Watching My Brother's Addiction From the Inside

My brother Tendai is two years younger than me and we grew up in Harare close in the way of siblings who had shared a small house and large family pressures and the particular bond of navigating both of those things together.

When his drinking became serious after his mid-twenties, I was the family member who responded most actively - calling, visiting, arranging things, researching resources, having the honest conversations, being the person he called when things were at their worst and the person who would come.

I did all of this from genuine love and from an assumption that was so embedded I could not see it as an assumption: that if I helped enough and in the right ways, the outcome would change. Four years of that approach taught me something I did not want to learn.

Addiction is not a problem that can be solved by the love and effort of the people around the person who has it. The will and the work and the professional support have to come from the person themselves, and everything I was doing - the rescuing, the problem-solving, the being available at 2am, the conversations that we both knew had been had before - was not helping my brother.

Some of it was actively unhelpful, in the way of enabling, because it reduced the consequences of choices that needed to have consequences in order for the calculation to change.

I went to a support group for family members of people with substance problems at 28, expecting practical advice, and found something I had not been looking for: a community of people who had been doing exactly what I was doing for much longer, and whose experience had produced the same result.

The most important thing I heard in that room, which I had to hear many times before I could integrate it, was this: you did not cause it, you cannot control it, and you cannot cure it. The only person whose behaviour you can change is your own. I changed mine. I stopped rescuing.

I told my brother clearly and once what I was available to support and what I was not. I stepped back from the role of manager of his crisis and tried to be his sister instead. The change in me did not immediately change him.

He is in a better place now, partly through his own work and partly through professional support he accessed when the weight of the situation was no longer being partially absorbed by me. I cannot draw a straight line between my stepping back and his stepping forward.

I can tell you that four years of stepping in had not produced it.