Recovery and the Family

Transcription

Male Speaker: How has addiction affected your family?

Female Speaker: It robbed me of my father.

Female Speaker: Addiction's affected my family in absolutely every way.

Male Speaker: It has caused a lot of turmoil.

Female Speaker: It goes back to what I understand is at least three generations.

Female Speaker: It robbed my daughter of her mother. It robbed my mother of her daughter.

Female Speaker: Addiction has made our family quite challenging.

Male Speaker: Addiction has affected my family tremendously.

Male Speaker: It's affected my relationship with my sister where I wouldn't – I'd go for months without talking to her. It's a very difficult thing for everybody involved. It doesn't just affect the one individual. It's a disease that affects the whole family

Male Speaker: Addiction is spread not only genetically through some of my relatives and I assume ancestors.

Female Speaker: It's generational.

Female Speaker: I think of him every day.

Casey Arrillaga:  Welcome to Addiction in the Family, a podcast by and for family members of anyone with an addiction. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Wellness Centers in Texas. I've led hundreds of family workshops, but I've also lived the experience of being family to addiction as both a child and adult. My wife, Kira, and I were in our addictions together for over a decade and now have been in recovery together for almost 20 years. Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

In this episode, we will explore how you as a family member of someone with addiction can find help for yourself and your family. We'll look at why families need recovery, too, yet may have never considered this, and we'll give some ideas about how you can find it. To help us on this exploration, we'll hear from a family member like some of you who's found and strengthened his own recovery through the years of his son's struggle with addiction and related behaviors. Finally, we'll address one of the questions that family members so often ask:  what can I do to help? Let's get started right after a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors.

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Welcome back. Alright, let's go ahead and look at our first topic. If you're like a lot of people, you may be thinking why do I need recovery? I'm not the one with the problem. Well, that may be true, but if you listen to this podcast, there's a good chance that you and others in your family have been affected by addiction. That means that everyone in the family needs to recovery from the effects of that situation. If you think about it, you may've spent a lot of time waiting for your loved one to change or perhaps trying to make that change happen for them. You probably didn't get very far by trying to force them to change, but you have a pretty good shot at getting yourself to start healing.

To get a perspective on this, we asked people who've been affected personally by addiction what recovery has done for their family. Let's see what they have to say.

What affect have you seen on your family from recovery?

Male Speaker: I got my grandpa back. That was the real important thing. I got the man who taught me how to fix engines. I got the guy that taught me how to fish. I've got all of that.

Female Speaker: My relationship with my husband is really good, but it hasn't always been. I mean, this was difficult.

Male Speaker: Recovery has affected my family tremendously because all four of us are in recovery now, and so the family has come back together. We're starting to function as a normal family, I guess.

Female Speaker: It took a decision to stay together. It took a decision over, and over, and over again for us to decide okay, we're going to work through this.

Male Speaker: Me being in recovery actually helped my father and mother's relationship.

Female Speaker: It's allowed us to change the course of history in terms of my daughter being able to have her mother, and she's gotten experience life in a different manner. I truly believe that because of my recovery, my daughter may never have to use.

Male Speaker: Things that I thought could never be repaired have been – are being repaired, and the family's coming back together as a whole again. Yeah, that's probably one of the best things about recovery.

Casey Arrillaga:  What are you hoping for around recovery?

Female Speaker: Recovery in the family.

Casey Arrillaga:  In my family, I was the first one to seek recovery. This isn't because I was so much ahead of the curve. It's because my problems were the most obvious, and they were getting worse. My life looked great from the outside:  ten-year marriage, young child, good job, owned our own house, two cars in the garage, respect in the community, clean legal record, dog, and a picket fence. Problem was I was getting ready to lose everything on that list because I couldn't recognize, let alone control, my addiction.

Despite all my efforts to keep my problem hidden, it had gotten to the point where it was all going to burst out into the open because like most addiction, it was steadily getting worse. When I went on a three-week spree that could've led to being front-page news if I had been caught, my wife confronted me and I got honest about everything for the first time. Then she said the magic words.

Kira Arrillaga: I guess you'd better go find one of those meetings we keep hearing about.

Casey Arrillaga:  This was my entry into recovery. I really didn't want to gain anything when I went to those first meetings. I just didn't want to lose anything. I had heard that I was supposed to keep going for the rest of my life, but that seemed a little big to think about. Instead, I figured I would just go and show everyone how it was done, cut out some problematic behaviors, then fashion the rest of my life so that nothing else really changed. As you may've guessed already, that's not what happened. While I didn't realize it at first, I'd started into something that has become one of the most profound blessings of my life. I've gained a serenity I'd not thought possible for me, something I imagined might come if I had enough money, or fame, or sex, or friends, or if my family would just do what I thought they should do. Instead, I slowly learned to let go of these things and found the peace I always wanted through becoming a community of people who are focused on growth and being of service. I gained family relationships that are deeper than I'd dared hope because in part, I was taught in recovery how to let go of my demands and expectations for them and instead learned to love them more and more deeply for who they are rather than who I want them to be.

One thing I really didn't see coming is that they would decide to join me in this recovery journey one day. This would be a good time to introduce Kira, my wife and co-producer of this podcast.

Kira Arrillaga: Hi, I'm Kira.

Casey Arrillaga:  Hi, Kira. So what was all this like for you?

Kira Arrillaga: From the perspective of being the wife of the person in recovery and watching him go through it, I know that he was going through possibly the hardest time in his life. When Casey started going to his first 12-step recovery meetings, I was at first very relieved. Then when he found a second meeting he could go to – so up from one to two meetings a week – my initial response was how come you have to go to two meetings a week, which looking back now was really just the silliest thing I could have said at that time.

He was getting better in a way that I thought was exactly what I wanted and yet I wasn't ready for that. I needed to step up my own game and get some recovery myself. Me being in recovery has helped me not be a doormat and has helped me to set boundaries. Setting the boundaries and not being a doormat are two of the biggest changes I've made in my life, and they are a hundred percent due to being in program.

Casey being in sobriety led to me being sober from a different addiction. It led to me eventually joining one of the family fellowships. I've been in it for years. Being in recovery has helped our family be closer, and stronger, and more loving and oh, we communicate so much better than we used to. It's not just because Casey got sober; it's because I worked a program.

Casey Arrillaga:  Some of you may be thinking hey, nice story, but I've never had an addiction. What about the family members who just want to see their loved ones get better? To answer that question, we're going to talk to a family member who's seen some dramatic ups and downs in their child's addiction and who found the power of recovery for themselves regardless of how their child was doing at the time. While this may sound selfish at first to some people, we'll hear how this has actually allowed them to have a better relationship, all this and more after a quick word from one of our sponsors.

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Welcome back. A note about this interview:  our guest talks about being in Al Anon, which is one of several recovery fellowships available to help family members We'll be talking more about those fellowships later but for now, you just want to know that this is a group started by and for family members and friends of alcoholics to help one another through the issues that come up for those who are in a loving relationship with those alcoholics. Out of respect for the traditions of many such fellowships that their members remain anonymous in public media, our guest will be identified only by his first name. Without further ado, here he is.

Steve, welcome to Addiction in the Family.

Steve:  Hello, thanks. It's great to be here.

Casey Arrillaga:  Could you talk a little bit about what recovery has done for you as a family member of someone with an addiction?

Steve:  Well, capable of being serine and peaceful and accepting in whatever happens. Initially this applied to my son and in his addiction but over time, it applied to so many other stressors in life. I always say that in Al Anon you learn the hardest thing first and then you apply that lesson to easier problems. Even if he was completely fixed and cured, I'd still be going to Al Anon.

Casey Arrillaga:  Could you give us an overview of what your son's addiction has been like from your perspective?

Steve:  Wow, that's a long story, and he's not the type of guy who just does drugs and sits at home. He's the kind of guy that seems to do drugs and then commits crimes, so I am thinking back to the first time my son stole his grandmother's car and took the trip out of state with an underage girl. He was only 18 himself, and I got a call from the police in another state. This was actually the first time that I got him into rehabilitation. That's when I said I tricked him. When the police called me, I said...

Casey Arrillaga:  As Steve talks about his son, it is clear that there has been a lot of ups and downs. Since his son tends to engage in criminal behavior when he uses drugs, Steve has lost count how many times his son has been to treatment or locked up.

Steve:  It just seemed like every time he would get sobriety and I was thinking wow, this might be the one, then all of a sudden for some reason, the siren call of some type of drug would hit and he'd be back at it.

Casey Arrillaga:  His son has most recently been incarcerated for five years for a crime that seems unlikely to've been committed by someone who was sober.

