When Love Stops Rescuing and Starts Awakening
Real love doesn’t rescue—it rises!
By Donna Marston
You thought love meant rescuing. You thought that if you tried hard enough, said the right words, or fixed every mistake, your child would be safe. But addiction has a way of revealing a deeper truth: the most profound transformation might be happening inside you.
No one talks about what really happens to a parent when their teen or adult child is in active addiction. We talk about enabling, boundaries, and letting go, but few speak about what awakens inside a parent through this storm.
Addiction doesn’t just show up to destroy you, your child, or your family; it shows up to reveal. It reveals both of your limits, your pain, your patterns, and if you’re open to receiving, changing, and taking a look at yourself and your childhood, you just might discover how emotionally strong you truly are.
At first, you think it’s all about your child. You obsess, you fix, you plead. You tell yourself that if they could just get better, everything would be okay again. But eventually, something shifts. You start to see that this isn’t just their battle, it’s an invitation for you to heal, too.
This journey forces you to decide: Do I stay stuck in the pain of what I can’t control, or do I use it to uncover who I really am?
It’s not an easy choice. Victimhood is seductive; it gives us someone to blame. But growth asks more of us. It asks us to look at our own wounds, the childhood trauma we stuffed down, the people-pleasing, the fear of not being enough, the belief that love must hurt to be real.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor
When you start changing yourself, everything changes. You begin to stand taller in your truth. You stop apologizing for protecting your peace. You stop rescuing from guilt and start responding from love. You learn that boundaries aren’t punishment—they’re sacred acts of self-respect.
Your child’s addiction may have cracked you open, but the light that seeps through those cracks is your healing.
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” — Maya Angelou, American poet, author, and civil rights activist
This is what no one tells you: addiction can be the fire that forges your strength. It can lead you back to yourself, the self that is grounded, intuitive, compassionate, and unshakably whole.
It’s not about waiting for your child to recover. It’s about choosing to recover yourself.
If this message resonates with you, you’re not alone.
At Sharing Without Shame, I offer parents the tools to turn heartbreak into healing and codependence into clarity. Visit www.SharingWithoutShame.com to begin your own transformation.