Love Another Way™
Love Another Way is the approach Barbara Decker created to help a parent love an addicted or mentally ill adult child without losing themselves.
It is the shift from rescuing, fixing, and controlling your child to steadying yourself, holding loving boundaries, and doing your own healing — so you can stay connected without being consumed by their crisis.
What Love Another Way means
For most parents, love has meant doing more — saying yes, softening, rescuing, staying up at night trying to manage a grown child’s choices. Love Another Way names a different kind of love: one that stops trying to change the child and starts with changing the only person you actually can, which is you.
Barbara built the approach out of her own years inside her son Eric’s addiction. When she stopped rescuing and started healing, she found her footing and her peace — and that steadiness gave Eric the room to find his own way. He has been in recovery since 2018.
The only person you can change is you
That single line is the heart of Love Another Way. It is not about giving up on your child or cutting them off — it is about letting go of the exhausting job of fixing them, and picking up the one job that is truly yours: your own steadiness, boundaries, and wellbeing. When a parent changes, the whole dynamic around the child changes with them.
You can love your child fully and still refuse to be destroyed by their struggle.
Who Love Another Way is for
Love Another Way is for parents — most often mothers — of an adult child struggling with addiction, mental illness, or estrangement, who are exhausted from carrying it all and ready for a way to love that does not cost them themselves.