TRIGGER WARNING. PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

I've been holding onto this for a while. There's going to be trigger warnings all over the place, and I apologize in advance if anything I am about to say hurts, upsets, or offends anybody. It's just that I've been looking for a safe place to get it said, and if I don't get it out of me soon, it's going to eat me up from the inside out.

My daughter is an addict. I'm sure a lot of you here know the drill. When she says she's clean and sober, what she means is that she is not currently engaged in the act of using. It may still be in her system, but she's not using right now this minute, so she's clean and sober. She also will not stay in any kind of treatment program, because she finds fault with all of them, and of course she knows better than anybody else how these programs ought to be run.

If I bring this up in Nar-Anon setting, the only feedback I'm going to get is that I can't make her get clean and I have to work on my own program.

No $h!… Sherlock.

It's not that I'm trying to make her get clean, or trying to control her, or anything like that. I am trying to do the next right thing and live a sane life regardless of what she or anybody else does.

The problem is that I'm grieving the loss of the daughter I basically don't have anymore. The last time she called me, a few days ago, she wanted to do FaceTime, and all I could see was that case of meth mouth she's got going on. Her teeth are rotting out of her head, and her mouth is pulled back tight when she speaks. She'll be 38 soon. I know very well I can't do a darn thing about it, but how many of us here have ever watched a loved one self-destruct?

One thing I have been working on is setting boundaries. That only got me bawled out by a mutual friend, who lectured me about how I'm obligated to help (read that "enable") my daughter because these things are caused partly by biology, and partly by upbringing, and she got both of those from me. Of course, that strongly hints that she got those things from ONLY me, and no other factors. Not like her father was an addict too, or anything like that. Not like there aren't alcoholics and substance abusers all through our family. I am the one who gave birth to her, so everything she suffers from is all entirely my fault.

I do struggle with the concept of "it's a disease." Does that mean that when somebody lies to me and steals from me, and when I'm trying to live that sane life as I mentioned earlier, they come in and disrupt it, I'm supposed to just smile and have empathy because they can't help it? I'm supposed to cancel an out-of-town trip at the last minute and stand by in case somebody decides to go into treatment? And then when she doesn't, I'm supposed to think oh well? When this happens repeatedly, I'm supposed to just put my life on hold for hers, and be called a narcissist if I don't? I'm not allowed to have my own health issues, or a job, or anything that doesn't revolve around being there for somebody else?

Growing up in an alcoholic family, I heard enough of that "it's an illness" excuse. Again a trigger warning, but as a child, I was actually SA’d by an alcoholic stepfather, and my mother didn't do a dang thing about it because "he's sick, he can't help it, he didn't know what he was doing." Two years after they divorced, she even seriously considered getting back together with him even knowing what he had done to me.

But according to all feedback, I alone am the problem, and everybody else is just the victim of an illness. They can't help it, poor little diddy-iddums, and I just have to have compassion. No matter what they do or have done to me.

In the same vein, no matter what I do it's the wrong thing. I use sentences beginning with "I," and I'm self-centered and egotistical. Can I even hear myself? Everything is I, I, I. But if I begin my sentences with "you," then I'm controlling and blaming. I do something to help, I'm enabling. I don't help, then that brings me right back to the start. It's an illness, and I am a monster who has no compassion if I feel any kind of resentment at all.

I don't even know what to do anymore. I've probably p!$$ed off everybody reading this, but I just had to get it out of me.