Codependency of relatives of people with addiction

Codependency of relatives of people with addiction is presented in David Sheff’s memoir as a family-wide condition of absorbed attention, fear, self-blame, and attempted control. As Nic Sheff’s addiction repeatedly destabilizes the family, David comes to see that devotion can become damaging when it centers every responsibility and hope on the addicted person. The account does not offer a simple cure: it follows the painful recognition that relatives need help in their own right, and that they cannot choose whether Nic lives or how he lives.

Definition and Family Pattern

David describes becoming addicted to his child’s addiction. His preoccupation seemed justified by the life-or-death stakes, but it did not help Nic and may have harmed him; it did harm David and the rest of the family. The addiction reorganized attention around its crises, sometimes at the expense of David’s responsibilities to his wife and other children. In this account, codependency is not merely concern for a loved one. It is the way concern can take over a relative’s identity and daily life, even when the effort to protect the person produces no control over the outcome.

A counselor’s lecture on the addicted family makes this dynamic visible through a hanging mobile. A paper-doll addict occupies the center, while smaller figures representing Karen Barbour and the children hang off to the side, tied to the central figure’s moods and drug-taking. David’s figure hangs precariously between them: he is described as propping Nic up, making excuses, caring for him, trying to protect Karen, Jasper Sheff, and Daisy Sheff, and trying to keep everyone connected. The image gives physical form to a pattern David recognizes in his own family: one person’s addiction pulls other people into roles organized around managing its effects.

Control, Self-Blame, and the Limits of Care

The counselor describes relatives hiding alcohol and medication, searching clothes and bedrooms for drugs, driving the addicted person to meetings, and trying to control where that person goes and whom they see. Such actions arise from understandable fear, but the lecture identifies them as futile attempts to control an addict. It also describes how family members’ moods become dependent on the addicted person’s condition, how worry makes them controlling, and how their own sources of joy and identity can disappear. David’s earlier account of neglecting other family responsibilities echoes this description: his absorption in Nic’s struggle did not make Nic’s choices his to command.

Self-blame persists even when support groups challenge it. At an Al-Anon meeting in Novato, David and Karen sit among a dozen people in plastic chairs, with Folgers coffee, powdered-sugar doughnuts, flickering neon tubes, and a wobbly fan. The meeting’s familiar principles—that relatives did not cause the addiction, cannot control it, and cannot cure it—meet David’s resistance. He had stopped taking drugs, whereas Nic could not stop; looking back, David fears that his own drug use with Nic may have given tacit permission, despite his warnings. He recognizes that his actions were naive and immature, yet continues to blame himself. His first impulse is condescension toward the people in the room; by the time he leaves, he feels an affinity with parents, children, spouses, partners, and siblings affected by addiction. The movement from judgment to solidarity marks an early recognition that family suffering is shared, not a private failure peculiar to his household.

David’s conclusion is more difficult than simply absolving himself or Nic. He remembers Nic as brilliant, charismatic, loving, and wonderful when not using, but as a stranger—distant, foolish, self-destructive, broken, and dangerous—when high. He considers possible explanations including genetic predisposition, divorce, his own drug history, overprotectiveness, leniency, harshness, and failures of protection. He does not settle on one cause. Instead, he describes addiction as seeming to acquire a life of its own and acknowledges mistakes made through ignorance, hope, and fear. His experience leads to a distinction between responsibility for past actions and the impossible burden of believing that a parent can decide a child’s fate.

Secrecy, Stigma, and Finding Company

For a long time, David keeps the family’s problem private, not because he says he is ashamed, but because he wants to protect Nic’s reputation and preserve other people’s good impressions of him. He later finds that speaking about the addiction, reflecting on it, and listening to other people’s stories can help. The AA adage about being as sick as one’s secrets gives a name to the cost of silence, while Al-Anon offers a place to hear relatives describe what had been kept within the family.

The social response to David’s published account shows how stigma compounds isolation. A counselor contrasts the support that might surround a family facing cancer with the judgment and secrecy often associated with addiction. David’s article in The New York Times Magazine brings hundreds of responses from people affected by addiction, especially parents. Most offer compassion, counsel, consolation, and shared grief; a few accuse him of exploiting Nic or fault his parenting. One hostile response blames Nic’s addiction on a period when he wore his clothes backward. The breadth of these reactions shows how public disclosure can invite condemnation as well as recognition.

Some respondents describe children who died of overdoses at fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen. A father writes that another bereaved father brought David’s article to a weekly breakfast for fathers who had lost children. These letters make the family’s isolation part of a larger social toll: strangers recognize their own suffering in the story and feel able to tell it. David finds a painful form of companionship in that exchange, while the losses in the letters keep the stakes of addiction in view.

The Effects on the Whole Household

The family’s later therapy makes the consequences of prolonged crisis concrete. On a wintry evening, Karen, Jasper, and Daisy sit hunched on a leather couch in a family therapist’s office, initially withdrawn into their sweatshirts. As the family discusses what has happened, they sit taller; what had been undeniable but insufficiently acknowledged begins to be spoken about. Nic may be safe in rehab at that moment, the therapist observes, but that does not mean the future feels safe or that everything is fine.

Karen describes a state of alarm in which a missing object can make her fear that Nic has been in the house again. The telephone carries a similar threat: it may bring news of another crisis, a call from Nic when she cannot tell whether he is sane or high, or the disappointment of hearing nothing from him. She sometimes lets it ring until the answering service picks up because she cannot face what may follow. Jasper notices that she does not answer and asks why, revealing how an adult’s attempt to avoid the next crisis also unsettles a child. The therapist helps name the household’s constant tension; the phone is not a rare intrusion but a recurring signal around which everyone’s attention and fear have gathered.

Meaning and Limits

David’s account rejects both the idea that a family can control addiction through sufficient vigilance and the implication that relatives’ suffering is incidental. He recognizes that his obsession may have harmed Nic, certainly harmed the rest of the family, and consumed his own life; he also recognizes that this does not mean the family caused the addiction or could cure it. His most consequential realization is that children live or die with or without their parents’ efforts to decide for them. Accepting that Nic will determine how—and whether—he lives is devastating, but it also allows David to choose life for himself rather than remain consumed by the attempt to control Nic’s.

The memoir’s form reflects the limits of certainty. David says he resisted foreshadowing because no family can know how the next day will unfold. Writing the story gives some order to experiences that had seemed chaotic, but it does not create a reliable map for other families. He hopes instead to offer solace, guidance, and company, and to show that people who care for someone with addiction have their own complex, debilitating experience. Codependency, as the memoir renders it, names both the reach of addiction across family relationships and the difficult work of recognizing where care ends and control cannot begin.