Love WITH Boundaries

It's exciting to see when great humans and their businesses are nominated for awards. Meet my colleague, Candace Plattor, whose business, Love With Boundaries has been nominated for two awards, The Business Impact Award, and, The Premier's Peoples Choice Award.

See more here:

Here's a little information about Love With Boundaries:

Love With Boundaries is an outpatient counselling organization that specializes in working with families that have been devastated by the ravages of addiction. There is a variety of options available to the people who are dealing with the addiction themselves, but very little help available to the loved ones who struggle and suffer right along with them. We understand that when there is addiction in a family, everyone is affected and everyone needs to heal. Because we know that enabled addicts do not recover, at Love With Boundaries, we assist families to stop their enabling behaviours and learn how to actually help the addicts they love so dearly. Once this happens, the addicts are then ready to work with us to recover from their addiction and to rebuild their relationships and their lives.

Voting is a part of the process for these awards: Go here to cast your vote: https://smallbusinessbc.ca/awards/nominee/2023/love-with-boundaries/

I LOVE Candace's WHY that she shares here:

Tell Us Your Story. What motivated you to start your business? Why are you passionate about what you do?

While working as an Addiction Counsellor in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 16 years, my clients were the addicts and alcoholics living in that area. I enjoyed the work very much - but it wasn’t until their families also started working with me that things truly began to shift. I knew that enabled addicts don’t recover (because, really - why should they?), so I started to teach their loved ones the difference between enabling and actually helping; how to set and maintain healthy, respectful boundaries; and how to practice holistic, self-respectful self-care for themselves.

This is when the positive changes really started to happen in these families. When I was entrenched in my own opioid addiction – a result of prescriptions for my Crohn’s Disease – I wasn’t sure I wanted to live anymore. I often contemplated swallowing all the pills I had available to me. It was a very dark time in my life. No one helped my family and I know that this made it harder for all of us. When there is addiction in a family, everyone is affected and everyone needs to heal, otherwise the loved ones will continue behaving in dysfunctional ways and the addicts will continue to relapse.

There is a lot of help for addicts who want to recover -- detoxes, treatment centres, self-help groups and counselling -- but there continues to be very little help available for their loved ones, who struggle and suffer right along with them and often don’t have any idea how to remedy the horrific situation they have found themselves in. When I became aware of this gap in service, I knew that I wanted to devote my professional career to helping these families – so that the addicts would then have a fighting chance of a lasting recovery from addiction.

In 2010, I published my first book entitled "Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself: The Top 10 Survival Tips for Loving Someone with an Addiction." I had been achieving wonderful results with the families I was working with and, because I knew there were addicted families all over the world that I wouldn’t be able to work with, I thought that writing this book could be helpful to them. I was quite surprised when the book won several USA and International Book Awards. I’ve now been working with addicts and their families for the past 3 decades, and I am happy and grateful to be celebrating 36 years clean and sober this year. I deeply believe that by stopping the enabling we CAN bring addiction to a grinding halt.

I would love our followers to take a few minutes and check out Candace's nomination page, and please cast your vote if this resonates with you. Go here to cast your vote: https://smallbusinessbc.ca/awards/nominee/2023/love-with-boundaries/

Thank you for helping us celebrate people and their businesses who make such a big difference and impact,

Charmaine :)