The first of this three-post series on loving detachment focussed on the overall concept of loving the addict while at the same time making the decision NOT to support the addict in their addiction. The last post focused on physical detachment from the alcoholic. Physical detachment in this instance means no longer enabling addictive behaviour. We do this by allowing the addict to make their own choices, and feeling the results of those choices. In this post, we focus on emotional detachment, which is the change in ourselves that is needed in order to allow us to practice loving detachment.

When we love someone, it is very natural and human to want to protect that person. This protection instinct ensures our genetic survival, and so is deeply engrained in us. This parenting instinct is particularly strong in supporters of alcoholics. More often than not, we find that they seek our personalities out when looking for a partner. They need someone who is prepared to care for them, looked out for them, take responsibility for their actions, and clean up their messes. But unlike children, they never grow up. Their dependence on us only increases. We, in turn, are comfortable in the role of being needed, and through our actions – albeit very loving and altruistic actions – we encourage co-dependency.

In time, we find that our lives and even our personalities are almost completely geared toward enabling our addicts. Our sense of self becomes wrapped up with the alcoholic, as if their actions are our actions, their responsibilities are our responsibilities. In truth, depending on our relationship with the alcoholic we may indeed be very affected by what they do – so there is good reason to want to protect ourselves from the worst of the addict’s actions. Our finances may be tied, and we may be legally tied to the actions of our addicts. We need to set boundaries and protect ourselves and we’ll get there… but first we need to develop the strength and wisdom of our own person. We need to re-establish our independence emotionally, find our own personality again, feel our own feelings again. We need to emotionally detach ourselves from our addict and become ourselves again.

When I was in the throes of supporting the chaos of life with an alcoholic, I didn’t know how I was feeling that day until he woke up and set the mood for the house. If you had asked me my favourite colour I would not have been able to tell you. If you asked me what had happened that day, I would probably have told you about the day of my alcoholic. I was totally lost in his life, and all of my decisions were made from that fuzzy spot. I knew that before I could truly practice loving detachment, I needed to detach myself from my addict emotionally.

We do that by taking the focus off of the alcoholic and putting it onto ourselves. Those who regularly read my blog know that for a number of years, I was helped by a Shaman. She encouraged me to focus on my femininity as a way of rediscovering myself. I bought myself some new, feminine clothes. I painted my toe nails for the first time in my life (!) I hung out with girlfriends or my sisters. I read books that I wanted to read and I watched movies that I wanted to see. I explored who I was, apart from my alcoholic. I started to live at least some of my life for myself. In time, this space allowed me to create an emotional separation in my mind between my personality and actions, and those of my alcoholic. That, in turn, eventually enabled me to let him make his own choices, and live with the consequences. Eventually, I had the strength to establish and hold to certain boundaries. And at some point, my boundaries and change in behaviour forced my alcoholic to realize that he couldn’t carry on the way he had, and seek out help. By then, I was strong and independent enough to be able to care for my children, and manage my job and my household, while my alcoholic started the long road to potential recovery.

In truth, I probably wouldn’t have been ready for him to focus on himself if I hadn’t taken the time first to learn how to focus on myself. And he likely wouldn’t have made the choice to work toward recovery as long as I was carrying him, physically and emotionally.

The concept of loving detachment, and how to practice it, can’t be adequately covered in a blog, but hopefully this three-part series has given you a taste of the elements of loving detachment and how to practice it. For those who would appreciate more detail, I am writing a book on the concept and hope to have it published by the early summer. Stay tuned to this blog for the book launch announcement.

As I mentioned in my last bog, loving detachment doesn’t require that you physically leave your alcoholic. You don’t need to separate from a spouse or kick an alcoholic child out of the home if these are actions you do not want to take. You can remain physically close to them and still gain sanity and even peace. Even if you live apart from the alcoholic and want to show love and support but not enable their illness, then the concept of loving detachment will help.

Physical detachment in this case refers to the detachment by you of any actions which will support the addict in their addiction. In order to understand why this is important you must accept two probabilities: 1. that to some degree, the alcoholic is able to live a functioning life as an addict because you help to make that possible; and 2. that their healing must start with them taking full accountability for their choices and actions. If you do not honestly believe these two probabilities, then it will be difficult to accept the logical consequences of loving detachment: that you must let go of your control of the alcoholic and allow them to make their own choices, and suffer the consequences, if they are ever to have a hope of getting better.

We carry our alcoholics, daily. They might as well be physically on our backs, with their legs dangling heavily down behind us and their arms wrapped tightly around our necks. And because we’ve allowed the vision of ourselves as a functioning couple to be one that is interlaced and co-dependent, we believe that it is our duty in the relationship to carry them. Without our super human strength, the relationship would fall apart, the family would cease to function, and the world as we know it would stop. One of the most powerful things my sponsor ever said to me was “maybe the world as you know it should stop”.

We may be super human, but we are not Gods. We cannot change another human being. We may be able to manipulate them to modify their behaviour for a short period. We can encourage them to lie to us in order to maintain equilibrium for a time. We can move the world around them to give their lives (and ours) the perception of balance. But we can’t change another human being. The only person we can change is ourselves. The only dynamic we can change in a relationship is ours.

