The best thing I EVER did, to understand recovery, and see what it really looks like, was go to a lot of open AA meetings, meet some people who had turned their drinking, their attitudes, their habits, their relationships - their souls - around and done it with the gut-level commitment of someone who KNOWS it's do-or-die. Once you see the tangible difference in someone who has made that decision for themself to change, you can see it a mile away. The confusion evaporates and you have crystal clarity what is BS and posturing and manipulation, and what is RECOVERY. And then, seeing this with clarity, it makes it very easy to either support, or detach from a person as they make their choices.
It's the ever present self-doubts and negotiations with SELF that do the most damage to loved ones of addicts. We twist ourselves into pretzels, trying to create a reality where the addict is on the path of our magical thinking. Once we have clarity of what recovery looks like in a person, it's hard to sustain that magical thinking, and OUR decisions become much easier, what we are dealing with, and what we might want to consider.
CLMI