How to Help Relationships Survive Early Recovery

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 39: How to Help Relationships Survive Early Recovery.”

Casey Arrillaga: 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 and the Family. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a clinical social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Center in Texas. I’m the author of the books Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions and Spirituality for People Who Hate Spirituality.

Kira Arrillaga: I’m Kira Arrillaga, addiction counselor intern and recovery coach at Windmill. Casey and I were in our addictions together for over 10 years and have now been in recovery together for almost twice that long.

Casey Arrillaga: I've led hundreds of family workshops, but just as important is that Kira and have lived the experience of being family to addiction as both a children and adults.

Kira Arrillaga: Join us as we offer experience, strength, and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

Casey Arrillaga: Welcome to the episode. Before we get going, I want to take a moment and thank all of our listeners for all of the support you’ve given us over the last three years. Creating this podcast for you has been an amazing experience, and as of this moment right here when we’re recording, we’ve been heard in over 60 countries around the world. We’ve had over 35,000 listens, and it’s just been so rewarding to know that so many people are helping to get this message of hope around addiction for people who have it and people who love them. Thank you again for your support, and thanks so much for being on this journey with us.

In this episode, we look at all the challenges that relationships face in addiction and early recovery. We talk about attitudes and actions that can help get over some of those hurdles and things that can help along the way when it isn’t so easy. Kira and I also tell part of our story as a couple who have not only survived but also thrived with each of us finding our own recovery. All this and more after a word from one of our sponsors.

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Welcome back. Before we start talking about how to get through early recovery, we have to stop and acknowledge what happens before that point. What was going on in the relationship before the addiction started to get under any kind of control? That involves talking about a lot of stressors in relationships around addiction. When we say stressors, what we mean is something that causes or invites stress into a relationship or into an individual’s thinking. We’ll look at a few things today. We’re going to look at dishonesty, broken trust, repeated relapses, time apart, emotional distance, infidelity, family wanted to help but feeling helpless, family conflict around what to do, anger, guilt, and shame, and playing the blame game.

Let’s start breaking it down. Dishonesty is one of those things that we see much around addiction that I personally and professionally think of it as simply being a symptom of addiction. That’s because it’s really hard keeping addiction going if I’m being honest with myself and the people around me. The problem, of course, besides just getting in the way and keeping the addiction going, is that dishonesty is one of the number one things that can undermine a relationship. When people feel like they can’t trust each other, well, it’s hard to keep things going, and unfortunately, around addiction, we see trust broken over and over again. Dishonesty is one of the biggest ways that happens.

In fact, I can’t think of how many times I’ve heard one family member or another say, look, I’d rather that you weren’t using, or acting out, or drinking, or whatever, but it would be easier if you just told me what was going on. Not so much to stop it but just so that I wasn’t blindsided; I wasn’t always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Unfortunately, this is something that happens. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it’s because we’re not being honest with ourselves. If somebody is in active addiction and they’re being dishonest with you, I urge you to not take it personally. That doesn’t mean you have to put up with it or pretend like you’re okay with it, but you don’t have to think, oh, they’re being dishonest because they don’t love me. They don’t respect me, anything like that.

Just recognize this is something that comes with the disease, which means that, actually, growing honesty, not perfect honest, will likely be a feature of early recovery. Now, of course, I need to acknowledge that there are some people who just struggle to be honest at all about anything. If you’re not sure if you’re facing dishonesty that’s just about addiction or not, then maybe as a family member or a loved one you can take a moment and think to yourself does the person that I love with the addiction tend to be dishonest in general about all kinds of things, or do they tend to mostly just be dishonest around addiction? Be as honest with yourself as you can around this, and you’ll have a better guiding light about whether this dishonesty is something that you need to fear in all areas or just around the addiction. That can make a difference. Another way that trust often feels broken, though, is through repeated relapses. Many people when their loved one gets sober think this is it. They’re finally doing it, especially, you say, if they have gone to treatment or done something else really big to try and cement their sobriety or learn new skills, things like that. We can just assume, okay, now they’ve got it. Now they’re ready. They finally want it.

If our loved ones has repeated relapses, it can feel like a huge letdown and sometimes a break in trust, and that goes back to the idea of dishonesty. Maybe they’re just saying what we wanted to hear. While that can certainly happen, it’s also quite possible for somebody to really want recovery and still relapse. It’s when we doubt their motives or see signs that maybe they’re not as serious or maybe they haven’t really hit bottom that trust can really feel broken. If that’s happening in your relationships, I encourage you to be honest with yourself and with them about how you feel.

Another major stressor on relationships and addiction is time apart, and that’s because addiction takes time. It takes energy. Whether the person with the addiction is leaving the house at all hours, whether they just don’t come home, or maybe they’re around the house and they just seem like they’re not there, that time starts to create emotional distance, and that emotional distance is really corrosive for relationships. No matter what kind of relationship it is, that sense that someone is not present for us, that starts to really undermine closeness. In romantic relationships, it can also start to feel like there’s just no support when the person is being emotionally distant. Alternatively, in romantic relationships, one partner can start to feel like – when they’re taking care of the addicted partner, that it’s like they have a child to raise, even though that person is a fully grown adult. This can be especially frustrating if there are actual children in the relationship.

One of the biggest things that creates distance and distrust in romantic relationships is infidelity. While this does not happen always around addiction, it can certainly be a feature and there’s nothing more corrosive. If this is something that’s happened around your relationship, I’m going to strongly recommend counseling, both individual and as a couple, and to have as much patience and compassion as you can for each other knowing that this process of healing may take years.

Not all the stress on relationships and addiction actually comes directly from the person with the addiction, though. Sometimes it’s behind the scenes in the family. There can be a lot of helplessness and hopelessness within families, feeling like they desperately want to help, but they don’t know what to do. People feel stuck. This can actually lead to arguments within the family where different family members have their own ideas about what is the best way to address this? Some may feel like we just need to show tough love and cut this person off. Others would say we need to be more loving, draw them in closer, keep trying, and some family members have no idea what to do. They just try to pretend like it’s not even happening.

All of these various stressors on the relationships can lead to a lot of anger, guilt, and shame, and this can seem like it’s flying in all directions. Sometimes the person with the addiction reacts with anger, flashing out at family about how can you get on my case? Look at your problems, things like that. Leave me alone. Underneath this there’s always guilt and shame. I’ve seen it over and over again in my own story and in the stories of many people that I’ve helped, that they feel guilty and shameful about what they’ve done in their addiction, no matter how well they’ve hidden it from others and even from themselves.

Likewise, family members often feel anger, guilt, and shame. How can you do this to our family, if you really loved me, all that sort of thing? Then the guilt and shame that can come from thinking maybe it’s me. Did I do something wrong? Have I not been nice enough, or mean enough, or whatever? Then, in many cases, this turns into the blame game. Whose fault is it? Are we pointing fingers at each other?

Unfortunately, blame and shame don’t actually get people sober. In fact, none of this really is that helpful. If anger, guilt, shame, and blame were enough to make this change happen, it probably would’ve happened a long time ago for everybody, and yet, miraculously, one day, the person with the addiction has had enough. They’re finally ready to get sober. Maybe they’ve tried a few times before, but this time feels different. Maybe they go to treatment. They start hitting meetings. They just do something different, and they start to get something different.

At this point, it’s really easy for anyone in the family to think, all right, whoo, we made it. Yet, anyone who’s been through this part of the process can tell you it ain’t easy. The fact is that early recovery lasts usually – estimate’s about a year or so. That’s a year in which things are likely to be difficult, and we can’t say that at the end of that year all of the troubles are over, but chances are things will be starting to get better.

How do we get through that first year? First and foremost, we want to recognize some of the challenges that are going on. These can include the idea that sobriety was supposed to fix everything right away, more anger, guilt, and shame, lack of trust, family pretending that they’re okay when they’re not, trying to sweep everything under the rug, and just trying to make it go away. Old patterns keep coming up. There’s time needed for recovery. There may be slips and relapses, and all the things masked or overshadowed in the family by the addiction, they’re all going to come up. The family may not be willing to engage in their own recovery. They may think, well, I’m not the one with the problem. Why should I have to do work? If I started going to family recovery meetings, say while my loved one was in treatment, now that they’re in recovery, I can stop.

Let’s take a few minutes and look at each of these in a little more depth. First and foremost, the idea that sobriety was supposed to fix everything and right away, we may even know intellectually that that’s not true, but the reality is is that all of us have expectations of what it might look like if our loved one gets in recovery. We might think that they’re finally going to become the loving, attentive person we always wanted them to be. They’ll become a better parent. They’ll become a better partner. They’ll become a better family member overall.

While sobriety undoubtedly improves everything, the reality is is that person is still probably struggling inside, and a part of them likely misses their addiction. This may or may not be conscious, but the fact is that addiction is something that felt like a survival skill. It felt like something that was getting us through, so giving it up is going to feel scary. When people are feeling scared, they’re not going to be at their best. They may not be the most attentive. They may not be as emotionally present. They may be trying to hide all of this out of their own guilt and shame, and so they’re trying to make it look as good as possible, which by the way, does not actually lead to honesty.

Now, if they’re sticking with their recovery and they’re doing the work, this all should start to resolve itself, but it will take time. If they’re not doing recovery work, they might be what people in AA would call a dry drunk, which is to say somebody who has stopped the addiction but is still having a lot of the old personality characteristics. Usually, this resolves itself one way or the other. You can’t make that happen, but you can focus on your own recovery. Speaking of which, family members may also be feeling guilt and shame. They may also be trying to hide where they struggle thinking, well, I don’t want to upset the apple cart. They’re doing so well. I don’t want to say anything to upset them.

All of this dishonesty, remember, that undermines relationships, and it goes in both directions. If family can’t be honest with the person in early recovery and the person in early recovery can’t be honest with the rest of the family, there’s going to be struggle. In fact, it’s going to start to feel like some of the old patterns are still there. I thought recovery was supposed to make it all better, but the reality is we’re fighting, bickering, hiding, being scared just as much as we ever were. This then becomes a call to greater honesty on all sides, to just be open and vulnerable about where we’re struggling. Anything else leads to a lack of trust.

The fact is family members are often thinking what do I do to trust my loved one more? The person with the addiction may be feeling frustration that they’re not trusted yet, even though they’re making these marvelous changes that everyone was asking for. The reality is that we can’t build trust overnight. We can’t force ourselves to trust someone. That only comes when we feel safe, and safety, trust, that takes time and effort on everybody’s part.

