Tyler’s family had always been there. Always. Bailing him out. Letting him crash. Hoping that maybe this time would be different. But addiction has a way of turning love into leverage and eventually, enough was enough.
Tyler is an alumni of Sunflower Recovery Center and this is his story.
Tyler grew up with two loving parents and a childhood that, by all accounts, was rock solid. “I had a great childhood… my mom and dad are still married,” he said. Sports. School. The occasional beer. Nothing wild. But things started a downward trajectory after college.
Like a lot of Americans, Tyler got injured and was prescribed narcotic painkillers. Before long he was hooked on hydrocodone. The slide was fast and brutal. “I was popping three to four hundred dollars a day worth of pills,” he said. “Then I started stealing—from work, from family, from anyone.” Before long he moved from pills to meth.
Each time he got arrested, his parents would be there to bail him out. Each time he messed up, they gave him a place to sleep. And each time, Tyler used their love to prop up a lifestyle that was killing him. “They’d let me back in, and I’d go straight back to the streets.”
But then one day, all that enabling stopped.
“I was in jail for a $300 bond and they left me there—for seven months,” Tyler recalled. “That tough love was the eye-opener. That’s when I knew they weren’t playing anymore.”
It wasn’t that his parents stopped loving him; it was that they decided they weren’t going to love him to death. They were going to love him with boundaries. They were going to love him not with rescue, but with reality.
It hurt. It had to. But it worked.
For families dealing with addiction, the line between helping and enabling is razor-thin and hard to walk. Practicing tough love doesn’t mean you don’t love someone anymore; it means you aren’t going to help them destroy their lives.
Tyler finally saw that when his mom looked him in the eye and said, “You’re not my son.” “She disowned me,” he said. “I was homeless. I was sitting there thinking, ‘Why can’t I stop? What’s wrong with me?’”
But that breaking point was the beginning of something new.
After the judge gave him one last shot—“The prosecutor wants to throw you in prison,” he was told—Tyler made a phone call that changed everything. He reached out to Sunflower Recovery.
“Dan answered the phone and didn’t let me go until I was admitted. He called my sister, my dad—he was on it,” Tyler said. “It was the first time someone fought for me without enabling me.”
And this time? Tyler was ready.
At Sunflower, Tyler got connected. He healed. He became part of a community of people who’d been through it and were willing to walk with him, not carry him.
“My dad hugged me for the first time in years. Dan had open arms. Everyone told me, ‘You’re gonna be okay.’”
Now, Tyler is living in an Oxford House, working, attending church, and staying plugged into recovery. “God restored my family so fast. I got my kids back, my support system back. People keep telling me they’re proud of me.”
He gives his sobriety coins to his dad. That’s how much things have changed.
If you’re a family member stuck in the cycle of hope and heartbreak, know this: change is possible. But it often begins when you stop trying to fix it for them—and let them feel the cost.
Sunflower Recovery is here when they’re ready. And when you are, too. Call us today. Real recovery starts with real boundaries.