Parenting
You don't know whether to confront or support or kick out or wait and every option has a real cost.
You found something. Or you’ve been suspecting. Or they’ve already been honest with you and you don’t know what to do with the honesty. You don’t know whether this is experimentation that will end, or addiction that won’t, or use that’s somewhere in between. You’re scared to push too hard and lose them. You’re scared not to push and lose them in a different way. You’re checking their things. You’re tracking their movements. You feel like you’ve become someone you didn’t want to be.
Every parental decision has a real cost. The wrong call could push them deeper. The right call isn’t obvious from where you sit.
The using continued or stopped briefly and started again.
You very likely came up in a household where addiction was either present or specifically absent in a way that defined how you’d think about it later. You may have grown up watching a parent or a sibling use, and you swore you’d recognize the signs early in your own kids and stop it before it took root. You may have absorbed cultural narratives about addiction that frame it as a moral failing or as a disease, and either frame has made it hard to know what your role actually is. You may have lived through a stretch where being the supportive parent felt like the only way to keep them coming home, and the support has been part of what’s let the use continue.
Standard intervention models assume the addict is the system. The family is part of the system. As long as the family continues to provide the safety net that softens the consequences of using, the consequences of using stay tolerable.
This doesn’t mean throwing them out. Throwing them out has its own consequences and its own loop. It means looking honestly at what your specific role in the system has been, and what changes in that role would actually shift the equilibrium.
For your child’s side of this, see I have an addiction and the specific spokes there. For your own carrying of this, see I’m struggling as a parent .
The using is being maintained by the system. The system includes you. The intervention has to start with what you do differently.
In strategic therapy your child is not the client. You are. We look at what your specific role in the household has been (the food, the rent, the rides, the late-night rescues) and decide together which parts of the safety net to withdraw and which to hold. The using becomes harder to sustain at its current scale because the conditions that allowed it have shifted, and the conversation that was impossible before becomes a real one.
From a different parental position, your child meets different terms.
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