Chaos surrounds addicts and I’ve come to believe that those of us who love them or have been around a lot of people addicted to different substances become addicted to the drama and chaos.

It’s what we know and we become comfortable there in a twisted way. I never realized how much it effected me until a few years ago. As we went through my wife’s oldest daughters addiction, to my wife’s addiction to her youngest daughters addiction. My wife and her oldest daughter are now sober and the toll the chaos took on them and the toll the chaos surrounding our youngest has created ptsd that is hard to heal from.

The constant worry, the mood ups and downs, the anger, the feeling of constantly being on edge, living your life walking on eggshells. It’s a drain on the entire nervous system. It isn’t until we start taking back our power that the chaos leaves. Now my wife and I can’t stand it, when chaos finds us it’s a big trigger and we know we need to change gears.

This is hard with my mom being a drama lover, because I get sucked into her orbit and find myself falling back into old patterns, fighting and arguing and creating the drama she needs and I abhor.

So I’m learning I have to create some boundaries for my sanity, ways I can help and ways I can’t, keeping self care as my main focus and goal. I have to take a step back and ask myself what can I handle and what do we need help with, and then give her the tools or the options to fill in the rest.

I had a therapist who would draw this Y and say one side of the upper v is one option the other is another option you just need to choose one, otherwise you sit at the intersection and spin, until you finally make a choice. Neither choice is necessarily wrong and you can back track and make a different choice but you can’t stay in indecision that’s where chaos reins. So maybe when I find myself in these spaces with my mom I have to step back and draw myself a Y identify my choices and make a decision.