Virtology GlobalAn initiative of Instituto Virtudes · Brazil
A threat gets shouted and is almost never carried out. A request depends only on him. A boundary is something else: it is what you do, agreed on calmly and kept on the tenth day, when exhaustion whispers “just this once.”
English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
You have said “this is the last time I give you money” so many times that not even you believe it anymore. He does not believe it either. Maybe you once shouted “if you use again, I’m throwing you out,” and two weeks later opened the door at three in the morning, relieved that he was alive.
Almost every family goes through this. Nobody is handed a manual for loving someone in addiction. In this article I want to separate three things that look the same and work in very different ways: the request, the threat and the boundary. And to show why the boundary, which so many people experience as a punishment, is a form of care.
A few things need to be clear from the start.
Someone’s addiction is not explained by the fault of one person in the family. What is being discussed here is not who caused it. It is what you can do from now on, in what depends on you.
A boundary does not mean withdrawing protection. Food, safe shelter, access to treatment and help in an emergency remain guaranteed. Nobody stops protecting another person’s life so that he will “learn.”
And when there is a risk to life, it is a different conversation. Talk of suicide, signs of overdose, threats of violence, a debt to a drug dealer: none of this is a test of a boundary. It is an emergency. I come back to this further on.
I write “he” because the language needs a pronoun, but this applies to a daughter, husband, wife, father, brother. And it applies to alcohol, drugs, gambling.
Look at these three sentences.
“You’re not going to use anymore.”
“If you use again, I’m throwing you out.”
“I’m not going to give you money anymore.”
The first is a request. It may be sincere and full of love, but only he can fulfil it. You have no way of making it happen.
The second is a threat. It usually comes out in a shout, in a moment of anger, and it is almost never carried out. When it is not carried out, it teaches him that your words in anger are just noise.
The third is a boundary. It depends only on you.
In Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology, this difference has a name. Acting within your own domain is Responsibility. Trying to control what lies outside it is one of the forms of pride: the demand that reality obey. His use is not within your domain. What you do with your money, your home, your sleep and your words is.
And a boundary is not abandonment either. It is the form of presence that asks the most of the one who loves: being there, fully, without doing things for him. Nor is it a punishment or a show of strength. A boundary is safe, it is the size of the problem, and it is revised when the risk changes.
After years of this, many families want to gather everyone in the living room and throw the truth in his face. “You’re an addict and you’re going into treatment today.” I understand that urge. But it tends to produce the opposite of what it promises.
Casarotto cites two pieces of research on this. In the first, William Miller, one of the creators of motivational interviewing, and his colleagues recorded and analyzed sessions of therapists treating people with drinking problems. The more the therapist confronted, the more the person was drinking a year later (Miller, Benefield and Tonigan, 1993). Confrontation did not bring the defense down. It fed it.
The second is a review that compared three approaches for families of people who refused treatment. One was training the family to change the way it relates to the person who uses, called CRAFT. Another was support groups for relatives. The third was the confrontational intervention, in which everyone gathers to put the person up against the wall. Family training brought about three times as many people into treatment as the family groups, and about twice as many as confrontation. With it, roughly two thirds of the people who had refused treatment ended up starting it (Roozen, de Waart and van der Kroft, 2010).
What worked best was not tearing down his defense. It was the family changing its own.
Humiliation is one of the strongest triggers of what Virtology calls the blackout: the moment an impulse overrides everything the person knows. When someone feels exposed and made small, the pride system, which everyone has, reacts as if it were a threat to life. It attacks, flees, or reaches for whatever relieves fastest. For someone in addiction, what relieves fastest is the use. And this holds for both sides of the room: humiliation triggers his blackout and yours.
Each family puts together its own list. But the logic is always the same: you guarantee the person, you do not sustain the use.
What the family goes on guaranteeing:
What the family stops sustaining, because it sustains the use and not the person:
The form matters as much as the content.
In a low voice, in a short sentence. No humiliation, no sarcasm, no audience. If there is a threat or agitation, safety comes before the conversation.
No embellishment and no list. The boundary says what it is. “I’m not going to give you money anymore. If you need something, I’ll pay for it directly.” No speech. No list of everything he has done. The list turns the boundary into a sentence passed on him, and it is the sentencing that makes a boundary feel like a punishment.
At the right time. A boundary is not stated in the middle of a crisis, nor in the early hours, nor when he is under the influence. It is stated at a calm moment, agreed on beforehand, ideally with the family support group or the health service.
With the household in agreement. A boundary the mother keeps and the father breaks is not a boundary. It is a back door. And someone in addiction finds the back door with the efficiency of someone who has spent years looking for money. The family needs to sit down beforehand and agree. If there is no agreement, each person keeps at least their own.
Saying it is easy. Keeping it is the whole job.
When the boundary goes in, the pressure rises before it falls. He insists, cries, promises, fights. It is the system testing whether the rule is real. It almost always gets worse before it gets better.
And the most dangerous day is not the first. On the first day, you are determined. It is the tenth. On the tenth day you are tired, he is still insisting, the neighbor made a comment, someone in the family gave in, and a voice inside says: “just this once.”
If the boundary falls on the tenth day, he learns that ten days of insisting work. Next time, he insists for eleven. People who study learning call this intermittent reinforcement. When the reward comes sometimes rather than always, the behavior becomes more persistent, not less. It is the same principle that keeps a gambler at the machine: “sometimes” holds on harder than “always.”
And why does the tenth day weigh so much on you? Keeping an agreement against the wish of the moment depends on the brain’s executive network, led by the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain, behind the forehead. It is what holds a plan in place against an impulse. When Perseverance is lacking, Virtology describes an executive network that tires early and a reward system tuned to respond to what is immediate. Add ten badly slept nights and an alarm going off at every round of insisting, and “just this once” gains strength. Casarotto puts it in one sentence: nobody perseveres without sleep.
