There's an ancient Persian adage that kings would inscribe on rings: "This too shall pass." It was meant to humble them in times of triumph and comfort them in times of despair. If you're a parent walking through the valley of your child's addiction, these four words may be the lifeline you need to hold onto today.
You Are in a Season, Not a Sentence
Right now, it might feel like addiction has colonized every corner of your existence. The phone calls in the middle of the night. The lying. The money that disappears. The person you raised seemingly vanished, replaced by someone you barely recognize. The weight of it sits on your chest when you wake up and follows you into fitful sleep.
But here's what I need you to hear: this is a season of your life. It is not the totality of your life.
I know that's hard to believe when you're standing in the middle of the storm. Seasons, by their very nature, are difficult to see clearly when you're inside them. Winter feels eternal in February. But spring always comes.
The Story Isn't Over
Your child's addiction does not get to write the final chapter of their story—or yours. Yes, this season is painful. Yes, it may last longer than you ever imagined possible. Yes, there will be setbacks that feel like starting over at square one. But the story isn't over.
Recovery happens. Transformation happens. People get better. Families heal. Not in the timeline we'd choose, not always in the way we'd script it, but it happens more often than the darkness would have you believe.
You Are More Than This Crisis
One of addiction's cruelest tricks is how it tries to consume everything else. Your identity becomes "parent of an addict." Your days revolve around crisis management. Your relationships strain under the weight. Your own health, dreams, and joy get shelved indefinitely.
But you are still you. You are not just this crisis. You have a life that deserves to be lived, even now. Even in the middle of this. Especially in the middle of this.
Taking care of yourself isn't selfish—it's survival. Going to dinner with a friend, taking a walk, laughing at something silly, allowing yourself moments of peace: these aren't betrayals of your struggling child. They're how you make it through to the other side intact.
What You Can Control
You cannot control your child's choices. You cannot love them into sobriety. You cannot manage their recovery for them. These truths are agonizing, but accepting them is also strangely freeing.
What you can control: your own boundaries, your own healing, your own response. You can choose to learn about addiction as a disease rather than a moral failing. You can find a support group of other parents who understand this particular hell. You can decide what kind of help you're able to offer and where your limits are. You can grieve while still holding space for hope.
The Wisdom of "This Too Shall Pass"
This phrase doesn't promise that everything will be perfect. It doesn't guarantee the outcome you desperately want. What it offers is perspective—the long view that can be so hard to access when you're drowning in today's crisis.
This season will change. Maybe your child finds recovery and rebuilds their life. Maybe the path is longer and more complicated than that. Maybe the story takes turns you can't predict from here. But it will not stay exactly as it is in this moment. Nothing ever does.
The suffocating fear you feel today will not feel this acute forever. The hypervigilance will ease. The constant state of emergency will shift. You will find a way to live your life again, whatever form that takes.
To the Parent Reading This Today
I see you. I see your exhaustion, your fear, your love that feels like it's breaking you open. I see how you're white-knuckling your way through each day, how you're doing your best in an impossible situation, how you're holding on even when you don't know how much longer you can.
This is a season. A hard, brutal, seemingly endless season. But it is not your entire life.
There will be mornings when the first thought that enters your mind isn't worry. There will be conversations about something other than addiction. There will be laughter that isn't tinged with guilt. There will be a future that you cannot see from here.
Hold onto that. Hold onto "this too shall pass."
Not as denial of the pain of now, but as a promise that now is not forever.
You're going to make it through this. Maybe not unscathed—this kind of pain leaves marks. But you will make it through.
One day at a time. One breath at a time. One season at a time.
This too shall pass.
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