Cindy, i'm also wondering the same thing. I know I have enabled my son during all this, but how do you turn off a mother's love?
My first alanon meeting talked about detachment & it sounded so cruel to turn your back on your child. Most of them had alcohol problems with a spouse which is why I never went to another meeting.
I'm looking for a good book on this subject-do you know of one? There is so many out there-too many choices.
I hope someone will respond to your question-as I feel I also need help with it.
Love & prayers,
Lydia

Dear Cindy

You release them with love and get into recovery yourself and educate yourself and then you will understand that the scales are not balanced, the odds are heavily against your enabling the loved one to death where if you let them hit bottom, they may have no other way but to get help.

My mother would tell me when my brother would get arrested and she would again bail him out, feed him, house him, that at least she knew where he was. He died from a overdose and nothing she did made it any better, in fact she kept him from facing consequences, which is the reason all of us here got clean and sober. Unfortunately threre are some that never get it. But you do not have the power to save anyone. You can however baby them into a premature death. Plus what it does to you and your family is not fair.

Love just as raising a child sometimes has to be tough love, or they will run all over you and never fit anywere or respect anyone.

Get into recovery, and not one meeting but go for a year then if you feel its not working don't go. I feel bad when someone says the meetings were this or that, and they see only negative. With 19 years I still only know a little, but I do know that people that go to meetings and stick it out do change, and so do their lives. People need to give the meetings and people a little credit that it does work but we had to work it.

Letting go of anyone you love is so hard. It runs counter to every instinct a parent has. When your child was learning to walk, at some point you stopped holding them up and they fell a couple of times. When they learned to ride a bike, you ran beside and held on, until you didn't and they probably fell a couple of times. There have been many times when for them to learn to do things for themselves, we have had to stand back.

When a baby is very young, and you are used to them waking up in the midddle of the night, when they stop you are so worried. Is there something wrong? You run to see if they are breathing. It is hard to start sleeping through the night and not checking because what if it isn't that they are asleep this night, what if they are in trouble, they need help. How horrible a parent would you be if you were asleep in the next room and your baby was not able to breath?

But you learned to sleep throught those nights. Now there is another point where you cannot help but worry, wonder what kind of a parent is asleep while their child is out there in pain? Only now, this child is grown. They are not a helpless baby. They can take care of themself, even if they do not want to.

When my parents let me fall, I was really pissed. I felt like we had a deal, I fuck up and you make it better. That's the way we do things. It took quite some time for it to sink that was no longer how things were going to go, and I tried really hard to get their attention and give them huge messes they would have alot of trouble ignoring, but in the end, I gave up. I gave in. I realized that I was sitting in a the mess of all messes, and I needed a realy big shovel. That was called sobriety.

None or it is easy, I know when people say it, it seems like it just rolls of our tongues and we think...just go do it. But everybody knows it isn't. But with each bit of wieght you throw off, it will get easier. Nobody expects anyone to ever stop worrying, but how much of your life it becomes is what is important. JMO

Thank you both very much. I am starting to catch on to the meaning. But it sure is not easy or comfortable. Love to all peace

Here are some very good guide lines if your like me I like to print them out and read them often.
Detachment with love is :
* Ability to allow people, places or things the freedom to be themselves.
* Holding back from the need to rescue, save or fix another person from being sick, dysfunctional or irrational.
* Giving another person "the space" to be herself.
* Disengaging from an over-enmeshed or dependent relationship with people.
* Willingness to accept that you cannot change or control a person, place or thing.
* Developing and maintaining of a safe, emotional distance from someone whom you have previously given a lot of power to affect your emotional outlook on life.
* Establishing of emotional boundaries between you and those people you have become overly enmeshed or dependent with in order that all of you might be able to develop your own sense of autonomy and independence.
* Process by which you are free to feel your own feelings when you see another person falter and fail and not be led by guilt to feel responsible for their failure or faltering.
* Ability to maintain an emotional bond of love, concern and caring without the negative results of rescuing, enabling, fixing or controlling.
* Placing of all things in life into a healthy, rational perspective and recognizing that there is a need to back away from the uncontrollable and unchangeable realities of life.
* Ability to exercise emotional self-protection and prevention so as not to experience greater emotional devastation from having hung on beyond a reasonable and rational point.
* Ability to let people you love and care for accept personal responsibility for their own actions and to practice tough love and not give in when they come to you to bail them out when their actions lead to failure or trouble for them.
* Ability to allow people to be who they "really are" rather than who you "want them to be."
* Ability to avoid being hurt, abused, taken advantage of by people who in the past have been overly dependent or enmeshed with

