Spiritual Solutions by Deepak Chopra

Author:Deepak Chopra [Chopra, Deepak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307719195
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-26T13:00:00+00:00

Parenting an Addict

How am I to emotionally deal with having an adult son who is drug dependent? When he is using or his life is in chaos, I don’t know how to keep his situation from occupying my mind 24/7—there’s a feeling of doom surrounding me. Can I deal with this from a spiritual standpoint? How does a parent let go of the pain and anxiety I feel?

—Bernadette, 61, Milwaukee

It would take days to go into detail about parent-child relationships, but you are asking about an issue we can isolate: the guilt, anxiety, and frustration of not being able to help. In spiritual terms, this is about attachment. You identify with someone who is separate from yourself. You all but lose the boundary between yourself and your son. Attachment makes you obsess over your son’s chaotic life. It makes his pain feel like yours.

Please see that I am not criticizing the loving empathy that connects a mother and son. You can get beyond crippling attachment through a process that involves the following steps:

1. See that attachment isn’t positive. It helps no one. The most effective therapists tend to be unattached, even detached. It gives them clarity and objectivity. It allows their skills to be used most effectively.

2. See that your attachment is harming you. As close as you feel toward your children, the life that is closest to you is your own. Sacrificing a good part of it to suffering is destructive. You must value yourself enough to want a good life for yourself. From this goodness you will offer more help to those in need, not less.

3. Reject false hope, wishful thinking, and the constant recurrence of “solutions” that never work and that your children reject anyway. If they say no, be an adult and accept that no means no.

4. Heal your wounds. Most addicts have lost the ability to care about those around them. They are in the habit of hurting, rejecting, betraying, keeping secrets, and breaking faith. The disease works that way. But all that negative behavior has hurt you. Don’t let parental guilt turn you into a punching bag or a rug to trample over. Heal yourself where you hurt.

5. Fulfill your primary relationship. You don’t mention your husband, but if you are still married, repair your bridges with him. This is not a path to walk alone. Realize that your children are not your primary relationship. If they are all you have, that still doesn’t make them your primary relationship, because they aren’t relating to you at all. Find someone to relate to who cares for you. They certainly don’t.

6. Find a vision to follow. Right now, your vision is an illusion. It is fixed on the false notion that if you found just the right key, you would solve your children’s lives. Please see that no parent solves any grown child’s life, which means you haven’t failed. It’s impossible to fail at what was unachievable to begin with. The mind abhors a vacuum, and you need a purposeful goal in life to fill the place where anxiety and guilt now reside.

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