Changing a boundary because the risk has changed is not giving in. It is caring. And it is decided calmly, with the group and the health service, not in the middle of the pressure.
Everything I have written so far applies to ordinary pressure: the asking, the insisting, the crying, the promising. There is another category, and it does not follow the same rules.
Talk of suicide is never a test. Take it seriously, always. Stay with him if it is safe, and call emergency services.
Signs of overdose are not a test either. If he is hard to wake, very confused, breathing slowly or with difficulty, or having a seizure: call emergency services.
Threats of violence, a debt to a drug dealer, collection at gunpoint: this is not a consequence for him to learn from. It is a risk to life, his and the household’s. Do not negotiate alone with anyone who threatens. If you are in danger, call the police. Women facing violence can turn to a domestic violence helpline, and children, teenagers and older adults at risk to the services that protect them.
You do not cause a crisis by setting a boundary. But one may come. That is why every boundary comes with a plan: who stays with you, where to go, whom to call. And once life is protected, you go back to the boundary.
There is a boundary almost nobody talks about, and it comes before all the others. It is the boundary you set on yourself.
I will no longer check his phone. I will no longer stay up waiting. I will no longer stop going to my work, my church, my group, my mother’s house, because of him. I will no longer forget my other children. I am going to sleep.
This is the hardest one, because there is nobody to test it but you. And it is the one that changes the household system the most. While you keep watch, he has someone to rebel against. When you leave the watchtower, he is left alone with his own responsibility. It is uncomfortable for both of you. And it is the beginning.
The family of someone with an addiction is often the most persevering there is. Years of admissions, relapses, promises, new starts, and it keeps going. So why talk about Perseverance with the family?
Because there are two kinds, and the family usually has the one that does not help. The first is persistence in rescue: years of paying, covering, watching, bailing out. It is the same gesture repeated, expecting a different result. It is persistence in what does not work. Virtology treats stubbornness as the excess of the virtue, not as the virtue.
The second is Perseverance on the new path. In the agreed boundary. In the group. In caring for yourself. In the no that hurts. It is much harder, because the new path does not give the immediate relief the old one did. Rescue settled the night. The boundary leaves the night bad. And that is where the family gives up. Not on the son. On the new path.
There are also two opposite ways of giving up to avoid. One is giving up on him: “there’s nothing more to be done, he can fend for himself.” The other, more common and more hidden, is giving up on yourself: “when he gets better, I’ll start living again.” As long as you wait for him to get better before you live, your life stays in the hands of his relapse. And stepping away to protect yourself from violence is not giving up. It is safety, and it always applies.
The sign that Perseverance is coming in is concrete: the time between falling and getting back up gets shorter. Before, one of his relapses knocked you down for a month. Then for a week. Then for a day. And the boundary on the tenth day comes to be kept with the calm of the first.
A boundary is not a virtue. It is a gesture that needs several, and in Virtology the order follows the Pyramid of Virtues.
Humility and Selflessness come first, as a pair. Humility, because the family’s pride often blocks everything before it begins: the shame of asking for help, “I know my own son,” “only I know how to take care of him.” And because it lets you review your own way of doing things without destroying yourself. Selflessness, because for the family it means putting his growth ahead of your relief. Bearing the bad night is Selflessness.
Then comes the rest of the Treatment Foundation. Responsibility, which is the very shape of a boundary: acting on what is yours and handing back to him what is his. Acceptance, because nobody controls another person’s use. Forgiveness, to let go of the accumulated hurt, which is what turns a boundary into a punishment. Individuation, so that your life has its own outline and the neighbor’s opinion stops deciding for you. State of Certainty, to keep the boundary without a guarantee that it will work. And Perseverance, to sustain all of this on the tenth day. It only works with the rest of the Foundation underneath it.
Only then comes Development, with the two virtues that give the words their shape. Gentleness, which is the low voice, the short sentence and the absence of humiliation. And Truth, which says what is, without embellishment and without threat. The two go together. And Gentleness requires a whole foundation before it: Humility, Acceptance, Selflessness, Responsibility, Individuation and Perseverance. Without that foundation, the calm in the voice is a performance, and it breaks at the first round of insisting.
At the top, as the horizon, Helping Others. Casarotto describes the imitations of it, and one is paternalistic help: help that does for the other person what he would need to do himself. A well-set boundary is the opposite of that.
I wrote about the guilt of saying no in Saying no without losing yourself to guilt.
The practice is not to set every boundary at once. It is to set just one, well, and to get through the tenth day with it.
Doing everything for someone tells him, without words: “you can’t.” A boundary says something else: “you can, and I’m here.” It hurts the one who sets it and it hurts the one who receives it. And it is the only kind of care that bets he can grow.
That is why a boundary is not a punishment. Punishment looks backward and wants the other person to pay. A boundary looks forward and makes room for him to take responsibility. If you feel your boundary has become hard, full of anger, with the face of revenge, that is a sign that the Foundation is still thin, not that the boundary is wrong.
This article is about the ordinary pressure that comes with addiction, not about dangerous situations. Talk of suicide, signs of overdose, seizures or slow breathing call for local emergency services at once. Threats, violence or armed debt collection call for the police; domestic violence helplines and child and elder protection services can also guide you. Stopping alcohol or sedatives suddenly can be dangerous and should be planned with a doctor. The family has a right to care too: local addiction services can guide relatives, and family support groups are usually free.
Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.
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Explore the Professional Formation →Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay.