Parenting Adult Children in Addiction: Boundaries, Loving Detachment, and Recovering Your Soul

What if the bravest act of love is stepping back?

Parenting an adult child who’s struggling with addiction can feel like walking a tightrope between love and heartbreak. In this episode, we explore what it means to Recover Your Soul while learning to let go with grace.

Rev Rachel Harrison offers heartfelt guidance on how to hold firm boundaries without withdrawing your love, how to separate behavior from identity, and how to let consequences become the teachers we cannot be. Through honest reflection and spiritual insight, she shares what loving detachment really looks like and why it’s not indifference, but a higher form of compassion.

If you’re a parent standing at the crossroads of love and limits, this conversation offers hope and clarity. You’ll learn how to stay grounded in your own healing, find emotional balance, and see the light of the soul beneath the cloak of addiction.

Listen for encouragement, spiritual truth, and language you can use today as you navigate your own path toward peace. Together, we are remembering that healing begins within — and that when we recover our souls, we help others find their way home too.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Core Message
• 1:29 Host Intro And Mission
• 3:41 Community Support And Format
• 6:40 Today’s Focus: Adult Children Using
• 10:34 Control, Powerlessness, And Feelings
• 14:34 Remembering Their Essence Beneath Addiction
• 18:09 Recognizing Walls, Bottoms, And Choice
• 21:49 Boundaries With Love And Clarity
• 25:54 Letting Consequences Teach

