. Just listening to Raul and Derrick, it’s just really hard to accept.

Jenn: Especially when they come to you and say, “I want to come home. Home is my safe place. I need to get my stuff together. I need to be here with my parents.”

Steve: I think that’s what Derrick and Raul talk about boundaries. And your own boundaries. Ann, it looks like you want to say something.

Ann: Yeah, I just want to say, my son is kind of the opposite. He’s only here because he had shoulder surgery. He couldn’t drive and his lease was up, so he really had… his job ended, his lease was up, he had shoulder surgery, so he had 6 weeks an immobilization cast. So the plan was he would come back here until he was finished with that process. He knows he has to leave, and he signed a lease. That was the arrangement was that he was here as long as he was immobilized with his shoulder, but then he had to go. And we’d never laid that boundary down with him before. We’d always left it more open ended, but we told him the date that he has to move out. He’s gotten the lease. He still has to find a job, which he’s starting to do now, because he was just able to start driving last week. But he thanked us for holding him accountable, and he commented, “You guys have never told me I have to leave at the end of a certain period of time. I want to leave, don’t get me wrong. I feel like when you guys hover over me all the time you’re insulting me and demeaning my dignity and you’re disrespecting me.” And so he said, “The last thing I want to do is be here.” I’ve never heard him say that before, and I feel like that’s a good thing. Us drawing that line made him feel empowered, right? As long as he feels like he has that wind in his sails right now, knowing the clock right here is winding down on him, I think that was a good thing. Any time that I try to second guess or comment or suggest, he immediately shuts me down. He says, “Mom, that’s my business.” So it’s hard because we have a more robotic relationship now. I’m walking on egg shells, not managing, not controlling. I’m always trying to figure out what’s the line? But we’re kind of ships passing in the night here now, and knowing that he’s going to have to go out and deal with it himself… so it’s weird because I feel like a lot of spontaneity and our old relationship is gone right now because I’m trying not to manage, as his mother. That’s what mothers do, they keep kids safe, they help their kids with all kinds of things. They’re there when their kids need them. And to be told, “I don’t need you and you’re hurting me when you do this,” has been an eye opener. But we’re kind of making it work, and I’m going to respect him enough to listen to what he’s saying, and take him at his word. It’s hard, but that’s where we are with it right now.

Raul: I’m a little confused. You’re saying you’re taking alcohol boxes and smelling alcohol?

Ann: When he’s on a binge here, yes. He goes through sobriety phases. He had 15 days last week, then he left, got a ride to the city, and ended up binging there. But when he binges here, we have the problem with alcohol in the house, yes.

Jenn: And he’s usually doing that secretly right? Hanging out in his room?

Ann: Yeah, but sometimes he’ll come to us and say, “Take this away.” Not always, but sometimes he’ll come with a half full wine box and say, “Take this away.” But it’s only going to be another couple of weeks before he’s gone. So we’ll see how that goes.

Jenn: Well now that both boys are home – both their jobs ended because they were bought out by Google – so they came home after their leases were up. Their plan is to find new jobs, which my oldest was actually rehired by the job that was bought out by Google, so Google ended up hiring him back on. He starts Monday. So it’s just a matter of the youngest one finding a more consistent job than what he’s doing now, which is just door dashing here and there just to pay the couple of bills that he has. His health is a big concern. He cannot drink anymore. And it took this last stint for him to finally say, I’m not going to drink anymore. And we’ll see. I hope he means it. If not, I might not have a son at age 35, because his addiction is pretty bad. I’m just hopeful. And he’s been going through this for so long and he keeps trying, he keeps going to programs, he keeps going to the doctor. But when he does that he just hasn’t learned to put in the work like we do. We read books, we do zooms, we listen to podcasts, we do whatever it takes, we go to AA meetings if that’s what we’re doing. We put in the work daily to keep our head in the game of sobriety.

Steve: And we all got to that point on our own.

Jenn: Yeah, and it took me til about a few months ago to realize this is his journey. He’s got to do it.

