With a loved one's addiction, 'guilt offers the illusion of hope'

And why it's so hard to accept powerlessness.

Sunset at Laguna Madre, a hypersaline bay in South Texas.

It’s been two days since I’ve heard from a sibling of mine, who is currently in the throes of severe addiction.

For anyone who’s been in my situation, you know what this means: I feel worried — and I feel guilty. Worried for the worst. Guilty for not doing “more.”

This pattern has become common the past few months. With each relapse, I start worrying: Is he OK? Is he alive? I also wrestle with what, if anything, I should do. Inaction feels like indifference.

I didn’t really understand this one-two punch of worry and guilt until I came across this recent article in Psychology Today titled “What Guilt Is Really Trying to Tell You” by David Prucha, LPC.

As he writes:

“There’s something quietly desirable about guilt. It feels active. Guilt gives us a sense of agency, a feeling that if we try harder or research more, we can change what happens. It tells us we can make a difference.

Our guilt hides hope within it.”

If you’ve ever tried to help someone suffering with severe mental illness and/or addiction, you know all too well the layers of guilt that can grip you in the middle of the night.

There’s the obvious interpersonal guilt (am I doing enough?), but also stuff like survivor‘s guilt (how did I escape this?) and participatory guilt (why did I give him money?). It can feel endless, because it is. Unless we find a way to move beyond it, which isn’t much fun, either.

“When guilt leaves us with nowhere left to turn, we find ourselves staring at something we like even less: the feeling of powerlessness,” Prucha says.

And it’s true: Feeling powerless sucks. It’s admitting defeat, and all the cliches around it, from throwing in the towel to beating a dead horse to waving the white flag to abandoning ship.

More than grief, it’s a violation of values

Accepting powerlessness over your loved one’s addiction is more than just accepting loss. Letting go can feel like violating every personal value you hold true. If you yourself have ever been abandoned, for example, it can feel almost impossible to do that to someone you love, to inflict that level of pain (even the fact that I’m using the word “abandon” reveals how painful this journey is for me).

And if you consider yourself a compassionate person, and your loved one has run out of money for basic items like soap, you buy the damn soap.

How can you not? What kind of monster are you?

Toxic optimism in the recovery community

And that’s just the internal pressures. There’s plenty of external messaging telling you to stay on the sinking ship and put down the white flag. Like the recovery community itself, which pleads with loved ones to remember there is always hope. Across the internet, you’ll see this refrain repeated over and over, mostly from addiction treatment centers, which of course have a financial stake in keeping loved ones motivated to help.

While that mantra is meant to be inspiring, for those of us with a loved one suffering from end-stage addiction, it can feel toxic, akin to gaslighting. (I should note here that the substance abuse counselors I know directly are not toxically optimistic, but they’re also not exactly going to tell me to give up hope.)

What I’ve wanted is instead a more scientific assessment of the situation; a prognosis of sorts, not a trite encouragement to never give up. Just like I can input my medical history into a cardiac risk calculator to determine my risk of heart disease, I’d like to do the same for my loved one’s odds of recovery. It would go a long way in helping me determine what kind of expectations are actually reasonable, and from that, I can plan more accordingly.

Turning to my ‘peers’ for a reality check

As an antidote to this well-intended but toxic optimism, I often turn to r/AlAnon subreddit, where people will not bullshit you about the odds. (The counterpart to AA, AlAnon is a global support group for loved ones of alcoholism.)

In this community, I learn what the recovery community is perhaps scared to say: Sometimes rock-bottom is death. It’s also comforting to know there are many people out there who know firsthand the brutal sensory experience of stepping into a space occupied by an end-stage alcoholic, an experience that can occupy your every waking thought yet is not permissible to discuss around the water cooler or during your kid’s volleyball game.

The heartbreaking stories of AlAnon make for perhaps the bleakest corner of the internet, and yet, it has become a second home to me, filling the need for honesty and relatability that I’m not getting from the “experts.”

Sometimes the internet is a digital wasteland, but this community has been invaluable.

An update

Since I started this post, my family member came up for air, and checked into inpatient treatment (again). So the tiny window of hope remains: Maybe this time sobriety will stick?

But if it doesn’t—and it probably won’t—I will come back to where I am now: One foot in the murky water, and one foot on shore, getting ready to dry both feet off.

On a random happier note

There is nothing I repeat NOTHING cuter than a baby beaver.

---

This newsletter is my labor of love for prickly people. If you enjoy my writing, please support my work and buy me a coffee. ☕️🤎🌵