Don't Get Your Goodness All Over Everybody

And happy birthday, Annie!

This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it, but it's an inside job. And we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and chapstick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to. And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer anyway. - Anne Lamott

I grew up in a family plagued by addiction, as many families are. My mom’s dad was an alcoholic and a gambler. He died ten years before I was even born, in his early fifties, of liver cancer. My oldest brother is also an alcoholic. Luckily, he’s been clean and sober for decades now. The younger of my older brothers? Who knows what his drug of choice was. I just know he made sure to check off all his options with dedication for decades. This eventually led to his death of liver cirrhosis, also in his early fifties.

It’s worth mentioning that both my older brothers are adopted, proving you don’t need biological ties to create repetitive family patterns.

I expect more of us are aware of the systemic nature of addiction in families than used to be the case, but for those of you who aren’t, the addict is not the only sick and suffering one in this scenario. All of the people around them who enable and excuse their behavior are also sick and suffering. (As are any folks who have to distance themselves to escape the family dynamic. They may be more suffering than sick in that case, but they’re still in the system.)

Once you see it you can’t unsee it, this toxic enabling that so often surrounds people suffering from addiction. Even when they want to get clean, live differently, the get-out-of-jail-free card offered by their enablers undermines their ability to do so. Because getting clean is hard. It’s painful, both physically and emotionally. Feeling all the feelings that you’ve been medicating yourself to avoid for who knows how long and learning how to develop what’s called distress tolerance is not for the faint of heart.

But I’ll tell you a secret which you may not know. The work to step away from enabling is also incredibly difficult and also requires improving your distress tolerance. And this work isn’t just required when you love a person who suffers from addiction. It’s required anytime you love anybody. But particularly it’s required for parents, regardless if they’ve ever loved someone who suffers from addiction a day in their lives.

Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash

For my full-time day job I work in the study abroad office at a university. We send hundreds and hundreds of young people abroad for anywhere from a week to a year every academic cycle. The vast majority of our students handle the necessary work to prepare to be abroad just fine. They do their research. They make decisions. They fill out paperwork and meet deadlines. And then they go and have an experience which permanently transforms their sense of themselves and the wider world.

However, a small number of the students we work with really struggle to prepare to be abroad, and not because they are incapable of the tasks required. It’s because their parents can’t seem to allow them to take the lead on their own experience.

This week alone I have fielded half a dozen phone calls and emails from parents doing the initial research work for their child to understand how study abroad works or how to navigate one aspect of preparation or another. I have had to tell parents repeatedly that all the information they seek is on our website, including the time and location of drop-in advising hours and the means to make a longer one-on-one advising appointment at which their student can directly ask any questions that aren’t answered by the website.

Kids who grew up on the internet, got accepted to an Ivy League university, and have been on campus for more than a year and a half know how to find and peruse a website.

A few days ago, I had a kid appear in our office in a tizzy because he didn’t know how to fill out a visa application to go to Spain and it was due in less than a week. I asked him how he got the paper application he was holding in his hand. “My mom printed it out for me over Spring Break from the provider website,” he responded.

“Have you gone to the program provider’s website since then to review their instructions and requirements?”, I followed up.

“Um, no.” he sheepishly offered. I told him (gently, kindly) that no, no one was immediately available to help him fill out the application. I emailed him a similar sample with all the fields filled in. I encouraged him to email the program provider if he had any further questions. I reminded him that he could also call them on the telephone if he got really stuck.

He agreed to do these things. He even thanked me, god bless him. And then he sat in our office lobby, called his mom, talked to her instead for nearly 20 minutes, and eventually walked out with the phone still clutched to his ear.

In a New York Times op-ed this week, Dr. Mathilde Ross, a senior staff psychiatrist at Boston University Health Services, wrote about an increasingly common challenge for college parents:

Today’s parents are suffering from anxiety about anxiety, which is actually much more serious than anxiety. It’s self-fulfilling and not easily soothed by logic or evidence, such as the knowledge that most everyone adjusts to college just fine.

