When Love Becomes a Shield: Understanding Enabling and Boundaries

What happens when love becomes a shield that prevents necessary growth? In this powerful episode, Matt Brown examines the complex psychology behind enabling behaviors and offers practical strategies for breaking free from destructive patterns that keep both families and their addicted loved ones stuck.

Drawing from over two decades of experience as an interventionist, Matt compassionately challenges the notion that addiction is simply about poor choices. He reframes addiction as a survival mechanism—sometimes the only thing keeping someone emotionally afloat despite devastating long-term consequences. This perspective shift opens the door to understanding why both the addicted person and their family members remain locked in patterns that perpetuate suffering.

The heart of this episode revolves around two transformative questions families must confront: "Have I enabled the addiction?" and "Have I been harmed by it?" These seemingly simple inquiries demand brutal honesty and lead to the most difficult realization—that we cannot control others, only ourselves. Matt walks listeners through the emotional parallels between addiction and codependency, revealing how both stem from avoiding uncomfortable feelings.

Perhaps most valuable are the practical insights on boundary-setting that actually works. Matt explains why boundaries must have integrity, why consequences matter, and how starting with smaller, manageable boundaries builds credibility over time. His approach empowers families to reclaim their lives while still supporting recovery in more effective ways.

For anyone caught in the exhausting cycle of enabling a loved one's addiction, this episode provides both the compassion and clear direction needed to begin making meaningful changes. Matt also announces a new weekly West Coast family support call starting June 15th at 8pm Pacific, complementing the existing Monday/Thursday calls—all completely free and designed to help families navigate these challenging waters.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Party Wreckers podcast, hosted by seasoned addiction interventionist, Matt Brown. This is a podcast for families or individuals with loved ones who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism. Perhaps they are reluctant to get the help that they need. We are here to educate and entertain you while removing the fear from the conversation. Stick with us and we will get you through it. Welcome the original party wrecker, Matt Brown.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Hey, thank you guys. Thanks for coming back for another episode. My name is Matt Brown. I'm your host. I'm an interventionist. I've been working with families who have loved ones who struggle with addiction for a little over 20 years now, in different capacities, but as an interventionist, pretty consistently. I've worked in treatment centers along the way as well. But I really love that front-end crisis work. I really enjoy working with families who have that loved one who just hasn't been able to find the willingness to get help, and really working with those families to find new language, new strategies and how to create opportunities for those conversations to look a little bit different.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Before I get started in today's topic, I do want to let everybody know that, in addition to the normal Monday and Thursday family calls at 8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific, starting on June 15th, which is just a couple of weeks from now, every Sunday night at 8 pm Pacific, I'm going to be hosting a family in crisis support call on Zoom through Intervention on Call every Sunday night. So if you're a West Coaster and have found it difficult to get on those 5 pm calls because you're on your way home from work or there's just a lot going on with your families because it's still early in the evening. We are going to start a West Coast meeting at 8 pm on Sundays every week. To start a West Coast meeting at 8 pm on Sundays every week. Another interventionist his name is Pej, out of Southern California. He's going to be joining me. He's another one of the providers on the service on intervention on call and together we're going to be hosting that West Coast meeting. So if you are out here in the West and it's easier for you to attend on a Sunday night at 8, by all means I hope we'll see you there. And, as always, everybody's welcome to the other nights of the week, of course, as well Mondays and Thursdays.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Hopefully we will get it to the point where we have a family meeting every night of the week so that people can come and have that place to just to feel like they're not so alone. It's completely free. As interventionists, we want to provide that. In particular, I think it helps to take away some of the fear of the word intervention. Oh my gosh, this is such a scary thing and intervention sounds like a really scary experience and we want to take a lot of that fear away from the experience for families and, I think, just settling in with us for an hour and getting some feedback, asking questions and making it a little bit more interactive, or just listening in you can keep your camera off and listen in if that's what you want, but hopefully it'll just make the process a little bit less intimidating for you.

