The following addendum was originally written to accompany the Starting Over workbook, an 11-session addiction recovery program. It’s intended for those with skin in the game, the loved ones, friends, and family navigating the painful and uncertain road of addiction in someone they care about.

If you live in constant fear of the next phone call or what may be around the corner, my hope is that these reflections, drawn from years of working in small group recovery settings, can offer comfort and direction.

Desire vs. Chemical Hooks

Many believe drugs contain “chemical hooks,” powerful forces that hijack willpower after a single use. While there’s truth in that, it’s only part of the story. The deeper hook of addiction is desire. The addict is constantly confronted with vivid memories of how good it feels.

Without firsthand experience, it’s easy to underestimate how powerfully drugs can relieve pain. In addition to feeling pleasurable, they can feel empowering. Life can feel dull, diminished, and burdensome without them. Put simply, once you’ve experienced something while high, it’s hard to find the same experience satisfying while sober.

In short, it is difficult to communicate the willpower needed to use drugs like heroin only once; they are just that yummy.

An Addict Who Chooses Not to Use

A central theme in the Starting Over program is the phrase: an addict who chooses not to use. This continued state of choosing sobriety is what recovery strives toward. Addiction changes the person struggling with it. The addict will either be using or fighting not to use, because the middle ground of a truce with addiction is gone.

The addict can’t erase the past or the memories, but in a new and purpose-filled future, they can learn to live above them. They can recognize those memories, urges, and desires but refuse to satisfy them. This refusal creates a tension—a dissonance—between what they want and what they choose. Learning to create a meaningful and fulfilling life within that discomfort is how they become an addict who chooses not to use.

It’s a choice made daily, hourly, and even moment by moment to keep the momentum of recovery.

Nature Hates a Vacuum

For recovery to take hold, simply not using isn’t enough. Nature hates a vacuum. When the addict removes addiction, they must fill that space with something greater, including new desires, new purpose, and a new future. If they love being high, it is essential to discover another healthier love that speaks to them just as loudly or louder than their addiction.

For many addicts, it feels like there is only one choice: to keep using. Long-term recovery depends on discovering new choices that speak to the same deep longings that drugs and alcohol once did. Our role is to help the addict we love imagine again, dream again, and recover not just from, but toward something greater.

A Diagnostic Gift

But how do you help someone if you’ve never struggled with addiction yourself?

It begins with humility. You may not have walked in their shoes, but many of us carry our own forms of denial, including socially acceptable habits or artfully camouflaged ways we learn to deal with life and living. With artful self-interest, we cling to anger, sadness, anxiety, and depression, justifying it, excusing it, and medicating it. From alcohol to pot to porn, many of us practice addictive, habitual behaviors, evading the painful reasons why. We numb our pain rather than use its diagnostic gift to unlock deeper truths that could lead to lasting happiness.

Step one of AA is an acknowledgement. Can you acknowledge your own habits and blind spots? If not, then how can you truly support someone on a journey you haven’t begun yourself? Recovery begins with empathy, rooted in honest awareness that healing takes work from all of us.  

When Helping Becomes Hurting

Understanding the Limits of Help

Helping someone through addiction can be difficult, especially if you haven’t lived it yourself. The mental gymnastics it takes to let go of something that once brought so much comfort can be impossible to grasp from the outside. Even sincere efforts like mandates, incentives, and directives can make things worse.

On the other hand, support from within the community of the addicted isn’t always effective either. Every addict still carries disguised self-interest and denial. Even in recovery, they battle an inner voice that still makes sense of destructive behaviors.

Blending Perspectives

Loved ones need a third path. Without help, the addict can’t pull themselves out of the hole they’re in. They need someone outside the hole who can see clearly and stay grounded. But the helper must also respect what it feels like inside the hole. Neither perspective is complete on its own. When recovery is guided by both clear-headed accountability and lived understanding, something powerful happens.

Recovery works best in a community of addicts who choose not to use and those who choose to walk beside them.

Mutual humility, listening, and shared limitations allow that community to function.

When You May be Disqualified

The family and friends of the addict feel the pain and heartbreak of addiction acutely. Years of bad behavior, including deception, betrayal, and attacks, have left families and friendships in ruins. The journey of those who love the addict often leaves them as broken and disillusioned as the addict.

To have any possibility of success, recovery requires a new beginning, a clean slate each time the addict strives to attain sobriety. Because it can often be too much to ask family and friends of the addict to give the benefit of a doubt, allow a do-over, and forgive, they can’t always provide what recovery requires. At the same time, constantly revisiting painful memories can cause more damage, pushing the addict further away from the vital connectedness needed.

