You Can’t Break Up With Your Family

Realising there is a problem versus accepting that there is a problem are, unfortunately, two very different things. Living with someone in active addiction will have you circling the five stages of grief more times than you can count.

From my lived experience, you cannot help someone who firstly does not see that they have a problem, and secondly does not want to get help or change.

Loving someone in active addiction can look like hiding cash in odd places, hoping that they won’t find it. It can look like constantly checking their phone, changing your banking passwords and making sure of their whereabouts every day. It can look like taking them to the police station to be questioned by a detective over a missing phone, and watching that questioning turn into an arrest because despite their claims of not knowing what happened to the phone, there is video footage showing them stealing it. It can also look like going through your daughter’s birthday presents to write thank-you notes, and realising her R500 gift voucher is gone.

Addiction does not only affect the person using. It changes relationships, finances, trust, routines and the emotional lives of everyone involved.

As in most romantic partnerships, my instinct was to go above and beyond, to try and fix things. But I am not a trained professional, and with hindsight, I can see that my help only made things much worse. There’s a thin, blurry line between helping and enabling, and in romantic relationships, even the best intentions can lose sight of it.

That blurring, however, is not unique to romance. Seeing a loved one in the grip of addiction can make even the most level-headed person act out of character in the effort to try to save them. But in all that trying, what happens to the people caught in between?

In my situation it meant letting my ex-partner spend the weekend in a holding cell, and when the theft charges were dropped, taking them to a halfway house where they could rebuild their life with the help and expertise of professionals. That decision ended the relationship and I was free. But addiction doesn’t stay contained to romantic relationships.

It’s a controversial statement to make, but you can’t break up with your family. So where is the line between helping your loved one and protecting them from the consequences of their own behaviour?

The following account is shared by an aunt detailing her nephew’s ongoing struggle with drug addiction. She has been granted anonymity to protect her family’s privacy and shield her nephew from further social stigma during his recovery.

For the aunt, the early stages of her nephew’s drug use were difficult to recognise as addiction because the warning signs presented themselves as the behaviour of a “naughty child” who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. As she explains it, this lack of understanding meant that the family’s ability to intervene in the beginning was limited not by unwillingness, but by not understanding what they were actually looking at and dealing with.

Because the family is geographically separated (she is in KwaZulu-Natal and her sister’s family is in the Eastern Cape) she didn’t experience the daily realities of her nephew’s addiction in the same way as his parents did but once the situation became clearer, her role changed from simply offering emotional support to her sister to actively helping her nephew. She encouraged his parents to send him to rehabilitation and, afterwards, opened her own home to him, hoping to keep him away from the toxic environment that had shaped his habits. She also arranged support groups and counselling with a psychologist.

What she learned though, perhaps the hard way, is that removing someone from a place doesn’t remove the addiction from them. “I did not notice anything strange until my helper saw him smoking weed,” she says. “That’s when I realised that we still have a problem.” She moved him again, to a cousin, but he continued smoking there as well.

Although weed has now become legalised and people are known to use it for various reasons including its health benefits, for a person who struggles with substance abuse it can look like simply switching one vice for another and in some cases it can even lead to relapse. According to the National Library of Medicine, whilst the use of weed as a “gateway” drug to harder substances remains scientifically unproven, research has shown a correlation between the two if not direct causation.

Having exhausted all the help that she and her family could offer, the aunt ultimately suggested her nephew return to his parents, telling him that he could come back once he’d decided what kind of life he wanted to live. This was not an easy decision for her to make but she also had to think about protecting her young children in the household from being exposed to his behaviour. “I felt bad that we were unable to help him recover. But for the sake of my family’s well-being I had to let him go.”

What she wishes had existed earlier wasn’t a program or an institution, but vigilance, the kind that catches changes before they turn into crisis. “Parents need to be firm with their children and monitor them very closely,” she says. “Any change of behaviour should be followed up on until you figure out the cause.”

Despite her nephew’s setbacks, the aunt still believes recovery is possible with the right support and intervention. “The journey to recovery is unique for everyone,” she says. “For some it’s a straight line; for others it’s a zigzag.”

Her family’s story raises the same question mine does, just from a different angle — not only where the line is between helping and enabling, but whether there’s a way to intervene before families ever have to find that line at all.