Sometimes no matter how much we want people to sort themselves out

Bretrick

Bretrick

Well-known Member
Location
Perth Western Australia
it is just not going to happen.
Watching getting their life back together, making forward progress gives me a good feeling.
Then there is a break of months where there is no contact.
Contact is reestablished and I find out that person has crashed again.
Gone back to old habits, drinking, drugging, jobless, directionless.
Eventually one needs to let them go to get through life how they see fit.
As difficult and sad as that is.
 

Totally agree. I have known a few people that continue to make decisions that lead to a bad outcome. Or even the same outcome that has always been. WTH?

Had a friend/neighbor, my age, whose adult son was a drug/alcohol addict. He lived with her until such time as he would be very abusive and she would throw him out. He would go to rehab, come out in a couple of weeks, she would let him come back to live with her. The last time, she had to call the police. I gave her new locksets, installed them for her, and two months later she had given him a key and he was back. What was she thinking?
 
Yep I've had to walk away and not look back with regard a couple of family members, I spent years trying to help

You can only do so much for them, until it start affecting your own health, then you need to just walk away.....


if people are not willing to help themselves despite all their promises and continue to destroy their own lives, there comes a point where you have to stop them destroying yours too..
 

I walked away from my 2nd husband when he would not even try to stop drinking. I went to Al-Anon and they were even telling me to leave him when they don't usually do that. Our marriage counselor did the same. I told him I could not stand by and watch him kill himself. He died before his 52nd birthday. Alcohol came first with him.
 
It's a near universal consensus by all alcoholics in recovery, that an alcoholic will not stop drinking even if he already recognizes that he is miserable. There is nothing anyone can do to help them until they come to that point where they are serious about stopping, and even then, quitting won't be a walk in the park, at least at first. If they make it out of active addiction, it almost seems like a miracle, but there is no guarantee they won't start again.

The frustrating thing for the rest of us, as Bretrick points out, is that expecting them to get better is... well, frustrating. For those of us who have made the leap, we can explain to them what we had to do, which is frequently exactly what they don't want to do. No matter that others have found the answers, help can fall on deaf ears until they are ready. Often times when an alcoholic begs for help, what he really wants is to keep on drinking, but avoid the negative consequences of his actions. Usually, they want to learn to control their drinking, which doesn't work.

But once in a while someone breaks free, and it's wonderful to watch that happen.
 
I wanted to marry a guy who was on pot. There was an older man online on a christian forum. He used to preach. He was wise. My mom said: No please he's horrible this and that but I didn't listen to my mom. He just said: Take it veeeeery slowly. No accusations, no telling me not to do it. He said he always tried to save damsels in distress and it came back to bite him. I broke up the same week.
 

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