Love is something we all hope to feel and enjoy. Many times the love we feel with our immediate family and friends is simply the best part of our lives. In addiction however the strength and definition of love is pushed to the limit of human endurance and beyond. The term of love can change in addiction. Tough love gets thrown around a lot. What exactly is tough love? How do you love unconditionally and still keep sound and protective boundaries in place?

When dealing with addiction, you might want to separate two issues. The first is how much you care. The second is what you do. It does not matter how badly someone behaves in their addiction you are allowed to care. The more you care, the more you will be able to maintain to opening and lifeline for change. Try not to pull back on your love when they are difficult and lavish it on while they are sober.

Your actions however need to be carefully scripted and held in by common sense. Decide your boundaries alone and with careful thought. Write them down. Decide your limits both in terms of time and financially. Decide if and when you are going to say no. A great area to start with this is simply the law. If your loved one breaks the law, let them deal with it. Do not rescue them. Do not try to save them from a criminal record. If you save them from this incident, with minor issues, how will you feel when they run over and kill someone while they are intoxicated? By helping them avoid the consequences of their actions, you may unwittingly aid them in more dangerous and disastrous actions. Tough love, might mean stop rescuing. Stop paying rent when they are not working or looking for work. Stop treating them like they are 12.

Last night was the time we move the clocks ahead.  I think a lot of us feel a little out of sync today.  Our time clock is a bit off for the next day or two.  I also think there is another factor in this.  We all "lost" some time last night.  An hour just disappeared.  When an hour can disappear in a second, it is a very visible reminder of the march of time we all face.  It also can remind us of all the time we have wasted or lost in different ways.

In a drug rehab program there are lots of momments like this.  While learning new ideas about how to handle things, it is hard to eascape the realization that our old ways of handling things cost us days, weeks months and possible years of our lives.  Gone from our grasp.  Rehab is a place to stop this waste.  Ironic that you have to spend time at a rehab program to learn how not to waste time.  You have to invest time to learn to be more efficeint at life. 

It is also true that if you work at learning new techniques, you will be given new opportunities to connect and reconnect with people.  You can build a history of accomplishment and service to others.  Life does hand out second chances.  Even look at daylight saving's time.  In the fall after you work all summer, it gives you the hour back.  Why not make losing the hour last night a chance to decide to not waste more time in your life?  What have you got to lose?

Text messaging is certainly all the rage with teenagers today. It is a form a communication with its own language. It also requires a level of dexterity to chat with any speed but a snail’s pace for me. I was actually doing some texting last night. It was the read a message, send a message thing, but each message was being sent a couple of hours apart. Somehow the person I was texting and I got out of sync with each other. I would send a message, and then receive one 10 or 15 minutes later. The problem was the text I got in return was not in response to my last message, but the one before it.

Needless to say I got quite confused. At one point I even got a little offended at one response. Being a slow learner, it took me a little while to catch on. Once I realized we were having two different conversations, I got back in sync, and everything made sense.

I started to think about this and how often this happens in our own life without texting. How many times are we having a conversation “in our head” while at the same time trying to converse with the real person. I see it in our drug rehab center all the time. I see clients and staff talking with themselves and each other, but sometimes not connecting. It is easy to get confused and sometimes even offended if you are not carefully listening to the other person. You have to turn off the conversation in your head. The only words in your head while someone is talking to you should be their words. Actually hear what they are saying in real time. Slow down and enjoy it. It is so much better to have one productive conversation, then 2 or 3 botched ones.

Understanding an addicted family member can be very difficult. Often the family cannot figure out what happened. Why would they use these destructive drugs in the first place? They can tell the clients get little or no enjoyment from their present drug usage, they just have to do it. It was not like that in the beginning. When clients first used a drug they had different feelings and different results. If there were no positive benefits of some sort at the start, they would not have kept going.

At first they received pleasure and share in the excitement of having other people around when they used. The objective was to connect and have fun with other people. They also used the drug to improve how they felt. They thought the drug made them feel happier, sexier, and more relaxed.

