I get a lot of sad emails and calls from parents who want to help their children get sober. Their words are dripping with pain.
And, of course, it's natural for them to want to help their children. I think we all want to help our children as much as possible, whether they're addicts or not.
But the reality is that parents and loved ones are a lot more interested in sobriety and recovery than those they're trying to help. Probably out of every 10 contacts people make to ask for help with recovery, nine of them are family members or friends trying to be helpful.
There are rare occasions when an addict has had so many bad experiences that they will come directly to us for help. But the bulk of referrals come from parents, husbands, wives, girlfriends, prison counselors or parole officers.
While there are no bad reasons to get help, I think the help that we benefit from the most is the help that we seek on our own. I know that in my own case people were trying to help me with my drug problems from the time I was a teenager. Parents, wives, counselors, parole officers, they all suggested that I could benefit from sobriety.
Yet, what it took for me finally want to change is that I kept losing everything over and over. That includes my freedom, marriages, businesses, friendships – everything I valued - all for the sake of my addiction.
When I finally reached my bottom, when I was homeless and stealing every day to survive and to provide for my addictions, that's when I cried out for the kind of help has kept me sober for over 28 years. I think that when we run out of people to blame, people to help us, that's when we realize the seriousness of our addiction.
Only when I had nowhere else to turn, did I find a halfway house that would take me with no money. And the day I made that decision, is the day that I changed my life.