Steve: It’s got to be incredibly hard to separate yourself from that. The maternal instinct draws you into trying to want to save, and make your nest his again. There’s so much emotion involved that it really… I’m listening to you all talk, and Derrick your father and your family, and Raul your son, Jenn your two sons and Ann your son. We’re all addicts. We all understand that this isn’t an easy journey. And we’ve all traveled our own, and it’s really hard to accept that they have to travel theirs too. As much as I know what my answers are, they’re not the same for them. They have to really find their way.

So tonight, we talked about how our addiction affects so many more than just us. It’s that ripple affect. Derrick you talked about it’s a family affair. Derrick you talked about how it’s okay to grieve someone that isn’t gone. Listening to all of you talk, it sounds like to get to that acceptance you have to go through a small grieving process. To think of that, “I have to let go.” That grieving of either enmeshment or codependency or wanting to save someone… it pulls at your heart strings.

Raul: One of the things that they say a lot in recovery is “Let go and let God.” Trust in the process. And for me, it was really hard. It got me depressed. But I’m coming out on the other side of this. I’m seeing changes for me, and one of the best shining things that I can do is when my son sees me, when we get together, he says, Dad, you look great! He can tell, like Jenn was talking about earlier. We can see – that light is a little bit dim on my son, and it’s sad to see. I know he’s still using and I know he’s still using. You can see it in people’s face. And for me to be showing up, to be there, to be the best example is the best thing that I can do. Show up, show up for myself, and if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen. But it is not my responsibility. It took me a long time to separate and draw that boundary and to let go. There is freedom, there’s a lot of different freedoms from active addiction. I still love him more than ever and he still knows that and has a lot of respect for me. And I just keep showing up for me. Sobriety speaks for itself. I don’t have to talk to him about it. He knows I’m there and I don’t have those conversations with him because like Steve said, they have to come to it on their own. And Derrick, talking about his dad. It’s sad, it’s really really sad. But when they talk about tough love, right? That – I love him that much that I’ll just get out of his way. Because I’m stifling his growth, I’m stifling his journey. And it’s the toughest thing I have to do. And I have been able to do it and I’ve actually found some peace over it.

Derrick: The last time I saw my dad, which was about a week ago, he was coming off the streets. Fentanyl, meth, he’s ready to get help, he looks like something out of Moses because he’s got such a beard. Reminds me of myself. We were sitting – the moment I sit down with him he says “You still love me?” I said, “Dad, I’m always gonna love you man. There’s just some paths I can’t take with you.” And that’s really hard. I heard that – if you take this path, guess what? We could have a relationship, we could do things together, we could love each other. But if you stay on this other path, I’ve got to stay at the crossroad. That’s really hard to tell him that, but I want him to hear that. That no matter what he’s doing, I will love him. I’ll show grace, I’ll always be there for him, I’ll be kind. I just can’t walk that path. But if he chooses this path, he gets his grandsons, he gets his kids, he gets his own life, his own spirituality his own healing. And it’s so uncomfortable but that path, I can take every step with you. So that was kind of a cool realization, the crossroads. And it’s hard to see loved ones after you tell them something like that, they’ll turn, and take the path you told them not to take. And you’re sitting there going, “Oh, man!” And that realization of how powerless, how helpless I am. And realizing that I have to take care of myself, do my own work, so when the time is right, I can show up as my best version to my father with healthy boundaries. With the love and respect I have for myself. Because right now, he’s taking that choice. And guess what, I’m calling him, I’m there for him, like how can I support you? Because I want him to know that this action, this choice that he’s making, will allow him to have his son in his life. And there’s power behind that.

Raul: I can totally relate to that pain and that love, Derrick.

Steve: Compassion. I’m listening to you guys and it’s like a dose of vitamin N. No. No, because that’s my boundary. And then love and compassion. You guys really helped close this right out for me. It’s just amazing, that compassion and love. Call it tough love, but really it’s just – I know where you’re at, I understand where you’re at, and I know there’s nothing I can do for you. It’s just great. It’s hard. But you know if they finally be with them on the other side. So I want to say thank you guys, for your time tonight, really appreciate your thoughts. Thanks for being here, Derrick, Raul, Jenn, and Ann, you guys were great, thank you so much.