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All the ways to love an addict

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 My son has an addiction. My husband and I have used all the love strategies we know to leverage for our motivation for him to stop taking drugs. They have been useless. We did the tough love approach and kicked our son out when he used drugs in our house. He didn't quit then. For some reason, I thought this would be the last trick in the book of stopping enabling which would have him hit bottom. Maybe because I had heard so many times from other people that when they kicked their person out of the house their loved one reached a bottom. It didn't work. Mainly because other people offered him a place to stay. So, even though we stopped enabling him, others picked it right back up. One family who took my son in had a daughter who used meth just like my son. If I were the parent of a daughter, I would not have allowed a young man to live in the same house as my daughter--especially if he met her in rehab. They both began using meth again. Another family with two daughters too
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When you wish they were dead

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I attended the support meeting for families who have relatives with addictions. The mothers in the room, including myself, bawled their eyes out and wished their children were dead. Actually, we wanted our children to get better but if they can't get better then we wished they would just hurry up and die. Please give peace to all of this suffering. This was our honest, shattered sharing which addiction forced from us. There is nothing like the anguish of a mother who is placed in a position to want her child's suffering to end by extinguishing his or her life. No one gives you empathy when your addicted child is alive. Society blames you, the mother, for that child's mental health condition.  Many families spend thousands upon thousands of dollars finding the right medical services for their children. That money is down the drain. There's no cure for addiction. It's a chronic, relapsing brain disorder. When people are sober they live pretty good lives. They are
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What to do when you work with someone who doesn't like you

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I have had a lot of jobs. And in some jobs, I've made really good friends and I'll even go visit them in the nursing home when it comes to that. But there are some people I've worked with I just couldn't stand. When I tell other people--in other words GOSSIP about it--I usually preface it with "I'm sure it's something about me that can't figure out them." But that's a lie. It's about them and something that I notice about unethical behavior or they were just plain mean or lazy. I shared an office with a woman who had worked for the organization for about 100 years. She didn't like me because I replaced a man who had retired from the organization after working there for 150 years. She liked the guy because the guy told her how wonderful she was to work with all the time. So, since I wasn't THAT guy, she decided to handle it by REFUSING TO TALK TO ME, EVER. She was capable of talking because she had family members who visited he
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What to do when your neighbors Facebook shame you

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My 19-year-old son took our dog for a walk. Like many young (and old) men, he wasn't inclined to pick up the stuff that our dog dumped on her walk. So he left it there and walked on. This is not my son. This is someone Else's son. They have a good son. He might have been paid to pick up the poop in this staged photo.That's the only way my son would do it. The neighbor saw this occur in front of his house, on his street, and he didn't like it. In fact, he didn't like it so much that he took a photo of our dog and posted it on our neighborhood's Facebook page. I discovered the wall of shame after I got off from a long day of work. At about 10 p.m., right as I was getting ready for bed. I was EMBARRASSED. Because by the time I discovered the post, about a dozen neighbors had posted their opinions on how the event should be handled, which included picking up a bag of other people's dog poop and leaving it at our doorstep. THESE PEOPLE HAD ALL DAY
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