What Kids Absorb In Addiction Part 2

Your child is learning what love looks like by watching your marriage and that truth should stop us cold. When addiction, relapse, and constant crisis become the normal rhythm at home, the lesson isn’t just “substance abuse is bad.” The lesson becomes anxiety, hypervigilance, codependency, and the belief that real love means fixing someone while your own needs disappear.

I dig into what kids actually absorb when we stay in the chaos without healing. We talk about the emotional cost of the hope and crush cycle, how children feel the tension through the walls, and why “I’m holding the family together” can still translate to emotional starvation for them. I also share my own story and the hard responsibility of admitting that my choices and coping patterns shaped my kids, even as I tried to manage someone else’s addiction.

From a faith perspective, we anchor on the idea that God is a God of harmony, not confusion, and what it looks like to pursue peace that isn’t dependent on the addict’s current mood or sobriety. We also address the question people ask most: should I stay or leave? The focus here is getting healthy first, building boundaries, gaining clarity, and modeling what healing looks like so your kids have something better to repeat.

If you’re a spouse of an addict looking for real support, I also point you toward a community and courses designed to help you take the next step. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more families can find hope and a path toward healing.

👇 YOUR NEXT STEP IS RIGHT HERE

🙏 Free Community — You don't have to walk this alone 👉 https://partnersofaddicts.com

📖 FREE GUIDES — Choose What Speaks to You:

💛 Navigating Love — Codependency & where you lost yourself 👉 https://funnel.walkrightcommunity.com/guide

💛 10 Truths Unspoken — What nobody told you about loving an addict 👉 https://funnel.walkrightcommunity.com/download

💛 Your Kids Are Watching — A guide for the sober parent 👉 https://funnel.walkrightcommunity.com/kids-guide

📚 READY TO GO DEEPER?

🔥 Weekend Course — You Are Not Lost 👉 https://funnel.walkrightcommunity.com/weekend-course

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Transcript

Your Marriage Sets The Lesson

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The most powerful classroom that will ever teach your child is your marriage. It's not the classroom in the grade school or the high school or the junior high. It's not church, Sunday school, youth group, anything like that. It's not a social group that your friends hang around with. It is your marriage. Your marriage teaches your children everything about relationships, love, and how it all looks like. What is your marriage today if you're battling with an addict, you're married to a spouse that's battling an addiction or unhealthy habit, and you haven't broken a cycle, you have not stepped away to get healing for yourself. What is that classroom teaching your child? Let's talk about that today, on part two. I'll see you from the inside. Welcome to Reclaiming Your Identity, a podcast dedicated to providing hope, healing, and support for married individuals whose spouses are battled in addiction. Rooted in the truth of your identity in Christ, this podcast offers practical guidance and biblical insight to help you navigate the challenges of addiction within your head. Here we'll find encouragement and embrace God's plan for restoration in your life. Let's walk this journey together.

Why Part Two Matters

SPEAKER_00 1:15

One step. Hey, we're in part two of what your kids will absorb while you're being in this cycle of chaos married to battling with somebody who has an addiction. And I want to welcome you here today. And if you haven't listened to part one, I suggest you go back and listen to it. We had some powerful stuff in there. Talked about the statistics of what is going on in your home and how it affects your kids. We're talking about how it personally affected my kids and how they are grown adults today struggling with everything that they learned from me while I was battling my spouse who was addicted to pain medication. So go back and listen to that, but welcome to part two of what your kids are absorbing. I am hopeful that people are starting to get the passion that I have to save families from the things that I've did. When I was battling my ex-wife and her addiction, it is such a passion of mine. It is something that I want to save people. I spent 13 years because I did not know I had codependency. I spent 13 years because I did not know any better. I spent 13 years of not breaking the cycle, one relapse after another, and the hope that was always there that this is the last one. That's not the way it works. And unfortunately, I destroyed my family, my kids, I lost friends, I just lost time. And I hope to help people out of that situation that is just so much on my heart. And that's where God's led me today is to help you. So if you are battling the same things that I'm talking about, if all this stuff's resonating with you, would you please continue to follow, like, subscribe, comment, do all those things on the socials that uh you can help get this message out even further. But let's not waste any time. Let's get into

