251 Odyssey House Journals - Christine Carlisle

251 Odyssey House Journals - Christine Carlisle

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation gives a raw, emotional look at recovery from the other side of addiction – the side of the fixer who can’t stop helping. Therapist and clinical mental health counsellor Christine Carlisle talks with host Randall Carlisle about spending 12 years “addicted” to her using ex-husband and later to her son’s chaos.

She describes herself as a “queen enabler”, sharing how long it took to see her own part in the cycle, even after years in Al‑Anon. At one family session, a doctor told her, “I think that you are sicker in your disease than he is in his,” a line that shook her into recognising how deeply she’d been pulled into the illness.

You’ll hear Christine describe the moment she realised she was “surrounded by addicts” and had to face that she was the common denominator. The hardest scene she shares is turning her emaciated, homeless son away at 2am in the rain: “I can tell you to this day, it was absolutely the single hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.” That boundary, she says, later became a turning point in his recovery.

Now working in prisons, courts and treatment programmes, Christine speaks bluntly about enabling – especially from mums who are “loving them to death.” She talks about planting “a seed of hope – hold on, pain ends,” and why she refuses to sugarcoat things for people in active addiction or for their families. This conversation is geared towards families and loved ones of people with substance use issues, as well as anyone tangled up in codependency and people‑pleasing.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your help is actually harming someone you love, this honest, sometimes funny, often tear‑jerking half hour might be the reality check you need. Where might you be loving someone to death instead of giving them a chance to live?