Speaker 2: 3:54

One of the questions that gets consistently brought up One of the questions that gets consistently brought up and I know that I've talked about this in different ways and it comes up from time to time here, a weekly basis but in my private practice, seems to be the biggest barrier for families and the hardest thing for them to wrap their heads around, and so I want to really dive deep into that today, and so bear with me. For some of you, this may be old hat, For some of you, this may be review, and if you're new to this, then this may be exactly what you need to hear today. In any case, I hope that everybody gets something out of this, and so let's go ahead and launch into it. Before we get into enabling and boundaries, I think the first thing we really have to do is really understand what it is that we're enabling, and really understand what addiction is and what it's not. Let's dispel the rumor right away.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Addiction is not a choice. I think a lot of times families look at their addicted loved ones and they say why can't they just make better choices? Why can't they just stop? That was in my family growing up. That was one of the things that was baffling to my family is why does he continue to do these things? Why does he continue to get in his own way? And none of us want to live the life of addiction. But when you live in this place of emotional distress where you don't have any kind of internal mechanism to manage the ups and the downs of emotional and mental life, and then you discover, hey, I can drink something or I can smoke something or I can snort something or eat something that will take those feelings away and make it that much more manageable, consequences be damned, I don't care about the consequences, I just want to feel better right now.

Speaker 2: 6:01

And at 18 years old, when I took my first drink and discovered that alcohol made a lot of those feelings go away and it made them go away for as long as I drank I didn't have to feel those things again until I sobered up. And so my brain very early on in this process, learned that I don't need therapy, I don't need meetings, I don't need any of that. I I just need to drink. And then gradually it became other substances and other behaviors as well. So addiction, first and foremost, is not a choice, it is a disease and it has nothing to do with the drugs or the alcohol, and that may be a little bit of a confusing statement for some of you.

Speaker 2: 6:44

Most of the time people look at going to treatment or getting sober as simply the elimination of compulsive behavior. I'm going to stop using drugs, I'm going to stop drinking. That is not enough, that's simply abstinence, and for most of us who are truly addicted, that's not going to make things better, it's going to make things worse when you simply eliminate the one thing that has allowed me to feel those really shameful, hurtful, painful feelings. And so in my mind that was some degree of level. And for my family, of course, it certainly wasn't. For the people that were around me it certainly wasn't, but that was the one thing that made my life survivable made my life survivable.

Speaker 2: 7:47

I know I've shared this on here before, but there was one night in my twenties where, literally, drugs saved my life. I was in the process of contemplating ending my life and had a tool at my side with I mean, I'll just say it I had a loaded shotgun sitting next to me on the bed and I was going to end my life that night and I had some drugs in my pocket and I thought, well, I'm going to use the rest of these drugs and then I'm going to go ahead and follow through with this. Well, once I got high, I didn't feel that desperation anymore, my life was not so completely overwhelming and that desperate feeling of there's no way out of this it was gone. And so I'm alive today because I got high that night. And that sounds really counterintuitive when I tell people that drugs saved my life, but I think for a lot of us that's the case, and I want you to look at addiction more as a survival mechanism than as a mechanism of self-harm.

Speaker 2: 8:49

It is the one thing that might be keeping your loved one here on this earth. Now, does that mean it's going to keep them here on the earth? Absolutely not, because eventually we end up in one of three places we end up in jail, we end up in a mental institution or we end up in a cemetery. That is the end result for anyone who stays in active addiction over a long enough timeline. It's inevitable. There's no such thing as a drug addict that dies of natural causes, and so I don't want to minimize the impact that, over a long enough timeline, that addiction will have. But on a short timeline, on a day-to-day timeline, that's the only thing that was keeping me alive helpful life support, but from an emotional standpoint, that's what was keeping me alive. It was keeping me from constantly feeling that desperation, that shame, that guilt, that overwhelming sense of impending doom. And, yes, life finally got bad enough that I decided I was going to get some help. And so, as families, I don't want you to look at boy, this person's really making bad choices and I wish they'd stop. Nobody wakes up to the life of active addiction and celebrates. Nobody says, yeah, this is exactly what I wanted to be when I was a kid.

Speaker 2: 10:18

So don't look at addiction as simply consistent or compulsive use of drugs and alcohol. I want you to look at it as a way to avoid the feelings that otherwise would be there if we didn't use, and I'll talk about how that shows up in families here in just a little bit when we talk about codependency and we talk about enabling, because codependency and addiction are almost identical. It's just the acting out, how it gets acted out, that's different, but the feelings underneath it are exactly the same. So that's you know again, without spending too much time dissecting addiction and if you go back and listen to previous episodes, I'm sure you'll learn a lot more about that but that's just kind of, at a very high level, what I want you to really hear about what addiction is and what it's not.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Now, when we get into the enabling phases, as addicted individuals, we lose touch with our ability to live life on the terms that life requires of us, and so we start getting other people to carry the water for us, so to speak. We get other people to step in and provide financial help, emotional support. Enabling can take a variety of different forms. Some of it is very visible. Sometimes I'm met with families where there's a person living in their home who's actively using, disregarding the rules, and the family continues to provide shelter, transportation, communication, finances, and the list goes on. And so sometimes it's very visible and very tangible support in terms of financial enabling or providing the comforts of life or even the necessities of life to the person who's struggling. Sometimes, the enabling takes the form of the form of emotional enabling, where we find it difficult to really talk plainly about what's really going on.

