What's up guys, welcome back to Sober Tube. Today's episode is about a little bit of codependency and a little bit of enabling. You may be a person that has someone in your life, a kid, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a son, a daughter, an aunt, an uncle, a best friend, or an employee that is suffering from the disease of addiction, and this is the one place in life, it's the one medical emergency, that we all decide to take on the role of the doctor or the person in charge of someone's recovery. If somebody has cancer, they go to a cancer doctor, a hospital, and they seek professional help from a physician. If somebody has a broken leg, they go to the emergency room, but a giant mistake that I see so often is that when somebody is suffering from the disease of addiction or a hopeless state, the loved one decides that just because they don't suffer from the disease, they have some knowledge or some ability to help that person. That, I can tell you, 100% of the time is not true. You will either become codependent or enabling, and there's a difference. You will become codependent by trying to get some sort of validation inside of you or make yourself whole because you have some sort of emptiness by trying to help somebody else, by trying to make somebody else whole. By letting someone sleep at your house or trying to take care of them to not put them in a bad mood, you are trying to help somebody else because you feel empty, and when you help people, you feel better. As well-intended as that is, you are actually enabling that person to stay sick because you do not realize that the addict in active addiction, or an addict who is removed from drugs and alcohol but has zero recovery, still has the mind of an addict. So the more you give, the more they will take. The more you supply them with food or shelter, the longer they will not be able to provide food or shelter for themselves. So, you may think you are trying to help them, even though subconsciously you don't realize that you are not, you're only trying to help yourself, and you will also be hurting a sick person from getting better. If you let somebody who is sick and suffering in active addiction live with you, or steal from you, or you provide them money, or you provide them a phone, or a car, or a ride, or shelter, you are enabling them to use that money to get drugs, use your house as a place to get high, possibly die there, possibly commit crimes there. You are now part of the problem also. If they are sober but not working a good program, and you continue to allow them to stay with you, you're not helping them, and eventually, their addiction will turn back on, and you will be the first victim. So it is very important to understand why people get very codependent on their addict and how not to enable somebody in their addiction or in their dry recovery. I believe a good detox followed by as much time as a rehab will allow you to stay, followed by a real program of the 12 steps, is the recipe that I used to put together nearly 10 years, and that works.