My (43M) daughter (22F) has started stealing to support her heroin addiction, and my wife (39F) wants to kick her out of the house

I hate how addicts are describes as 'abusing drugs'. The drug is the abuser.

Right now your good, sweet, kind, loving daughter is completely in love with, and will do anything to keep her relationship going with a certain 'significant other' that is called Heroin. Your daughter and Heroin are utterly inseparable right now; wherever she goes he is there too. This means as long as she lives in your house, he lives there too.

Your daughter would never lie or steal or abuse you. But Heroin will, and it will do this to anyone he touches. Heroin makes your daughter do all this stuff for him, and she does it because right now, she loves him more than she loves anything else in the whole world: she loves him more then she loves her brother, her mother, and even her daddy, and even herself.

As long your daughter stays with Heroin, he will live in your house and lie and steal from and abuse you and your family, through her, unless you kick your daughter out. Kicking your daughter out is the only way to get Heroin also out of your house.

You can't ever really choose who your child falls in love with. But you can choose whether or not to associate with whoever she chooses to associate with, whether they be coworker, friend, lover, or addiction. You can also love your daughter, as you do so heartbreakingly much, without allowing her to bring Heroin around the rest of the family.

There are ways to help a loved one free themselves from an abusive relationship that don't involve get yourselves entangled with and harmed by the abuser. They also require you to be willing to witness your loved one suffer for their destructive decision to stay with and choose to support the abuser over their own health and connections with others. This holds true for the abuse that comes from bad people, and kind of abuse that comes from using addictive drugs.

/r/relationships Thread