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If you love someone struggling with addiction, you've probably wrestled with this question:

How do I stay loving and supportive without rescuing them, enabling them, or becoming a doormat?

In Episode 70, Jason breaks down one of the most difficult parts of loving someone with a substance use disorder: learning how to hold clarity and charity at the same time.

You can have empathy for the disease and still hold someone accountable for their choices. You can create a safe, nonjudgmental relationship and still enforce a boundary. You can love someone deeply without protecting them from the natural consequences that may ultimately help them change.

Jason walks through the Stages of Change and explains why your loved one may be making incredible progress in one area of life while appearing completely stuck in another. He shares the story of “Costa Mesa Chad,” whose family nearly overlooked 60 days of sobriety because they were focused on everything he wasn't changing fast enough.

You'll also learn why relapse doesn't automatically mean recovery has failed, how natural consequences can help resolve ambivalence, and why expecting someone to change every area of their life at once can leave the entire family frustrated and discouraged.

Jason also explores the work happening on your side of the relationship: surrendering fear, letting go of outcomes you cannot control, setting strong fences, and developing the emotional sobriety that allows you to respond instead of react.

Because the goal isn't to control their recovery.

It's to become someone who can support recovery without supporting the disease—while getting your own peace, identity, and life back in the process.

In this episode:
• The Stages of Change and why people don't simply jump from denial to action
• Why your loved one can be in different stages of change in different areas of life
• How unrealistic expectations create unnecessary suffering
• The difference between empathy and enabling
• How to respond when a boundary is broken
• Why natural consequences can actually help create motivation
• Jason's “clarity and charity” approach to difficult conversations
• Why relapse can sometimes become an important impact moment
• The role fear plays in controlling and rescuing
• What emotional sobriety looks like for the family
• Why sometimes the right decision is to stay—and sometimes it's to leave

You didn't cause their addiction. You can't control it. And you can't cure it.

But you can learn how to contribute to recovery instead of unintentionally making the disease more comfortable.

And you can learn how to live unhooked.

Support the show

Join Jason Coombs LIVE each week for tips and tricks and LIVE Q&A’s. Go to https://www.liveunhooked.com/live-unhooked.

For information about treatment services visit https://www.brickhouserecovery.com/

For more information about Warrior Heart Bootcamp for men visit www.awarriorheart.com

https://awarriorheart.com/

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To learn more about the women’s retreat, Heart of a Woman:
https://theheartofawoman.net/

$100 DISCOUNT CODE for Heart of a Woman = 2026Brick100