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:00

As a parent, watching our adult children go through addiction is incredibly, incredibly painful. And I think that what we're learning in our letting go of codependency, our entanglement with our adult children is how to attend to our own feelings and to learn to be present for them in their experience with loving detachment and in a way that offers support without control. And it is a balance. But each one of us has an opportunity as we're watching them to step more fully into our own recover your soul process. And from that space, we can actually be present for them to experience and go through whatever it is that they need to experience and go through to learn more about themselves and hopefully eventually choose a softer, more healed way. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcast, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and community. I'm Red Rachel. I'm so grateful that you're here with me today. And if you're new and maybe you found this podcast by just searching a title that inspired you and you're beginning to get some information, I'm so glad you found us. I feel like it's by no mistake that people find this community. And if you're coming back time and time again, I'm so grateful to be able to, I'm honored really to be part of this journey with you where we're learning how to recover our souls. We're learning how to be okay when the people and the circumstances around us are complicated and painful and difficult. And last night we had our once a month, it's the first Monday of every month, soul recovery support group. It's free and on Zoom. And we have anything from, I don't know, 30 to 50 people on average that come every month. And it's just such a beautiful connection with people. And maybe if you've been to an Al-Anon meeting or an AA meeting or another kind of 12-step meeting, it's not really like that. It's really its own special group. And what I like to do is have us come together. And then I often will pick a topic of soul recovery, something that we talk about, and then we break into small groups. And sometimes I just do a peer question and answer. What's going on? What can I address? How can I be of support to you? And that's what we did last night was we had all of us together. And then I asked a couple questions about what people wanted to talk about. And we talked about those things. And then I thought, oh, that'll be really good. I'll use those as ways to have topics of communication and conversation here in the podcast. Because if somebody in the group is thinking it, that means that we're all thinking it. And that's the beauty of having thousands of people who are in this space listening at the same time as we resonate together. So I wanted to talk about one of the questions that was brought up in terms of children. This one's going to be about children who are in their own recovery journey and how to be parents in that space. And as it is in life, and the reason why I think you resonate so much with me is because I'm willing to share my own journey. And as soon as I was thinking that that's what I would talk about today, something pretty substantial happened with Bodhi in the last 24 hours that that's really a crossroads for him. And so I can talk about it a little bit. I can share with you what um what I can at this time because I do need to keep his life as private as I can and honor his own experience. But I want to talk about it from my experience because I think it resonates so much with what was brought up in the meeting last night. So this was a client who I have worked with um a little bit. So I knew the situation with her and her adult son, who is divorced, has kids, is, you know, a grown, grown man. And the uh consequences of his addiction are part of what were the downfall of his marriage. And he's gone through a lot of hardship and he's having to really work on bettering himself and having a better life. And what she was saying is that what's hard is that he's decided that he doesn't want to quit drinking, quit drinking, that he thinks that he can manage and do some drinking. And that's really hard for her because she can see the steps that he's taking. She can see the improvements that are happening, she can see how there's good things happening within him, and yet he won't make this final decision to stop drinking, drinking. And so what I talked about last night is that we have this part of us that we're learning in recover your soul how to how to stop trying to control everything. But it doesn't mean that you don't have your feelings. And I talked a lot about this last night that if we can step out of their experience and move into what it is for us, what it feels like to us, then that's where our real work is because we are powerless over what they decide. We're powerless over the choices that they make, we're powerless over whether they decide they want to be sober, whether they want to get well, whether they see that it's a problem, we're powerless over their addiction. I mean, there's so many things that we can use step two in soul recovery, that tool to let go of the grip on us that we think, ah, I know what I'm gonna do. This is what I'm gonna do, this is how I'm gonna fix it, this is this is the answer. And if he would just stop doing this, then that would happen. But it feels a certain way to us, and especially if you have children who are struggling with addiction, it feels hard. And it's gonna make me cry because these feelings are really important to allow yourself to be scared and to grieve and to wish for it to be something different. I don't I don't think you should ever take away the fact that it feels really hard. Because when we don't feel our feelings, we get obsessed with their situation and their choices and their circumstance. And if we look at it from the recover your soul perspective, we begin to look at the truth that being here in these bodies as souls is really complicated. And when I was struggling in my own addiction, what I can tell you is that letting go of something that felt like the solution and felt like the only solace that I had at times to either have fun or to dampen how I felt or to have that moment of euphoria of where just for a minute it didn't feel so hard or so scary. I get it. And I think that's part of what allows me to be present with my own children in a way that um that sometimes sometimes may not um be able to hold the other place where it's like, you know, get over it, just stop. Because I know, I know that it's useless to demand that they stop. But I hope that I can be present with them in each moment to exactly where they are. Because one of the things about being a parent, and this is what started to make me cry, is we held them in our arms when they were little babies. And we saw the perfection of who they are. And I think that there's a lot of beauty around how innocent we are when we're little. And even as toddlers, you know, there's this rambunctiousness, there's this wildness that then we train down, you know, sometimes in better ways, sometimes in not so great ways. And they're creating their own belief systems, they're creating their own world in which they see through, they're creating their own patterns, their own stories of who they are. And in some ways, we have been beautiful offerings of letting them see how wonderful and how loved they are. And sometimes out of our own ignorance or our own dysfunction or our own attempt even to do the right