There was a time in my life when I believed love meant rescue.
Love meant saying yes.
Love meant coming through.
Love meant giving me what I wanted, especially when I was falling apart.
And I can admit it now… I had a very specific definition of “unconditional love,” and it usually looked like someone making it easier for me to stay the same.
Back then, I didn’t call it enabling. I called it support.
I didn’t call it avoidance. I called it peacekeeping.
I didn’t call it manipulation. I called it desperation.
When I was in the thick of addiction, I wanted love to look like a thousand second chances. Like someone picking up the pieces behind me, quietly sweeping up the wreckage so I didn’t have to face it. I wanted comfort without accountability. Relief without change.
And then there was the day someone finally told me “No.”
I remember it clearly. I was spiraling – panicked, restless, desperate for something outside of myself to make me feel okay. I made a phone call to the source I had gotten so used to rescuing me from my dysfunction and asked for “help,” but what I really wanted was permission. Permission to keep escaping. Permission to keep numbing. Permission to keep living in denial because it was the only way I knew how to survive.
On the other end of the phone, there was a pause, the kind that feels like rejection when you’re sick. And then came the words that made me furious in the moment:
“I love you too much to do that.”
I thought it was punishment.
Now, I know it was protection.
Because real love doesn’t always feel soft. It doesn’t always feel like comfort. Sometimes love feels like grief, because it’s refusing to participate in what’s destroying someone. Sometimes love looks like letting a person feel the weight of their choices, not because you don’t care, but because you care too much to keep cushioning the fall.
And here’s the wild part: the people who held the line when I begged them not to were often the ones who ended up saving my life.
They didn’t love the version of me that needed to be rescued.
They loved the version of me that I couldn’t even see yet.
The one who was barely capable of healing.
The one who could be free.
The one who could build a life instead of burning one down.
Today, I see it everywhere. I see it in the relationships I have now, and the kind of love I get to give and receive. I see it in the way recovery taught me responsibility instead of resentment. And I even see it in my marriage – two people walking forward, not because life is perfect, but because honesty is.
It’s strange… the thing I once thought was unloving ended up being the very thing that made room for my healing.
So, if you’re in a season where love feels complicated, where doing the right thing hurts, where choosing healthy feels like losing someone, please know this:
Love isn’t always the thing that makes someone feel better in the moment.
Sometimes, love is the thing that gives them a chance to become well.
With Gratitude,
Jamie, In Recovery
