How do you change your people, places, and things when you are in recovery when most of your family uses?
Supposing you grew up in a family where alcohol, drugs, and gambling are an ingrained part of the family culture?
Recovery, in these situations, involves not only abstinence, AA, and other kinds of treatment services, but family of origin work as well.
I am starting a new category of posts on this blog tagged "family disease". These will deal with information concerning alcoholism and substance abuse being not just an individual problem but behavior which developed, is maintained, and sustained, and impacts the family system.
To use alcohol as an example, the trouble that alcohol causes is not only detrimental to the well being of the person abusing but to everyone that person is in relationship with. Buddhists describe the importance of "right relationship" and engaging in, developing, and sustaining a "right relationship" is very diffcult, if not impossible, when chemicals, and other addictive behaviors are involved.
Let us know what you think about this idea of substance abuse being a family disease.
This is article #1 in a series on substance abuse, the family disease.
1 comment:
Early in my career I worked moslty with adolescants. Many times the teenager was following the lead of an addcitied parent and had no chance of recovery without the adicted parent coming to grips with their own addiction. It probably borders as unethical to treat the teenager outside of the family system.
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