Loving someone struggling with addiction is one of the hardest journeys to walk. In this episode, Sunshine shares her deeply personal experiences of supporting loved ones through addiction—her best friend’s battle with prescription pills and her ex-boyfriend’s struggle with heroin and alcohol. She opens up about the emotional toll, the frustration of watching someone you love suffer, and the fine line between helping and enabling.

But there’s hope. 🌟

Sunshine explores how magick, energy work, spell casting, and even something as simple as cooking with intention can offer support—without losing yourself in the process. She also dives into the importance of boundaries, self-care, and knowing when to step back to protect your own well-being.

Whether you’re currently supporting someone in addiction or healing from the experience, this episode is a powerful reminder that you can love without losing yourself—and that hope is never out of reach. 💖✨

Sunshine – The pink-haired sober witch:

Sunshine   

Hey, everyone looks like we are live. Welcome back to the sober witch life sunshine, Guide to a magical recovery. That’s right, it is me here in this episode, and I think we’re talking about something that’s pretty damn important today. When I sat here and thought about what I might want to share, this was the topic that came up, and it hit me pretty hard. As I was writing out my show notes, I’m not going to lie, it was a little difficult.

Today, we’re going to talk about how we help those that we love with addiction. Oh my goodness. So we always start these off with a little bit of story time. And this is what I mean, but it was a little hard because I had to take a step back. And I’ve had a handful of folks in my life that have struggled with addiction, and there’s two people in particular that came to mind, though today, it’s been over eight years now since I walked away from one of my best friend of roughly 20 years, right? Her and I, we didn’t grow up together, but we met in high school. And not going to lie, it was drugs that brought us together. It was pot that brought us together. Yeah, I was, you know, around the age of 16, and I wanted to try it. And so I found out a circle of folks. Found a circle of folks that I thought, you know, might abide, and they did, but we are very dear friends, part of each other’s families, you know. And I loved her a lot. I loved her and I loved her children she had by the time her and I, kind of like, broke up, she had three kids who I adored very, very much. And it’s been over four years since I asked a man that I deeply love to move out. I was divorced, you know, I left my ex husband in 2015 and in 2016 I met, you know, Keith, and I met him, and he was just getting out of rehab. Actually, he was still in rehab. But before I get into that story, I want to touch on like I realized, and this is something that I realized, you know, a while ago into my recovery. But when I was in active addiction, I hung around folks who had their own addictions, right? It kind of normalized things for me. It made me feel, I don’t know, maybe, like my problem wasn’t as big as their problem. Maybe, you know, I mean, comparison is a horrible thing. But yeah, it normalized it. I thought it was normal, and it supported my own addiction, you know, my my best friend, she didn’t really drink, but her drug of choice was prescription pills, and she never had any issue with me drinking. I mean, I would drink, you know, if I went over there, you know. I mean, we did all sorts of things together, but if it was like a week night, oh, you know, weekend night, or anything of that nature, I always brought alcohol with me. I brought beer. I brought, you know, liquor. It didn’t matter, right? And she had no problem with me drinking, no problem with me drinking, you know, one too many. No problem with me even drinking and driving if we went out, right? She hated to drive. And the reason she didn’t drink, though, I’ve come to find out in later years, is because she had the prescription pill the opioid addiction for a long time, like since we were in our mid 20s, right? My ex’s drug of choice was heroin. I mean, heroin, and then everything else, pretty much. And as I said, he was in rehab, just kind of getting out of it. And, yeah, it should have been a red flag, right? It should have been a red flag.

Now, mind you, he wasn’t honest with me when we started dating about all of that, like the depths of it, it came out after, you know, he moved in very quickly after he got out of rehab. And so things started to come to light. But the reality is is I came out of an abusive marriage, right? I’d been out of an abusive relationship for a year, and he loved me. Keith loved me. Loved Me, right? Like, just devoted, you know, loved. And so I just looked at these as character flaws, you know. And I, you know, looking back, I didn’t have when you know him and I started dating, even though I experienced what I did with my best friend, I didn’t have a lot of experience with addiction, I didn’t know a lot about it, you know, I tried to get my ex best friend sober three times, and so I knew, like I knew about withdrawals. I knew what happened from that perspective. But I really didn’t know a lot about addiction, not, not like I do today, right? And it was after the third. Time when she relapsed, and she tried to, like, lie to me that she hadn’t and, you know, I could just see her children were starting to suffer, and it was well beyond what I could I could help anymore, like, I couldn’t do it. I was seriously concerned. And, needless to say, yeah, it’s been over eight years. And, yeah, a whole, whole another story for another day, my ex, though, shortly after we’d gotten together and he’d moved in, it wasn’t long before, you know, he kind of relapsed. I literally had no clue. Like he started hiding. He started going, you know, using my car. He had his license. He did not have a license, but he dropped me off at work, and lo and behold, he was using my car to go drive a dealer around in order to work off an exchange with a drug. And it was a time he was supposed to pick me up from work, and he didn’t show up, and he wouldn’t answer his call. And so I took an Uber home, and there he was trying to jump into the car as I pulled up, and I knew something was up. And he admitted, he finally admitted, and I was like, we can’t do this. You’ve you’ve got it. You’ve got to get help. You’ve got to seek help. And so he did. He went and got on a harm reduction program. He started taking Suboxone, and he was good for a long time.