If you’re a family member, you might look at the idea that if you’re not being honest and open and vulnerable with your loved one where you struggle that you’re actually not being very trustworthy either. We are going to have to work together to rebuild trust, and just understand it’s going to take time. Therefore, no matter how tempting it is, family, don’t pretend like you’re okay when you’re not. Don’t try to cover up the past or sweep it under the rug like it’s going to go away if you ignore it. That’s not how things work. Everybody’s going to have to take the time and effort and energy to heal. That may take individual therapy. It might take going to recovery meetings. I personally recommend doing all of the above because all of that can help and that the most helpful thing you can do for your loved one in early recovery if they’re getting over their addiction is to embrace your own recovery and to work on yourself.

Another stressor that comes up a lot in early recovery is the fact that old relationship patterns and behavior patterns are going to keep cropping up. There’s some jokes about this in the Alcoholics Anonymous program. They might say, well, you take the alcohol out of the alcoholic, and you’re just left with the ick, or others might say it’s alcoholism, not alcoholwasm. The reality is is that, when we get over our addiction, when we stop acting out, all of the stuff that was underneath is going to come bubbling up. This can also be true of family members. There can still be plenty of fear about what’s going to happen in recovery. Who am I now, or what is my loved one going to do? Are they going to be okay? Are we going to go back to those old patterns some day? When we feel fear, any of us, we’re just not going to be on our best behavior.

Another stressor around relationships in early recovery is that recovery takes time. This partly means it takes a length of time, again, at least a year in most cases to get through the stage we call early recovery, but also, it takes time out of every day. The people who make it in recovery are often the people who put some work into it every day of their lives. That’s making sense, if you think about. In addiction, I spend time on my addiction every day. Why shouldn’t I spend time on my recovery every day? Many people in early recovery find that they need to get to a meeting every day, sometimes more than one, but if they’re not doing this, even on days when they’re not going to a meeting, they’re probably going to be spending some time meditating, journaling, using SMART Recovery tools, self-examination, going to therapy. It can start to feel for a family member like, well, you’re gone just as much as you used to be. If you stop and think about it, the consequences of the time taken out for recovery are very different for the consequences of the time taken out for addiction, and as a family member, sometimes we need to step back and recognize that.

We can also get scared if it seems our loved one is not taking enough time for their recovery, but here’s what I’m going to say, if you as a family member wish your loved one was working harder, put all of the time and effort you wish they were putting into their recovery into your recovery. Do you wish they were going to more meetings? You go to more meetings. Do you wish they were reading recovery literature? You read recovery literature for family members. If you do that, you will start to feel better and better, often in ways that you thought could only happen if they were doing the right thing.

What if family is not willing to engage. Now, if you’re someone with an addiction, that can feel really frustrating. He might think, well, if my spouse, or my kids, or my parents, or my cousin, or whoever would just work on recovery for themselves, maybe they’d understand me better. Although, for people with addiction, I always say that’s actually not why they’re going to recovery. We may think, oh, they’re going to go, and then they’re going to do what I’m doing. Then we’ll all be one big happy family. The reality is family members have to make their own decisions. Similarly, if you are a family member and you’re thinking to yourself I’m the only one in my family who’s doing recovery, if only everyone else would get onboard, we’d all be there. We’d rally around and support the person with the addiction, and then we’d be one big happy family. Again, that’s not really how it works. Just as you can’t force your loved one to get sober, you can’t force other family members to get in recovery.

Sometimes that fear is based around the idea that I need to get everyone else to be right so that my loved one with the addiction can be okay, but that’s never true. Even the recovery literature, such as in AA or some other programs, would say wife or no wife, family or no family, a person can get sober, so that tells us that they don’t need you to do anything to get sober. It’s great if they do, but it's not a requirement. Engage in your recovery for you knowing that that’s the most powerful thing you can do to help the people around you, and they are going to do their own thing at their own pace. I have a friend who says he waited 12 years for his spouse to get into recovery after he did, so it’s going to take whatever it takes. Some people may never come around. You just keep focusing on your recovery, and you’ll watch your world get better. It may not always do what you hoped it would do, but I guarantee it’ll be better than it was and probably miles better than where it was heading.

Now, one of the more difficult things for families to deal with is if there are slips or relapses. While there’s not an official bright line definition between them, I would say that a relapse is a full-blown return to old patterns and behaviors, especially around the addiction, and that a slip might be a temporary thing, something that just happens flash in the pan. Maybe somebody skins their knees and goes, whoa, I really need to do this work, which by the way, is not that uncommon after treatment. People will get out. They feel like they really want to go get this, but there’s some part of them that still has a little bit of nagging doubt. Do I really need to do this recovery work? Can I really be okay being sober? They have to touch the stove one more time to see if it’s still hot, which, in my case, it was always still hot.

If that happens, don’t panic. Really go by what happens next? Does the person who slipped seem to double down on their recovery efforts? Are they digging in even deeper? Are they trying harder, reaching out to more people, going to more meetings, reading more literature? Then this whole thing might turn around, and it may even turn out to be a gift. If it seems like old patterns of dishonesty, deflecting, hiding, things like that are going on, then we might be headed for a full-blown relapse.

If you see that happen, somebody goes back to all their old behaviors, the addiction is flaring up, then it might be time to look at different options. If they’re willing to get help, we may need to get them into treatment. If they’re not, then it might be time to batten down the hatches and maybe create some distance and also looking out for protecting young children who might get caught up in this, but family members, look out. It’s not always the person with the addiction who has the relapse. What I mean by that is that sometimes family members can easily relapse or slip into their old behaviors. You might see nagging, scolding, trying to control, or perhaps binge eating, binge watching, doing anything you can to escape the situation rather than being honest and open and dealing with your own feelings. If you want to know more about what relapse looks like and what we can do about it, check out Episode 8 of this podcast, the relapse episode. It’ll give you a few more tips.

