How I stopped trying to fix my alcoholic dad and found peace.How I stopped trying to fix my alcoholic dad and found peace.
Addiction and Codependency Breakthrough
Reverend Heidi Rain shares how years of trying to rescue her alcoholic father shaped her life, career and relationship with herself. She explains how accepting him as he truly was, quitting alcohol and setting boundaries allowed her to step out of fixer mode and finally find peace.
38:39•1 Aug 2026
Letting Go of Fixing Dad: Heidi Rain’s Journey from Rescuer to Peace
Episode Overview
- Trying to fix an alcoholic parent often starts in childhood and can grow into a lifelong pattern of hypervigilance and over-responsibility.
- Success, self-help and even spiritual work can become another way to escape pain while still centring other people’s problems.
- Letting go of alcohol herself helped Heidi see her own hypocrisy and step into more honest work in addiction and codependency.
- Peace came when she stopped demanding a fantasy "dad" and instead accepted her father as a flawed human being with his own limitations.
- Real change rests on the choices of the addicted person; the healthier path for loved ones is detaching from the outcome and setting firm boundaries for their own wellbeing.
“I did not have a dad. I had a Tim. When I shifted my perspective to embrace the reality of who that man was, I was free.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? Reverend Heidi Rain shares exactly that, through the raw story of growing up as the daughter of an alcoholic father and spending decades trying to save him.
Across this deeply personal talk, you'll hear her childhood memories of sitting outside bars at 1am, inventing an imaginary "Wonder Woman" steering wheel in the back seat to keep her drunk dad from driving off a cliff, and building a Barbie house out of his empty beer cans to make him see the damage he was causing. Each attempt to "fix" him just led to more exhaustion, hypervigilance and a lifelong habit of scanning for problems.
Heidi traces how that urge to rescue turned into a full-on identity: success, self-help obsession, law of attraction work, a coaching career in Beverly Hills – all while secretly overdrinking herself. Her dad’s blunt accusation of hypocrisy pushed her to quit alcohol for good and move into professional addiction work.
The heart of the episode comes when she brings her dad into the treatment centre where she works, convinced that this time she can finally make him into the father she always wanted. Instead, she realises something huge: “I did not have a dad. I had a Tim.” Letting him be Tim – a shy, anxious, depressed man with his own limits – instead of the fantasy "knight in shining armour" becomes the turning point.
This conversation is aimed squarely at adult children of Alcoholics, codependents and anyone stuck in fixer mode. Heidi talks about detaching from outcomes, setting boundaries with yourself as much as with others, and shifting from trying to change people to choosing how you want to experience them.
If you grew up trying to rescue an addict, you might hear your own story echoed here – and maybe start to ask: what happens if the armour comes off and you stop trying to polish it?
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