I need all the help I can get even my dogs run the show here. LOL

LOL Cinderella I know how those dogs can be I say off the couch turn my back their on the couch again.

I am an ex heroin addict. I am here to tell you that suboxone worked for me. I have been clean for 8 yrs.Thanx to the meds and therapy. So if he is taking them as prescribed let it be. It saved my life. It will get better.

Thank you Nikki, Tinker, Katrinka for your posts on detachment.
Also thank you Nicole for your post. I'm proud of you for being clean 8 yrs.-wonderful. I pray you'll always stay this way.
love & hugs

Thank you. I had a lot of support.Hang in there.

Clean for 8 years, Nicole! Congratulations. That's the kind of story I desperately need to hear as the mother of TWO heroin addicts. I'm so sick of the effects on MY life & I so desperately want them to get clean and stay clean. I, too, think Suboxone will work if an addict is serious about getting clean and willing to work at it and not just look at the Suboxone as another magic fix. That is, afterall, what got them addicted to start with.

i am a herion addict in recovery. i am on methadone and beleive it has saved my life several times.iwas hiper active as a child so my teachers sent me to a shrink with started me on drugs to calm me down witch i think sent me on my way to addiction. i have tryed to get off methadone before but everytime i do i relapse 2 months later.i have done better than i ever have in my life on meth started my own buisness but when i stopped it all came apart. so if he is doing good on it give him a break its alot better than the alternitive.

I have been taking Suboxone for 13 months, and it truly is a miracle solution for me. I had been addicted to drugs prescribed to me for severe back pain, and eventually was on over 120mg of Morphine a day and other drugs. If you go to an Addictionologist that offers a complete program of recovery, then you will be able to get off the medication within nine months. In my case, I still have chronic pain and must continue to take Suboxone. So.. a program of recovery means you must go to weekly group therapy sessions, attend either AA or NA meetings, work the 12 Steps, believe and rely on a Power greater than yourself and then help others who are still suffering. If you just go to a doctor who gives you the pills, then you are wasting your time and will drink and use drugs irresponsibly again. Suboxone is NOT methadone, it does not make you high!

My husband is an oxy addict also. He began a suboxone program about a month ago (through an MD) and he feels that it has helped him emensly. He is also in therapy and goes to NA meetings. He feels that, and I'm told that the combonation of the 3 help addicts get clean and stay clean.

I have also recognized, through going to a therapist and going to Al-anon meetings, that, that is his recovery, not mine. If the suboxone, NA Meetings and therapist help him, than that's his process.

And I need to work on my own recovery. I can only control myself and make my own choices. And my husband makes his own choices. If his choice is to be on suboxone vs. oxy pills, to me, that's a great decision. I'd much rather pay a copay for a prescription that pay ump-teen dollars for pills, running the risk of him getting arrested for illegal possession, not facing his problems because he's getting high, lying, cheating, stealing, etc...etc...

Told my pain doc that, after many years of one opiate pain med after another, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life dependent on some pill! The last Rx was for Opana, a time release version of Dilaudid. Now I've tapered to the smallest dose of Suboxone with minimal withdrawal, even when I miss a dose, while still treating my chronic pain - arthritis, etc. I'm 60 years old, and hope to have a lot of years without dependence. There are other ways to treat pain. I know that I may have to go back, but right now, I'm hopeful.