The last big stressor that we’ll look at for relationships in early recovery in this episode is when other family patterns or problems that were masked by the addiction start to come up. What I mean by this is that sometimes one person’s addiction seems so big or so overpowering or is simply used as an excuse to not look at other problems in the family. Now that person gets sober. Everybody’s happy. Everybody celebrates. Then we start to notice that maybe there’s other things that we’re not talking about.

Some of the really big obvious ones around this could be that someone else in the family also has a problem that could be an addiction or compulsive behavior. I’ve worked with more than a few families where one family member comes into treatment and gets sober, and then when they get home, they recognize that another family member is next in line and needs to go in. This can, again, turn into cascading recovery and a huge blessing for the family, but the initial shock can be pretty big, especially if it was a child who went into treatment that everyone thinks, okay, whew, now that they’re okay, we’re all okay when, in fact, their problems have just been a mirror of one of the other adults, especially a caregiver in the family who actually has had a problem for much longer. Just nobody was looking at it, and they could say, well, my kid’s the one with the problem, not me. If that adult or caregiver is willing to embrace solution, what a moment of pride for both the child and the caregiver to recognize that they can be on this journey together, and the child, in fact, helped to lead the family into recovery.

Sometimes the hidden problems are not as big and dramatic, though, as another family member’s addiction. Instead, early recovery may uncover communication problems, financial issues, or the fact that one of the kids has been overlooked. Because they’re doing so well, we thought we didn’t need to worry about them. Whatever it is that early recovery uncovers, just pay attention to it. Deal with it head on. Sometimes we may need to prioritize and recognize that maybe this is something we don’t need to get to right away, but we should definitely put it on the list of things that we are going to deal with.

This leads us to the idea of setting realistic expectations. First and foremost is that recovery takes time and persistent effort. This applies just as much for the family members as it does for the person with the addiction. It’s easy to start to slack off when things seem like they’re getting better, but I will say that the people that I’ve seen really do well and thrive in recovery are people who work hard when everything’s good. That way, they’ve got a running start, and they’re already prepared for when things don’t seem so good because life is going to have its ups and downs. This process is not a straight line or a smooth path. It is going to take time. As somebody wiser than me said to me one time, you can’t walk 20 miles into the forest and expect to walk 1 mile back out.

The second realistic expectation is that sobriety won’t erase all the old feelings by itself. This is why we recommend for both the person with the addiction and the family member to actively engage in recovery, which might look like individual therapy, group therapy, attending recovery fellowship meetings, reading recovery literature, listening to podcasts like this one, anything that helps you bolster your recovery life and, if that recovery life includes spirituality, to dig deep into that spirituality and recognize that a power greater than yourself has their hand and their eye over this whole process so that it may not go just the way you want it to go, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going in a good direction.

The third realistic expectation is that family members will likely set each other off sometimes. Your loved one may get that old look in their eye. There may be a twitch of an eyebrow, an old expression that you haven’t heard for a while. Something may just smell different, and all of a sudden, it can set us off and think, oh, man we are back to it. Nothing’s changed. This was all a waste of time. This isn’t doing any good, but that’s not realistic.

The realistic thing is to think that you know what? We’re going to have some of our old behaviors. In fact, my first really brilliant therapist used to say, well, somebody’s worst characteristic that annoys you the most is probably going to be the last thing to go. Allow people time and space for their recovery. Recognize that the things that you want them to work on may not be their first priority, but it doesn’t mean that they won’t get to it. Over time, if people embrace their recovery process, we will see slow but sure incremental but steady progress. That is the way real change is made, not big dramatic things, but it’s the little things over and over again that create new habits and new ways of being. That can happen for you if you work on you, just like it can happen for your loved one if they work on them, and if it seems like sometimes you’re leap frogging where one of you is working harder than the other, recognize that it’ll probably go the other way around too, that they may work harder than you sometimes. Even if they don’t, you can still be okay as long as you keep up with your recovery.

The last of the realistic expectations is that there’s always hope. That’s right. The most realistic thing is to recognize that there’s always hope that change is possible. We can’t always make it go the way we want, but we can always count on the idea that it can happen. What’s really cool about that is to recognize that we can be the agents of that change. Rather than waiting for our loved ones to change and grow and do the things that we want or to start to finally behaving the way we always thought they should, we don’t have to wait. Instead, as Mahatma Gandhi suggested, we can be the change that we want to see.

In light of that truth, let’s take a moment and review the benefits of recovery for everyone. First and foremost is the idea of cascading recovery. This is what I call that phenomenon that I’ve had the pleasure to witness so many times in various families, including my own, which is where one person gets recovery and then a second person does and then maybe a third person or a fourth person. You might even turn around and see that everybody in the family is recovering in their own way, and that’s important. We can let it happen in their own way. For instance, if one person is going to Al-Anon meetings, somebody else might go to SMART Recovery. A third person might try out LifeRing, or Women for Sobriety, or any of the other recovery fellowships that are there. Let’s give each other room and recognize the miracle that’s happening as various people are finding their way to recovery.