Speaker 2: 12:31

Instead, we want to try to encourage, we want to try to be supportive hey, everything's going to be okay. Don't worry, this isn't going to be the way that things always are. It'll get better. It'll get better. And instead of getting honest with somebody and saying, hey, I really think you might benefit from getting some professional help, I don't think that we have in this house what it is you really need, and as much as I love you and as much as I want to be able to provide some help for you, right now, we just don't have that here. We don't have the capacity to give you what you need right now. We just don't have that here. We don't have the capacity to give you what you need right now. Instead, we opt for a much easier conversation which feels good hey, I love you and things are going to get better. We're going to get through this, don't you worry. You'll get another job. You'll find another person to be in a relationship with. She probably wasn't the right person for you to begin with.

Speaker 2: 13:19

Whatever the story is, we find ourselves emotionally enabling somebody instead of having a much more significant and deeper conversation with someone that might actually get them moving in a different direction, because we get afraid, and that's the other thing. That happens is because of the history that a lot of us have in terms of, hey, when my family wants to talk to me about my addiction, I'm going to make that conversation really uncomfortable for them. If they want to talk about how you know, the condition that I was in when I came home last night, or the things that I did I wrecked another car or I, you know, took money out of their purse again, or you know whatever it was if they want to talk about those behaviors or those details, I'm going to I'm going to make that conversation really painful. I'm going to talk to them about how it's their fault. I'm going to talk to them about, of course, if you had a family like I do, you'd drink too. You'd use drugs too. If you had parents, like I do, of course you'd act out in similar ways.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Life here is miserable and we start to gaslight everybody into thinking that you're the one who's at fault here, you're the one who's responsible for why my life looks the way that it does. And we convince families, in particular moms and dads, that somehow if you had done something different, life would look differently for me. If you had done something different, life would look differently for me. And as parents, I get it Like we want to take responsibility so that our kids don't have to make these big changes. Hey, if I can make changes in my life, that will better the lives of my kids. Of course I want to be able to do that, but we get to this point, especially in early adulthood, where we have to assume that mantle of responsibility. Our self-esteem depends on it. Our future successes depend on it, on us being able to step into that arena of personal responsibility. And when we can do that, we get to attract all of the self-esteem and all of the benefits that come with that. Get to attract all of the self-esteem and all of the benefits that come with that, even if we fail, even if we square up to it and we're not successful, it's okay. We have the experience that we get to learn from and the self-esteem comes regardless of whether or not we're successful. We tried, we made the effort and there's opportunities for self-esteem even in that that I think sometimes we get robbed of by well-intending family members, and so those are really the primary ways that people will enable Financially, emotionally, and then just by staying silent, because I don't want the headache, I don't want the contention or the conflict that's going to come if I bring this up today.

Speaker 2: 16:05

So just for today I'm going to stay silent, and then today bleeds into tomorrow, and tomorrow bleeds into the next day, and before long we've got weeks of silence. And that's really where the enabling becomes more apparent, because now it's been going on for so long that it's like well, I guess this is just the way life is, and we silently resign ourselves to a life that we know we don't want to live both the addicted individual and the family. And so the question then becomes okay, so how do I create boundaries? How do I start changing this? Because I feel like I'm so deep underwater here that this problem has been going on for so long. How do I even start? And that is the million-dollar question for most families, because by the time they get into a conversation on the phone with somebody like me, where they're talking to a professional interventionist, or maybe they're talking to their therapist or a doctor or somebody that you know. Clergyman, where they've confided, like this, is just bigger than what we can handle now, and it's gotten so out of control that we just have no idea where to start.

Speaker 2: 17:17

There's two questions. As I'm preparing to do an intervention with families, there's two questions that I ask everyone to consider. The first question is have I enabled the addiction in any way? And we've already talked about the ways that we can enable. The second question is have I been harmed by the addiction in any ways?

