You Can’t Force-Feed Recovery to Others

“You saved Richard Callahan’s life. You can’t live it for him.”

Helen Pryor, American Dreams

There’s an episode of the TV series American Dreams where Jack Pryor is attending a reunion with his Navy buddies. It’s late 1963. It’s been 20 years since these men served together during World War II. One of the guys who shows-up for the reunion is Richard Callahan. Jack saved Richard’s life during the war. But, since that time, Richard hadn’t done much with his life.

We learn that Richard is an alcoholic, divorced twice and he’s been unable to keep a job for very long. During the episode, he actually looks like a dead man walking, like a zombie. Richard feels guilty to be alive. Jack had two buddies injured in the same attack and he had to make a choice about who to save. The other man had insisted that he was OK and had told Jack to go help Richard. He died while Jack was saving Richard.

Richard is portrayed as a man who has never felt like his life was worth living from the get-go, much less worth saving. He displays a worthless-victim mentality that is often the norm for people who were raised in addictive households. And it seems he’s felt even less worthy to be alive since the death of his friend. At the reunion, he actually faults Jack for having saved him. He’s got nothing to show for his life. He’s played the victim for 20 years and has wasted those years away feeling sorry for himself and drinking himself into stupors to survive.

Naturally, Jack feels bad. He questions whether or not he did the right thing in saving Richard as opposed to saving the other man. And he feels partly responsible for the fact that Richard’s life has turned out so miserably.

This is where Jack’s wife Helen steps in and says “You saved Richard Callahan’s life. You can’t live it for him.” In doing so, she makes an important point. We may be able to physically save someone’s life, but we can’t save someone from him or her self. That’s impossible. And we can’t live someone else’s life for him or her. That’s also impossible.

Still, as codependents, many of us carry around tremendous guilt over our inability to rescue people from themselves, and for our inability to live their lives for them. We feel responsible for friends, family members, people we go to church with, coworkers, etc. And we need to get over the guilt. We can only be responsible for ourselves.

There are lots of Richard Callahans in this world. They’ve chosen to abandon themselves and be life’s perpetual victim. They are locked-up tight in their shame, fear and guilt. We can’t rescue them from it. We can talk with them, encourage them, point them in right directions and share our own recovery success stories with them.

But we can’t make them help themselves. We can’t force-feed recovery into their systems. They have to want it, and they have to finally acknowledge that they are worth it. And until they do make the conscious choice to help themselves, there’s absolutely nothing more we can do for them. We can’t rescue them from their own self-hatred and we can’t live their lives for them.

So we need to detach with love and empathy for them. We may feel frustration or even anger over the fact that they aren’t willing to help themselves. And yes, we may feel some guilt over our choice to back-off; but there’s a difference between backing-off and abandoning someone. We aren’t abandoning them by acknowledging that we can’t live their lives for them. We aren’t tossing them aside. We are allowing them to be responsible for their own lives in the same way that we have learned to be responsible for our lives.

We can pray for the Richard Callahans of the world. We can be empathetic and kind to them. We can love and encourage them. But we cannot fix them or live their lives for them.