DEEPAK CHOPRA'S ADVICE ON DEALING WITH AN ADULT CHILD ADDICT

Writing in Oprah Magazine, spiritual teacher and medical doctor Deepak Chopra responded to a parent asking how to deal with her adult child addict.  Here's Dr. Dhopra's wisdom:

In spiritual terms, this is an issue about attachment. Attachment makes you feel obsessed about your children's lives. It makes their pain feel like yours. You all but lose the boundary between you and them.

You can get beyond such attachments through a process that involves the following steps:

• See that attachment isn't positive. It helps no one. The most effective therapists tend to be unattached, even detached. It gives them clarity and objectivity. It allows their skills to be used most effectively.
  
  
• See that your attachment is harming you. As close as you feel toward your children, the life that is closest to you is your own. Sacrificing a good part of it to suffering is destructive. You must value yourself enough to want a good life for yourself. From this goodness, you will offer more help to those in need, not less.
  
  
• Reject false hope, wishful thinking and the constant recurrence of "solutions" that never work and which your children reject anyway. If they say no, be an adult and accept that no means no.
  
  
• Heal your wounds. Most addicts have lost the ability to care about those around them. They are in the habit of hurting, rejecting, betraying, keeping secrets and breaking faith. The disease works that way. But all that negative behavior has hurt you. Don't let parental guilt turn you into a punching bag or a rug to trample over. Heal yourself where you hurt.
  
  
• Fulfill your primary relationship. You don't mention your husband, but if you are still married, repair your bridges with him. This is not a path to walk alone. Realize your children are not your primary relationship. If they are all you have, that still doesn't make it your primary relationship, because they aren't relating to you at all. Find someone to relate to who cares for you. They certainly don't.
  
  
• Find a vision to follow. Right now, your vision is an illusion. It is fixed on the false notion that if you found just the right key, you would solve your children's lives. Please see that no parent solves any grown child's life, which means you haven't failed. It's impossible to fail at what was unachievable to begin with. The mind abhors a vacuum, and you need a purposeful goal in life to fill the place where anxiety and guilt now reside.
  
  

If you seriously undertake these steps, you will go long way to reclaiming your own life from the self-destructive tendencies that have set in. It's never too late to find yourself.

(source:http://www.oprah.com/spirit/how-to-deal-with-your-childs-drug-addiction-ask-deepak )