Thank you for that, Holly. I looked up Teen Challenge online, and it does look like a really good program.

I really appreciate your response as someone who’s seen the difficulties of both sides: the friend of the addicted and the addicted one. I also really love to hear that just laughing and doing things outside the problem were probably the most helpful thing your friends did for you. That’s super good to know. And I do believe that sometimes people might not have a choice. In some ways, I think Charlene might have been at that point. Her health was already so broken by the time I knew her…she depended on the cigarettes just to make it through a day.

I like how you put that. Easy to sit in judgement. Just as easy not to help. Maybe acknowledging my own demons is the first step in being able to help someone else.

On my side, I used to have extremely bad OCD (OCD that mostly and blessedly faded away somehow over time, seemingly independent of the many medications and therapies I was trying). I identified much more with addiction than OCD back then, because of the helplessness and complete lack of control I felt. If someone tells me that they have zero control over their smoking or eating or drinking, I can absolutely believe them, because that was exactly my experience. I can’t put into words the frustration of having no control over your own actions. It’s like endlessly struggling inside a cement box with not even a paper’s width of give in any direction. The frustration and the desperation! In hindsight, the main thing that friends did that helped was having fun with me, to give me a break from that feeling: just laughing together, or involving me in something that had nothing to do with my problems. Although sometimes they felt like they were enabling me, then.

When my OCD let up a bit, I was able to start taking more and more responsibility for getting better. But there needed to be that wiggle room first, for a struggle to actually take place!

I do wish people could believe that sometimes people might not actually have a choice. Not that cop-outs or false helplessness or denial or enabling don’t exist, of course–not at all! But can people believe it’s possible? Maybe you have to experience it to believe it. Anyway that’s my 2c!