Over the last several weeks, I have tried to provide several key ideas that are essential to integrate into any successful treatment program:
1. The first being that alcohol and drug addiction is a chronic brain disease – with all of the data supported by scientific studies. Since it is a chronic medical disease, you have to treat it as such in order to be able to manage it successfully over your lifetime.
2. The second idea - discussing the latest anti-addiction medications and their pivotal role within a comprehensive treatment program. Medications like:
a. Vivitrol for alcoholism or
b. Suboxone for heroin or prescription pain pill (narcotic)addiction
3. The third concept discussed ways to help spot signs of addiction in a family, friend or loved one and how to best access help for that person to get engaged in treatment.
4. Finally, I hope that you utilized the various treatment resources that I mentioned over the last several weeks, targeted specifically at patients and their families in order to help educate and support them through this process, with the two primary tools being my new book Healing the Addicted Brain (www.enterhealth.com/healingtheaddictedbrain ) and a patient-friendly website www.enterhealth.com.
Today, I would like to discuss how important it is for the family to become educated about all of these issues as well as many others, if the alcoholic/addict is to have a great chance of success. I will start out with a brief excerpt from my book:
“I am so tired of trying to handle the family responsibilities, the finances and everything else all by myself.”
“My kids hate their Dad for disappointing them so many times. Can you really blame them?”
“She’s not trying hard enough to stay away from her drug buddies.”
“If he really cared about us, he wouldn’t have blown all our savings… again!”
“If he shows his face here again, I will kick him out before he gets through the front door.”
“She doesn’t even remember slapping the kids around! How can she not remember?”
“I went to some stupid counseling session with him. The idiot shrink told me I was an enabler and insinuated that this disease had affected me as well.”
I’ve heard many comments like these from the families of my patients, and they illustrate a sad truth: addiction is never just one person’s problem—it devastates entire families. When your family member is in the throes of addiction, you can feel abandoned, anxious, fearful, angry, embarrassed, guilty, and a host of other emotions. The damage extends throughout the entire family as you struggle to cover up the problem, work around the addict, deal with your own negative emotions, and cope with the responsibilities the addict left untended and the roles that are unfulfilled. You, the family members, often become enablers unwittingly, helping the addict continue his or her damaging behavior and keeping the addiction in play. For all of these reasons, you need to be in recovery right along with the addict, although you may not realize that you need help.
The most important thing for you, the family member of an addict, to understand is that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing or inborn sin. That’s a good thing, because the disease of addiction is treatable and manageable with appropriate medical assistance, while sin is not. It may be difficult to arrive at this new understanding, and you may have trouble letting go of years of accumulated anger and resentment, but always remember that your new understanding and skills will help your addicted loved one recover—and will help improve your life tremendously.” P185-186.
This excerpt summarizes a lot of the inaccurate information, strong emotionality and hopelessness that is present in most family members that are struggling to help save the life of the alcoholic/addict. If you think about it, the addiction spreads this “blanket of negativity and futility” across the entire family system. Then once the addiction becomes enough of a problem, if the family is lucky enough, the “patient” will go into a treatment program. As we all know, convincing the patient to go to treatment, as well as choosing the right program, can many times be a very long and arduous process. Once the “patient” is in the program, however, the entire family usually exhales a huge sigh of relief – the problem is solved, correct?, they actually get a break and can “rest-up” - and then hurriedly get back to their “regular” lives without the “stress” of their addicted loved one in their life for some period of time. In other words in most treatment programs, the patient is the one that gets all of the new information and teaching, while the rest of the family receives little to no intervention or information.
Fortunately, when the patient finishes treatment, many times they have achieved a higher level of understanding about their chronic brain illness and even may have learned some new “healthy” coping skills to more effectively deal with stress.
( Note: this does not always happen by the way, because if you remember from my previous blog entries, alcohol and drugs injure the brain and most of the time, this injury seriously impairs the patient’s ability to learn new ideas and remember new information – very important parts of their brains just go offline , in many cases for several months; unfortunately, these are the early months of sobriety, during which the addict/alcoholic is in the intensive treatment phase – precisely the time during which the addict/alcoholic has the worst chance of learning and retaining new tool sets and information. It really does not make a lot of sense does it? At least, until you start using some anti-addiction medications that can in partnership with the treatment program, accelerate the “rebooting of the brain” so that the learning and thinking systems can come back online much sooner)
However, unfortunately the family has usually not learned anything new, because no one told them that they needed to be using the time while the addict was in the active phase of treatment to learn all that they can about this life-threatening illness (either the treatment program did not involve them in order to convey this message or they were too tired/fed up to take the time to participate or both). Consequently, they are “stuck” in their old ways and dysfunctional habits- the ones that they have learned over the last 5-10 years of living with the growing addiction in their family member.
So what is wrong with this picture? What is the problem here?
Well, if the patient comes home with these new, “healthy” skills and yet he/she has not completely integrated them into their “habits” about how to approach life, and if the family is stuck using the old “unhealthy,” proaddiction communication patterns, then the momentum in the situation will be to pull the addict back into his/her own “old” ways (using denial, dishonesty, anger to deal with most situations) and thus seriously increase the chance of relapse. Well hopefully, it should be obvious that this is the WRONG scenario to occur after everyone has spent so much time, energy and money on the recent treatment program. Can you imagine this happening to a diabetic patient, where a patient goes into the hospital in a diabetic crisis and when he comes out, the family still has ice cream and other high sugar foods still all over the house? Does that make any sense at all?