Speaker 2: 17:40

And when I say the addiction, I'm not talking about the individual. These individuals that we get to work with are some of the most intelligent, kind, sensitive, loving people you'll ever meet. When they're at their best, and that's what's worth fighting for. They are not the problem the addiction is. And so when I say, have I enabled the addiction, have I been harmed by the addiction, I don't want you to put that onto your loved one, because at their core they're still that wonderful, loving person. That's worth the effort that you're about to make as you embark on this opportunity to create a conversation, or maybe it's to the point where you need to do an intervention and get them into a treatment program, but they're worth whatever effort you're about to make.

Speaker 2: 18:31

And so those are the two questions that I really want you to ask yourselves when I say have you been harmed by the addiction I'm talking about? Have you been harmed financially? Have you been harmed emotionally, whether it's verbal abuse, emotional abuse, even physical abuse sometimes, and that's the other thing. Have I been harmed physically? And sometimes there is physical abuse, physical violence. That's not altogether common, but it happens Most of the time.

Speaker 2: 18:59

The physical manifestations come when I neglect myself. I'm not able to sleep the way that I need to, I'm not able to take care of myself the way that I need to, because all of my mental and emotional bandwidth are spent worrying about this other person and how to help keep all the plates spinning in their life, and I become a secondary issue. And you know, in the short run that's not always a bad thing. That's what we do for our kids as parents, that's what we do for our spouses as loved ones, and so I'm talking about over the long term. You know, as this progresses, we find ourselves neglecting ourselves and not taking care of ourselves. We find ourselves neglecting other important relationships or even finding conflict in other relationships where we're at disagreements on how to handle things, and so unity becomes an issue.

Speaker 2: 19:51

It's really important to really see this with honest eyes, and these are not easy questions to have to ask yourself. Have I enabled this? Have I been harmed by this? And if the answer to either or both of those questions is yes, the next question can't be well, what does my loved one have to do so that I'm not enabling this anymore, so that I'm not harmed by this anymore? We have no control over them. No-transcript work so much harder on solving this problem than the individual will, and so the question then becomes what do I have to change so that I'm no longer enabling this, so that I'm no longer being harmed by this? And that can be a pretty big pill to swallow, and so we don't want to eat the whole elephant in one bite During an intervention. When we're sitting down and the family has the support of a group of people and a professional in the room, we'll come at that a little bit differently than what I would recommend for somebody having a one-on-one conversation about these kinds of things and really kind of setting up individual boundaries before it gets to the point where an intervention is needed. But this is where addiction and codependency really begin to appear. The same Because, as families look at implementing boundaries, they're met with the same emotional difficulties that were met with an active addiction.

Speaker 2: 21:49

I used drugs and alcohol to avoid feeling what I was going to feel. If I didn't use drugs and alcohol, I didn't want to feel the shame and the guilt and the sadness and the fear and the loneliness and the insecurities and all of those feelings that came when I didn't have something in my system. Families and loved ones will enable, for the very same reasons. Now we will dress it up and make it look like well, I'm doing this because I love that person. I'm doing this because I don't want to see them suffer. I don't want to see them go hungry. I don't want to see them go hungry. I don't want to see them be cold. I don't want to see them out on the streets with no place to be. That I get.

Speaker 2: 22:30

But if we dig a little bit deeper, uh, what we will discover is that we're doing it because we don't want to feel what we're going to feel if we don't do it. Well, I don't want to feel like I'm a bad dad. I don't want to feel like I'm a bad mother. I don't want to feel like I'm a bad spouse. I don't want to feel the guilt that's going to come if I know that my kid is out on the street because I won't let them use while they're here at home or I won't get them a hotel room where I know that they're just going to throw a party and use with everybody else. They can fit in that room. We don't want to feel what we're going to feel if we don't engage in those behaviors, and that's why addiction and codependency are so. They're really just different sides of the same coin and as actively addicted individuals, we will find people who are codependent to enable us and even though that person's not using or drinking in an addicted or alcoholic way, the emotional distress that goes on under the surface is identical to what's going on with the addicted individual.

Speaker 2: 23:40

And so, if you're listening to this and you're having one of those aha moments, I really want you to know like, okay, you've just had like your first step experience. I've admitted that I was powerless and my life was unmanageable, like that. That is step one. When you're looking at this from a 12-step perspective Now, what do I do? Now, you have to really understand. Okay, regardless of how I feel, what is the healthiest thing I can do. And you know, my really good friend and interventionist, sam Davis, has a really poignant way of putting this and I'll put it to you guys the same way but I want to give him credit for this idea and the way he frames this.

