2. The stark reality that most parents of addicts fail to recognize is this: despite all of your exhaustive efforts, you cannot save your child.
This is not your fight.
You can be armed and equipped with all of the latest information out there but no amount of knowledge will change your child’s destiny. Your child’s ability to make it out if this war alive, does not depend on you.
3. What you need to prepare for is not the fight, but the letting go. Finding a way to be okay, despite the outcome. Learning to live your life, regardless of whether your child lives or dies. Building a support system that holds you up when the ground falls out from underneath of you. Deepening your faith so that when the world feels like it’s a dark, cold, and scary place, you can look up and find hope.
Letting go is going to take hard work. It’s going to take preparation. It’s going to take lots of practice. It will go against every ounce of parental instinct that lives inside of you. You will feel incredible guilt. You will feel like the worst person in the whole world. You will feel judged. You will feel alone. Letting go will be excruciating painful.
But letting go will be the best thing that you can do for yourself and your child. Letting go will give you room to breathe. It will, paradoxically, give your child the best chance at survival. Because when everyone around him stops fighting he will have no choice left but to step up. To give the fight all he has. Chances are he won’t reach that pivotal point of desperation until you have let go.