That being said, another one of the benefits of recovery for everyone is that it only takes one person to change the family dynamic. Now, remember that many people in the family may not want things to change, even when they say they do. We get uncomfortable when family dynamics change. We’re not sure where we stand if you stand in a new way, so if you get some pushback, don’t give up. Just recognize that people can move through that discomfort and find their way to the other side. One of the greatest benefits of recovery is that life can get better, even if someone goes back to their old behaviors. Now, the most obvious form of that would be if the person with the addiction goes back to their addiction, but let’s say they stay sober. Other people in the family may still go back to worrying, or back to controlling, or back to being in a place and then pretending like they don’t see anything, even when they do. if they do, it’s okay. Your recovery and your life don’t have to slow down or even go backwards just because someone else does, so stay strong and stay steady in your recovery and watch your life transform for the better. With any luck, your family members will come back around for recovery, and that way, the whole relationship will be stronger.

Let’s take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors, and when we come back, we’re going to get Kira back in front of the microphone to talk a little bit with me about what helped our relationship survive and later thrive in recovery.

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Welcome back, and without further ado, let’s invite Kira on to the program to talk a little bit about our relationship in early recovery and how we got to where we are now. Kira, what would you say helped our relationship survive early recovery?

Kira Arrillaga: I think the most important thing was that we were both really committed, and we were both willing to work really hard. We had a good work ethic on our relationship and on our own stuff.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s true. That had been a feature of our relationship all along. It was just so much that I didn’t know I needed work on and hadn’t crossed my mind that we needed to work on.

Kira Arrillaga: I sure had plenty that I needed to work on too, and it took me even longer to figure that out.

Casey Arrillaga: Now, that point is worth noting that, actually, we had two stages of early recovery. We had my early recovery when I first started in, and I was the guy with the problem. That was it.

Kira Arrillaga: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you were definitely the one with the problem. It took me two years to figure out I had a problem at all.

Casey Arrillaga: I will never forget when I came home and you were crying. You said, “I can’t stop, and I think I need to go to meetings.” I remember at the time just thinking not, yay, you have an addiction but more like partly relief that I wasn’t alone and that you were willing to embrace solution. That’s such a big deal.

Kira Arrillaga: Yeah, there were times when each of us cried at the beginning of our recovery when the other one was very excited. When you were in very early recovery, it was the only time in your life you’ve ever been suicidal. You were putting together a plan and all this stuff, and I reacted so badly to that. You were telling me about it, and to me, I just saw it as, oh, here comes the growth spurt because that’s what I always saw for myself in therapy was everything gets really, really, really dark and awful when you’re working on yourself. All of a sudden, there’s a breakthrough, and you can see the light. You’re like, oh, that’s why. Okay, I get it now. I felt like you were on the edge of something wonderful. All you felt was how can I fake my own death so that my family can still collect the life insurance?

Casey Arrillaga: It’s true. I was so sure, (A), that I couldn’t do it and, (B), that life was not worth living, and you guys would be better off without me. That, for me, reflects something that maybe a lot of family members wouldn’t recognize about early recovery, which was the idea of how much guilt and shame and fear comes up for people and how hard it is to talk about that. I know, in my early recovery, I tried to talk to you about whatever was going on for me, but it was hard to express how scared I was that I couldn’t make it and how scared I was that you guys would be better off without me. Now, fast forward all this time, the stuff that I couldn’t see has been such a blessing in our family to bring recovery and especially with both of us in recovery.

Kira Arrillaga: Yeah. I never had any doubt that you could do it. Everything you’ve ever tried to do and put your mind to you’ve done. I just went, oh, now he is going to get better, and that’s how that works, okay. Then it was like this horrible struggle for you for a while. Honestly, I’m glad you went there first because you’re better at this stuff than I am, and I had a really good example so that, when I was finally ready to start going to meetings myself and working program and quitting things, I knew somebody that it was working for. That was really helpful to me.

Casey Arrillaga: One of those things that I talked about earlier in this podcast and I write about it in my book, Realistic Hope, is the idea of cascading recovery, that one person in the family gets recovery and then that opens the door for someone else. While it’s not a guarantee to happen, it becomes really cool, and it becomes so powerful when multiple people get into recovery. It also highlights something that I had to be really cautious about, which is that, when you got into recovery and I had some experience, it was very tempting for me to try and guide your recovery or to be like your sponsor in the 12-step sense of, okay, well, I’m the one who knows, so I’ll tell you how to do it. You should be doing it the way I think you should. You should be doing it the way I think did, and that’s not a winning formula.

Kira Arrillaga: Nope.

Casey Arrillaga: Much better off to step back and let you have your journey. When our daughter looked at some of her own issues around mental health and how she was going to recover from that, same sort of thing. I totally wanted to guide the process and all that. I found that I needed to work harder on my recovery once each of you looked at it than I did when nobody else in the family was looking at their own recovery.

Kira Arrillaga: Right. Yeah, for me, the hardest part was admitting the depth of my problem. It was very embarrassing to me to have an addiction. It was very embarrassing to me the things that I had done in the name of my addiction. I didn’t even know I had more than one addiction, and I did.

Casey Arrillaga: I remember, actually, in the previous episode, the one we released last month, it came up in the interview just in passing that, in doing the family work, one of the – one of our interview guests, Travis, said his wife started to recognize she’s got her own issues, and he mentioned just casually going by that they now have a sobriety date that’s just five days apart. Who would’ve thought that whole thing? One person getting sober, you would think everyone else could maybe breathe easy, but instead, the other people sometimes look and say let me work harder and maybe recognize some of my own issues. What a blessing for the family when that happens.