thing, we have given them stories that they get to spend a lifetime working on. And so then as adults, I think that we do the codependent thing where we we want to fix potentially what we created harm for, or fix the parts where we see that they don't see themselves or they don't love themselves enough, and the reason why they would fall back into addiction, or you know, we want to save it and fix it for them. God knows I do. I do. But what I'm grateful for in Recover Your Soul is that there's this ability to step back just enough to love them so unconditionally that we can believe that everything is working out for them too. And you know that over the last couple months or whatever I've been talking about it, um, I shared that Bodhi had fallen off of his strict sobriety that he had been on for about six months. And when I went to go visit Alex and his girlfriend and little Rocky when he was two months old, I was pretty devastated and heartbroken when I saw that Bodhi was drinking again. And I had to lean really heavily into this work that we're doing, which is not to pretend like nothing's happening, and it's also not to not say anything. And I I want you to know that we don't have to say it perfect. And in and it isn't actually about saying exactly the right words, because if we think we're going to say just the right words, we're actually in control. We're attempting to control. But it's about saying the words from this place of loving detachment where we are so in our hearts and we are seeing the purity of who they are in their shining light. And we're knowing that the addiction is a cloak, as I like to call it. It's like you're either it's this identity or this cover that they're wearing over themselves that is whatever it is. And it is a very uh difficult cloak to remove, having been somebody who drank until I was 45 years old, 48, sorry, give myself even three more years, 48 years old. You know, why why did I keep doing that? You know, I never I never had to hit the wall that was so horrific. You know, I never got a DUI, I never landed in jail, I never killed somebody while I was driving, all the things that I could have very easily done. I didn't lose a job, although I was a horrible employee for a while at a job. So when you really look at like what does it take to get to a place where you hit a wall that's so hard? And why do we have to hit those walls that are so hard? And when you look at your kids, you're like, isn't that the bottom? Isn't that a wall that's hard enough? Like, haven't you hit a place that's enough that you want to do something different? And those are those are legitimate questions to a place where we're trying to control it. We're we're wanting it to be different. That's suffering. The suffering is the clinging, the wishing, the wanting, the demanding. When I speak to my kids, I'm pretty honest about what I think and how I'm afraid. Are you ready to step into your soul recovery? Visit the website recoveryoursoul.net to learn more about the nine-step soul recovery process. I hope that you'll join us the first Monday of every month for the free soul recovery support group on Zoom, where we learn more about soul recovery and connect with each other. If you'd like to work directly with me to move through the nine-step soul recovery process, I'm here for you. But you can also choose to work the steps on your own with individual modules intended to support you to work at your own pace and on your own time. And if you want even more soul recovery, join us for the Recover Your Soul Bonus podcast for Patreon members and Apple Podcast subscribers, where I interview amazing people sharing soul recovery tips for us and also do spiritual book studies. You can also find daily inspiration on Facebook and Instagram and join our private Facebook community. Visit the website for more information, links, and registration for everything. So when we went to Asheville for the retreat and I spent a couple days with Bodhi, I shared with you that um there he was. I'm hanging out with him again, and he's, you know, he said, Well, I'm not drinking right now, but he was smoking weed. And I looked at my child with just love in my heart, and I just was as present as I could be with him in that moment with trying to do these practices of not judging, not wanting to be different, not um being against it, but recognizing how it makes me feel. I prefer to not be around my children if they're going to be using. I prefer them sober. And then I have to make a decision, as I've talked about in the past, that says, you know, if they're choosing to do these things, I can have boundaries. And I talked about this in the support group last night. You can have boundaries that say, don't drink in my house, or, you know, you can, but don't go overboard, or you know, what you get to decide what that is for you. You get to decide because this is all about you coming back to yourself and how it feels for you. And I've just made a decision that I will share with my kids exactly what I think, but I can't control their behavior. And so I want to um I want to be present with them for where they are. But when I was with Bodie in Asheville, I could feel his addict growing. And I thought to myself, oof, I'm not sure where this is gonna go. And so I said to him while we were in Asheville, I said, seeing you smoke weed like this again is really concerning to me. And he said, I know, I know. It's I'm just on a season, this isn't forever, you know, I've had a lot of stress lately. It's just, you know, how I take care of that stress and don't worry about me, and I've got this. And you know, that that is that is the truth of how they feel in that moment. And I think part of the thing that can be so hard is how to detach our crystal ball, as Rich calls it. You know, he'll often say, like, I had a crystal ball about this. Well, the crystal ball might be right. It might actually mean that they're gonna have to hit some pretty intense wall. But when we keep them from hitting that wall by trying to save them from a bottom, we might be keeping them from the bottom that they need to save themselves. And so as this current situation is happening with Bodhi, a lot of really um incredible things are happening that are both hard and and profoundly beautiful and and different than ever I would have dealt with it before. One is that I'm present in myself in a way that is um empowered, strong, at the same time incredibly compassionate, open. I want to hear what he has to say, but I also am holding truth and saying it like it is, you know, this thing that you're dealing with right now, you got yourself here. You and your addict, you did this. And whatever the consequences are, you get to be the one who is gonna figure this out. You get to decide in this crossroads whether you're going to pick one direction or the other. And I have a direction I'd like you to pick because I'm on that direction and it works really well for me. And I cannot even imagine my life now if I put a drink to my lips. I I'd ruin everything. But I can't make him make that choice of what the crossroads is. And that hurts. And that goes to the comment that was in the meeting last night, right? So she's saying, I'm seeing all these beautiful things happening to him, and he's really working really hard on himself, and yet he's making this decision. And it's hard to watch. But just like I'm always encouraging us to look more at what's working and the soul that's behind there, and to cheerlead that part and then