Protect yourself, and your sanity. my parents enabled my addiction for many years. It simply doesn't help the recovery process. When they got healthy and said no more, it was a good thing. I was able to see real adults acting in a healthy way. Addiction is nasty, it really sucks, it is painful for the addict to know that he is "failing" on a daily basis, the reality is that until the addict decides to want to be uncomfortable and try to stop, nothing will change. Encouraging him to get into treatment is not enabling, neither is helping if he is staying clean, but until that happens protect yourself and your family. hope, pray, and love, but from a distance. of course these are my opinions, not necessarily facts.

My brother is an addict. You are enabling your son. Your husband is an enabler as well. As long as he has two adults who give him money, rides, tickets out of jail, and a roof over his head, you can expect him to continue. You can't control his addiction. However, you can control your willingness to participate in it. Your son is 23. You sound like my mother, who also raced to the phone, ready to bail my brother out of his next latest and greatest crisis when he was 23. Now my brother is 45, and my mother still enables. You don't want to be doing this two decades from now, assuming your son is still alive, which is a big assumption. I suggest you go to al-anon and learn from people who WERE in your situation, but are practicing tried and true methods for disengaging from their own addicts. It doesn't mean you don't love your son. I just means you are not going to participate in loving him to death. I have no doubt this is tearing up your marriage. I saw it happen to my own parent's marriage. You'll have to decide, along with your husband, if you want to build your marriage around the manipulative actions of an addict, or if you want to disengage from the addict and focus on each other. If you decide to quit enabling, but stay with a husband who chooses to enable, your marriage will get harder and more unpleasant.

Well, take it from me, there is nothing you can do for your son. The ball is in his court now. When I married my husband of 17 years, I too knew nothing about the drug scene. Now I know too much. He hass been to detox and rehab a number of times and sometimes it works for a while, some longer than others, but he still goes back to heroin. We have an 11 year old son and it kills me to know he sees things he should not. To make a long story short, I literally just threw my husband out of the house because he has been getting high every day for weeks now, with only a few days here and there when he stayed clean. I love my husband but I don't love what he does. I am sorry to ramble on. I meant only to support you. I feel for you, I really do. I wish you the best of luck. We are not in an easy quick fix situation. I hope he straightens up - he sounds as though he is still young and anything is possible.

simonew- Good for you for putting your 11 year old son's well-being ahead of yours or his fathers. So many children are sacrificed to the addiction altar, and it is refreshing to hear from a mom put her kid first, instead of the addict.

My niece is 18 and is an addict. She went to rehab about a year or so ago and we thought she was clean. She just informed her mother 2 weeks ago that she had used a couple of times. The truth came out a few days ago that she has been using steadily because she didn't have any money and went through withdrawals. She went through 2 days of withdrawals before using again. My sister doesn't know what to do....her daughter is living with her, plus her 13 year old daughter and 12 year old son. She is currently recovering from back surgery and she hasn't been able to get her blood pressure to stay at healthy levels. She knows if her husband knew that her daughter was using again, he would kick her out. She feels her daughter has no where to go and is lost as to what to do. I wish I could help both of them. I don't know what to tell my sis other than she can't enable her daughter...but how does a mother handle kicking their daughter out? Is there any other option if they won't go to rehab and if they don't want to quit?
Thank you

You probably already know the answer... the 18 year old needs to leave the home. Providing shelter for a practicing addict is the very definition of enabling. Your sister is the one who needs to come to that realization, and if she does, her kid has a greater chance of finding a reason to quit using. Your sister's husband is on the right track, and hopefully he'll follow through. It's unkind to enable an addict.