MSA---what you are feeling is a natural feeling---it is what we enablers feel when our precious adult children are self-destructing. I don't know the details of your story but here are a few thoughts.
I used to feel that way too, and I would just go to bed and cry, sometimes sleep, and sometimes lie there staring at the wall. If his life couldn't move forward, then mine couldn't either.
My every waking moment, even while I was functioning, had him running in the background. Like background music. It never turned off.
And I did it all trying to "help" him. There was literally no rock I didn't turn over---for him---trying to find a solution.
As Melody Beattie says in CoDependent No More (page 72 in the paperback book): "People say codependents are controllers. We nag, lecture, scream, holler, cry, beg, bribe, coerce, hover over, protect, accuse, chase after, run away from....(skipping over to some other descriptors).....demonstrate how much we've been hurt, hurt people in return so they'll know how it feels....whip power plays on.....whine, act helpless, do sneaky little things, do sneaky big things...enlist the aid of supporters, bargain with, drag to counseling, talk mean about, insult, condemn, pray for miracles, pay for miracles....supervise, dictate, command.....stay home and wait for, go out and look for, call all over looking for....drive down dark alleys at night hoping to see, chase down dark alleys at night hoping to catch....bring home, keep home, lock out, move away from, move with, scold.....set straight, insist, give in to, placate, provoke....remind, inquire, hint, look through pockets, peek in wallets, search dresser drawers....look into the future, call relatives about, reason with, reward, settle issues once and for all, settle them again, almost give up on, then try even harder...." ....."We aren't the people who make things happen. Codependents are the people who consistently, and with a great deal of effort and energy, try to force things to happen."
Beattie nails it throughout the whole book MSA. She describes exactly what I have done over the years to "try to get my son straight." All with good intentions. All out of love. All wanting the best for him.
All wrong.
Today, after 11 years of sighing, rolling my eyes, (all of the actions above plus more), I finally have gotten it.
None of this will EVER work. It hasn't ever worked for me. It hasn't ever worked for anybody else.
What more evidence could I possibly need in order to work for change in my own self?
And just let my son do whatever it is he is going to do. Because MSA----HE IS GOING TO DO IT ANYWAY.
That is what I started getting, little by little, at first just glimpses of "well what if they are right about him and about me?" Because at first, MSA, when I started going to Al-Anon and listening to all of these stories and all of these well-meaning people doing the same things I was doing, and it wasn't working for them either, I just thought: Well my situation is different. My son is different. I am different.
But I was wrong. It took me time to see that (I evidently am a slow learner, MSA, lol).
Today I am 100 percent convinced of this truth: I cannot change another person, place or thing.
Oh, MSA, I'll still try to from time to time because old habits die hard.
And really at the root of it all, I didn't want to look at myself and see what character flaws and defects I have that I need to work on. Because after all, I was the long-suffering "good" person. I didn't do drugs, I didn't steal, I didn't get pass-out drunk---that's what the "bad" people did. I just swept up after them and tried to hold it all together---doing the "right" things for everybody.
Wrong. Wrong again.
I have just as much stuff to work on as any hard-core drug addict ever did or does.
And when I started getting honest and working a program myself, and using the tools available to me---I started to change and then I was able to stop enabling more and more and more and more.
I will always struggle with my disease of enabling and I will relapse. It's part of the disease.
But I am so much happier today, MSA, even as my 24 year old son right now, today, is out there somewhere on the street. I don't know where he is.
There is happiness out there for all of us if we will work for it. Work hard, because it is the hardest work of life, I believe.
And the most beneficial for all.
Blessings and peace and strength for you today.