Summary: The reason most parents are afraid of sending their adult child to addiction rehab is a combination of emotions that revolve around fear of the unknown.
Key Points:
- If your adult child has an alcohol or drug addiction problem, lives at home, and needs addiction treatment, you may be surprised by the emotions you feel when it’s time to take the step and place them in a residential addiction rehab program.
- Even though you know, intellectually and logically, that it’s the right thing for them and for you, decades of dysfunctional relationship patterns may make you feel like it’s not the right thing to do at all.
- You may have grown comfortable – unconsciously – in your role of enabling their addiction: in most cases, enabling feels like helping, rather than harming.
- Accepting and understanding your need to grow and change in your relationship with your adult child may be as frightening for you as accepting the need to go to addiction rehab – and committing to it – is for them.
What’s There to Be Afraid Of?
You may fear losing:
- Your child.
- Your child’s love for you.
- Your identity and role as parent and caregiver.
- Your reason for living.
- The comfort and familiarity of the current relationship and family dynamic.
You may be afraid of sending your adult child to addiction rehab out of fear of losing all those things – even a family relationship dynamic you may know is neither healthy nor productive. However, when you learn to move past that fear – though it may be comfortable and familiar – you learn that what you gain has the potential to be deeper, healthier versions of all the things you fear losing.
To understand what we mean by that, we’ll share a definition of recovery published recently by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in a resource called “Navigating Mental Health and Substance Use Care: An Introductory Guide for Families.”
We’ll share the definition of recovery they provide in a moment. First, a disclaimer:
We want you to read it as if everything applies directly to your role in their addiction. If you fear sending them to rehab, the likelihood is very high that as much as they need to recover from addiction, you, yourself, need to recover – i.e. reassess/reevaluate/rebuild – from your role in enabling their addictive patterns and behavior.
What is Recovery – For Them and For You?
Here’s the SAMHSA definition:
“Recovery is a process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential.”
If your adult child lives at home and is currently in active addiction, meaning they engage in addictive behavior and the disordered use of alcohol or drugs while living with you, then please consider the fact that you may also need to improve your health and wellness and learn to live a self-directed life. It’s likely that in providing them a safe and protected environment where they continue drinking or using drugs, you yourself are not living a self-directed life, but rather a life directed by their alcohol and drug use, where you trade what you know is right for the familiarity of the status quo.
That’s not healthy for you or for them, which means recovery can benefit both of you, and the rest of your family.
In addition, SAMHSA identifies four areas of life that promote a successful recovery:
- Health. Making educated choices related to alcohol/drug use, eating habits, sleep habits, exercise and activity, and stress management.
- Home. A stable, recovery friendly environment that promotes health and wellness.
- Purpose. Reconnecting to meaningful aspects of life such as work, school, hobbies, a social life, self-esteem, and independence.
- Community. A robust family and social network that offers healthy and sustaining qualities like compassion, understanding, and love.
We’ll offer a hard truth here, which we encourage you to hear in a way that moves the conversation toward the benefit of everyone involved: you, your adult child with addiction, and your family and any friends close enough to fully understand your situation and circumstances. Here’s what many parents afraid of sending their adult child to addiction rehab need to hear:
If you allow your adult child with an addiction problem to live at home and continue drinking alcohol and using drugs, then one thing we encourage you to recognize is the possibility that you’re preventing them from experiencing real recovery and promoting the opposite of those four key life components that promote recovery.
In other words, rather than loving them to health and wellness, you may be prolonging their pain and suffering – and yours, too.
Wisdom From the Old Timers
If you go to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting or an Al-Anon meeting with peers with years of recovery behind them in attendance, they’d probably pull no punches, drop the sugar-coating, and say something just like this:
“What you’re doing is loving them to death.”
That’s hard to hear. Believe us, we get it. We’ve been on both sides of this situation. We’ve been the people our parents enabled and didn’t need to change because of it.
We wore golden handcuffs and welcomed the soft landing.
We’ve been the parents driven by love to soften fall and enabled addiction in our teenage and adult children. By not helping them find the path toward change, we ended up prolonging and entrenching the dysfunctional dynamic that allows addiction to flourish.
We provided golden handcuffs and made the bed for that soft landing.
Golden is, of course, a metaphor. You don’t have to be rich to enable your child or accept help from parents. But that’s beside the point. Here’s the question hidden behind the behaviors we’re talking about:
Why would anyone every prolong their child’s pain – and their own – when what they want to do is love them, provide for them, and protect them?
In most cases, the answer is fear. We don’t change what we know because of fear. We list five reasons you may be afraid of sending your adult child to addiction rehab above, but there are other fears at play, too.
Common Fears for Parents Afraid of Sending an Adult Child to Addiction Rehab
Things you may fear:
- Experiencing the unknown. What will life look like when you don’t need to take care of them. Who will you be? Who will they be when they’re in recovery and beyond?
You can’t know any of those answers ahead of time. You have to accept the risk of losing what you know in order to learn what’s possible.
- Feeling guilt for your behavior and responsibility for theirs. When you realize you may have contributed to their ongoing addiction, you may feel – and fear – an overwhelming sense of guilt that it’s all your fault. It’s not. You may also feel responsible for their actions. You’re not.
In order to move forward, forgiving yourself for things that have happened in the past and letting go of your sense of responsibility for the behavior of your adult child – in the past, present, and future – is essential.
- The grief that comes with loss. You and your adult child may lose the relationship you had before they went to addiction rehab. You may also lose the people you were while your child was in active addiction, before they went to addiction rehab.
It can be extremely difficult to realize you may need to reevaluate who you are in your relationship with your child and accept that you may need to build an entirely new way of parenting them and being the person they need. It may be equally difficult – and scary – to realize that your child will change when they begin their recovery journey, and you don’t know what those changes will bring.
It’s okay to mourn the loss of the people you were, because it opens up the possibility of loving the people you can become.
- There’s a significant amount of stigma around addiction, which means other people judge you and your child because of their problems with addiction. You may even judge yourself and judge your child for your situation, which may cause you to feel shame and embarrassment.
Remember: addiction is a chronic, relapsing medical condition that responds to evidence-based treatment. Developing a medical condition and seeking treatment for it is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is having a child with a medical condition who seeks treatment for that condition. Stigma around addiction is based on a misunderstanding of what addiction is: a disease of brain and behavior. We don’t stigmatize and judge people with other chronic, relapsing medical conditions or diseases, and there’s no reason to stigmatize and judge people with addiction.
- That sending your adult child to rehab won’t work and won’t change anything. We’ll be honest: not everyone succeeds at achieving long-term recovery and sustainable sobriety. However, when you and your adult child – and any other relevant family members or loved ones – commit to and participate in the treatment process, the chances of a positive outcome improve dramatically.
The risks are real. Unsuccessful rehab, relapse, and ongoing problems may all be part of the recovery journey. The only way for your adult child to know if they can meet their recovery goals is by committing to treatment and recovery. And the only way for you to know if you can face your fears and grow and change is to commit to the process of recovery, yourself.
We’ll discuss this list further, below.
Parallel Healing Journeys With One Common Goal
We want to be clear that you can’t recover for your child. They need to do the heavy lifting of recovery for themselves. If they don’t, they’re unlikely to internalize the lessons sufficiently. They need to want to change in order to make real change in their life. Your job, as a parent, in this context, is to give them the space to change. You can give them the time and space to try, to fail, to not be caught by you every time they fall, and to let them learn to pick themselves up after they fall.
Some of the changes your adult child will make are beyond your control. The changes you make, though, are within your control. You can change enabling behaviors – learn more in our article “How Do I Know If I’m Enabling Addiction?” – and you can create boundaries that protect your health and wellness while allowing them to do the work that improves theirs. You can set boundaries without abandoning them, you can say “No” while still loving them unconditionally, and you can embrace the promise of hope committing to recovery offers.
While they heal, you heal, and when they learn the skills they need to live a healthy and productive life, you can be ready with the skills you need to support them on their recovery journey. Here are several ways you can help yourself either before, during, or after you send your adult child to addiction rehab.
How to Take Care of You
- Attend Al-Anon meetings. These are designed to support people with family members, friends, or loved ones with alcohol use disorder, a.k.a. alcohol addiction.
- Seek professional support. This can help you work through your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors related to your adult child going to addiction rehab. It’s important for you to have your own safe space and know you’re getting expert support for the challenges you face in this situation.
- Talk to friends, go out with friends, engage in social activities, and reconnect with the aspects of your life you may have neglected while your focus was on your adult child.
- Do new things. While you’re rediscovering who you are, try things you’ve always wanted to try. You can take a yoga class, take a writing class, volunteer for a cause, or simply take a break from the responsibilities you’ve taken on. For instance, you may, for the first time in years, have the time to take an afternoon nap.
- Be kind and extend yourself grace. This may be a very difficult time for you. Acknowledge that, and treat yourself with compassion, patience, and understanding.
We’ll close with this last reminder:
You can heal and your child can heal. The sooner you start the journey from where you are to where you want to be, the sooner you can create a full, healthy, and fulfilling life for yourself – and your entire family.