The drug also changed their perceptions and physical sensations in the world. Many felt it changed and improved their ability to act in certain situations. Social activities, dancing, and even better sex have been attributed to drug use. Many times drug usage was just because of plain old fashioned boredom.

It was these positive attributes of drug and alcohol usage that initially lead to the addiction. The client well short sighted in their goals, was not stupid or dumb. These benefits actually did exist and were fun for a while. The side effects and the addictive cycle, of the drug use, came in through the back door. They then thought with either a higher dose, or a different drug they could regain the original positive benefits of drug use. This leads to the drug addiction.

At this point drug use switches from a fun experience to a coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, anger, pain and frustration in their life. This is the point we see the client in drug rehab. It may be difficult to look back that far to see how they started using. It is important because as a client gets better in a drug rehab center, they also have to find ways to get those original positive benefits of drug usage, without using drugs.

Most of the clients, who come to a drug rehab center, have a well developed set of communication skills. They are very personable, and have the ability to be quite charming. When you talk to most of them at depth a little bit, it does become rather apparent something is missing. While they have the skill to quickly form a shallow bond, they have a lot of difficulty making a deeper connection.

It may have something to do with most of the communicating in the past couple of years has involved a least a degree of manipulation. They are skilled at hiding the truth. They are skilled at getting people to provide and do things, the individual may not want to do. These skills are useful if you are trying to acquire drugs or justify your own behaviour. They are not useful at building deep trusting friendships.

Part of it comes from the “fear of really knowing me” type of thinking. If they really knew me, they wouldn’t like me. There are 2 main distortions in the above statement. Number one is you are mind reading and fortune telling. You do not know how someone is going to react. Maybe they have the same fear. Maybe your opening up will allow them to open up. The other distortion in the above statement is negative mental focus. All you are focusing on is your less positive traits. Everyone has both good and bad traits. You are assuming you will only “expose” your bad stuff.

Real communication involves asking questions to understand the other person’s fears and dream, not yours. If you are worried about your acceptance, you are not listening to what someone else is saying. No real communication takes place if you are in the, how does this affect me, type of mind. Ask questions and listen to the answers. Ask more questions based on their answers. See if you can have a whole conversation WITHOUT bringing up your history or opinion. Stop worrying about how you look. Start talking about them. Drug rehab is a perfect place to start. Lots of people you do not know. Lots of people, with time on their hands, a captive group for you to practice on. Make some new real friend in rehab today.

I had another interesting and challenging conversation last night. I am really very lucky to do what I do. Never the same thing, and boy it is never, ever boring. I was discussing the possibility of drug rehab with someone last night. They thought rehab might be a fairly good option for them. Drugs had been in theri life for a long time, and their life seemed to be stuck in somewhat of a rut lately. They hadn’t worked in quite some time.

The question arose, that would it not be a better idea to invest the money for drug rehab into starting a business for them, so they could actually support themselves. If they had a business and were accomplishing some things in life, they would not need drugs in their life and could move past addiction. There is good logic in this path and would it not make sense to build something rather than just go to drug rehab?

The real answer would lie in the actual reasons on a day to day basis, on why someone is using drugs. If the drug usage was truly do to boredom, then activity would seem to be the cure. The problem is, just like most things in life, not that simple. Even if that were the only reason, it still might be a better idea to go to rehab first.

One is that with long term drug use, the body and the brain has changed. The will be some depression and side effects while a person is stopping use. Being depressed and hyper-sensitive to the world is not the best time and frame of mind to start a business. The other is that it is rare, that drug use is do to a single cause. Most time it is because of multiple areas. Stress, boredom, anxiety, anger, social pressure and a few others are really common. Starting a business is always stressful and filled with some moments of doubt and uncertainty. Stress could lead to increased drug use, not a great idea while building a business.
Building a business is a tough demanding time. It is also a blast. Building a business while on drugs, while totally possible, seems to be really pushing the odds. Four out of five new businesses fail in the first five years.

I guess the final words I would like to end with are, if it were possible to quit without going to rehab, after decades of drug use, why have they not quit? I think building a business is a wonderful idea. I still think drug rehab and a business are in the realm of possibility. The only real shot at success is to do one, before the other.