David Sheff’s codependency

David Sheff’s codependency is the pattern in which Nic Sheff’s condition dictates David’s emotional life: when Nic is using, David is in turmoil; when Nic is sober, relief arrives but remains fragile. The pattern turns parental concern into a consuming dependence on another person’s moods and choices. Recognizing it does not end his fear for Nic, but it changes the question David must face: how to care about his son without making his own life—and the rest of his family’s—revolve around Nic’s addiction.

Recognition and the family’s crisis

At a weekend program lecture on the addicted family, a counselor describes relatives who lose sleep and appetite, become ill, blame themselves, and carry rage, worry, and shame in isolation. The stigma attached to addiction, the counselor explains, can make support less forthcoming than it would be for a family facing cancer. David hears the family’s predicament reflected in a mobile above the lectern: Nic hangs at its center, while Karen, Jasper, and Daisy are suspended at the periphery, tied to the addict’s moods and drug use. David’s own figure hangs precariously between them. He recognizes himself as the person who props Nic up, makes excuses, bends over backward to care for him, and tries both to protect the others and to keep the family connected.

The image gives form to a strain that David and Karen are also learning to understand through Al-Anon and occasional sessions with their therapist. David’s well-being has become contingent on Nic’s: the next change in Nic’s behavior can bring relief or throw him back into turmoil. Their therapist compares the recurring threat experienced by parents of children on drugs to post-traumatic stress in soldiers, whose bodies remain alert to the possibility of another attack. For David, the threat is not confined to memory; another crisis can arrive at any moment. The family tries to guard against it while also pretending that everything is all right.

Secrecy, blame, and the limits of control

David had kept the family’s problem private not because he felt ashamed of Nic, he says, but because he wanted to protect his son’s reputation among friends and acquaintances. Counselors recommend Al-Anon, yet it takes David and Karen time to attend. At their first meeting in Novato, they sit with about a dozen people in plastic chairs arranged in a circle, under flickering fluorescent tubes and beside a ticking fan. David’s first response is condescension toward the other attendees. By the time he leaves, that distance has given way to affinity and heartbreak for the parents, children, spouses, partners, and siblings gathered there.

The meeting’s principles—that family members did not cause the addiction, cannot control it, and cannot cure it—offer David a framework he cannot yet accept. He continues to blame himself, remembering that he once smoked with Nic and fearing that his warnings about drugs may have carried tacit permission to use them. He knows his earlier actions were naive and immature, but that knowledge does not quiet his self-reproach. The tension is central to his codependency: he recognizes that he cannot control Nic, while still searching his own past for an explanation that would make Nic’s addiction feel preventable.

Secrecy also gives way to the possibility of speaking publicly. After David submits an article about the family’s experience to The New York Times Magazine, he fears exposing them to public judgment. Most of the responses, however, are letters from people affected by addiction: relatives who share grief and offer compassion, consolation, and advice. Some readers criticize him, including one who blames Nic’s addiction on David’s allowing him to wear his clothes backward. The dominant response is different: readers feel less alone and find permission to tell their own stories. Public disclosure does not erase the family’s distress, but it begins to counter the isolation that had helped contain it.

Learning to separate care from rescue

David’s understanding of addiction remains conflicted. He considers the difference between the apparent simplicity of abstaining from drugs and the impaired control described by treatment professionals. Seeing addiction as a disease has practical consequences, since insurance may cover treatment; untreated illness can also bring physical and mental deterioration, family hardship, and addiction-related crime. Yet David still moves between explanations, sometimes questioning whether Nic’s relapses reflect moral failure or character, sometimes blaming treatment programs, and sometimes returning to blame himself. His oscillation shows how difficult it is to accept limits while a loved one remains at risk.

Al-Anon and therapy help David see that his own life has become unmanageable, not only Nic’s. He bristles at the label codependent, which he associates with self-help clichés, but acknowledges that his dependence on Nic’s well-being is harming him and the people around him. Worry, he learns, does not help Nic; it harms Karen, Jasper, Daisy, and David as well. This recognition does not mean that he stops caring. It marks a distinction between concern for his son and the belief that vigilance can secure his son’s safety.

Practical boundaries and an unfinished recovery

The change becomes concrete at Jasper’s lacrosse practice. David stands on the sidelines while the boys chase the ball, and his cell phone remains switched off in his pocket—a state that once would have seemed unthinkable. The phone had connected him to Nic, but every ring jolted David with the possibility of either reassurance or bad news. Each call fed his search for confirmation that Nic was all right, or proof that he was not. Turning the phone off is a small, deliberate boundary within a much larger recovery effort, which David continues in therapy.

That gesture does not establish that David has overcome codependency or stopped fearing for Nic. Instead, it shows him redirecting attention toward the life immediately around him: at the field with Jasper, he is not waiting for the next call. The book presents this recovery as ongoing work, alongside Nic’s uncertain course and the family’s continuing need for support. David’s growing insight is that his worry cannot govern Nic into health, and that releasing some of its hold may also protect the people—himself included—whom the addiction has drawn into its orbit.