The complex role of families in recovery
Families and addiction
Family relationships are often complicated at the best of times but can be so much harder when someone in the family uses drugs or alcohol. In this new blog series, we explore the challenging issues facing families who strive to stay together and overcome addiction. Future posts will discuss the benefits of family coaching – a form of counselling, the impact of family work in our services around the country and the role of the wider community as a nurturing, family environment for people in recovery. Today, we start with a poem.
Talking to families about recovery
Family support can really make a difference to people who want to beat addiction. But families can become caught up in a complex web of co-dependency that prevents them moving forward. When we begin to talk to families about recovery we often share this poem. Written by someone with experience of addiction, the poem explains that sometimes the best way for families to show their love may be to let go, stand back and let their loved one fall.
“Let Me Fall All By Myself”
If you love me let me fall all by myself, don’t try to set the net out to catch me.
Don’t throw a pillow under my ass to cushion the pain so I don’t have to feel it.
Don’t stand in a place where I am going to land so that you can break the fall, allowing yourself to get hurt instead of me.
Let me fall down as far as my addiction is going to take me.
Let me walk the valley alone, let me reach the bottom of the pit.
Trust that there is a bottom, somewhere, even if you can’t see it.
The sooner you stop saving me from myself, stop rescuing me, trying to fix my brokenness, trying to understand me to a fault, enabling me, the sooner you allow me to feel the loss and consequences, the burden of my addiction on my shoulders and not on yours, the sooner I will arrive, and on time, just right where I need to be.
Me, alone, all by myself in the rubble of the lifestyle I lead.
Resist the urge to pull me out because that will only put me back at square one.
If I am allowed to stay at the bottom and live there for a while, I am free to get sick of it on my own.
Free to begin, to want out. Free to look for a way out. Free to plan how I will climb back to the top.
In the beginning as I start to climb out, I might just slide back down, but don’t worry I might have to hit the bottom a couple more times before I make it out safe and sound.
Don’t you see? Don’t you know? You can’t do this for me. I have to do it for myself.
But if you are always breaking the fall, how am I ever supposed to feel the pain that’s part of the driving force to want to get well. It is my burden to carry, not yours.
I know you love me and that you mean well, and a lot of what you do is because you don’t know what to do and you act from your heart not from knowledge of what is best for me.
But if you truly love me let me go my own way, make my own choices be they good or bad.
Don’t clip my wings before I can learn to fly.
Nudge me out of your safety net, trust the process and pray for me, that one day I will not only fly, but maybe even soar.
– Author unknown
Help with addiction
You may be the relative or close friend of someone with an addiction or you may be worried about the impact of your own addiction on the people you love. So it is important to know that you can get help and that families can and do emerge from addiction stronger, happier and healthier. If this poem, feels like your first step on the way to family recovery please reach out to get help.
