This one's a little different. Most of what I write is for the person in it — the one fighting the cravings, showing up to meetings, white-knuckling through another Tuesday. But this post isn't for that person. It's for the one standing on the other side.
The mom who hasn't slept in three days because her son won't return her calls. The wife who found something she wasn't supposed to find. The friend who's watched someone they love disappear into a version of themselves that barely looks familiar.
You're the one doing the praying. I was the one being prayed for. And there are things I wish you knew.
Your Prayers Were Working Before I Knew They Existed
My mom told me, after I got clean, that she'd been praying for me every single morning for four years. Four years. Including the years when I wasn't speaking to her. Including the year I blocked her number. Including the Christmas she spent alone because I was too far gone to even feel guilty about not calling.
Every morning. Before coffee. On her knees in the living room, asking God to save her son.
I didn't know any of that at the time. I was too deep in it to notice. But when I look back at certain moments — the night I should've overdosed and didn't, the morning I woke up in my car and felt something that wasn't quite hope but wasn't quite nothing either, the day I walked into a treatment center instead of walking past it — I can't chalk all of that up to coincidence. Something was holding the net under me. I think it was those prayers.
What I Wish You Wouldn't Pray For
This might sound strange coming from someone who believes in prayer. But there are a few things I'd gently suggest you stop praying for, because I think they can set you up for the wrong kind of disappointment.
Don't pray for them to hit rock bottom. I've heard people say this — "Lord, let them hit bottom so they'll finally look up." I understand the logic. But bottom looks different for everyone, and for some people, bottom is a coffin. Pray for intervention, not destruction. Pray for a door to open before the floor gives out.
Don't pray for a quick fix. Recovery isn't a light switch. If you're expecting God to snap His fingers and hand you back the person you remember, you're going to be frustrated and they're going to feel like they're failing your timeline. Pray for endurance — theirs and yours.
Don't pray for them to become who they used to be. That person might not be coming back. And that's not necessarily a tragedy. The person God's building on the other side of this might be someone neither of you have met yet. Pray for who they're becoming, not who they were.
What Actually Helps
Pray for clarity. For the fog to lift just enough that they can see one true thing about themselves or about God. That's how it started for me — not a flood of revelation, just one verse that cracked through the noise long enough to make me stop.
Pray for the right person to show up at the right time. My story has about five people in it who showed up at moments that I can only describe as orchestrated. A guy at a meeting who said the exact right thing on the exact right night. A counselor who saw through my act when I was performing my way through treatment. Pray for those people to cross their path.
Pray for yourself. And I mean that seriously. Because loving an addict will hollow you out if you let it. You need sustenance too. You need someone praying for you, and if nobody is, start. You can't pour from empty, and I've watched family members burn themselves down trying to save someone who wasn't ready to be saved yet.
The Hardest Thing I'd Ask You to Do
Keep praying when nothing is changing.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like bad advice. It sounds like I'm asking you to throw hope into a void. And on some level, that's exactly what it is. But the void isn't as empty as it looks.
My mom prayed for four years with almost no visible evidence that it was doing anything. I was getting worse, not better. Every metric said she was wasting her breath. But she wasn't. She was doing the one thing she could do — holding my name before God and refusing to let go.
She told me once, after I'd been sober about a year, that there were mornings she prayed through clenched teeth. "I was so angry at you," she said. "And so angry at God for not fixing it faster. But I kept praying because I didn't know what else to do."
That might be the most honest description of intercessory prayer I've ever heard.
Boundaries Are Not the Opposite of Love
One more thing, because I think it needs saying. If someone has told you that setting boundaries with your addicted loved one means you're not being loving or faithful enough — that person is wrong. Boundaries might be the most loving thing you can do.
My mom changed the locks. She stopped answering my calls for a while. A counselor told her to, and she hated every second of it. I hated it too — I told her she was abandoning me, because that's what addicts do. We weaponize your love to keep you close enough to use.
But those boundaries were part of what eventually drove me to get help. Not because she stopped loving me. Because she loved me enough to stop making it easy for me to destroy myself.
You can pray for someone and have boundaries with them at the same time. Those things aren't in conflict. Sometimes the boundary is the prayer in action.
From the Other Side
I'm sober now. I talk to my mom every week. We had Christmas together last year and nobody stormed out. That's not nothing.
And when I think about the gap — those years when she was praying and I was running — I'm grateful in a way I can't fully express. Not just that she prayed, but that she didn't stop. That she kept showing up in that living room every morning, holding my name before God, even when every piece of evidence suggested it was pointless.
It wasn't pointless. I'm here.
If you're the one doing the praying, I just want you to know: it matters. Even when you can't see it. Especially when you can't see it.