For a really, really long time, he was on Suboxone. You know, we were together for five and a half years. So for five years he was on Suboxone, half of the year, you know, not he was using but for five the years he was on Suboxone and was doing wonderful, had no desire anything of that nature. I don’t think we realized that he just transferred his addiction to alcohol. And, you know, he could hold his alcohol a hell of a lot better. He got loud, but that was because he was hard of hearing, but he could, he could hold his alcohol, you know, maybe better than I could. And over the course of time, you know, we did. We partied a lot, we drank a lot, we consumed a lot of alcohol together. And so when I finally relapsed for that second time, and, you know, treated him horrifically, hitting my rock bottom on my 40th birthday, when we got back, I started at AA, and it took about two weeks before I told him, like, I I can’t be with somebody that drinks. I just, I can’t, I have to be with somebody that is also going to choose an alcohol free life that’s really important for me in order for me to stay on recovery. And it was at this time that I think we really started to realize, at least I started to realize that he transferred his addiction alcohol. Because just like the heroin he had started to hide drinking from me, he also started to abuse other drugs, like Adderall. And so I stepped into recovery in October of 2019 and the pandemic hit in, you know, March of 2020, and at that time, he had been doing a door to door sales job for about two and a half months. And you know, one of the ways he was kind of, I guess now I didn’t know this, getting the like gumption to get out there and go hustle, so to speak, was he was taking Adderall.

The unfortunate truth is he also dealt with some bipolar or some schizoaffective disorder, and so stimulants are horrible for this. He started to lack sleep. It led to paranoia, and the next thing you know about of paranoia led him to believe that I knew about all of these pills that he’d had, and he took eight of them and didn’t sleep for like, four days. It was hard, you know, I don’t I don’t know that I talked with a lot of people at that particular time to the depths of how hard the next, like, year and a half or two years, because that was in 2020 and it wasn’t until the end of 21 that I’d finally asked him to leave, you know, and we tried our hardest, and I tried to care for him, and, you know, be there for him and support him, but he started going through bouts of psychosis. It wasn’t so bad in that first year, right? It wasn’t so bad in that first year, but I realize now it’s because, once you know, we got towards the end of 2020, he made the decision to go back home and. At his family, and they were huge triggers for him to drink and drug. And he did.

And so by the time he came back in that particular Christmas at the end of 2020, he was in really rough shape, uh, really rough shape, you know, to the point that his family members were now starting to call me for the first time. They never did, never talked to me, never met him, none you know, he was. He tried to stay away from him because he knew how hard it was, you know, just what a bad influence, so to speak, they were for him. And, um, yeah, so 2021, was a really rough year, you know, he stopped showering, stopped shaving, you know, grew his hair out. It was, it was heartbreaking, and he continued on. And, you know, we kind of argued and but in 2021, like I had over a year and a half in recovery, and I wanted a different life. And I kept telling him, like, I want this different life with you. I did. I really, really did. Please get help for yourself. Please love yourself. I can’t do it for you, you know. And just, it was heartbreaking watching him struggle. Mind you, it wasn’t just addiction, it was also these mental health issues, but it was so fucking hard, just so fucking hard. And so I started dating around that time, and he knew it, and he was what, you know, he’s open to it. And but around July of that year, 2021 I finally told him. I said, you know, I can’t handle this anymore. I cannot be your only support. I need for you to commit to a program, right, like going to AA or NA on a regular basis, or some kind of therapy on a weekly basis, like I need, just like you asked me to do 90 and 90 days in order to stay together, I’m asking you to get in and I gave him six fucking months to do it. Six months, right? Wasn’t a you got to do it tomorrow. Maybe that’s a failure on my part, I don’t know.

