The addiction must go; the person must stay.

I have no interest in commenting on the Reiner family tragedy. Nick Reiner has only been charged and is presumed innocent at this point. I know next to nothing about him. I don’t know much about his addiction, whether he has had known mental health issues, or other problems that are likely to be discussed in the context of this tragedy.

My focus here is not the Reiners. Rather, I’m focused on the experience of friends and family trying to get help for the people they love with addiction. One small, unfortunately familiar, portion of the coverage grabbed my attention.

The Reiners expressed regret over how they had handled their son’s addiction in a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son,” Reiner said.

Michele added: “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”

Stringer, C., & Barker, M. (2025, December 17). How Nick Reiner unravelled before his arrest for parents’ murder. The Telegraph.

Reading these quotes made me really sad, and it got me thinking about some of the traps that families and professionals fall into.

I feel sad for loved ones who encounter professionals who, in their experience, seem to see only the ugly manifestations of addiction.

I don’t know whether this is what they meant, but I also feel sad for loved ones who determine that the answer is listening to their addicted loved one.

Listening to people with addiction is an essential part of maintaining a relationship and getting them the help they need, AND, depending on their state of mind, it can lead them astray and waste time or result in significant harm from untreated or undertreated addiction.

It brought to mind a saying I heard attributed to Scandinavia: “The addiction must go; the person must stay.” For me, it points toward an essential but controversial idea of the divided self — that there is an “addicted self” and a “true self.” This differentiation between the addiction and the person can be enormously helpful for families in figuring out how to navigate the short and long-term challenges of loving and supporting an addicted loved one.

We need to listen to, love, and respect the person, but we don’t want to be directed by the addiction. Discerning what’s the “addicted self” and what’s the “true self” is the tricky part. Further, recent changes in the frameworks for substance use problems, pathways to recovery, and the boundaries of recovery have complicated all of this considerably. There are benefits to all of the nuance that’s been introduced. We’ve gone from an often too simple model that conflated different kinds of problems, failed to celebrate the varieties of recovery experiences, and failed to recognize the multiple pathways used to achieve recovery. But without clear frameworks, models, and processes, multiple pathways can become no pathway at all. Even professionals and researchers often fail to clearly discern the problem type, the appropriate endpoint(s) for that problem type, and the appropriate pathways between the problem and the desired endpoint.

To expect loved ones to navigate all this is way too much. Unfortunately, I don’t see reason to believe that the pathway to stable recovery will get clearer and easier for families and people with addiction in the near future.