The Roller Coaster I Never Chose
One of the hardest things I have ever had to learn is that there is a difference between loving a person and participating in their crisis.
For a long time, I didn’t know that difference.
When someone you love has severe alcohol use disorder, every day can feel like a hostage situation. Your happiness becomes tied to their sobriety. If they’re doing well, you can breathe. If they’re drinking, you can’t. If they’re in the hospital, you’re in the hospital emotionally right along with them.
You live on a roller coaster you never bought a ticket for.
I got so used to monitoring, worrying, predicting, and preparing that I developed a relationship with the addiction itself. Not with my son. With his addiction.
That’s a difficult thing to admit.
I thought I was being a good mother.
In reality, I had become tangled up in something I couldn’t control.
There were times when people close to him would provide updates. Sometimes they were trying to help. Sometimes they thought I deserved to know. But eventually I realized that hearing the blow-by-blow details of every crisis wasn’t helping anyone.
“The ambulance is there.”
“They won’t answer the door.”
“He’s back in the hospital.”
“I don’t know if he’s okay.”
None of that information changed what I could do.
What it did change was my mental health.
I began to understand something that isn’t talked about enough:
secondhand trauma is real.
When a loved one repeatedly cycles through addiction, relapse, hospitalizations, emergencies, and chaos, the people around them accumulate damage too.
We don’t talk about that very much.
We talk about the person with the addiction. Rightly so.
But there are also parents, partners, siblings, and friends sitting nearby, absorbing shock wave after shock wave and trying to keep functioning.
When Boundaries Feel Like Abandonment
Eventually I had to draw a line.
My boundary wasn’t punishment.
My boundary wasn’t anger.
My boundary wasn’t rejection.
My boundary was protection.
I decided I could no longer participate in active crises. I could not be the emergency contact for every emergency. I could not spend my evenings waiting for updates and my nights imagining worst-case scenarios.
I could still love my son.
I could still answer the phone.
I could still support recovery.
But I could not continue sacrificing my own emotional health to an illness I couldn’t cure.
That was one of the most painful realizations of my life.
Because when you’re a parent, especially when you’ve spent years trying to save someone, stepping back feels like abandonment.
It isn’t.
It is acceptance.
At least, that’s what I believe now.
At the time, it didn’t feel healthy. It didn’t feel wise. It certainly didn’t feel brave.
It felt cruel.
It felt selfish.
It felt like the kind of thing a mother wasn’t supposed to do.
I thought good mothers stayed awake for every crisis, answered every call, and carried every burden.
I thought love meant never putting down a weight, no matter how crushing it became.
When I stopped participating in the roller coaster, I worried that I was failing him. I worried that people would think I didn’t care. Some days I wondered that myself.
What I’ve learned since is that exhaustion is not the same thing as love.
Fear is not the same thing as love.
Hypervigilance is not the same thing as love.
And sacrificing yourself does not guarantee that someone else will recover.
The truth is, I wasn’t helping him by drowning alongside him.
I was simply creating a second victim.
Acceptance doesn’t mean approval.
It doesn’t mean giving up hope.
It means recognizing that no amount of worrying can make another human being sober.
No amount of arguing can make them ready.
No amount of love can do the work that recovery requires them to do themselves.
Secrecy and Addiction
The other lesson I learned is that secrecy and addiction seem to travel together.
Whenever the story begins with “just between you and me,” my alarm bells go off.
Recovery grows in the light.
Addiction – and shame grow in the dark.
That doesn’t mean people lose their privacy. It means honesty has to become stronger than shame.
And shame is everywhere when alcohol is involved. My kid calls it “The Shame Cave” and it’s a truly awful place.
Changing the Conversation About Alcohol
Which brings me to the part of this conversation I care about most.
We still don’t talk honestly about alcohol.
Alcohol addiction ruins families. It destroys health. It fills hospital beds. It kills people.
Yet alcohol remains one of the few powerful, addictive substances we almost refuse to discuss openly.
We don’t need prohibition.
We don’t need moral panic.
We need information.
We need warnings.
We need honest conversations.
We need to stop pretending that alcohol-related harm only happens to “other people.”
Because it doesn’t.
It happens to our neighbors.
Our friends.
Our children.
And sometimes it happens to the people we love so much that we accidentally lose ourselves trying to save them.
The hardest thing I’ve learned is that loving someone can sometimes mean holding the line instead of crossing it.
Not because you don’t care.
Because you do.
And because if you’re going to walk beside someone through addiction, you have to stay standing yourself.