So we approached the end of the year, and the horrifying thing you know is it was around Christmas, and maybe that’s also something I could have done differently. But he still wasn’t. We’re two weeks before the end of the year, and I can’t handle it anymore. You know, he was sick. He wasn’t taking care of his, you know, taking his meds on a regular basis. I’m watching him, you know, lie about taking the All, all these things. It was just bad. It was so bad, and it was so dark. And a few days before Christmas, I had it, and something came out of me, you know, now that I’m was like two, two years into recovery at this point, something came out of me that’s so horrifying. You know, the anger and the rage was so horrifying, and I scared myself so much. I told him he had to leave. He had to go, you know, I didn’t know what was going to happen if he stayed. And I broke down. I bawled, you know, I bawled. I I cried for like, three weeks straight, pretty much multiple times a day for the first two weeks, and then at least once or twice a day for a couple weeks after that. Yeah, I think the hardest part is, as somebody that has psychic abilities, I knew, I knew the path he was heading down. When he left, he ended up back at home, and within a week, was back on heroin. There’s a lot more into that part of the story, but, you know, including his eventual death a year and a half after it. But I’ll share more about that at some point. But it was hard, you know, I’m going to fast forward to a point that happened in August of 2022, I saw him for the first time again. I picked him up for coffee, and he was so skinny, and so thin, you know, so thin, like sickly. And I asked him, I, you know? I said, you know the path you’re heading down, don’t you like, you have one of two choices, make a change and step into like recovery or to continue down this path to your eventual demise. And he told me he knew.

Which gets us to why am I sharing all of this with. You, you know it’s not just to sit here and cry and you know, reminisce into these things that you’re just so heartbreaking, but it’s because I know how unbelievably heartbreaking it is to watch an individual struggling with addiction. I know it. I know what toll it takes on their mind, their body and their spirit. He gave up. I know that all that it takes on your mind, your body and spirit, you know, I was anguished. I didn’t know what to fucking, do, you know? And from a body perspective, like, oh, just being a sensitive person like, my body hurt. It ached. My heart like literally ached, and I cried, and there’s a lot of tears, and I felt so helpless. I’m also sharing this because I often see the ask and support groups right on Facebook, a lot of witchy groups that I belong to, I belong to two types of groups, well, maybe three witchy groups, recovery groups, and then craft groups, crafter gardening, I shouldn’t say. And in a lot of the witchy groups, they’re all people, be people that ask, Hey, you know my boyfriend, my mother, my father, my sister, my cousin. You know somebody that they know and they love is struggling with alcoholism or addiction. What can I do? Are there spells that I can do? And so many of the comments fall into an Al Anon styled response, you can’t do anything for them. They’ve got to want it. They’ve got to hit their rock bottom right, go to El anon. That’s all you can do. You can’t help. You can’t help, you can’t help. And that’s bullshit. We’re witches. There’s a lot of things that we can do with our magic.

So to say this, when someone isn’t very familiar with addiction, personally, they may not realize or understand how much strength and courage that it takes to step into recovery. They may not know how scary it is to give up something that has falsely supported you, the drugs, the alcohol, the shopping, the what, whatever it is, right? The gambling it has. It’s provided some support, some numbing something. It’s given you something, even while it’s robbing you of everything else. They may not understand how nauseating it can be, both literally and figuratively, to imagine life without that drug of choice, or how painful it can be to withdraw from some of them. Right? Opioid withdrawal is hellacious on the body, and if you are a severe alcoholic, detoxing can send you can literally take your life. Same thing with benzos, two two things, alcohol and benzos. So these very both of them, if you were to step off of them, and we’re at a point in your consumption, you are potentially risking your life. How fucking scary is that? But you’re a witch, my dear. And there is something you can do. All of your actions should be focused around increasing their courage, increasing their love for themselves. If you do energy work, remove blockages from their solar plexus and their heart chakra right, feed that energy back in, strengthening those two chakras, giving them the courage, the confidence to step onto a new path and to make a change, and to do so because they love themselves. If you’re a Kitchen Witch, start cooking and feeding them things that you are inviting with courage, strength and love. If you like doing spell work, create a spell around increasing encourage increasing strength, increasing self love. Buy them some stones or something to wear, right? Put the intentions into those they don’t even need to know just hey, I thought that. I thought of this. I thought of you when I saw this. And if you’re a chaos, which you could create a servitor, right? That helps with the courage for them use all of their addictive behaviors to transmute into that courage and that strength.

Now, you’re not going to be able to change them, per se, but you can help shift the energetic around them so that they can change themselves. You That being said, My dear friends, I get it. It’s hard and it’s heartbreaking. So even when you are doing all of these things, do not forget love yourself in the same moment. To set boundaries and to be strong for yourself. That being said, My dear friends, till next time. Much Love for Me to all of you.