Kira Arrillaga: Yeah.

Casey Arrillaga: As we’ve moved forward in our recovery, getting through the first year of my recovery, the first year of your recovery, what would you say helped you the most and what were the biggest gifts?

Kira Arrillaga: After the first week, I started to feel a lot better. There was a huge sense of accomplishment as time went by. I was very lucky. I only ever had one lapse, and it was almost seven years in. It lasted for two hours. In 22 years, there’s only been one lapse on that first program of mine, which is really fortunate. I know it wasn’t like that for you, but every day that went by, I felt stronger. I think, by the time I got into recovery, I was overdue.

Casey Arrillaga: I’m glad you spoke to the lapses, or slips, or relapses, depending on how you look at it, and I know that, as you referenced, I didn’t get sober from Day 1 and stay sober from Day 1. I’ll say that it was always so difficult to go to you and say, hey, I think I need to reset my calendar, or hey, here’s what happened. It’s not an easy conversation with your spouse. I know there was at least one time where you just broke down crying at what I was telling you, and I don’t blame you for that. I felt horrible, but at the same time, interestingly enough, I think the roles had reversed where, at that point, I was in recovery for long enough that I felt confident like, okay, I know I’m going to get through this. I know I’m going to get this right, but it seemed like it was much scarier than that for you.

Kira Arrillaga: Yeah, I had expected you to just get on the wagon and stay there.

Casey Arrillaga: I think, when I first came into the program, I expected that too, but for a lot of people, that’s not necessarily the journey.

Kira Arrillaga: No, it’s not.

Casey Arrillaga: What are the tools that you would say have helped you the most to get through all the ups and downs of early and mid and now I’m going to dare say late-stage recovery?

Kira Arrillaga: Early recovery, definitely the meetings were the most important thing to me. I didn’t start working the steps right away. I just showed up. It was really all I could do. I shared from Day 1. I was actually pretty optimistic about my program, which is – I’m not an optimistic by nature, but I felt optimistic because I knew it could be done. I had done therapy for such a long time. I had pretty good confidence in myself in this area. Later, it was helping others. The first time somebody asked me to sponsor them was a really big deal for me, and I said, “No, but I’ll cosponsor you.” I didn’t have a sponsor at the time. I had bad luck with sponsors at the beginning. I had wonderful people sponsoring me. Then one fell off the wagon, one disappeared. I don’t know what happened to her. In the interim, there was a woman at my meeting who had the gift of desperation. She wanted recovery really badly, and I recognized that in her. Her bottom was so much lower than mine, and she asked me to sponsor her. I said, “No. I will cosponsor you.” Then we met every week after the meeting. I don’t even think we talked on the phone, but we got all the way through Step 5 together. Then she moved away. Then I saw her a year later. She had lost 99 pounds and holding. She looked fantastic. She had an amazing energy to her. She had come farther than I had, and it was so beautiful. It was just two people helping each other. I got more done because I was helping her. She got more done because she was helping me.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah. That’s such a big deal. The last thing I’ll ask is what tools most helped you in our relationship, getting that through moments in recovery?

Kira Arrillaga: I would say the thing that helped us the most was communication and acceptance, nonjudgement. We really did not judge each other or at least we made a point of trying really hard not to judge each other at all, and therefore, we judged each other very little. My addiction didn’t look like yours. Yours didn’t look like mine. You did things that were just mystifying to me, and I did things that were just mystifying to you. Neither one of us was judgy about it, and so I felt like I could tell you anything. A lot of people don’t have that, but we do have that with our sponsors. Even if you don’t have it with your partner, or your best friend, or whoever, you have it with your sponsor, and if you don’t, get a new one.

Casey Arrillaga: One of the things that I’ll say has helped me along with that because I completely agree is the open communication, the honesty, being able to just talk about what’s really going on. One really cool tool that I’m going to talk about in a few minutes in the podcast in more detail has been doing a nightly check-in with each other and a no feedback nightly check-in. We can talk to each other about what the day’s been like, and we have a format that we use from a particular recovery fellowship. In that process, one of the big things is just being able to hear the other one, what they have to say, and not jump in, not take it personally, not sit around and – if we hit a part that says do we owe an apology, not sit around and tapping my fingers. Yes, you do.

Kira Arrillaga: The first six months we were doing that, I was always just thinking was there something in the tone of his voice that suggests that perhaps I do owe an apology? Oh, I took everything so personally back then. I still take things a little personally.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s maybe a big thing to highlight is that idea that never take somebody else’s recovery or their addiction personally because it’s never been about you.

Kira Arrillaga: No. No. Yeah, one of the gifts of going through this together is just really getting that it’s not personal. I tell my clients all the time don’t take it personally is a long-term goal, and you should not use the word just. We don’t say just don’t take it personally, but we say aim toward not taking it personally.

Casey Arrillaga: It’s very wise.

Kira Arrillaga: Thank you. I’m very wise.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you for doing this with me, the whole thing.

Kira Arrillaga: You’re welcome.

