Love is the guide

If you love them deeply and want to be an agent of goodness in their life, drop the knee-jerk righteousness imbibed into you by centuries of societal insecurities.
Lean in genuinely, from the heart. Let love, curiosity and the desire to understand be your guides. Sense the sore spots at the core of the disconnect and don’t offer solutions. Don’t condemn. Don’t preach. Look for ways to bring warmth and comfort to the pain.
Be the space in which their brokenness can relax unpressured. Soften their knots with your undemanding presence.
Don’t pull at the tense strings of their heart. Breathe with them and expect nothing while offering everything. It won’t be fair. It’s not what you deserve. But this is about them and if you are to reach them you have to internalize that profoundly. Crisis is not the time to review how they got there. It’s not when they need to be set straight, punitively, “for their own good”. The old methods already failed them, and you.
You must be freshly available, unceasingly, unreasonably. You have to shut out other voices, internal and external. You have to follow that deep burning love you feel. Maybe for the first time you have to let love color your instinct, and nothing else. Your heart knows. Listen more, say very little, judge not at all. Seek to understand. They got there step by step somehow. There was a path. Meet them there. Together, once the embers of love glow stronger, you will walk into a new light, which you will have to discover for the first time.