When your child is struggling with addiction, your world narrows. Every phone call sends your heart racing. Every silence feels ominous. The crisis becomes all-consuming, and somewhere along the way, you and your spouse stop laughing together. You stop noticing sunsets. You forget what it feels like to simply be present without the weight of worry pressing down on your chest.
I want to talk about something that might sound impossible right now: finding moments of joy while your family is in crisis.
This isn't about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine. It's not about abandoning your child or stopping your efforts to help them. It's about recognizing a hard truth: you cannot pour from an empty cup, and a marriage cannot survive on crisis alone.
The Guilt of Happiness
Many parents tell me they feel guilty when they catch themselves smiling or enjoying something. "How can I laugh when my child is suffering?" The guilt feels like loyalty—as though your pain somehow helps your child, as though joy would be a betrayal.
But here's what I've learned from couples who've walked this path: your suffering doesn't reduce your child's suffering. Your joy doesn't diminish your love for them. In fact, maintaining some lightness in your life may be one of the most important things you can do—for yourself, for your marriage, and ultimately, for your child.
Small Acts of Reclamation
Joy in crisis doesn't arrive as a grand celebration. It comes in small moments that you have to intentionally create and protect.
It might look like taking a fifteen-minute walk together after dinner, holding hands and talking about anything except addiction. It could be cooking a meal you both enjoy, really tasting the food instead of eating mechanically. Maybe it's watching a favorite show together, allowing yourself to get absorbed in someone else's story for half an hour.
These aren't distractions from your reality—they're lifelines that keep you tethered to each other and to your own humanity.
Protecting Your Marriage
Addiction has a way of colonizing every conversation. Before you know it, you and your spouse are only talking logistics: treatment options, financial strain, whether to answer the phone, what boundaries to set. You become co-crisis managers instead of partners.
Make space for non-crisis conversations. Set a boundary around certain times or places where you won't discuss your child's addiction unless there's an urgent need. This might feel artificial at first, but it creates breathing room for your relationship to exist beyond the emergency.
Ask each other questions you used to ask: What made you smile today? What are you reading? What are you dreaming about? Remember that you're still individuals with inner lives that deserve attention.
Permission to Feel Multiple Things
You can be devastated about your child's addiction and grateful for your morning coffee. You can be terrified about their future and delighted by a friend's joke. You can grieve deeply and still notice that the lilacs are blooming.
Human hearts are vast enough to hold contradictions. Allowing yourself moments of lightness doesn't erase the heaviness—it just reminds you that you're still alive, still capable of experiencing the full spectrum of human emotion.
What This Models for Your Child
When your child is ready to recover—and we hold onto hope that day will come—they'll need to relearn how to experience life without substances. They'll need to discover that joy is possible in sobriety.
You cannot teach what you don't practice. By allowing yourself moments of genuine pleasure, by maintaining a marriage that has warmth and connection despite the crisis, you're showing your child what recovery could look like. You're demonstrating that life can hold both pain and beauty, struggle and peace.
Practical Suggestions
Start small. Choose one thing this week that brings you joy—a shared activity, a favorite ritual, a moment of play. Don't wait until the crisis is over. It may not be over for a long time, and you cannot put your marriage and your well-being on hold indefinitely.
Be gentle with each other when one of you is ready for lightness and the other isn't. Some days you'll take turns holding the weight. Some days you'll both need to rest. That's okay.
Consider working with a therapist who specializes in families affected by addiction. They can help you navigate the guilt, set healthy boundaries, and find ways to support your child without sacrificing your marriage or your mental health.
You Are Not Abandoning Your Child
Let me say this clearly: taking care of your marriage and finding moments of joy is not abandonment. You can love your child fiercely, advocate for them tirelessly, and still reserve some energy for yourself and your spouse.
In fact, you must.
Your child needs you to be resilient, not depleted. They need you to model that life is worth living, that relationships can endure hardship, that hope isn't foolish.
A Final Word
This season of your life is brutally hard. There's no sugarcoating that reality. But even in the hardest seasons, there can be moments of unexpected grace—a shared laugh, a tender conversation, a sunrise that catches you off guard with its beauty.
You're allowed to reach for those moments. You're allowed to hold your spouse's hand and feel grateful for their presence. You're allowed to find joy in the midst of crisis.
It doesn't mean you love your child any less. It means you're still here, still fighting, still choosing to live fully even when life is breaking your heart.
And that matters more than you know.
0 Comments