Casey Arrillaga: Let’s talk about some tools and techniques that can help. First and foremost, underpinning everything is a growth mindset. The more you can foster this in yourself and, thus, maybe inspire the people around you, the better everything gets. This is the mindset that says, if I work at things, they can get better, and that’s worth doing. That might seem like a no-brainer for some of us, but for others, it’s a pretty revolutionary concept. Working on ourselves means having to face things that we don’t like to see, believing that we can actually make them better, and then putting in the work, and that’s not a no-brainer. For some people, it may seem like foreign territory. For others, it might even seem like going behind enemy lines, but no matter how you see it, I guarantee that having that growth mindset will improve your life for the rest of your life. Who knows? It may inspire some of the people around you. That’s sometimes where we get cascading recovery to happen. In fact, being around other people who have a growth mindset and who are actively working on improving their lives is a huge inspiration and one of the biggest things that makes it possible for many of us, and that’s why we make such a big deal out of recovery fellowships. Recovery fellowships are places that are free where other people are coming together to work on themselves. As an added bonus, one of the biggest ways that they work is by one person helping the next person. When you first come in, other people are ready to put their hands out and help you, and then you get a chance to help the next person. That spirit of service and passing the message along is something that actually really lifts people up in their recovery, and both of those things can help inspire that growth mindset and keep it going. Here’s a list of family recovery fellowships. These were all started for and by family members to help out people who are in the exact same position as you. Al-Anon and Alateen, these are the ones where it all started, so they’re the biggest and easiest to find. Another one is SMART Recovery Family & Friends. While it seems to take a completely different approach, the underlying message is pretty much exactly the same. Also, there’s Celebrate Recovery. This is specifically a Protestant Christian version of the 12 steps, so for some people, that might be the opposite of what you’re looking for but, others, may be exactly what you’re looking for. There’s also Families Anonymous, Co-Dependents Anonymous, Nar-Anon. Now, just a word on that. Nar-Anon is not the same as Narconon. Narconon is a group that’s actually started by the Church of Scientology, and while there’s nothing for or against it that I’m saying here, it’s simply not a family recovery fellowship. Then there’s also Adult Children of Alcoholics and NAMI, which is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. While their recovery meetings can look a little bit different, they are there specifically, again, for and by people who have a loved one who struggled with mental illness. They also do offer meetings for people who do have the mental illness themselves. Now, as mentioned earlier, it is fine, in fact, sometimes encouraged that each person has their own meetings. For instance, there are some places where there is an AA meeting, Alcoholic Anonymous, in one direction for the person with the addiction problem, and then there’s an Al-Anon meeting in an adjacent room for the family member of the person with the addiction. For some relationships in recovery, this may be exactly what the doctor ordered, but in other cases, you may find that one family member may want to check out 12-step recovery. Another family member may want to go to Celebrate Recovery, and a third member may want to go check out SMART Recovery Family & Friends. It doesn’t matter if everybody’s taking a different approach. What does matter is that everybody’s getting involved. Now, if you do have multiple people who are going to the same fellowship and quite possibly going to the same meetings, the most important thing is to make sure that everybody feels safe to share what is on their mind and heart, and the best way to do that is to have a set rule that there is no feedback, no criticism, no commentary on what anybody shared in the meeting. That, of course, is not just during the meeting but on the way home or anytime afterward. If you want to kill off the openness of somebody’s recovery, all you have to do is turn to them later and say what did you mean when you shared in the meeting about blah, blah, blah, blah, or to bring something up, or even worse, to share it with somebody else, so what goes on in the meeting stays in the meeting. If any family member is having difficulty with this idea, then the best bet is to simply not go to the same meetings. Given that all these fellowships have online and telephone presences as well as in-person meetings and many of them have podcasts, social media presence, literature, there’s a lot of ways to get into the fellowship. Even if you’re in the teeniest, tiniest isolated little town, there are still meetings you can go to all around the world where you’ll be welcomed and helped, so there are not two family members that are ever stuck having to go to the same meeting. Another vital tool to help relationships survive early recovery is therapy. Now, you might think I’m biased on this because I’m a therapist myself, but I actually became a huge therapy fan long before I even considered going back to school myself. That’s because therapy has made a life changing difference in me as an individual but also in what I bring to relationships and, thus, for the long-term survival of those relationships. This has happened both through individual and family therapy, so I highly recommend both. In individual therapy, I get to see my own issues. I get to see what it is that I bring to the table, both positive and negative, and I get to see what is going on underneath the hood. Why do I think this thing? Why do I get caught up in this resentment? Why is it that I act this way, even though I tell myself I’m not going to? Individual therapy acts as a laboratory where it’s safe to try new behaviors out, to explore things deeply, and all with the help of experienced and educated guide. Whatever progress I make there then in turn becomes a positive influence on all my relationships. That’s not such a bad deal. It’s not that uncommon, though, to find that there are some issues that really need to be worked through together, whether it’s the entire family coming in or both members of a couple finding that there are things that are just too difficult to talk through, hurts that feel too deep to just be worked around, or just things where we’re not even sure how to talk about them. That’s another great reason to go in and see a therapist who’s experienced in these matters, both in working with families and working around addiction who can walk you through some of the issues and help you find and resolve conflicts. Now, whether you’re doing individual or family therapy the most important thing is to find the right therapist. Don’t necessarily just go with the first person that your insurance company recommends. You may need to audition a few people to see if somebody’s really a good fit. The most important thing in any therapeutic relationship is how well you connect, how