Alcoholism Is a Family Disease
Alcoholism is a family disease. Compulsive drinking affects the drinker, and it affects the drinker’s relationships. Friendships, employment, childhood, parenthood, love affairs, and marriages all suffer from the effects of alcoholism. Those special relationships in which a person is really close to an alcoholic are affected most, and we who care are the most caught up in the behavior of another person. - Al-Anon pamphlet, Understanding Ourselves and Alcoholism
Most of us don’t get help early in our addictions. By the time we came to Asana Recovery, most of us had years of drinking and using in our past, which left behind collateral damage in all aspects of our lives, particularly in our relationships. Some of us had grievous injuries to our relationships: divorces, lost custody, and friends who no longer speak to us. Even those of us whose relationships remained intact had left behind hurt feelings and anxiety in the people who cared about us the most.
While our lives had been consumed by using, our loved ones’ lives were consumed by responding to our using. They adapted to our behavior just as we adapted to theirs. They were avoiding, accommodating, justifying and running away from our addictions. They lived in helpless fear of our disease or tried to control it. Well-intentioned but ineffective loved ones tried to “fix” us or solve our problems for us. In a different way, our families’ lives revolved around drugs and alcohol just as much as our own did.
We know that someone suffering from addiction needs understanding, emotional support, time to heal and new tools to handle life without substances. It follows that the people closest to them - the families and loved ones affected by another’s addiction - need all the same things.
Understanding, Emotional Support, Time to Heal, New Tools to Handle Life
What we fail to realize or accept is that alcoholism is a disease. So many of us have longed for the day when the alcoholic in our lives would find sobriety, only to be dismayed when sobriety ushered in a whole new set of difficulties. Taking care of one symptom, even a a major symptom, does not cure the whole disease. - How Al-Anon Works for Families and Friends of Alcholics
While reading this article may trigger feelings of shame or guilt for those of us in recovery, that’s not the intention. Nor, are shame and guilt helpful for improving anything. If we are working the steps - staying sober, doing personal inventory, making amends - and trying to be better people, that is our atonement. The purpose of this article is, instead, to encourage people in recovery to have patience and understanding with the people we care about.
Al-Anon, family therapy and individual therapy are all helpful resources for families trying to find their footing after addiction has knocked them down. We can offer our loved ones encouragement, support and understanding to help them find the same recovery we have. They deserve our understanding, not our criticism, blame or hurt feelings.
It will take time for the family to heal. We earn back broken trust by showing up again and again, day after day. Being honest. Fulfilling responsibilities. Helping others. Working to improve ourselves. Staying sober. These are the things that we can do to help our families heal.
As long as we are sober and compassionate we can mend broken relationships and build new ones better than anything we had before the gift of recovery.
Protecting Our Sobriety
Many of us grew up in families - or created family groups of our own - where drugs and alcohol were the source of many problems. Just because we have a new design for living, doesn’t mean that the people around us have. When we return home from treatment, all of us have to figure out how to handle other people’s drinking and using while ensuring our own priority: protecting our own sobriety. Many of us with the disease of addiction find that Al-Anon can be helpful, or even essential, to our healing and long-term recovery.
Save the Date: Saturday, June 17
Let’s go out to the ballpark! Join your fellow Asana Recovery Alumni for an Oklahoma City Dodgers game on Saturday, June 17 at 7pm.
Alum Spotlight
If you’d like to be featured in an Alum Spotlight feature in the newsletter, please contact your admissions counselor. If you don’t have their contact info, check the list below:
Kimberly Brave: 405-999-0550
Lyndsay Gasser: 949-922-0180
Krystal Smith: 949-244-6822