Historically, professionals have interpreted a family’s response to addiction in terms of personal psychopathology, rather than normal adaptation to the chaos of addiction in the family. Families have learned to be apprehensive of professional services. Families feel responsible, keep secrets, suffer in silence and often isolate themselves through the worst of times. My family was no different.
It’s personal to me
For some reason, my parents never spoke about addiction. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I expressed a series of questions to my mother about my grandfather’s relationship with alcohol. My mother’s response to each question was the same, “Jeff, the only thing you need to understand is that your grandfather was an alcoholic.” While talking about her father, my mother’s volume and intensity of her voice increased. I understood that if I continued talking about my grandfather it would bring her pain. Through a series of nonverbal messages, I learned to “take care of her” by avoiding direct conversations. Indirect communication was modeled. This early family structure taught me to act differently from how I felt. I learned to discount my feelings.
I understand both sides
As a young adult, I did my own “research” with drugs and alcohol. My problems evaporated, until the next morning. On occasion, my problems with alcohol put me in the center for my parents to orient around me. The roles flipped, and they would be guessing my thoughts and feelings. There was something “comforting” about them expressing concern for my safety and guessing my thoughts and feelings. On another level, however, their concern felt like control. It would be many years before I would see the impact of my grandfather’s alcoholism contributing to my mother’s trauma and defensive coping, which trickled down to my personal coping patterns. Growing up in a structure that oriented around a person of concern contributed to a surface relationship with my family, as well as a relentless curiosity about clarity.
A long lesson in creating structural conditions to minimize conflict
In the late 80’s, I became part of a Cohousing group, an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space. The physical structure of shared spaces includes a greenhouse, workshop, and a common house. Shared outdoor space includes parking, walkways, open space, and gardens. Households have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces. The structure that guided how we would live together was in the by-laws and the CC&R’s (Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions). We wrote these documents to follow a specific structure so that we could get home loans, but we had the intention to live in alignment with Cohousing Community values. It wouldn’t be until years later that we would learn how saying one thing in the CC&R’s document, but then not living in accordance to those documents, created more opportunities for conflict. Yep, more conflict.
Community as a safe crucible of learning
Community became a crucible to explore the theme of structure either contributing to conflict or creating conditions that minimize conflict. Furthermore, because of my own childhood and, then, my professional expertise, I became curious about the structural components of addiction in the family.
Putting pieces together took me 40+ years
Over time, I understood how the structural conditions of my childhood were influenced by the structural conditions my mother grew up in. At various points in my journey of remaining curious, cultural puzzle pieces connected to personal pieces of my family story. For example, I could see how the divorce laws in the 1940’s contributed to my mother’s pain from her family being ripped apart. The court system did not recognize addiction when her father wanted a divorce. He kicked his wife out of the house and kept the children. During this chaotic family time, my mother lived with a family from their church. The denial of addiction from the court system trickled down to my mother’s coping strategy – denial, which was modeled for my sister and me. When I look back at the stressors in the culture and economic conditions of my ancestors, more puzzle pieces fell into place. I could see that underneath the story I had created about addiction in my family were numerous factors (cultural, economic, familial) that contributed to my current choices.
Structural challenges in the culture of addiction and recovery
My personal research into addiction recovery emphasized the importance of recovery for the whole family. However, as an addiction professional, I could see that the focus was continually on the individual with addiction, the core individual having an individual solution. Although the literature espoused the importance of recovery being a family process, this method was not reflected in what I saw as the standard of care. What was the cause of this discrepancy?
Families had good reasons to not reach out for help early. William (Bill) White, who, over the span of five decades, has become the addiction field’s preeminent historian and one of its most visionary voices and prolific writers on addiction, states:
“Throughout the history of addiction in America, family members have been castigated more as causative agents and sources of recovery sabotage than as recovery resources or individuals deserving services in their own right.”
http://www.williamwhitepapers.com/pr/2005AllintheFamily.pdf
Families are a valuable stakeholder in change
Sending this pejorative message to families needs to change. I believe that families are not the cause of addiction. I believe that families do not consciously sabotage recovery. However, without recognizing generational structural patterns of individual and family coping, even today, White’s statement (above) can appear true to family members as well as addiction professionals. Narrow thinking about addiction that focuses only on the individual needs to change. The idea that individual healing, results in family healing, and eventually community healing, is not a complete picture. The Family Recovery Solution flips the trajectory of impact from individual, family, community – to a trajectory of healing. Through the process of community signup and participation, families learn and practice trust building, boundaries, communication and conflict resolution skills. Unlike a Facebook group, participants can initially exercise anonymity and eventually share their own story highlighting learning points to families a couple of steps behind them in the healing process.
Unified families are our best chance to change the statistics with addiction (in less than 40 years)
The online process of engagement allows for individuals to incrementally navigate their own needs for 
privacy and build trust and connection with other community members at their own pace. My mother was not the kind of person to go to an Al-Anon meeting. She was also probably not the kind of person to go into an online family community. However, the statistics with addiction grows. I advocate that families are stakeholders who can work together in a safe structure to become a stronger part of the solution, and positively impact the statistics with addiction.
“Every 4 minutes someone in the US dies from overdose or an alcohol-related cause. One in three families is impacted by these deaths” (www.facingaddiction.org). A death in the family does not heal the structural pattern that was used to cope with the addiction. Many more families are impacted by addiction before death. There are many good people on the frontline working with individuals in some stage of addiction or recovery, and these statistics are not going down. There’s room for improvement.
There’s room for families to learn together, grow together, work together and take actions together to become a stronger part of the solution around addiction in their family and in the world.