Perhaps the most loving part of loving detachment is the love it forces us to give to ourselves by taking back our own person and physically separating our actions and responsibilities from those of the alcoholic. We are only responsible for living our own lives. And we are, in fact, worthy of living our own lives. We are not responsible for the alcoholic, whether they are our spouse, child, parent or our best friend. We did not dent the car. We did not forget our son’s birthday. We did not miss work today. They did. Will those things happen if we do not take on the responsibility of ensuring they don’t? Perhaps. Will life be a bit more difficult for us if we stop intercepting, smoothing over, neutralizing the actions of the alcoholics? Perhaps. Then again, living for two lives – one ridiculously over-functioning and one not functioning at all – has hardly been easy on us. By choosing a different kind of difficult, we are at least choosing one that has a hope of changing for the better at some point, of resulting in healing – for the alcoholic and, you’ll realize with time, for ourselves.

“Physical detachment” in loving detachment means physically detaching yourself from enabling the alcoholic before, during and after their addict-resulting actions. It means becoming your own person again, not one that is joined at the hip with your alcoholic. It means allowing them to make their own choices, and to be responsible for their own actions. It means giving them a chance to start the long road to recovery. If they are going to buy alcohol and drink, so be it. If they are going to sleep in and miss work, so be it. If they are going to pass out in the hallway, so be it.

Will these things possibly affect you in some way? Probably. This is the reason that those who love an alcoholic need a support program. We learn ways to protect ourselves, to set boundaries and consequences and to stick with them, to ensure that while our addict is deciding whether or not they want to get better, we are doing what we can to improve and support our own lives.

I’m not suggesting that it won’t be difficult, embarrassing or scary to allow the alcoholic to live their own life. But in my experience, addiction only goes in one direction: down. As long as they choose to continue in their addiction, they will go downhill. If you choose to continue to enable them, you are helping them to get there and they may even take you and your family with them. By detaching your actions, responses and choices from theirs, you will start to protect yourself AND allow them to feel the weight of their choices, which is the only thing I know of that helps an addict to start to realize the impact of their actions and even make the choice to live in a different way.

When I discovered the concept of loving detachment, I was pretty close to my own bottom. I had had just about all I could take. My boundaries, my morals, my value systems had been tested to the limit. I knew that I could physically continue to find a way to balance my family’s life; but I could no longer live with the emotional and spiritual toll it was taking on me to do so. My alcoholic clearly loved his alcohol more than anything or anyone on earth, including me and his children. I was holding our family together so he could continue to practice his love for alcohol, and his disdain for us. Something had to change and I knew that I only had control over me.

Oddly enough, the most difficult part of physically detaching myself from the actions of my alcoholic was the requisite accompanying emotional detachment.
More on this in the next post

According to Google Analytics, the #1 search phrase that draws people to my site and blog is “loving detachment”, and I think I know why. When we are in crisis and trying to find help, it doesn’t take long for someone to tell us that phrase and encourage us to embrace the concept. So we search for more information on loving detachment on the internet in the hopes of finding help for our immediate pain.

The most important thing to learn about loving detachment is that it is about you, not your alcoholic. Most recovery programs for supporters of addicts will tell you to take the focus in your life off of the addict and put it back onto you. This seems counter-intuitive to people who seek help. After all, we’ve survived life with an alcoholic by being super controlling. When that stops working, we seek out ways to gain back more control over the addict. So to hear that this isn’t the path to sanity feels like the emphasis is in the wrong place. Soon, we learn the three C’s: I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it. And if that’s the case, then what tools do I have left to get out of where I am today? Because where I am today is simply too painful a place to continue to be. The answer is “loving detachment”.

Most simply, loving detachment is giving yourself permission to continue to love the addict in your life, while learning how to limit their ability to affect you both physically and emotionally.

Like most behaviour modifications, this one takes patience and practice, but it is achievable and life is far more sane and even happy once it can be achieved – whether the addict is still in addiction or not.

Of course, finding sanity in the middle of chaos is not necessarily an easy thing to achieve. In fact, I am writing a book about this process that will be published in 2012 (check this blog for the launch announcement around summer). But for now, during the month of December I will post three blogs dedicated to the topic (this being the first), to help you get started.

Let’s start with a definition of “detachment”. This doesn’t mean that you have to leave your alcoholic husband, or separate rooms from your alcoholic wife. Nor does it mean that you are required to ignore the presence of an addict son or daughter. Those actions hardly seem loving and supportive. But it does mean that you need to set boundaries around what you are and are not willing for put up with. It means that you place more emphasis on your own actions, thoughts and feelings. And it means that you stop trying to minimize the impact of the addicts behaviour so that they can begin to feel the consequences of their actions.

For many of us, the concept of detachment is a difficult one because we still love the alcoholic and want to protect them. The concept of loving detachment separates those two ideas. We can still love them, but by protecting them, we have actually been enabling them to remain in addiction. In loving detachment, our words and actions tell them “I love you, and I’m not going to support your drinking anymore, or cover up the consequences for you”.

Alcoholics before and early in recovery hate loving detachment because it limits their control of you and the situation. They maintain control through dysfunction, chaos, lying, and by having someone around them who can keep the world running relatively smoothly despite the trouble they are causing. When you step back from that role, they may accuse you of not loving them. It’s important to re-enforce with your words and your actions that you do love them. Ask them how their day is going, make their dinner, do their laundry, continue with whatever you do normally to demonstrate you care. But don’t make excuses to their boss when they don’t show up for work. Don’t apologize to the neighbour when the alcoholic dents their car. Don’t pick the alcoholic off the floor where they’ve passed out and escort them to a warm bed. Learn how to say (and act) “I love you and I’m not going to support your drinking anymore” and mean both of those things.

The two next posts will focus on what it looks like to physically detach from supporting their addiction; and what it means to emotionally detach and find peace and even joy for yourself.