Lisa Katona Smith Family Consultant
Interventionist
Speaker
Author

In the summer of 2012, the mountains I love taught me something I didn’t want to learn. We were at a swim meet under a hot, bright sky, the bikes were on the back of the car for an afternoon ride, and my phone started buzzing with the same question from different friends: Can you see the smoke?

At first, it felt far away, just a gray plume on our hill. We finished the meet. We went for that ride. We told ourselves it would be fine. By the time we headed home, the texts had shifted from curiosity to urgency: They’ve told us to evacuate. Your dog is with us. Do you need anything from the house?

We didn’t know. You never really do in the moment the ground is starting to shift.

That fire became a teacher. Not because I wanted it to be, but because it burned away the illusion that if I could just keep everything tidy and calm, the hard would pass me by. It didn’t. We rushed home, threw what we could into the cars, and left with the sprinkler running and the mail still being sorted. Later there would be footage of a news briefing turning, in an instant, into go now. Later there would be ashes.

Years after the fire, that same lesson met me again in a different form: my son’s struggle with substance use. I kept waiting for easy. If he could just stop. If treatment could work. If we could coast for a while. I kept trying to smother the flames with all the little moves that felt manageable—explain, negotiate, rescue, hold my breath. Easy now. We’ll face the rest later.

Later always came

Choosing Hard Now So We Can Breathe Later

Some choices put the hard in front and the ease after. Others flip it. I call it hard–easy and easy–hard.

Hard–easy looks like having the difficult conversation instead of hoping the moment will pass. It looks like setting a boundary and standing in the discomfort that follows. It looks like letting consequences land, even when your heart knows how to cushion the fall. It looks like naming your grief instead of silver-lining the loss.

Easy–hard is quieter. It looks like avoiding the talk, softening the line, rescuing one more time, telling yourself it’s probably nothing. It buys a little reprieve now and sends a bigger bill later. This is a pattern that I know in my bones.

We like to believe there’s an easy–easy option hidden somewhere if we search hard enough. With wildfire and with addiction, there isn’t. There is hard one way or hard the other. The only question is whether we will do the hard that lets us exhale on the other side.

What Firefighters Know

When we were finally allowed back to the neighborhood, the firefighters were still there. Some of them cried. “We tried,” they told us. “We tried so hard.” I think of them when I talk with families. How their work isn’t to smother a wildfire with a bucket and a blanket; it’s to hold the line, carve boundaries, and protect what can be protected while the fire runs its course.

Loving someone in active use can feel like standing at that line. The nervous system is hot. The behavior is unpredictable. Our instincts scream, Douse it. Make it stop. We try to bat away consequences like they’re tiny sparks, and sometimes we can for a while. But consequences grow. The asteroid you can flick away when it’s a dot in the sky becomes something else when it fills your view.

Holding the line and allowing reality to land while staying connected, doesn’t feel easy. It isn’t. It’s hard–easy: hard now so there can be ease later. It’s the work of Parallel Recovery®: protecting your peace, staying in relationship, refusing to abandon yourself or your person.

What the Hard Teaches

After the fire, it took fourteen months and nine days to settle the insurance claim. The process was an endless list of forms and calls and mismatched plates from kind neighbors when what I longed for was the set I’d chosen myself. We built a house where a home had been. The grief didn’t show up on anyone’s clipboard, but it lived in the empty places where memory used to sit.

I said “we’re okay” when I didn’t know if we were. I wanted to spare my kids the weight of the unknown. My youngest believed me. My oldest could see what I couldn’t say: I couldn’t control this. I wish I’d trusted that we could tell the truth and survive it together.

That’s another piece of hard–easy. Telling the truth costs something in the moment – tears, awkward silence, the end of pretending – but it pays you back in breath you don’t have to hold anymore. When I finally stopped silver-lining and started naming what was real, we could actually start to heal.

Living With Hard and Hope

November often brings family gatherings and unspoken tension. The table can hold love and old pain side by side. If this season stirs up the urge to choose easy–hard, keep the peace at any cost, say yes when your body says no, try this instead: