Hope For Parents With Addicted Loved Ones: Discovery and Immediate Response

There are very few experiences in life more devastating then parenting an addicted loved one. It has been compared with the experience of watching your child slowly commit suicide day after day for years on end. It is also one of the most destructive forces to marriage and family that there is. Our goal is to help you adjust to and learn to function in your new reality in order to prepare you to help your addicted loved one, when and if they are ever at the point to want that help. But the focus of this book is on you, we hope to help you to make small changes in your life so that you will have more resources, feel less angry, desperate and hopeless, and therefore to become more resilient.Our message is hope! Not blind, unreasonable hope, but fact-based, reason-supported hope. For example, did you know that the long-term recovery rate for addiction is better than it is for Asthma, Cancer, Diabetes, Hypertension, and several other diseases? That is great news for parents because people recover from or learn to live with those diseases all the time. Many people who suffered these conditions go on to live long, happy, successful lives. I bet you never heard that piece of good news before; but those are not my findings, those are findings reported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse! Even if you do not read any further than this paragraph you now know one more reason for hope that almost no one talks about.The tone we tried for was that of two dear friends who respect and care for each other, sitting by the fire place sipping a pinot noir talking about some pretty serious stuff. Each chapter starts out with a real-life short story to help you connect with what we are going to talk about in that chapter. Then, talking with you, not to you or at you, we will take an in-depth look at the specific topic the chapter deals with. Our premise is that you are a wonderful, mature, competent person who did the best you could for your child with the knowledge and tools that you had at the time, we would just like to explore some ideas and tools that might help you to respond better to this new reality. You are smart and intelligent. You know your unique situation better than anyone else ever could, you are more than competent enough to decide whether or not the information we provide will work in your family situation.Finally we would like you to know that even though it seems like your world has crashed around you and there is no one you can trust, you are not alone.