Speaker 2: 24:23

If your loved one were allowed to hit bottom and I mean bottom, like lose everything they were literally homeless, penniless, jobless, without a relationship, without anyone around to support them. Are they capable enough, are they lovable enough? Are they intelligent enough to be able to rebuild their lives? And when we ask this question of families, most of the time the response is well, of course they are. Yes, they're capable, they're smart, they're lovable, they're good with people. They are very capable of rebuilding their lives from nothing.

Speaker 2: 25:10

The question then becomes why are we preventing that from happening? Because the moment that I hit bottom was the moment that I started to rise above it, that I started to actually find the humility that I needed to reach out and ask for help and begin that rebuilding process. Now I get it. For some people, the bottom is irreversible. It's catastrophic. For some people, it's death For some people. It's prison. For some people it's something else. There's an inherent risk in this. It's not just hey, they're going to hit bottom and they're going to bounce back. That's not the case for everybody, but by and large, that's not the end result for most. The vast majority of people do not die from addiction. They'll hit that bottom, they'll get sober and then they begin to recover.

Speaker 2: 26:05

In the studies we always hear about the people that don't make it. In 2023, I think it was 2022 or 2023, there was a study done that said 49 million people in this country were in active addiction in 20, I think it was 2022. 13 million got help. Now those numbers seem pretty abysmal. Those numbers seem pretty depressing. But here's the other way that I want you to look at it. There are millions of people in recovery in this country. There are millions of people. We can't even count how many people because AA and NA and all these other anonymous organizations are just that they're anonymous. We don't track how many people are in those organizations. And then you look at the people that do get well, whether they get well by going to church, or they get well by going to treatment or they get well through other means. They have that experience that allows them to get sober and stay sober and grow.

Speaker 2: 27:12

That's the end result for most people, and so I want you to really look at this with some optimism and some hope, if you will step back and allow your loved one to hit that bottom or, at the very least, let them have the experience they're choosing to have without interfering. Let them experience the natural consequences. You don't have to make artificial consequences. We're good at making our own consequences, believe me. So if you all, if all you do is just get out of the way and say, hey, I'm not going to give you money anymore, I know, I know how you're spending the money that I've been giving you and I don't feel good about that. So, going forward, I don't want you to ask me for money. Going forward, I'm not going to allow you to use drugs in my home, and so I want you to find someplace else to live. I'm not going to provide transportation for you to go and acquire drugs or sell drugs, if that's the thing that they're into. I may not feel good about providing a cell phone for you anymore, because I know that that's a way that you're facilitating not just communicating to be able to acquire drugs, but with really unhealthy relationships. And so, going forward, if you need a cell phone, you're going to need to get that for yourself.

Speaker 2: 28:21

There are a number of ways that we can look at eliminating some of the enabling the cell phone is usually the scariest thing for families, because how are they going to call me when they're ready to get help? I get that, but, trust me, if I can get drugs without any money, I can find a way to contact my family without a phone. Trust me, what I will say is allowing someone to be fully responsible for their life will bring this to an end much faster than if you continue to put a pillow under them every time they fall, because unless I get to experience what that fall feels like and the bruises and the blood that come from, that gets to be more than I want to experience again. That's when I get willing to change, that's when I get willing to do something different. And it wasn't until my family got out of the way and said hey, you can either go to treatment today or here's the alternative you do have to leave, we aren't going to support you. And I chose option B.

Speaker 2: 29:27

I didn't think I needed treatment and it took me a little while to come around to the idea that I needed to be sober. But unless they had done that, I don't know that I'd be here talking to you today, and I can't tell you how many times I've thanked my family, my mom in particular and my dad but my mom in particular because she I think it was harder on her than it was anybody else in my family and the strength that it takes for a mom and a dad to really tell their son hey, we love you and we want to provide some help for you today, but we're also going to allow that space for you to make a different choice and for you to go and experience that as well. That's love. They were done trying to control me. They were done trying to control my addiction. They were willing to let go and they were willing to let me have an experience that I was bent on having. But I just was so entitled and so arrogant that I thought that they were always going to be there to clean up the mess, and once the mess got too big for me to clean up on my own, I changed.

