- Has your loved one been sober, but you’re still worried?
- Has your loved one stopped using, but something still doesn’t feel right?
- Is the communication in your family leaving you feeling disconnected?
Because of cultural messages about addiction, you may mistakenly believe your loved one’s sobriety solves the problem. You may feel powerless to effect positive change any other way than to focus on your loved one’s behavior.
Numerous factors about addiction from our country’s history complicates the problem for families to effectively engage in best supporting their loved one in early recovery.
You may not understand if you should protect your loved one from a potential trigger, or let them navigate it themselves. Mixed messages are prevalent.
You may feel confused about how best to navigate day to day challenges that naturally arise in your loved one’s early recovery.
Unfortunately, it’s normal for families to feel disconnected from their loved one. You may respond to this loss by feeling like you:
- Want to trust them right away because they are sober
- Can never trust them again because of past behavior
Often, families don’t have a clue as to how best to navigate new situations and when and how to set a boundary. Your feelings are normal and likely founded in cultural patterns.
Solutions to addiction in our country reinforce patterns that minimize families
Ideally, our health care system would provide strategies for families to be a stronger part of the solution in addiction recovery. But the definition to addiction is narrow (a chronic relapsing brain disease), resulting in a health care system that narrowly focuses on the individual.
Our health care system:
- Minimizes natural human experience and struggles of family
- Reinforces the denial of impact
- Shapes how we think about addiction and recovery
- Minimizes family becoming a strong part of the solution
- Reinforces families feeling blamed
These patterns in our health care system directly impact you, the family member.
The system that you turn to for help, may inadvertently reinforce a division and disconnection between you, your family, and your loved one in early recovery.
No one person or organization is at fault.
Historically, families were blamed for being part of the problem. Even today, the residual of stigma and shaming language still exists. Consequently, families have been reticent to reach out for help.
These patterns make family recovery difficult.
Your loved one may be taking responsibility to best stay sober
- Inpatient treatment
- Day treatment
- Individualized Out Patient (IOP)
- Therapy and/or recovery coaching
- Self help groups (AA, SMART, Lifering, etc.)
It’s not unusual that families assume that sobriety automatically solves the problem. Sobriety is a great first step, but an incomplete solution. If the family has not made changes, family can be more a trigger than a stabilizing resource.
The family can also be responsible by creating a new family structure
Families can best maximize their loved one’s recovery efforts by recognizing the pathway addiction has taken through their family, and shift patterns that have enabled addiction to patterns that enable health. Each family has differences as well as similarities.
It’s necessary to rebuild trust over time, create forums for honesty, and navigate relational boundaries to create a family structure that best serves a particular family’s goals.
Creating new family patterns creates protection from cultural patterns
Optimally, you recognize the cultural patterns that trickle down onto your family minimizes positive longterm outcomes. Optimally, you are motivated to make change that creates conditions that increase protective factors in your family.
But the optimal will not happen unless you are proactive and start the process. Without ongoing support in the change process, cultural patterns will likely dominate and limit your thinking through the ups and downs of recovery.
Ideally, families recognize the need for a complement to the general thinking about addiction.
Ideally, you and your family will become aware of the specific family rules and patterns when your loved one was in addiction. Ideally, you and your family recognize the need to change in order to create conditions that maximize your loved one’s longterm recovery success.
But other family members don’t want to change anything
Even if others do not see they have been impacted by addiction, it’s common that different people will have different interpretations, interests and intentions.
Right now, it may not be realistic to expect everyone to get onboard around a unified goal. But don’t let that stop you from starting a change process. Your change ripples out to others.
But others in my family use substances, don’t have problems and won’t change
Of course. Because of our different beliefs, brain wiring, and experiences, different people will have different levels of vulnerability to addiction.
Creating new family patterns won’t be the same for each family. However, honest communication about the what, when, and where of other substances being consumed can be an ongoing topic to keep create conditions in the family that supports family goals.
Changing habits often means repetition, reminders and feedback
For the last 18 years, I’ve worked with families in some level of distress. I’ve seen the difference between families who engage a resource once or twice and others who stay engaged with a change process over time.
I’ve spent years in the role of therapist, addiction counselor, interventionist and family coach and have seen families struggle with seeing these patterns, accepting these patterns, and changing them.
Initially, the biggest obstacles have been:
- Mixed and shaming messages about addiction
- A cultural history of stigmatizing and blaming language
- A system of care that came out of this history
- Hundreds of years of reinforcement
We can’t learn something from a book, read a handout or pdf, and expect longterm change. But when we have a guide, reminders, and a forum to ask questions and get feedback our potential for change increases.
You can start and others in your family can join you when they are ready
With online/phone coaching you can learn the pathway of healing, identify what makes most sense for your situation, begin to make change in areas you choose, and have ongoing times to check in about your progress.
You can start a change process in your family and know that your change will have an impact on others. You plant seeds of change for the future. They can join in the change process when they are ready.
Creating new patterns individually and/or as a family
Individually you have two choices:
- Individual coaching
- Online group coaching
Individual coaching allows you to focus on your specific topics, situations and decisions that are pivotal for you right now.
Group coaching provides info delivery on specific topics specific to the Change/Integrate stage, and group sharing/debriefing of experiences and strategies, as well as discussion to support staying in alignment with their goals.
Multiple people in a family can engage in healing process together.
- Whole Family Healing
Whole Family Healing is a sequence of facilitated meetings. Some are specific to a family’s pathway of healing and others focus on specific topics that are most helpful for a particular family’s current situation. You can learn more at Whole Family Healing.
If your only information and support comes from the dominate cultural thinking you will likely revert back to narrowly focusing on your loved one’s recovery as the only thing you can do.
Know that changes you make in this generation will have an impact on the next.
Why listen to me?
Sure. I have the license and credentials, and professional experience. But what’s important is why I’m doing this work. I grew up in a family that did not talk about the addiction.
As a child, I saw, felt, and heard things, but I was told the opposite by my parents. I took these mixed messages personally. As a teen and young adult, I often believed what I heard, even when it meant discounting my own inner knowingness. I was middle age before realizing addiction robs everyone of their inner knowingness.
After becoming a therapist and doing my own work, I realized I had been living with limited beliefs and distorted thinking that negatively impacted friendships and relationships for years.
My process of healing took 40+ years, which inspired me to accelerate healing for others, and where a family can heal together.
My hope is that you and your family start a healing process sooner rather than later.
Would you like to sign up for coaching? https://go.oncehub.com/jeffcoaching
Got questions? Email me at jeff@thefamilyrecoverysolution.com or schedule a time for us to chat: https://go.oncehub.com/jeffjones