How Family Members Change With Addiction In The Family
Family members are often confused about the parts that they plan in the family dynamics of addiction
. They are confused about how they can end up acting outside their own value system and end up not liking themselves.
The answer is that alcoholism and other drug addiction is a disease that affects the entire family. Addiction takes a toll on each family member, not just the addict.
As the addict gets more and more involved in the addiction, the chemical comes to take center place in his or her life. In the process, the addict's life gets smaller and focused in on getting the drug, using it, and recovering from its use. Family members also find that their focus gets more and more narrowly tuned in on the addict and his/her substance abuse.
Individual and family dynamics of addiction take a predictable course of progression. As the addict applies chemical coping to a broader spectrum of life's problems, amount, frequency, tolerance, and negative consequences all increase. Some of the negative consequences that begin to occur are family conflicts, anger and hurt feelings, and relationship problems. Other negative consequences that may be occurring include arrests, hangovers, blackouts, mental health problems, work problems.
Negative consequences are not obvious to the addict. Making the connection between the drinking/drugging and these consequences is prevented by denial and other defense mechanisms.
Family dynamics of addiction are just as predictable as the individual addict's progression of the disease. Although the consequences of the drinking/drugging behavior are foreseable, family members, with their own denial, often believe the explanations, and rationalizations for the behavior and its consequences. The alcoholic wants to believe that s/he is still in control. The family member wants to believe that the alcoholic can regain control. Family members set about trying to help the addict regain control or to try to gain control for him or her. They try all kinds of problem solving behavior to fix the problem. They start trying to fix the problem long before they have correctly identified it. Family members often incorrectly diagnose the problem as issues such as depression, ADD/ADHD, underemployment, low self esteem, or not having a girlfriend. Some of the things they do to solve the problem actually end up enabling the very behavior they are seeking to eliminate.
Eventually the spouse or parent discovers that the real problem is addiction and begins to try to modify the addict's drinking or using. They may feel compelled to take control in the obvious absence of the addict's control. These family members get quite creative (and manipulative) in their efforts to change the alcoholic. They get the addict to promise to quit. Family members regain some hope with each new promise, only to have it dashed with each broken promise and failed attempt to quit or stay quit.
In the process of struggling with the addict over the chemical, non-addicted spouses come to see the addict's behavior as something that they are deliberately doing to try to destroy themselves and the family. Eventually the addict and the family member get locked into a game of tug-of-war over the chemical that comes to characterize and define the relationship.
Everyone in the family feels hurt and afraid. The family system shifts to accommodate the illness of the addict, and eventually the ongoing struggle between spouses. Both spouses feel resentment and blame the other for his or her own behavior.
As the addict becomes more and more disabled by the addiction, the non-addicted spouse takes on most of the roles in the family. The children are often recruited to help. The family operates in survival mode most of the time.
Survival mode includes stereotypical roles that family members take on. These roles, that tend to persist over time, are chosen or assigned based on personality, birth order, and family structure. Each person in his/her role has a job to do for the system. The survival roles all serve to reduce the tension and pain in the system.
Changes occur incrementally over time, often outside of the awareness of the family members themselves. With these changes, each person finds himself or herself making choices that s/he might not ordinarily have made. Many of these choices involve acting outside one's value system. This leads to shame, guilt, low self-esteem, and turning into someone that they never wanted to be.
The pain, the conflict, and the walking around on eggshells usually persists for some time, often until the one or both of the two battling spouses decide to separate. This change often signals a crisis that is enough to motivate the addict to seek treatment, help, and recovery. The other family members may have already sought assistance, or they may have discovered that their efforts to make the addict change simply have not worked and are not likely to work in the future. When a family member internalizes this awareness s/he is able to "detach".
Family members operate under the belief that when the addict stops drinking or using that all the problems in the family will be solved. They believe that if the addict can just quit drinking or using, or at least quit having the negative consequences of his/her drinking and using, that everything will be alright. This is usually not the case.
The first year of recovery is often a very difficult time, not only for the recovering alcoholic/addict, but for the family as well.
Copyright (c) 2009 Peggy L. Ferguson, Ph.D.
by: Peggy Ferguson
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