When Loving Them Hurts: A Parent’s Guide to Surviving an Addicted Adult Child: The Hard Truth, The Tough Love, and The Fight for Your Sanity (The Loving Through the Storm Series) - Softcover

Carrillo, Nati

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798311656214

Publisher: Independently published, 2025

Synopsis

How do you love a child who is destroying themselves?

You fight. You beg. You rescue. You wait for the call that will shatter you forever. You cancel your appointments, decline the invitations, and drive them every morning while they are rude in the passenger seat—because love does not know what else to do.

But what if saving them means losing yourself?

This book is for the parent who is drowning in guilt, fear, and exhaustion. The one who has tried everything — prayer, ultimatums, therapy, silence, screaming — and is still losing the battle against addiction. The one who understands, somewhere in the back of their mind, that they cannot keep carrying this weight. And who has no idea how to put it down.

When Loving Them Hurts is not a memoir. It is a lifeline—written by a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner with seventeen years of clinical experience and a mother who has lived every page of this from the inside. It combines the clinical truth about addiction with the raw, honest reality of loving someone through it, and it delivers both without judgment and without false hope.

Inside these pages, you will find:

• Why you missed the early signs—not because you failed, but because love is designed to believe the best


• The neuroscience of addiction explained in plain language: why they cannot simply stop, what the disease does to the brain, and why love alone cannot break the neurological trap


• The clinical truth about enabling — 20 specific behaviors, what each one costs you, and the empowering alternative for each


• How to set limits that protect your sanity without abandoning your love — with real scripts for the hardest conversations


• How to recognize manipulation with compassion — and how to respond without losing yourself in the process


• What to do when you have already let go and they still fall—because sometimes you do everything right and the hardest outcome still arrives


• How to build the specific kind of support this grief requires—including CRAFT, Al-Anon, and professional resources


• How to let go without giving up — and why letting go is one of the most loving things you can do
• Plenty of pages to reflect and journal your journey.

This book also speaks directly to the parent who carries both roles at once: the clinician who understands the disease and the mother or father who still drives them to work, cancels their own appointments, and waits up at night. Knowing the science does not make you immune to loving someone through it. This book knows that—because its author lives it.

You did not cause this pain. You cannot fix the situation. And you do not have to carry this burden anymore.

This is not just a book. It is the honest, clinical, deeply human conversation you deserved to have a long time ago.

Perfect for readers of Beautiful Boy, Codependent No More, Beyond Addiction, and every parent who has ever Googled "how to help an addicted child" at two in the morning.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798311656214
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124