well you trust the person, and there’s no way to know that without talking to them first. I will say that all the great therapists that I found have been through word of mouth, so don’t be afraid to ask around, perhaps at one of those recovery fellowship meetings, to see if anybody has a recommendation of a therapist who’s particularly good at working on the issues that you’re facing. Now, the next few things that we’ll recommend are things that you can do on your own without needing the fellowship or a therapist. One great tool that I found in my own relationship is doing check-ins. That is to say that every night my wife and I check in with each other to see how we’re doing. Now, one big rule that’s important is, just like in those recovery meetings, when we’re doing check-ins, we don’t give each other feedback without invitation. Unless I say or she says you know what; I’d like your feedback on this, I hold my tongue and just listen. Now, you could just do an open format check-in. How’d your day go? I don’t know. How’d your day go? It’s easy for that to just turn into a list of what happened, so maybe use a format to give you a little bit of a deeper dive to help structure it a little bit. One that my wife and I particularly like to use is the questions that are found on Page 86 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and you don’t have to be a member of AA to use these questions. On that page, it says, when we retire at night, we ask ourselves – and then it gives a series of questions such as were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid? The my wife and I like to do it is we ask that set of questions, and then we each answer it. Then we go on to the next question. Do we owe an apology? We each answer and so on until we go through all the questions. The last question on the list says something about what did we pack into the stream of life? Now, that seemed like an odd question when I first heard it, but what was suggested to me by other people in recovery was that that was a good place to put in everything we got right. Where were we of service to others? Where did we live up to our values? Where did we contribute to our recovery or somebody else’s? Where did we shine and feel particularly proud of ourselves? It’s a great way to end the nightly check in on a positive note just before our heads hit the pillow. Another popular check-in format is called FANOS, F-A-N-O-S. This was developed by a couple, Debra and Mark Lasser, with their organization, Faithful and True. As you may have guessed, FANOS is an acronym. First is F, feelings, so share with your partner something that you’re feeling that is going on for you. Next is A for affirmations, affirming your partner for something that you particularly value about them or perhaps something they said or did that day. Next is N for needs. Ask for something that you need. Then comes O for ownership, taking responsibility for something that you’ve done, and then S, struggles and sobriety. Here’s a way to just check in with your partner about how you’re doing in your recovery. Another great tool to use in helping your relationships survive early recovery is having good boundaries. Now, people sometimes think of this as being telling other people what they can and can’t do, but as listeners here know, that’s not really where I come from. I think it’s more about telling other people what you’re going to do because other people are going to do whatever they’re going to do. What that comes down to is looking and saying where is my safety, including the safety of my household, especially children, and where are my values? Using my boundaries, I’m going to stand up for those things, not just try and push other people around or get them to behave. That doesn’t usually work or we wouldn’t even be talking right now. If you want more detail on that, I’m going to recommend Episode 19 of this podcast, which is titled “Effective Communication and Boundaries.” It’ll give you lots of details and tips and tricks to make these things work for you, and of course, that episode is largely based on a chapter in my book, Realistic Hope. The next helpful tip is actually more of an idea and an attitude than a thing that you do, and that idea and attitude is very simple: everybody’s responsible for their own thoughts and feelings and actions. Now, that might seem like a no-brainer to some people, but sometimes we forget those things. We could start to say, well, my loved one did this thing, and that’s why I’m upset, when the reality is is my loved one did whatever they did, and I’m upset because of whatever meaning I attach to it. Doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, but it does mean that, if I’m upset, I can stop and look and say what am I bringing to the table? Is my pride hurt? Is my fear stirred up? Am I getting frustrated? All of those things are not actually somebody else’s fault. They’re my reactions, and if I don’t like my reactions, then I can work on what’s going on within me rather than blaming it on somebody else because it just leads to meaningless conflict in chasing our own tails. Instead, I can take my reaction as a signal that maybe I’ve got some work to do, which could lead me back to one of the recovery fellowships, some of their written exercises, or an individual therapy or maybe family therapy session where I can explore what’s going on within me, and I can learn and grow, which then means the relationship is probably going to be better anyway. By the same token, I’m not going to take responsibility for anyone else’s thoughts, feelings, or actions, and for a lot of loved ones around somebody else’s addiction, that can be an easy trap to fall into. What if I say or do the wrong thing and they relapse? The fact is, if I say or do the “wrong thing,” it doesn’t actually make anybody relapse. Lots of people have said the wrong thing to me. I didn’t relapse. Other times, everybody was treating me just great, and I went off the deep end anyway. Let go of that responsibility of thinking that it’s up to you to manage your loved one and make sure that they’re okay. It just doesn’t work. My final suggestion is going to be to have, dare I say it, realistic hope, and I originally picked that phrase because, to me, it means finding a balance between the sheer hopelessness of nothing’s going to get better and nothing seems to be improving or the unrealistic hope that I know it’s just going to be smooth sailing from here. Now we’re in recovery. Everything’s good from here on out. It just doesn’t really work that way. The reality is is that recovery is not a smooth road. It’s not a straight line. It’s not an easy path, and that’s for the person with the addiction or the person who loves them. There are going to be struggles. There are going to be ups and downs, but it can always get better if you put in the work. Let that be my parting thought because I wish each and every one of you, anybody listening, some of that realistic hope and some of the recovery that we’ve been so privileged to enjoy and the improvements we’ve seen in our relationships as a result. Thanks for being with us through another episode of Addiction and the Family. 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. We’re also happy to be your friend on Facebook, and we can be found tweeting on Twitter.

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