It happens a few times a month at random, unexpected moments. I’ll walk out of a store or get off the train and confront the one thing I’ve tried to avoid over the past year and a half: a reminder of my brother. Last month, as I rounded the corner of JFK and Brattle Streets in Cambridge, I saw two people huddled together on top of a large piece of cardboard, sleeping beneath a pile of blankets. As I passed by, glimpsing their faces, I thought to myself: “Oh hey — there he is.”
My brother is a heroin addict. We used to be very close. We moved to Seattle from Boston together on a whim in the late aughts; he wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a music journalist. While I wrote for punk fanzines, my brother's career never got off the ground. Instead, he started using heroin, first casually, and then daily. He lost his job and his apartment. There were times when I’d walk past him begging for change on the street and he wouldn’t recognize me. I’d see him walking down the street without shoes or shooting up in abandoned buildings near the University of Washington.
I tried everything to help my brother. I gave him money. A place to stay. Endless support. Our relationship became one in which the more I gave, the more exhausted I became. He came to live with me in the winter of 2016; it was too painful to see him sleeping in the subway, lying in the middle of a sidewalk, or begging for change. I wanted him to have a stable place to live so he and his girlfriend could actively seek treatment. Over the next ten months, the situation deteriorated. My brother and his girlfriend had violent fights, sometimes hurting each other. They were still using. The last straw came when he threatened to hurt my boyfriend. I just didn’t feel safe. I had enough.
People who have loved ones with addiction are often told that they need to stick by them no matter what. I felt guilty and heartless for admitting I needed a break. Now, years later, I know there is no quick fix for addiction. And while my brother has sought additional treatment, the devastating effects of his disease remain.
In Boston alone, at least five people die from opioid overdoses every day. This leaves millions of people who care for a person with an addiction to struggle with how best to help the people they love. Should they support them? Should they show tough love? Some families open their homes to loved ones with addiction so that they have a stable place to live; others shell out exorbitant amounts of money for private rehabilitation clinics. Most exert a tremendous amount of energy helping their loved ones try to kick their habit.
I tried everything to help my brother.
Detaching from my brother was the painful final option for me. The idea of “detachment with love” officially appeared in the fellowship organization Al-Anon’s first handbook in 1955, and has since become a key method for families dealing with drug and alcohol addiction. It says that detachment is “neither kind nor unkind.” It doesn’t judge or condemn the person or the situation from which someone is detaching. By separating from someone with an addiction and the effects of addiction, detachment can help one see a situation “realistically and objectively.” I first became aware of the term when I was 12 and my mom took me to Alateen, an offshoot of Al-Anon that provides support for teens, to discuss the effects of my stepfather’s drinking. The psychological impact of addiction on me was great, and I had no idea how to talk about it. At Alateen I learned that it was okay to detach from people whose destructive behavior affected your wellness; I used this method with my brother as a way of gaining myself back.
Detachment with love is the opposite of tough love, allowing one to break an unhealthy cycle of obsession with someone else’s behavior. Whereas tough love seeks to help a person quit drugs by cutting them off, detachment with love seeks to restore the detacher’s physical and mental health while accepting that the detachee may be better off learning from their own mistakes.
Dr. Matthew Kendra, a clinical psychologist in the Addiction Medicine and Dual Diagnosis Clinic at the Stanford University School of Medicine said that placing healthy boundaries on relationships and working on your own mental health is a good way to help loved ones get better. “If you’re not taking good care of yourself,” said Kendra, “you’re really unable to take good care of anyone else, including the family member with the addiction. If you’re not setting good boundaries and good limits on what you’re able to handle, you’re not able to effectively help the other person. Giving yourself permission to be able to care for ourselves to help others is a really important thing to do.”
My family watched as the person we used to know became someone we didn’t know at all. My dad felt guilty about not doing enough as a parent and questioned where he went wrong. My mother encouraged my brother to focus on getting better. It took time for us all to understand that my brother’s urges to use drugs were stronger than his fight against addiction.
By separating from someone with an addiction and the effects of addiction, detachment can help one see a situation “realistically and objectively.”
Maia Szalavitz, the author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding Addiction, knows this all too well. A former heroin addict, she now writes about neuroscience, drugs, and different facets of addiction treatment. Though she views 12-step programs like AA and Al-Anon as more self-help than evidence-based treatment, she does believe there are times when detachment is a necessary, last resort situation. “If you have somebody that’s stealing from you,” Szalavitz said, “or somebody that’s violent, or getting high in front of their younger siblings, you have to protect yourself and your kids. I feel like people shouldn’t feel bad about protecting themselves in those situations. We are not all required to be saints.”
Joanne Peterson, the founder of Learn2Cope, a Massachusetts-based support organization that helps families struggling with addiction, shares a similar definition and set of circumstances for detaching with love. “Detaching with love is knowing that we have done everything we can,” Peterson said. “And that we can detach from the chaos. It’s saying to the person, ‘I love you, but I can’t participate in this. I can’t live like this anymore. We need to find other arrangements. Maybe someday when you seek treatment, maybe we can sit down and talk about repairing our relationship.’”
Peterson said that the process of detachment is different for everyone. “I think it’s when somebody has had enough,” she said. “It’s not an easy thing to do. You feel terrible, you feel guilty, but once you start saying it’s OK for me to not answer that phone when I know it’s going to be nothing but stress and drama or being yelled at or sworn at, you start to feel better. It’s a matter of taking care of yourself and your own health. Physical health, too, because you can get very sick, physically. You can become addicted to their situation.”
By separating from someone with an addiction and the effects of addiction, detachment can help one see a situation “realistically and objectively.”
Kendra said that the line for families starts when their money, careers, and mental health are affected by an addict’s behavior. “If finances start to run so low that they can’t afford to live a life worth living, and if you’ve tried seeking professional help and support groups, then it’s certainly worth considering [detaching with love], especially if the continued ‘help’ is harming yourself,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, detachment isn’t always well received by the detachee. It can leave them feeling alone, unloved or, worse, suicidal. “There have been times when something tragic has happened,” Peterson said, “where the person loses their life out on the streets, or where they end up overdosing. But they also overdose in the home. It’s almost like damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Explaining to a loved one why you need to detach is crucial, even if they object to your decision. And by telling a person you’re detaching from that you still care but need to focus on your own health, it tells them that you’re still supportive of them.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my brother. It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen him. I text him occasionally to see if he’s okay and to tell him I hope he’s doing well, but I still need time to heal. I only hope that someday we can be friends again; maybe talk about music like we used to. Until then, this is what we have, and it’s a way that’s worked for me.