The Hidden Cost To Your Kids

SPEAKER_00 3:32

part two. So let's talk about the classroom. You know, when I opened up the show talking about the classroom, you have to understand and we don't think clearly. Somebody has to shake you and wake you and tell you that although you think you have everything under control, you think that you're gonna manage this thing, we don't think about how it's affecting our kids. Maybe we do a little bit, but for the most part, they're put on the back burner. We are focused on the addict, we're focused on the addiction, we're gonna stop it, we're gonna fix it, that's what we're gonna do. And all along the way, we're destroying our kids. Not that we mean to, not that we intended to do it, but we do. And I spent a little bit on the last show talking about my kids, my grown boys, 30 and 28, how they're handling life today with codependency, with the I am less than feeling, with all the things that come with addiction, the codependency, the anxiety, the depression, the anger, all that stuff that they are now carrying around. And they're not putting it down. They see a father that is transformed, but they haven't chose themselves to put it down. So I had a classroom and I taught a pretty crappy subject. We need to let you know that you you need to find a substitute teacher that's gonna teach love, not chaos. And that's what we're gonna dig into here. But the University of Michigan did a study on children that are in situations that we're talking about. A spouse that is married to somebody battling an addiction, hasn't stepped away to get healing themselves, and just stays. They did a study and found that children that are in that situation are more likely to develop adverse mental conditions based on stain. That's anxiety, that's depression, that's substance abuse themselves. That's where they may go and cope with things that, you know, they may see you trying to fix the attic, but they may take up the attic side and go, well, I need to escape all this, so that's how I'm gonna cope with it. Don't think about those things too much. It's not the addiction they're inheriting necessarily. It's the anxiety, it's the chaos, it's the depression, it's the rage, it's the anger, it's the emotional starvation from trying to drink from a parent whose cup is completely dry. They inherit all of that, and it's a blueprint on how their relationships are gonna be with their partners in the future. The things that you are doing today are going to affect your kids in the future. That is what I'm trying to stop. Not only to get healing for yourself, but it's what you're doing today is gonna affect them down the road. It's just like cash flow. Anything that you buy today, anything you purchase today, anything you save today is gonna affect you six to eight weeks down the road. Your children are gonna be no different, except for it's gonna be years down the road.

Harmony Versus Household Confusion

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Now, before we closed last show, we talked about going to the Bible, and I'd like to go to the Bible for a little bit today, and it's gonna be in 1st uh Corinthians chapter 14, verse 33. It's a good verse, it is related to uh somebody talking to a church, but you have to listen to the message because this is truly how God is. And I'm just gonna go ahead and read it here. And it says, For God is the God of harmony, not confusion, as is the pattern in all the churches of God's holy believers. I just want to focus on the first part of that because God is a God of harmony and not confusion. God doesn't live in a place of chaos, God doesn't orchestrate chaos, and the situation that you're in right now is cultivating chaos. It's just chaos. There's no way around it. You think you're managing it, you think you've got it under control. You may be in a period of sobriety, but the relapse is coming. The hope's gonna be crushed, and you're gonna be let down again, and you're gonna hurt your kids even more. You're just gonna open up that wound even more on your child. Imagine this. You get your hopes up, you have hope that this is the last one, you have hope that you said enough, you prayed enough, you cried enough, you did everything you did in your power to will the addiction to be done. And it's gonna be this one. This is the one. And your kids are in a place of calmness, there's no fighting, and this is the one, and things are getting back to normal, and then pow, it happens, the relapse. You fly off the handle, you are a complete wreck. And what do you think it's doing to your kids? No matter how much you try to hide this from your kids, they know they can hear you arguing through the walls, they can feel the tension the moment they walk in that door from school. There's no hiding it, and it's complete chaos. And God did not design you or your kids or even your spouse who's addicted to live a life of chaos. He wants you to live a life full of peace and harmony. He designed us to live in peace. And what does that mean? That means a piece of no matter your circumstance, you live the same through it. If it's a great circumstance that's happening through you, you push through like Jesus did. If you are living in a complete hell today, you push through it like Jesus did. You don't waver, you don't falter, you don't step off the line, you don't base your life off a circumstance. Now that sounds hard to do, but you can get there. But you getting healthy is how you start to establish that peace. That's how you start to lay the chaos down. And once you are doing that, your kids are gonna see that. Your kids are gonna understand what peace looks like through you because you're teaching them. And wouldn't you want your kids to understand peace and harmony instead of chaos and destruction? I need to tell you something today.

Staying Without Healing Harms Everyone

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Staying is sometimes the right answer. I'm not asking you to walk out the door today. I'm not asking you to immediately pick up and just disrupt everything. That's between you and God, but that doesn't come until you yourself step into a place of healing and to where you can gain clarity and understanding. But I'm telling you, the way that you're staying in this relationship today is not neutral, it's not harmless. You staying right now without no boundaries, without no peace, without any working towards moving out of chaos is destroying you and your kids. You're walking around basing your day and your whole life on their circumstance. Is today a good day or a bad day? Are they using today or they not using today? Did they do the unhealthy habit today or not? And that's where you're basing your ups and downs and your life around. That version of you staying is what your kids are absorbing. You are the teacher, and that's what you're teaching them. That's what's rubbing off on your kids, is the way you're staying in that mess. A lot of people contact me and say, Well, do I just leave? Sounds like you promote leaving. You left, you left. Am I supposed to leave? Again, I want to stress that in a show that I do not promote you leaving, I do not promote you divorcing, I do not promote, I'm not like rallying for that to be done. What I'm rallying for is for you to get healthy. Let me get you healthy, or go somewhere else and get healthy. Then when you're thinking with a clear head, when you're thinking about what it is you're doing on your end, instead of blaming everything on the attic, but actually what you're doing and taking that responsibility and finding that clarity, that is when you can have somewhat of an idea on mapping out how you move forward. I separated from my ex-wife with the intention that things would get better, that we would take a break, she would realize that, okay, this is now getting really serious, but it just never worked that way. And unfortunately for me, we ended up getting a divorce. And she never got better. Now, if I didn't get clarity, I would have stayed all the way up to the end to when she overdosed a few years ago. Imagine if I stayed that in that with my kids still being a part of that. They'd be a lot worse off than they are now. And I said many a times, I do not blame her. She had her responsibilities, yes. But I am gonna stand up like a man and say, you know what? I destroyed my kids just as much as my ex-wife did and her addiction did. And why is that? Because I stayed in the cycle of hope, crush, hope, crush, hope, crush. That's the classroom I taught my kids. My kids learned that I took everything out on them because I didn't know how to handle the emotions with not being able to fix the addict. My kids learned that in order to have a great relationship you have to fix somebody. My kids learned that somebody else is more important than their own needs and ones. And now my kids are living that out exactly because that is the education they got from me. That's the school they went through. So the version of you staying with the addict, that version of you that I described, that's the classroom. You're teaching your kids this is what love costs, this is what a relationship looks like, and this is what love costs you. Your kids deserve to see somebody fighting for themselves. Your kids in this situation need to see somebody who understands who their identity is in Jesus Christ. Your kids need to see that you're fighting for yourself and them. That's the kind of love your kids need to see. That will go a long way. You see, you think you're fighting for your kids, but what you're actually doing is fighting for yourself to get this fixed so everything could go back to normal. And you think it's just a normal pattern because you love your kids and they'll be understanding that you're trying to fix somebody. They're not absorbing that, they're absorbing something totally different. Whether you stay or go is not the question at the moment. Your healing right now is the model that they need to be seen, taught, and learning at this moment. That it's okay, we could go through a circumstance like this, but I'm not gonna be a victim, I'm gonna be a survivor of somebody who takes control of my healing, not takes control of the other person. That's the healthy version that they need to see. So, yes, God designed everything to be in harmony, relationships, churches, Christians. He designed everything to be in harmony and not in conflict and not in chaos. That includes your marriage, that includes your relationships with your kids. And as we come to a close on today's message, I know that these hit kind of hard and kind of rough, probably in your heart, and I want to say that that's a good thing. The spirit hopefully is speaking to you, to where you can gain some kind of understanding that you have to get healing, you have to get healing for yourself before you can get clarity. And then you don't have to go through a long process of healing to go, okay, well now I get clarity. No, I'm talking a few weeks that you can start going, wow, duh. Oh man. Those kind of clarity moments. Those you can get right now.

The Cycle Your Kids Copy

SPEAKER_00 17:47

And this would be a great time to invite you in someplace that I've created for that. Number one is the community. There's a community I created that has people like us that come in and work on ourselves to gain clarity, understanding, and allow God to transform us for healing. If you don't like that, maybe you don't want to come into community just yet, or maybe you're going to look somewhere else, which is totally fine. I pray that you get that help. But I have a course called You're Not Alone. It's a weekend course, it's a crash course. It's like four counseling sessions with me. You dive deep, you peel back all the layers of what's really going on, all these things that we talk about, and it's supposed to have the spirit just hit you hard and wake you up to find the clarity you need. They'll take you most of the weekend or a few days. You don't have to do it just on a weekend, but it's a weekend course. Most people are off, they have time to lock themselves down and just work on themselves. You can check out that course. And I just launched a mini course, a super short course for folks that maybe just want to kind of put their foot in the water to see if this is for them, the healing process, if they want to go this way, inviting God into them to allow them to heal. That course is also going to be launched here this week. All that can be found on partnersofaddicts.com. Links are always in the show notes, so you can please go there and check

