Over the next three months, Antedote is hosting a written dialogue between two people who sit on different sides of the same fire. I’m writing as a treatment professional in mental health and substance use, as well as a father and a son; shaped by years inside recovery spaces. Lisa Katona Smith, M.Ed., a TEDx speaker and founder of Parallel Recovery®, writes from her deep work with families learning how to heal alongside someone they love. Together, we’ll explore addiction, treatment, sons and mothers, and the often invisible dynamics that shape recovery, offering two complementary perspectives on what it means to heal not just the individual, but the system around them.
Part I: Boundaries, Individuation, and the Adult Son
“Block your son’s number.”
If you’re the parent of a young man struggling with substance use or mental health challenges, you’ve probably heard this advice. Maybe from an interventionist. Maybe from a treatment professional. Maybe from a friend who’s watched you wince every time your phone buzzes.
It’s not bad advice, honestly. Those professionals know what they’re talking about. When your son is verbally harassing you, when every text makes your chest tighten, when you’re checking the phone at 2 AM terrified you’ll see another verbal attack—yes, blocking gives you some relief. Real relief.
The problem is what that advice doesn’t address: What happens next? What happens when you block him today and unblock him tomorrow because you’re terrified something’s wrong? What happens when the cycle repeats? Block, unblock, engage, regret, block again. And the distance between you grows wider each time?
Blocking doesn’t solve the problem. It just puts the power in his hands while you wait on the sidelines, disconnected and powerless. There’s a better way. One that doesn’t require you to accept abuse, but also doesn’t require you to give up connection.
The Cycle
An interventionist once referred a mother to me. He’d told her to block her son. When she came to me, she’d been through several rounds of blocking and unblocking. Each time she’d blocked him, the fear would build—“What if something happens? What if he needs me?” So she’d unblock. And he’d text. And it would be mean. And she’d engage anyway, desperate for any contact. Then she’d regret it. Then she’d block again.
With each cycle, the anger between them grew. The resentment on both sides deepened. She wasn’t protecting herself; she was just creating more chaos while convincing herself she was doing something.
The interventionist’s advice wasn’t wrong. It was incomplete. It addressed the immediate harm but ignored the longer game: How do you stay in relationship with someone whose behavior is hurting you? How do you have influence when you’ve cut off the line of communication?
What You Can Actually Control
Blocking is about trying to control his behavior. You can’t receive his abuse if you don’t receive his messages. It makes sense.
But you can’t control his behavior, no matter how desperately you want to. None of us can control another person’s choices, even when we love them this much. And trying to control it, even through blocking, keeps you reactive. You’re still letting him dictate the terms. You’re still powerless, just from a distance.
What you can control is your own response. Your own boundaries. Your own recovery work.
This is where Parallel Recovery® comes in. Your son has work to do. So do you. Your work isn’t fixing him or managing his reactions. Your work is learning to show up in this relationship differently—to set boundaries that protect you without severing connection.
I invited that mother to unblock her son and send him a text message. Not a message demanding change. Not a message explaining all the ways he’d hurt her. A message that modeled what she wanted the relationship to become.
I know. This feels vulnerable. It feels risky. You might be thinking, “If I send something like this, he’ll use it against me.” Maybe he will, but what you’re doing now isn’t working either.
Here’s what she sent:
“I have had you blocked because I didn’t know how to manage my reactions to your messages. That’s not how I want our relationship to be. I’m tired of managing your reactions. I want to communicate with you, and I can’t do that when it feels angry and attacking. I will respond to you when it feels like we have decent communication, and when it doesn’t feel that way to me, I won’t respond. What you have to say is important to me, I just need to be able to hear it, and I can’t when it is mean.”
Read that again. Notice what it does:
It owns her part. She didn’t know how to manage her reactions. That’s on her, not him.
It names what she wants. Connection. Communication. A relationship where she can actually hear him.
It sets a clear boundary. She’ll respond when communication feels safe. She won’t when it doesn’t.
It maintains connection. What he has to say matters. She wants to hear it, just not like this.
This message isn’t about getting him to behave better. It’s about her taking responsibility for her own recovery—for how she shows up, what she accepts, and what she models.
What Next?
He might test it. He might send another mean text to see if she meant it. He might ignore it completely. Your job isn’t to control his response. I know that feels terrifying. Your whole body might be screaming that if you don’t manage this perfectly, something terrible will happen. But managing his responses hasn’t kept him safe. It’s only kept you exhausted.