Speaker 2: 30:33

So, as families, as you really talk about, what kind of boundaries do we need to implement? It's different for every family. I can't say, okay, this is the first boundary that needs to be implemented, this is the second, this is the third. Everybody has to really take a look and say, okay, this is where we start, and it doesn't have to be these massive boundaries. It doesn't mean, hey, we're going to ask them to go and live somewhere else. It can be very simple things of. I don't let people talk to me like that. This needs to change and it can start very simply with the way you communicate with one another. Simply with the way you communicate with one another.

Speaker 2: 31:21

But once they realize that when you start putting boundaries in place, you hold them and those boundaries have integrity when the time comes that a bigger boundary does need to be implemented. They've got some history with you now of being able to set boundaries and hold boundaries. And they know if mom and dad say I've got to, I've got to leave the house because I'm not willing to get sober and go to treatment, or whatever the case is, they know, okay, in in recent weeks or months, my family has been able to put boundaries in place and hold them. They mean what they say and they say what they mean All of a sudden. That means a lot more than if you come right out of the gates with a boundary, that in their mind it's like yeah sure, mom and dad, you know. If it's a spouse, yeah sure, honey, I'm sure you're going to be able to do that. And then you know, I may toe the line for a couple of days and get back in your good graces and I know that once the dust settles I'll go back to running the show. I'll go back to running the show If the history shows me, as somebody in active addiction, that my family is changing, and even to be able to say hey, I'm going to Elanon, I'm going to Naranon, I'm going to a weekly family meeting with four or five, six different interventionists where they're coaching us on how to restructure some things in our home so that this doesn't have the kind of control over us that it does.

Speaker 2: 32:41

If you come to those family meetings, we don't want you to keep it a secret from your loved ones. We want them to know that you're getting help. We want them to know that you're engaging in something different. Now they're going to get uncomfortable about that. They're going to try to persuade you that you don't need that, or all these guys want is your money. All they want you to do is hire them for an intervention. That's why we make it free. We don't want people to feel like this is about you need to open up your wallets. We want families to heal from this. If you need us to have an intervention, okay, then we can talk about that. If you need us to do some coaching with you, we can talk about that too. But the sessions that we do several times a week, we do them for free because we don't want there to be strings attached. We want you to come, get what you need and be able to start implementing that in your homes.

Speaker 2: 33:29

Now, that's really what I wanted to dig into today. I wanted to really talk about why people enable and how we, as enablers, begin to implement some boundaries. And it all starts with those two questions, and we have to be honest with ourselves about the answers to those questions. And then we have to take a look and say, okay, realistically, what do I have to change here and what can I change here? And whatever you decide needs to change, it has to have integrity. You can't set a boundary and then walk it back. It won't work.

Speaker 2: 34:05

So start with boundaries that are realistic. Hold those boundaries. Have consequences when those boundaries get violated, and it doesn't mean that the consequences have to be hey, I'm asking you to leave our home. It can simply be. I don't have conversations where people speak to me like this when you're ready to have a different kind of conversation with me, let's pick this up where we left off, but for now we're going to be done, or however whatever that consequence needs to be. But a boundary without a consequence isn't a boundary. It's a request, and sometimes that's appropriate. But when you're implementing boundaries, there needs to be some structure to it. There needs to be a change that you're willing to implement. It's not about, hey, you need to do this, or else A boundary says I'm not willing to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy for me anymore or that are harmful for me anymore, and so until this behavior changes, I'm going to make a different choice, and so I hope this helped. I hope again, I don't want to drag on too long about this. I like to keep episodes to about a half an hour so that they don't get too wordy and too overwhelming. But I hope this helped.

Speaker 2: 35:19

If you have questions. I know I say this every episode. Sometimes people will reach out with questions. I wish more of you did, and so if you have questions about enabling, if you have questions about boundaries, send me an email. Shoot me an email at mad at party recordscom. I would love to hear from you. Let me know what I can do to help. If you have ideas for future episodes, if you have questions that you'd like for me to address in a future episode, by all means shoot that to me as well. I hope I get to see you on one of the upcoming family groups that we do Now. Again, we're adding the Sunday night, starting June 15th, and then, as always, we'll be doing the Monday and Thursday nights. But please, please, come and join us on that. Again, it's completely free, no strings attached, and until then, I hope your loved one will get sober and stay sober. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 1: 36:14

Thanks again for listening to the Party Wreckers. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a rating and a review. This helps us get the word out to more people, to learn more or to ask us a question we can answer in a future episode. Please visit us at PartyWreckerscom and remember don't enable addiction ever.