An Invitation To Fight For Healing

SPEAKER_00 19:24

that out. So as we close, I just want to let you know that this episode and the prior episode, and any episode I do, is not to condemn. It's not to say that you were a bad parent. It's not to make you feel guilty. It's not to do any of that. And if you understand, all that stuff is the devil trying to come and kill, steal, and destroy your life. He's the one that makes you believe the lies. He's the one that tells you you're not good enough. He's the one that tells you you're sucked because you can't fix the addict. He's the one that does all that. I'm not condemning you. So don't listen to those lies. What I am doing is giving you an invitation. Look into my eyes. This is an invitation. This is an invitation for you to fight. Not for their sobriety, but for you to get healing. Your kids need to see you fighting for yourself, fighting for your healing more than they need you to fight to hold the family together. That's what they need to see. What good is it to destroy your entire family fighting to keep something together that is not gonna get fixed because it's based on one person. And you think that one person is you to fix the sobriety, but it's not. It's the addict. And you think that it's this one person to fix the addiction. That's you. You've got to hold it all together. You've got to fix it, right? It's not. It's up to the addict. And you can't control the addict, and you never will be able to control the addict. Oh, there's glimmers of hope in there, there's a little bit of light in there, but reality says, and what I can tell you from experience of 13 years of battle in hell, they're not gonna change until they want to change. So it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter. You can hold a gun to their head and tell them to stop, and they promise they'll stop, and the next day they'll take it again. You need to fight for your healing. You need to fight for yourself, and you need to fight for your kids. Let's make sure what they're watching is worth repeating. Your kids need to see harmony repeated. They need to see your peace repeated. Repeated. They need to see you having clarity and loving on them through this and helping them understand that this has nothing to do with them. Your kids don't need to grow up thinking that their father or mother took medicine to escape them. You don't need your kids growing up thinking that the addict and the addiction was more important than their school functions or their personal needs. Your kids don't need to grow up seeing tears and anger more than harmony, happiness, and peace. They don't deserve it. They don't deserve it. And again, I'm not trying to condemn you. I'm hoping that the Spirit is speaking to you. If this episode hits you deep, would you please do something about it? Would you please share it with somebody that may need to hear it? Would you please take a moment to either help yourself or help somebody in that situation go get help because of their kids? We have to understand what's going on inside of us before anything out there. If you never change what's in your heart or your mind and your current thought process and your feeling right now, if you never change that process, out here is never ever going to change. It's always going to be the same. The only way that outside looks different is if you change your mind and you change your heart. And the only thing that can happen to do that is with God allowing you to get the peace, to get the clarity, so he can transform you. I promise you that. That is the one promise and guarantee I can get you. If you allow yourself to do the work and you allow yourself to start healing, he is going to be there for you.

When Kids Start Blaming God

SPEAKER_00 24:08

If you are a follower of Christ on top of having kids, on top of being married to an addict, if you are a follower of Christ and He's not fixing the marriage and not fixing anything, it is even more damaging for your kids. Because now you're dragging them to a church where they hear that God is love, God fixes everything, God's got a perfect plan for you, God's got all this stuff, and they don't understand everything about how it all works, you might not understand how it all works. But when they see failure after failure after failure after failure, who are they gonna blame? God. And they're gonna grow up with their back turns against God. Well, that's a pretty bold statement, Steve. Yeah, why don't you talk to my two kids, my two older boys, that have nothing to do with Christ, because they saw a father who was behind a pulpit every Sunday preaching to a congregation, had a radio ministry, was a part of one of the biggest churches in the area that we lived. They saw me doing that day in, day out, week after week, not being transformed, while their life completely sucked. Boy, how good was God there. That didn't really help them, did it? Knowing God and allowing him to transform you are two different things. So this whole classroom of you being a parent and what they're learning has to be done with love, peace, and harmony, and you getting

Share The Message And Close

SPEAKER_00 25:44

clarity. Again, my name is Steve. I want to thank you for being here today. And I hope you catch me on another episode. I hope you like, subscribe, follow, comment, do all those things again. Please help get this message out. Help let's save people from destroying themselves even more. And let's save their kids on top of it. And more importantly than anything, let's learn that God is an amazing God who will transform you if you let him inside of you. If you let him allow him to come into those deep dark places that are keeping you in a hell that you're in, he'll remove it. That is the wrath of God. That is the love of God. He wants nothing more than to come in there and just rip all that crap out of you and fill it with love and light. So you, like me, can in return go out and help other people walk through this crap. You are loved. You're holy. We're gonna see you in the next episode of God blessing.