If the next message is decent, you respond. If it’s not, you don’t. No explaining. No blocking. You just practice the boundary you said you’d hold.
This is harder than blocking. It requires you to do your own work. To notice your reactions, to manage your impulses, and to stay grounded when he’s testing you. It requires you to believe that you have the power to change this dynamic, even if he doesn’t change at all.
But it’s something else—sustainable. Blocking isn’t. The block/unblock cycle proves that.
To be clear: you shouldn’t accept abuse. No one should. But you have more options than “accept it” or “cut off contact”. You can set boundaries while staying in the relationship. You can protect yourself without giving up on connection. You can do your recovery work while inviting him to do his.
This is what Parallel Recovery® asks of families: to recognize that everyone has work to do. Your son’s work is his. Your work is yours. And when you step into your own recovery—when you model what healthy boundaries and honest communication look like—you create something new between you. Not perfect. Not pain-free. But real. A relationship he might actually want to protect.
Families have work to do too. It doesn’t start with him changing; it starts with you showing up differently.
Lisa Katona Smith, M.Ed., is a TEDx speaker, educator, and author of Parallel Recovery®—a family-centered model that empowers loved ones to heal alongside someone facing mental health and substance use challenges. Known for her clarity, compassion, and systems-level insight, Lisa helps families and professionals build sustainable, connection-based recovery through consulting, training, and transformative conversations.
—In partnership with Antedote Lab
Yeshaia’s Response
I appreciate this piece and the care underneath it. It names something real and painful that many families experience, especially mothers caught between fear, guilt, and exhaustion. The block-unblock cycle is familiar. The anxiety is real. And the instinct to protect connection rather than rupture it comes from love, not weakness.
I also agree with you, Lisa, that binary thinking fails families. “Accept abuse or disappear entirely” is not a humane choice. Most situations require something more thoughtful and relational than that.
Where I want to offer a different perspective is around development, particularly adult male development. Not as a refutation, but as an expansion. Because in some cases, especially with adult sons, the very thing that feels like care can quietly become the obstacle.
Continued maternal centrality in adult male crises is often developmentally catastrophic. Not always, and not in every case, but often enough that it deserves serious consideration. Adult male development frequently requires a withdrawal of maternal emotional centrality. Not cruelty. Not abandonment. Not punishment. But structural relinquishment.
This is initiation by absence.
There is a kind of suffering that cannot be spared without cost. Grieving the fantasy of rescue. Tolerating not knowing what will happen. Withstanding guilt without immediately repairing it. Allowing consequences to land without commentary or translation. These are not failures of love. They are acts of developmental faith.
Much abusive communication from adult sons is not simply dysregulation or illness. In many cases it is dependency rage. A protest against reliance itself. A fury at still needing the very figure who now represents failure, weakness, or unfinished adulthood. Continued emotional availability in these moments can stabilize the system while preventing it from reorganizing.
This is why adult sons often do not heal through maternal availability alone. Connection is not the goal. Individuation is. Emotional availability beyond a developmental window can become infantilizing even when it is well-intentioned. Abuse is often a protest against dependence rather than a plea for more closeness. Boundaries that carry no relational loss are often experienced as preferences rather than limits. And a mother’s nervous system cannot be the long-term recovery environment for an adult man.
Men often individuate through absence, not dialogue.
This does not mean blocking in anger or disappearing without clarity. It means stepping out of a role that no longer serves development and allowing other structures to take its place. Community replaces fusion. Authority replaces appeasement. Consequences replace regulation. Men step forward. Mothers step back.
This is not cold. It is developmentally honest.
And it does not contradict connection-based models so much as complete them. Some relationships heal through better communication. Others only reorganize through space. Each case is particular. Cognitive impairment, psychosis, trauma, and emotional disability all matter. No single approach fits everyone.
But what many family models call staying in relationship is sometimes an unconscious refusal to allow adult sons the suffering required for separation. A mother’s continued emotional availability can delay an adult son’s development more effectively than any substance.
Holding this possibility does not make families less compassionate. It makes them more aligned with how growth actually happens.
In that sense, this is not a disagreement about care. It is a disagreement about timing, structure, and what love looks like at the edge of adulthood.
And it is a conversation worth having together.