You Deserve a Better You

Busting Addiction and Its Myths

This article tackles the issue of what a family member or loved can do to liberate themselves from the ruinous obsession with someone else's addiction, which is, in reality, also the family disease.

1. The reality is that there is not much, if anything, you can do to change the trajectory of your loved one's disease, short of an intervention. Even then, there's no guarantee that it will stick.
2. If you don't address what the disease has done to your psyche, it won't matter whether your loved one cleans up or not. You will still be fearful, controlling, and resentful, unless you embark on the path of healing for yourself, and only for yourself.
3. The main illusion that drives this state of mind is the notion that we have any power over the disease, and we end up doing misguided things, and we believe these myths because we are so desperate to have this nightmare over with.
4. So the very first thing to get past the point of being stuck is to let go of old, ineffective ideas, and to adopt a new and healthy way of thinking.
5. We conclude in our desperation that we need to acquire some sort of power that could do for us what we haven't been able to do for ourselves.
6. Some of us find that power in our Al-Anon meetings where the collective wisdom of its members guides us to a new and liberated way of life which we have deserved all along.