Can Love Save an Addict?

Can love save an addict? Everybody who answers that question picks an army. Half say love changes everything. Half say love can't save anybody. I was the one in addiction, sixteen years sober now, and I don't belong to either army, because both of them are wrong about what happened to me.

This is lived experience from one recovery, not medical advice.

All of it landed

Here's my answer, and I want to be exact about it. My family's love reached me. All of it landed.

I need to say that first, because one of the armies will tell you the love was wasted, that it bounced off, that people in addiction can't feel it. That wasn't true for me. I felt it. I knew it was there the entire time. The love arrived.

And it could not get me sober.

Both of those sentences are true at once, and the space between them is where this whole question lives. Love reached me completely and did not produce sobriety, because sobriety was never something love could produce. Only I could do that part. Not because my family's love was too weak or the wrong kind or badly delivered. Because getting sober is a choice, and choices can only be made by the person they belong to.

What love actually did

So what was the love for, if it couldn't save me? Here's what mine did.

Love gave me somewhere to land when I chose it. When my moment came and I finally reached for help, there was a place to reach toward. People still standing. A home I could move back into at twenty-four, and years ahead of me to earn back trust, which is its own kind of place to land.

Love built the landing zone. It never made the choice. It couldn't. The choice was the one thing that was only ever mine.

That's my story, not a formula. I can't tell you what your person's choice will be, and neither can anyone else.

The impossible job

If you've been asking this question about someone you love, you were probably handed an impossible job somewhere along the way. Somebody, or a movie, or the general noise of the world, told you that if you loved them enough, hard enough, correctly enough, they'd get better. Which means every day they didn't get better became a grade on your love.

That's the myth, and I want to take it apart from the inside. Love was never the treatment. It was never designed to be. Asking love to cure addiction is asking it to do a job it doesn't have, and then blaming it when the job doesn't get done.

What love couldn't cure was never a measure of it. My family's love didn't fail because I kept using. My using measured nothing about them.

If you poured everything in

So here's where I land, for anyone still holding that impossible job.

If you poured everything into somebody and it didn't cure them, you didn't fail. The myth failed you.

Your love may have landed completely, the way my family's landed on me, whether or not you ever got to see the proof. What it could and couldn't do was decided by what love is, not by how much of it you gave.

If things are heavy right now

If this question has been sitting on your chest, there are people ready to talk with you today. SAMHSA's free helpline is 1-800-662-4357, 24/7, for treatment questions and family guidance. If you or someone you love is in crisis, call or text 988, or text HOME to 741741.

Why Haven exists

While I was using, nobody handed my family anything but the myth. No support, no honest answers, just the impossible job. That's why I built Haven, an app for the families and loved ones of people in addiction. Haven opens August 24, and if you want to be there, the waitlist is at joinprojecthaven.com.