Steve:  One of his more recent crimes was he and a friend, they saw a trailer that was just parked in a parking lot, and he had a truck. They said well, that looks inviting, so they hooked the trailer to the truck and drove away. Now they didn't hook up the lights, and it was the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, they were stopped and had no explanation of what they were doing with a trailer. They discovered later when the police opened it up that what they had stolen was a bunch of baked goods. They wouldn't have made that much profit.

Casey Arrillaga:  With all of that going on, how did you come to find recovery?

Steve:  I guess the very first time I heard about recovery for the family was after I tricked my son into going to rehabilitation and they told me that if you're going to have your son in a rehab facility, you need to come to the parents' weekends. I got training for a weekend and part of that was going to an Al Anon meeting.

Casey Arrillaga:  A lot of families seem to get the impression that they're supposed to go to Al Anon for their loved one, and I wonder, did you have any expectations going in thinking maybe this would do something for your son?

Steve:  Yes, I would say that I would be disingenuous if I tried to claim that I – in the back of my mind if I really got a gold star in my Al Anon-ism that somehow he would be fixed. While I was absorbing lessons about detachment and how to be serine myself, I was also in the back of my mind waiting for someone to tell me, “And here's what I did, and that's why my child's all better now” Year after year, that never happened.

Casey Arrillaga:  So what kept you coming back to meetings?

Steve:  I kept coming back because I was desperate. I quickly realized that I was quite obsessed with the fate of my son and how I was going to fix him. It seemed to me that people in Al Anon had their act more together than I did and I wanted to figure out what they knew.

Casey Arrillaga:  When Steve looks at how focusing on his own recovery has helped him through these sorts of things, he talks about one of the slogans used in Al Anon, the three Cs. As simple as these ideas seem, listen to how much they've helped him make reasonable decisions in unreasonable circumstances.

Steve: The three Cs, you didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it, so right there, if I was paying attention, you can't cure it. Over time, I saw how I was absorbed with each of those Cs, and I needed to pay attention to each of them. As a parent of an addict, I was pretty certain that had I been a better parent, he would not've been an addict, so there's a lot of guilt involved. It took a long time to believe that I didn't cause it. Curing it, I tried so many ways to cure it. It was hearing it in the meetings but also getting beat in life by every time I tried to apply a fix to the situation, it seemed to make things worse. That included things like paying for bail and lawyers and leases; I could go on.

Cause, cure, and control, well, the control, in so many ways I try to exercise control. That included when he had problems trying to talk to him and to the people he was having problems with, trying to arrange for him to get a job, paying for the lease. Then when he was nowhere to be found and the apartment was trashed, going back in and cleaning the apartments. It's a pretty miserable, long list of things I did that none of it ever brought about a change in his behavior, or a change in his addiction, or a cure. I think learning happens when you're hearing things, you're reading things, and then you're experiencing things and you put it together.

Casey Arrillaga:  Steve, thanks so much for coming in today.

Steve:  Well, thanks, Casey.

Casey Arrillaga:  If all this is helping you see the importance of finding your own recovery, we'd like to give you some ideas about how to make this easier. Addiction is a problem that's incredibly hard to beat and something we've seen is one of the best predictors of recovery is being around others who are also in recovery. Thus, recovery fellowships are often one of the first suggestions that many people get. They are all over the place, and they are free, so the barriers to entry are low, to say the least. Throughout this podcast series, we'll dig deeper into these fellowships, but for now Kira and I would like to give you a primer to get started.

Kira Arrillaga: While most people already know that there are groups like Alcoholics Anonymous for people who abuse alcohol and Narcotics Anonymous and Drug Addicts Anonymous for people who abuse other drugs. A lot of people don't know that similar fellowships exist for family members. As Casey mentioned earlier in the show, Al Anon was started by and for friends and families of alcoholics. While Al Anon's literature only speaks about alcohol, I've never heard of anyone being asked to leave because their loved one used other drugs, so don't let that stop you.

Al Anon is the largest and easiest to find of all the family fellowships, and throughout Steve's interview, you can hear the importance of Al Anon in his recovery. Al Anon is not the only game in town, though. There are other fellowships for families such as Nar Anon, Co-Dependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Families Anonymous, Smart Recovery, Celebrate Recovery, Recovering Couples Anonymous, and Chapter 9 Couples in Recovery Anonymous. Each offers its own flavor and is easy to find on the internet, so it shouldn't be too hard to poke around a little bit and see which ones you want to explore.

