Hi,
I feel your pain and know where you are just now. I WAS there about a year ago and then I found this site. That was when I stopped enabling my son and believing the lies his addiction was telling me. Is it any easier today – not yet. HOPE – yes and more important you will get strength from the lovely friends and family on this site. Xx

Ditto Redare’s comments. Trying to detach from your son is exceedingly difficult for a mom.

If you can find a way to supporting your son without enabling the addict you will start to find some peace of mind. Not easy but a necessity. I have struggled to find this balance for years!

I hope you are able to make the chat on this forum. Having support is vital to staying sane.

Cathyx

Hi Nk
Although your last post was a reply to another, I know how disappointing it is to not know if you were heard or not, so here I am to tell you that indeed you are being heard.
I think that if we get another group like last week we could use ‘What is an Enabler’ as our topic. It seems to me that there is a fine line between educating your children and then becoming this thing called an Enabler. As your child is growing you want to educate/enable them to have a good life when they become independent because that is the natural order of things. There is a feeling of failure when the child does not achieve the independence that was hoped for but instead is gripped by something that has caused them to lose control just as they should be flying free. Sadly too it is like a stone thrown in to a pond where the ripples spread outward and the parent/ spouse/siblings feel the control of their own lives slipping away – it is this feeling that creates the Enabler.
The addiction to gamble will sabotage trust in a family, causing unrest and confusion because in division the addiction can get the enablement it seeks. In my own case I did everything wrong for all the right reasons and it wasn’t until I gained knowledge and put myself before my CG’s addiction that I began a long recovery.
Where do you think you are enabling? What actions have you tried? These are rhetorical questions but examining what action we have taken and then discussing the outcome of the action we took can lead us try something different that we had not considered before. Left with questions whizzing round in our brains we just go round and round which is detrimental to the inner ear and causes dizziness leaving one falling further and further into ‘blob-hood’ – I know because I have been there.
Looking forward to ‘seeing’ you in a group again where I hope we can raise a smile or two but in the meantime please keep posting because knowledge really is power.
Velvet (ex top of the Blobs)