Addiction in your family? Help yourself first!

It is usual for family members to believe that they cannot be okay when someone they love is sick or miserable. It is normal for them to think it would be a betrayal to be all right amid a beloved’s illness or discomfort. However, that is precisely what is needed in the case of addiction in the family.

Remember what the airline flight attendants say in their safety instructions before takeoff. They remind you that in case of emergency and the deployment of oxygen masks, place the mask on your own face before you attempt to help others. This is the same kind of situation.

What does detachment mean?

Detachment is a tool for family members’ recovery and a goal of most recovery programs for codependents. Detachment makes it possible to give up responsibility for another person’s disease or recovery from it. As part of the family dynamics of addiction, the family member becomes hopelessly entangled in the addict’s addiction. The family member gets obsessed with the addict. Just as the addict gets addicted to his drug or bottle, the family gets ‘addicted’ to the addict!

Healthy detachment from the addict’s addiction must occur to begin one’s own recovery. When family members are healthily detached from the addict, they are more likely to seize an opportunity to assist the addict in getting into recovery.

In their obsession with the addict’s addiction, family members typically think that they have the answers, can (or should) fix it, or know exactly what the addict needs to do to change their lives. In the process, you get stuck in a fight for control that keeps you hooked on the substance.

When you obsess about others’ problems, you focus all your energy and resources on what they are doing or not doing, thinking or not thinking, and feeling or not feeling. These obsessions about others don’t solve anyone’s problems. Getting locked into a struggle over control with the addict helps the addict stay in denial by blaming you.

When you are obsessing about someone else, you become detached from yourself. You don’t know what you are feeling. You question your sense of reality and sanity. You may get into a circular pattern of worrying, reacting, and obsessively trying to control. Family members tend to get so bound up in this coercive pattern that they forget they have other choices than to respond in this manner. They are engaged in compulsive behaviour, like the addict. They become invested in their own solutions and compulsively keep trying to sell that solution to the addict. Family members’ solutions may be right on. They may be perfectly rational or reasonable. Unfortunately, addiction is not logical or fair.

Family members often get to a place of detachment through frustration and anger. Detachment does not have to involve anger or a hostile withdrawal. It does not include an acceptance of anything that comes your way. It is not about withholding love and concern. Family members can detach with love.

Healthy detachment from the addict’s addiction must occur to begin one’s own recovery.

Healthy detachment involves letting go of others’ responsibilities mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically. With healthy detachment, you acknowledge that you cannot solve another’s problems and allow them the dignity to do it for themselves. Healthy detachment also assumes that you take on the job of your own responsibilities.

How do you detach with love?

It is easier to let go of control of something when you realise that you never really had control in the first place. An excellent place to start learning healthy detachment is to identify how your attempts to take control have not worked and have created unmanageability in your life. These attempts might involve trying to manage their mood, limit their intake of chemicals, manipulate, nag, reason, plead or shame them into changing their behaviour.

It is helpful to understand that your efforts to take control have involved “chasing an illusion of control.” The illusion of control comes from thinking that your efforts worked when, over time, the effort was ineffective. In focusing on “them,” a family member becomes someone that s/he doesn’t want to be as their life becomes unmanageable. When family members can identify how attempts are not working and how those attempts create havoc in their own lives, it is easier to give up the illusion of control and the need to control.

Family members can recover from their ‘addiction’, regardless of whether the addict does. Allowing the addict to suffer the natural negative consequences of their behaviour can enable crises to happen. If you have peace of mind and stability in your own life, you can take advantage of crises and help the addict find the right help when they are most willing to accept it.

The term “Let Go” sums up quite eloquently what detachment with love is all about

Let Go

• To let go does not mean to stop caring; it means I can’t do it for someone else.
• To let go is not to cut myself off; it’s the realisation that I can’t control another.
• To let go is not to enable but to allow learning from natural consequences.
• To let go is to admit powerlessness, which means the outcome is not in my hands.
• To let go is not to try to change or blame another; it’s to make the most of myself.
• To let go is not to care for but to care about.
• To let go is not to fix but to be supportive.
• To let go is not to judge but to allow another to be a human being.
• To let go is not to be in the middle of arranging all the outcomes but to allow others to affect their destinies.
• To let go is not to be protective but to permit another to face reality.
• To let go is not to deny but to accept.
• Letting go is not nagging, scolding, or arguing but finding and correcting my shortcomings.
• To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires but to take each day as it comes and cherish myself in it.
• To let go is not to criticise and regulate anybody but to try to become what I dream I can be.
• To let go is not to regret the past but to grow and live for the future.
• To let go is to fear less and love more.

Support for family members is available at Hope Trust. The therapy team is equipped to help you with evidence-based, effective strategies to cope with an addiction in your family.

Call 90008 50001 or click www.hopetrustindia.com for an online or in-clinic appointment with an expert.