Casey Arrillaga:  If you can't imagine going to such a group, or if you feel like you and your family need more individualized help, then therapy is the other popular alternative. Needless to say, this is not free but it is widely available, and many insurance plans help cover the costs. Websites such as Psychology Today can help you find a qualified counselor by allowing you to filter for professionals who have experience and training to help families who are dealing with addiction. This is important because just as not every doctor specializes in heart conditions, not every counselor has experience with addiction, let alone working with family members around these issues.

You can always ask about this up-front before you come in for a session, and some practitioners offer a brief initial consultation for free to see if they're a good fit for your situation. I have to say, though, that all the really good therapists that helped me were found by word of mouth. Someone I knew would say, “I had this really good therapist; you should totally go see them.”

You might try going to a recovery fellowship and after a few meetings when you're getting to know some of the people, ask around to see if anyone there knows of a good counselor who specializes in family problems around addiction. Combining approaches like this can be a great idea. Recovery fellowships and therapy can work great together offering both social support and recovery tools while also giving you a chance to get professional guidance and support. The important thing is to find what works best for you and your family situation.

We close this episode with a segment called Families Have Questions. One of the common questions we hear is what can I do to help? To start into an answer, we thought we'd ask some people in recovery what helped them the most.

What is the most helpful that your family did around addiction recovery?

Female Speaker: They didn't do anything at all. They cut me off whenever I was probably 16, so I was just out to fend for myself for whatever and learn my lessons the hard way. That was the best thing that they could've done.

Male Speaker: There was a line that they drew, and I kept crossing the line, and they kept drawing a line. At one point, they held their boundary. I think the most important thing in regards to that is the fact that they held their boundary but never gave up on me. I think it's hard for a family to hold that boundary without feeling some type of way, like they're giving up on the addict or the alcoholic. The fact that they waited around for me so when I finally did wake up after all the addiction and foolishness and I became to know myself better, I got a good foothold on life and have some years of recovery now. The fact that they waited around for me and didn't hold any grudges knowing that was my disease at work, I think that's what really helped. That's just my opinion.

Male Speaker: What my family did for me was the fact that they didn't shut any doors. I was always bad about isolating. That was my big thing. I never really asked for help. It was one of those pride things. At the very end, they supported my decision to better myself. They knew that I needed to get help. They knew I needed to check myself in and they support my decision to put this above everything. I think it was the key thing is that there was hardly any enabling at the end. The enabling had stopped.

Male Speaker: One of the most helpful things was they didn't treat me any differently. I may have changed, but they did not change the way that they treated me and felt about me.

Casey Arrillaga:  As a family members, what's the most helpful you've seen around addiction and recovery

Male Speaker: There's kind of a fine line between being supportive and being an enabler kind of an aspect. A lot of it for me was just learning when to draw the line in the sand kind of a thing, because it's not fun being taken advantage of.

Casey Arrillaga: As you can hear, there's not one right answer for everyone, no how-to guide that will tell you the right move to make every time. This highlights the importance of focusing on your own recovery so that you can become clearer on the decisions that best fit you and your family and give everyone a chance to get off the roller-coaster of addiction. In my experience as both a professional and a family member, keeping this focus allows the family to show up in a loving and compassionate way to the person with the addiction while not condoning or encouraging the addictive behavior.

This brings us to the conclusion of this episode of Addiction and the Family. Thanks for being with us. In this episode, we looked at how important it is for family members to work on their own recovery rather than waiting for their addicted loved one to get better.

We heard from a family member who learned how to do this for himself through his son's addiction, and we considered possibilities around what you can do to best help someone else while helping yourself. As they say in many recovery meetings, take what you liked and leave the rest. Go out and explore the possibilities for recovery in your life, and give your loved ones the space and dignity to make their own choices.

If you liked this podcast, please subscribe. It means a lot to us. If you know anyone else who could use what we have to offer, please tell them about Addiction and the Family. If you have comments about this podcast, have a question you'd like answered on the show, or want to contribute your voice, or just want to say hi, you can write to us at addictionandthefamily@gmail.com.

Kira Arrillaga: Addiction and the Family is produced, written, and engineered by Kira and Casey Arrillaga with music by Casey.

Casey Arrillaga: On our next episode of Addiction and the Family, we'll look at some of the basics of addiction, what it is and what it isn't, discuss addiction with psychologist Dr. Heather Ingram, and look at addiction from a scientific perspective all to help families find greater peace and understanding around this difficult but vital subject. See you next time on Addiction and the Family.