Anxiety about anxiety has gotten so bad that some parents actually worry if their student isn’t anxious. This puts a lot of pressure on unanxious students — it creates anxiety about anxiety about anxiety. (This happens all the time. Well-meaning parents tell their kid to make an appointment with our office to make sure their adjustment to college is going OK.) If the student says she’s fine, the parents worry that she isn’t being forthright. This is the conundrum of anxiety about anxiety — there’s really no easy way to combat it.

But I do have some advice for parents. The first thing I’d like to say, and I mean it in the kindest possible way, is: Get a grip.

Yes, some kids are really in serious pain and need intervention to handle the cascade of adjustments involved in being out in the world on their own, but most don’t. “Most just need a responsible adult to show them the way”, Ross assures readers. “And most of what I do can be handled by any adult who has been through a thing or two, which is to say, any parent.”

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

Anne Lamott, novelist and memoirist, turned 70 recently. Anne knows a thing or two about parenting and addiction, since she is both an addict and the parent of an addict. In a recent interview in honor of the release of her twentieth book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Anne discussed the lessons she learned when her son was deep in the throws of his addiction.

She followed up the opening quote above about not “running alongside your grown up children” by naming the shadowy truth behind all of our “helping”:

Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.

Oof. But also, yes.

Raising children is incredibly stressful, sometimes even heartbreaking. Watching them struggle, feeling their pain as our own, can lead us to the shadowy side of boundless love, where there are no boundaries of self at all. Rushing into soothe their distress also soothes us so we do it again. And again. But when has becoming an adult— learning how to bear responsibility and consequences, handle disappointment and loss, delay gratification and work for what we want— ever been a pain-free process for any of us? Why would we, therefore, act as if the same won’t be true for our children?

As alarming as the world is right now, I don’t actually think it’s inherently more dangerous than it was when I was young. True, we didn’t have the internet and cell phones, but also? We didn’t have the internet. Or cell phones. Fentanyl didn’t exist, but crack and heroin and cocaine did, and all the ditch weed for sale where I grew up was laced with PCP. And most of our parents weren’t paying attention to much of anything, ever. We traveled. We went to school and worked weird, shitty jobs. We dropped out and hitchhiked and rode everywhere without helmets on. And, by and large, most of us turned out just fine.

I’m not trying to diminish the reality of our children’s struggle. I’m only urging us to remember that much of it is a feature, not a bug. It always has been.

I do sometimes help my kids (who are 16 and 20) with stuff when they ask, because leaving them to fend entirely for themselves is not the answer either. I’m more likely to ask them what they’ve done so far and then suggest what they might try next instead of doing things for them, but sometimes doing things is necessary. I recently fielded calls to help my son set up a series of medical appointments because he can’t answer the phone reliably when he’s at work. I looked up the time the DMV was closing when my youngest was planning to go get their learner’s permit with their dad and texted it to them because I knew they probably hadn’t and if they showed up and it was closed conflict would ensue. But they had to let their dad know and figure out how to adjust their plan for the day. They had to make sure they had the documents they needed. They had to fill out the paperwork and take the test.

I’m always looking for the nearest opportunity to bow out and hand the reins back. And I only step in and offer help unsolicited when I can see that they’ve honestly tried everything and are really struggling and stuck, or it looks like they’re about to fall in a hole. Sometimes they gratefully accept my help. Sometimes they tell me to back off. I do my best to not take it personally, and to still offer sympathy if they fall in a hole.

Part of learning to practice our integrity successfully is learning to take care of our own business and dealing with the consequences when we don’t. When we as parents rush to help our children with tasks they are capable of handling themselves then we’re just, and I say this with tremendous love, smearing our toxic goodness all over everybody. We’re undermining their integrity in the name of love.

Again, sometimes kids do really need help. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s our help they need. When we get out of the way and let them receive help from others, even if that help comes in the form of consequences or tough love, even if it means we don’t know exactly what’s going on or understand all the choices they are making, we are still doing the hard work of parenting. We are releasing them to learn to fly as far and as long as their journey can take them.

That was the point from the beginning, wasn’t it?

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