Are You Struggling with Family Chaos from Your Loved One’s Addiction?
Is addiction ripping your family apart?
Do you cringe at being called “families of addicts?”
Does addiction in the family mean you need “codependency recovery”?
Addiction has disrupted your family. Your heart is hurting. But finding help often means labeling yourself: typing into Google, “help for families of addicts” and “families of drug addicts.”
Labeling your loved one an addict, labeling yourself “families of addict” or “families of alcoholics” defines you by your loved one’s addiction. The language contributes to shame, stigma, secrets, addiction thriving and families being driven further into isolation.
The language of addiction has not been kind to families.
Your loved one’s addiction is not your fault!
It is not the fault of families that they’re reluctant to reach out for help
Addiction’s painful history is confusing. The burden of sorting through the confusion falls on families. Negative labeling increases difficulty in reaching out for help.
Even under the best of circumstances navigating a loved one’s addiction is difficult.
The severity of addiction in the United States has reached epidemic levels. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 72,000 people died in 2017 from drug-related overdoses—an increase from 63,632 deaths in 2016. Despite the best efforts of many caring addiction professionals and organizations, addiction statistics are not improving.
Most studies focus on the individual with addiction. But families are also disrupted. Conflict in the family leaves a wake of relational wreckage with few avenues of healing.
Our country’s current approach to addiction leans heavily on AA, which was created in 1935. It divides healing: the individual attends AA and the family attends Al Anon. Family therapy aside, there’s few avenues of healing to engage both the individual in recovery and their family, until now.
Whole family healing (WFH) accelerates individual healing
Whole family healing can engage everyone that surrounded the addiction before, during and/or after treatment. The focus and tasks of the family will change as your loved one goes through their own process from addiction to recovery.
You define family. People who engage in the process earlier, may not later. The structure changes based on the needs of your family.
Whole family healing (WHF) is not therapy. It’s coaching, family coaching that:
- Can be initiated before another crisis, pre intervention, during treatment or afterwards
- Complements and accelerates shifts in family perspective and actions
- Complements and accelerates an individual’s therapy and treatment
- Accelerates long-term healing of individual and family goals
- Extends the momentum of any one person’s change
Whole family healing is designed to create opportunities for your family to heal together.
A structured environment supports creating a new family structure
When your family comes together to interact, listen and be heard, there’s new potential to enable a healthier dynamic, increase protective factors, and possibly create an environment inhospitable to active addiction. Solutions expand.
During our work together, your family will go through a series of facilitated conversations. The sum of each individual’s contribution leads to your family’s next best step solution, and begins to create a new family structure.
Regardless of the stage of addiction or recovery your loved one is in now, your loved one will feel the impact.
WFH creates conditions for health and expands solutions
During our work together, I tailor the whole family healing program’s three phases of Recognize, Resource, Realize to your specific needs:
In the first phase your family will learn mindfulness skills to recognize impersonal/personal patterns, your body’s impulses and reactions, both/and focus of a situation, practice staying connected in the midst of ups and downs, and balancing your attention and focus as you develop and use a recovery message.
In the second phase your family will continue skill building, engaging in resources to help navigate trust building, boundaries, protecting longterm family relationships, wellbeing and future family functioning.
In the third phase your family will clarify protective factors and create a plan to address the family’s goals for the future.
Even when not everyone can attend, the work we do together allows forward momentum that accommodates the goals of the family. To accommodates busy schedules and family members who live in different areas, online tools are used to connect the family to the same info and conversations to make meaning of it.
WFH complements all addiction treatment services for your loved one
Learning new information starts with recognition and intellectual understanding, however it is only integrated with ongoing practice and assessing the outcome to reinforce the new behavior.
The information learned from a treatment center’s family program is only useful if it can be applied over and over. The sequence of family exercises and meetings support the new information being applied, discussed and honed over time.
Family change complements your loved one’s individual changes, giving everyone an opportunity to use the addiction in the family as an opportunity to reexamine connections, boundaries, and longterm family goals.
If nothing changes, nothing changes
If nothing changes in the family, the conditions present when the addiction started growing out of control will be present while your loved one is trying to get sober and staying sober. Family change supports individual change.
But my family didn’t do anything wrong, why would they change?
Family members often believe they did something wrong, which creates obstacles for them being effective agents of change in their family.
Families approaching change from wrongness disempowers their role. Our culture’s history with addiction contributes to families feeling disempowered.
However, family members need to consider change for two reasons:
1) In the slow gradual process of your loved one becoming addicted, you and your family develop ways to cope, reactions like confront, help, or avoid. Change may be as simple as an intentional pause before the automatic reaction, allowing a new response.
Optimally, reactions change to responses that create best conditions for individual and family healing.
2) Right/wrong thinking about addiction is old thinking that has trickled down from our cultural history. But right/wrong thinking is part of a cascade of reactions to chaos. Change may be as simple as recognizing right/wrong thinking, pausing, expanding your perspective and considering factors that contribute to your solution.
The right/wrong thinking that was created around addiction is what needs to change.
Why would WFH be initiated before my loved one is sober?
The old way of thinking about addiction sees an individual problem and an individual solution, but focusing solely on one person’s change is only part of the solution. Whole family healing is ongoing support and resources to best support change in the family.
During our work together, your family will expand their focus on areas they have most influence: increasing health in their whole family.
When your loved one sees others in their family engaging in a healing process, they will become curious.
When your family begins a healing process several things happen:
- Your family sees addiction in the family through a new lens
- Your family makes new meaning and inspires new thinking
- Your family becomes unified around a recovery message
- Your loved one begins to understand they are not just “the problem to be fixed”
- Your loved one feels their relational connections with their family differently
When we look at the statistics of deaths from addiction, our current solutions is not enough. Families engaging in a change process complement our current solutions.
But not everyone in my family would participate
It’s ideal that everyone in your family would get the value of their contribution in a structured family healing process, however don’t expect it. Don’t let the unwillingness of some people in your family stop you from initiating healing today. Know that you are able to start alone with coaching or group coaching. https://go.oncehub.com/jeffcoaching
You will have plenty of opportunities to “plant seeds” of change with other family members. When others in your family are curious they can learn more. When you are ready to explore how Whole Family Healing can be integrated into your family, schedule a time with me to chat, https://go.oncehub.com/jeffjones.
You have choice about the healing in your family
Adopt a new way to think about addiction, or continue doing what you’re doing and hope for the best.
However, if you’re not ready for a new way of thinking, prepare yourself to feel blamed and labeled by the old language of addiction, like:
- Families of an addict
- Codependency recovery
- Families of alcoholics
- Families of addicts
- Families of drug addicts
I welcome your questions. You can email me at jeff@thefamilyrecoverysolution.com or schedule a time for me to answer any questions, and for you to decide if whole family healing is right for your situation at this time. https://meetme.so/tfrsfamilycoaching.