Visions Journal

Alice

Reprinted from the The Ongoing Journey of Recovery: Recovery across the lifespan issue of Visions Journal, 2025, 20 (3), pp. 18-19

Around the time my teenaged son's troubles with mental health and substance use were becoming clear, my mother-in-law got sick. No one seemed to know what was happening as we watched her disappear. I set out to help. We were on a mission: find out what was wrong so we could get it fixed. We did research, made appointments, asked for tests. It was exhausting and terrifying.

One day, a specialist said that even if we figured out what was wrong, we wouldn't be able to fix it. She said my mother-in-law was dying and the best we could do was to decide how we wanted to spend our time together.

Later, sitting on a riverbank alone, the message sank in. My mother-in-law was dying. I couldn't change that. I felt the moment when I accepted this physically, like I had been holding my breath and I could breathe again. I was powerless. But accepting her approaching death allowed me to stop fighting it.

I tell this story first because that moment of acceptance was harder to find with my son. Accepting substance use feels a lot like saying it's OK that it's happening. It wasn't OK. I wanted him to stop. His behaviour was unacceptable. I felt compelled to tell him that, to point out he was hurting himself, hurting us. But the more I said, the more we fought, and the more the distance between us grew.

A wish for control

We entered into crisis: visits to the ER, suicidal ideation, attempts by my son to obliterate his existence with substances with no concern for safety—a deeper and deeper spiral. He kept expecting to hit rock bottom and each time realized there was further to fall.

I thought my job was to keep him safe. I thought my husband and I were flying a plane and our kids were safely tucked inside. Suddenly, I realized we were all in our own planes. We had been flying in formation. Now, my son was veering about wildly. I was not in control, so I tried flying my plane next to his, veering just as wildly to keep pace.

But I was not sitting in his cockpit. I didn't know where he was trying to go or what obstacles he was trying to avoid. And I certainly didn't have access to his steering wheel.

Things got very bad. I woke up each morning preparing myself to learn he had died overnight. My son refused to engage further with counsellors. I exhausted myself trying to convince him, and he avoided me to avoid the conversation. He couldn't respect boundaries the rest of the family needed, but he wouldn't go to treatment, the only safe place I had to offer. He became homeless.

I felt powerless because he wouldn’t get help, and I thought nothing could change until he did.

An altered view

Accepting that I couldn't keep my son safe, that that was his job, was not an aha moment like I experienced with my mother-in-law's illness. It was a shift in perspective. I considered the crazy idea that flying his plane the way my son was flying it might make sense to him. My son was using drugs for a reason. It wasn't bad behaviour. He didn't want to throw our family into turmoil. He was drowning.

Like all drowning people, he was flailing around trying to keep his head above water, and he would climb anything to keep himself afloat. Accepting this allowed me to let go of my anger. He wasn’t trying to hurt us. A terrible thing was happening in his head, and he was reacting in a way that made sense in that context.

I realized it was my job to keep myself safe. In the same way that you need a plan when you approach a drowning swimmer, I needed to set boundaries to protect myself and my family, simple things like don't keep pushing when someone says no, don’t steal, don't be high and lose sight of what’s real or safe. And I could set these boundaries from a place of love, not anger. It was freeing to know rules were needed and establish clear consequences so I didn't need to be mad when he couldn’t follow them.

New skills

When I accepted that I couldn't control him, I realized I had control over myself. My husband and I decided to seek help. We took the Family Connections program, a skills and support group for family members and friends of someone with emotional dysregulation. Initially, we struggled with the idea that we would put in effort when our son wasn't doing his part, but, ultimately, we realized that we were doing it for ourselves.

Meeting other struggling families made us feel less alone. Learning new skills and putting them into practice shifted our interactions with our son and, as a result, brought about change for him too. I couldn't change reality, but I could change how I reacted to reality, and this in and of itself changed our reality. I let go of pushing treatment, and this freed me to hear what my son was saying to me. He wanted a relationship with us. He wasn’t ready for therapy.

A friend sent me a card during this time. It said, "Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain." Standing in a downpour, it took work to see I still had choices. Accepting the weather allowed me to choose to be present with my son, not add to the harm, and to be there when he was ready.

Recovery, like the rest of life, is a journey not a destination. We're on the road of recovery, as individuals and as a family. I'm grateful for the moment of acceptance I had on the riverbank. It opened me to the power of embracing reality. Accepting that my son is struggling with addiction and mental health has not enabled his drug use. It has allowed me to acknowledge where we're standing so we can decide how to walk forward together.