speak to the cloak, the attic part, in in a way where you're it's almost like when you're talking to kids, they always say, talk to the behavior and not the child. If you tell a child they're bad, they're hearing you say they're bad. But if you say, when you do this behavior, this does not work for us. You can't hit your sister. It's not that you're bad, right? But hitting your sister is not acceptable. And we need to do the same thing when we talk about what happens when people are using. When you make this choice, when you decide. I've had a couple comments, um, just very few that have said something along the lines of on the YouTube podcast, you know, talking about people being addicts. I don't think they can make a choice when they get so far in their addiction. I think it gets harder and harder to differentiate that choice. But I was pretty far down there in my addiction. And even though it consumed me and I was completely controlled by it, there was a choice that I made every day. And I do think it gets much, much harder the further down you go because the chemicals begin to do what they do to our brains. But there is this level of having to take responsibility, which is why I think AA has some of the intensity that it has, is because you have to see how self shit is and how self-seeking it is to be in addiction and how it negatively affects the people around you. It's profound about how it affects the people around you when people are really in addiction. And so this is the piece, and I'm gonna do another um episode that'll be on not um not having to live the consequences of other people's actions. Because right now, I just really want to speak to the parents who are in situations where you love your children and they are making decisions. And how do we attend to ourselves? As this has been playing out with Bodhi, I've been very forthright with him. And at the same time saying, I love you. At the same time saying you have to take responsibility for the actions that you are making decisions to choose. And there are choices to be made that will give you information that you'll learn from, you'll grow from. There is something here to be learned, and you can get over addiction. It does not have to consume you. There is a choice, but I can't control him to make that choice. So when you're with people who are using, the key is that the boundaries are really around what we're gonna do. If you have somebody who is in the middle of using and and it doesn't feel good to you, you can have a boundary that says, I can't be around you when you're drunk or when you're using. Now that may mean that you don't have a relationship with them because when people are really in their addiction, it seems like you're asking them to not breathe. But you get to decide if that is okay with you. But on the other hand, if you're making a choice to have a relationship with somebody, and you can see in the crystal ball down the road that it is not going to go well for them, if we do that from a compassionate space where we understand that that may be what their soul needs to learn whatever they need to learn or whatever it is, whatever that wall or that bottom that they have to hit, that we stop trying to control and fix and save them. But then we're present in that moment. And in those moments, there's this opportunity to not count the drinks, not be obsessing about what's happening in the future, not be pissed about what happened before, but just to be present because this moment is the only moment that we have. And again, it comes back to how are we feeling in our own bodies, and so much of this opportunity for us to step into our own recover your soul journey, to step into our own journey of what we're learning about ourselves and healing ourselves. One of the other beautiful things that happened in this situation is Rich and I are on the same page. We are not fighting, we are not triangulating, we are not in battle with each other. And you know, if you've been listening to the podcast, that is one of the biggest wins that I could ever offer is that instead of calling my husband in fear of something, I called him and I said, Here's what's going on. And he jumped in in his place of his recover your soul self. And we came together to be able to look at it from a more compassionate, healed whole way. That is success. That's the only thing I have control of. That is literally the only thing I have control of how I show up. And I'm grateful that my partner is showing up in the same way. And so even if we have the crystal ball that says, oh my God, if you can't finally decide that the drinking is not going to work for you, there is so much benefit in rewarding the lessons and the awarenesses and the connection that they're having with their soul. Because this is a lifelong journey for all of us to understand and love ourselves and stand in our worthiness, to remember our wholeness. And as a parent, whether your kids are newborns and you're looking in their little incredibly innocent, beautiful eyes, or you are looking at somebody who now is your peer. You know, we have children when we're so young, and then they get to a place where you're like, oh, you know, my son's 50. I'm I'm 70. You know, it's very much the same. These are they're they're not our children anymore, but they will always be our children. But we have to let them have their experience and take responsibility for the choices and the decisions they make and have the most strength within yourself to have loving detachment and to witness from a place of compassion and to attend to yourself, to attend to yourself and your soul recovery journey. So this is gonna unfold, and I'm sure I will share more with you. But instead of it being a calamity, I feel like this is a crossroads that needed to come. And I'm actually really proud of my son and how he's standing in it in this moment today, in this second. And, you know, I don't have hope in that way of hope of thinking, oh, this will be the magic fairy dust to sprinkle over it to take care of it forever. What I have hope in is a knowing that this soul is invested in his well-being and his life. And I want to see him fully for exactly who he is: the light, the shadow, the parts, all the parts. And I want to be a support to him so that he can use this as a learning tool to do what's best and right for him moving forward, to be able to live a life that is free and happy and has as much ease and least challenge as possible. But I just have to let him find his way. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you for listening, and I hope that that helps support your soul recovery process. Just a reminder that every Friday is the Recover Your Soul Bonus podcast. This podcast is for Patreon members and Apple Podcast subscribers. And not only do you get an incredible interview or book study that comes with being part of that community, but your subscribing helps support this podcast and the Recover Your Soul community. If you want to listen to those bonus episodes but can't subscribe right now, do know that you can be a free Patreon member and have access for limited time to new episodes. Visit the website recoveryousoul.net or check out the show links below for coupons and information for upcoming events. I thank you for sharing this podcast with your friends and family. I thank you for giving it five stars, and the reviews that are left bring tears to my eyes. I am honored to be part of your life. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.