It is understandably difficult, especially for parents, to admit that they cannot help and protect the ones they love. But sometimes, the best way to help is to step back, especially if you’ve found your presence is part of the cycle. Recovery requires a clean slate, and it’s okay to admit if you can’t offer that right now.

Pay It Forward

Even if you can’t help the one you love right now, you’re not alone. Others are facing the same struggle. And maybe you can reach someone else. Wouldn’t you pray for someone to reach your loved one in a moment of openness, free from history and heartbreak?

You may not be able to help your person, but you can help someone else’s. And that still matters.

This kind of “paying it forward” is of enormous value. It creates new relationships and restores connections. It gives us a way to participate in recovery’s solution without becoming part of the problem. It offers a fresh start for someone else, and maybe, eventually, for us too.

Most importantly, it helps us see addiction for what it really is: a human problem, not just our family’s burden.

When the addict steps out from behind closed doors and into community, they trade isolation for hope, and that changes everything.

From Enabling to Empowerment

Isolation

Addiction craves and feeds off isolation. Like mold in darkened corners, it shuns honest, open dialogue. Often, the addict’s isolation is the fruit of fear and a defense against abandonment and rejection by those they love and trust.

As a defense, addiction will:

• Advocate for and orchestrate a preemptive strike, rejecting others before they can reject the addict
• Create isolation to reduce any threat to continued use

The addict minimizes the perceived pain of rejection or abandonment by removing that possibility.

This helps us understand the vital and lifesaving role empowerment plays. Empowerment is fearless in a relentless pursuit of relationship, compassion, and connectedness with the addict. Empowerment becomes the lifeline addicts use to travel back into the light through honest, open dialogue.

Enabling vs. Empowerment

Enabling promotes isolation.

Empowerment celebrates connectedness.

Enabling is the dark side of empowerment.

Empowerment is a requirement of recovery.

Like a pair of gloves, one left-handed and one right, they may look alike but serve opposite purposes. Enabling encourages addiction and empowerment encourages recovery through connectedness and relationships.

Enabling presents as:

• actions and the absence of communication (e.g., doing things that should not be done and avoiding confrontational conversations)
• using generalities, ambiguous or unrealistic deadlines, and threats

Empowerment is revealed through:

• inaction and direct, specific, honest communication (e.g., refusing to do something inappropriate and instead insisting on direct, honest communication)
• being unafraid, speaking clearly, and holding others responsible for specific, practical outcomes

Enabling says, “I need you to call my boss and tell him I’m too sick to work.” Empowerment says, “No.”

Enabling says, “Don’t let the neighbors know.” Empowerment says, “I already told them, and we are all praying for you.”

Enabling says, “I’ll be home when I get home.” Empowerment says, “Curfew is at 10 p.m., after that the door is locked, and no amount of ringing the bell will get you in.”

Enabling says, “I need you to drive me to the store today.” Empowerment says, “I will be happy to take you tomorrow when I am going.”

Enabling says, “I will be ready for my ride home between six and eight.” Empowerment says, “I will be leaving for home at 5:30, whether you are there or not.”

Enabling says, “I will move out if you don’t give me what I need.” Empowerment says, “You cannot stay if you are using.”

Enabling says, “The cops will arrest you, too, if they find drugs in the house.” Empowerment says, “I called the police, and they are on their way.”

Enabling says, “Leave me alone.” Empowerment says, “Let’s talk.”

Enabling encourages destructive, addictive behavior. It supports or ignores the addict’s dysfunction, shielding them from the consequences of their words, decisions, and actions. It yields to threats of disconnection and often comes from fear – fear of conflict, of losing love, or of the social anxiety of what others might think.

Enabling can look like:

• Ignoring drug use to avoid an argument
• Prioritizing the addict’s needs over others’
• Making excuses or covering for harmful behavior

The Problem of Resentment

One of the clearest signs of enabling is resentment.

Ask yourself: How do I feel about my loved one who is struggling with addiction?

If the answer is mostly hostility, anger, or pain, or if you feel used, unappreciated, or taken advantage of, it may be that, without realizing it, you’ve become part of the problem.

The Baby and the Bath Water

Discerning the balance between enabling and empowerment takes time and patience and a willingness to get it wrong on the road to getting it right. A temptation for family and friends can be to “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” In the fight against enabling, they sometimes abandon not just the harmful enabling patterns, but also the compassion, connection, and communication of empowerment. In our frustration we opt for a scorched-earth, all-or-nothing strategy instead of a more deliberate empowering approach.

This more deliberate empowering approach is what binds the addict to the real world. They’re the anchors that make recovery possible. Severing them doesn’t stop addiction but strengthens its hold, leaving the addict feeling more isolated and hopeless than ever.

Empowerment says, “I love you even though you like being high.”

Empowerment says, “I like being with you when you are sober.”

Empowerment says, “I am here for you when you are ready to talk.”

Empowerment says, “You can stay as long as you are sober.”

Empowerment is not yielding to requests for assistance or prioritizing the needs of the addict due to drug use or delaying consequences.

Empowerment is not maintaining the status quo.

Empowerment is not avoiding hard conversations.

Empowerment sees the long-term aspects of addiction and rejects short-term remedies.

Empowerment focuses on love for the addict, even though the addiction is despised.

Empowerment sees into the future, beyond addiction, into a new and better way of living.

Empowerment works through and beyond the pain and heartbreak.

Empowerment realizes that offenses are generally not personal but the fruit of addiction.

Empowerment is releasing the addict from their past, forgiving offenses to pave the way to a new future.

Empowerment is doubling down on connection.

The Final Word

No discussion on enabling would be complete without addressing “the final word,” a form of enabling, which becomes a cycle of destructive communication.

The objective of addiction is to stop the conversation and disrupt any communication that may threaten drug use. Loved ones enable by engaging in and inviting an embattled need for the last word.

Empowerment is to speak your position clearly, rationally, honestly, and with as little emotion as circumstance will allow. Hold your loved one responsible for what you have said, regardless of whether it is the last word or not. Addiction loves to fight. Do not enable addiction’s debate, through argumentation.

Following are examples of common forms of enabling and how loved ones can lean into empowerment to overcome them.

Practical Examples: Enabling vs. Empowerment

Time, Patience, and the Number

How Much Is Enough?

A frustrated family member once asked, “How much is enough?”

My answer, “more,” didn’t sit well with him. But that is the truth. Recovery is not a single event. It is an ongoing process. Hoping for a defining moment of guaranteed change will only lead to disappointment.

Addiction does not simply go away. Even in recovery, it remains something the addict must continually choose not to satisfy. That reality is not an excuse for harmful behavior. It is a call to support recovery through compassion, humility, and genuine connection.

Time and Patience

We often look for fast solutions. We want a pill, a program, a book, or a breakthrough that will make everything better. But addiction is not something that can be fixed with a single step.

It took many poor decisions to reach this point, and it will take just as many better ones to build a new path. Recovery is slow and uneven. It is shaped by setbacks as much as by success.

Addiction forms over time. Recovery requires time as well. A 30-day rehab may help, but it cannot erase years of self-destruction. Addiction often grows with the help of others, whether intentionally or not. Recovery needs the same kind of support from a community that believes in change and is willing to walk the long road together.

Tests That Teach

A baby learns to walk by falling. In the same way, failure teaches us how to move forward. Setbacks, shame, and struggle are not proof that recovery is out of reach. They are building blocks. They carry insight, and they shape the way forward.

These tests can offer valuable insight, not as proof of failure, but as part of the journey towards long-lasting recovery. Rather than clinging to a scholastic model of thinking “pass or fail,” supporters and loved ones can view the outcome of these trials the way a doctor views a blood test, using them for their diagnostic value, charting a new course toward better outcomes. Each test then becomes the beginning of success. Failures must be welcomed as the building blocks of a new, redefined, and reinvented future.

“I’ve Got Your Number”

Over the years, I’ve asked many people in recovery, “When did things start to change for you?” Their stories vary, but one detail often stays the same. There is always a number.

They might say, “After my fifth time in rehab,” or “When I left prison for the second time.” That number is personal. It is different for everyone. But it’s always there.

What is the number that fills the blank for your loved one or family member? Each time a loved one shows compassion and patience, they can reduce that number by one, hoping someday to reach that final number the addict needs to remain drug-free. Are you willing to wait for that number? Are you willing to concede that they may be closer to that number than you think? Are you willing to risk that it is not “this time?” When we think of programs like rehab, often we consider them as “once and done,” or “We tried that, and it did not work.” Addiction requires us to think differently. The addict is changed with each experience in sobriety. Each day, living without self-medication becomes a tool that can be used in recovery. Every time the addict says, “This time it will be different,” they may be right.