Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Hello my friend.

I want to share with you something that I learned in Al-Anon years ago as a teenager.

Now if you don't know what Al-Anon is, it is almost like the sister group to AA, to Alcoholics, Anonymous.

It's for the friends and family people who love the person living with the addiction.

And my dad would go to AA, sometimes it was court ordered,

his doctor would really, really impress it upon him the importance of going to AA.

And I remember one of his doctors, she said to me, you know, she saw my frustration, I knew that

my dad was killing himself slowly. It was heart breaking if you have ever loved an addict

I feel you. I have space in my heart for you. I know the roller coaster that that experience is. I know the

frustration and the pain that comes with seeing all this repetition without

progress. You can feel like you take a step back with somebody and then they just

fall seven steps. One step forward and it feels like it's seven or eight steps back.

I know you, I feel you, I am you.

And even if you haven't had an experience like this,

I still find this piece of wisdom from Al-Anon

wildly valuable, wildly helpful, wildly insightful, and it's

frankly given me a lot of peace. So in Al-Anon they teach you how to not judge, how to manage and protect

and preserve your own energy, how to take care of yourself, how to be someone who's not an

enabler, yet someone who is just a loving stable force in an addict's life

without, by managing to your own boundaries without giving everything that you have

away and feeling scared all the time and feeling depleted all the time. And I remember this one time I was with my group and the team leader said, because I remember thinking,

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