For many of us living with addiction, one of the elements of our recovery is examining how the dynamics and experiences of our families have contributed to our addictions. We might feel inclined to avoid looking at our families altogether. We might not want to address how we’ve been impacted by them. We might have unresolved issues with our families that we find too painful to face. We might have witnessed our families perpetuating such harmful patterns that we instinctively turned away from them and separated ourselves from them. We might be estranged from our families and feel as though we’ll never have a relationship with them. Addiction is often considered to be a family disease, for many different reasons. Among these reasons is the fact that addiction can be hereditary, and genetic traits for addiction can be passed down, another reason being that all the members of a family can be impacted by one individual’s experience with addiction. When one of us struggles with addiction, we are all affected, and we all have a recovery process to undergo to heal from it.
Persistent Family Patterns
When we have unhealed pain in our families, many of us fall into patterns of emotional avoidance and suppression, where we’re not actually tackling the family issues. We’re not facing the problems but instead turning away from them. They tend to worsen over time because our avoidance gives them more power over us. Also, the more we don’t give them our attention and healing energy, the more we perpetuate them and repeat them, over and over again, often because we are unconscious of them and don’t know how to resolve them. Our lack of mindfulness around our family issues makes us continue to feed into them. We continue to engage with each other in the same dysfunctional, problematic ways. We continue to self-destruct, to hurt each other, and to erode the fabric of our families. We don’t mend the broken parts of our relationships, we don’t rebuild the broken bridges, and we very often aren’t even discussing things with our families. We might use silence as one of our coping mechanisms, giving our family members the silent treatment and avoiding them or even cutting them off, for years of our lives if not forever. Gradually our issues can become so overpowering that we feel there’s no way to solve them. We give up on our families. We give up on the idea of having them in our lives. We stop wanting to communicate, to share, to bond. We let go of the relationships that have meant so much to us in our lives, thinking that our issues can’t ever be solved.
Shared Common Issues
Oftentimes our families have been a contributing factor in our unwellness. We learned our patterns, including our addictive patterns, from our families. We learned to suppress our emotions from them. We learned to numb our pain with our drugs of choice and to self-medicate with them. We learned that the way to handle conflict is to avoid it. We learned that difficult emotions are better suppressed and avoided rather than confronted. Many of us inherited the traits for mental illness from our families, along with traits for addiction, and we see signs of depression, anxiety, and other mental and emotional health issues not only in ourselves and in our own lives, but in family members as well and in their lives. Many of us are struggling with some of the same pervasive health issues as our families, but when we’ve been conditioned to avoid our challenges, we often won’t tackle these issues as a family. Instead, we might blame our families for our struggles. We might distance ourselves from them, labeling them as toxic and destructive, not realizing that we are all sharing in the same pain, not realizing that we might need each other to heal. We might need to get to the root of these shared family issues in order to recover.
Personal Healing Work Benefits the Whole Family
For many of us, healing from our addictions as well as our family issues entails going on our own personal recovery journey. We find that doing our own inner healing work, separately and on our own, makes us better equipped to return to our families and help them with their healing. We’ve gained valuable insight and learned helpful tools we can share. We’ve done some very important soul-searching around our family’s histories and experiences that our families can also benefit from. We’ve learned so much that we can then pass along to our family members, for them to use in their recovery. Sometimes our families will have done their own self-reflection work as well, and we can all come back together to address our common family issues, including our struggles with addiction. We can reunite with a shared purpose of family recovery. We can move through our challenges with newfound hope and faith because we’ve given ourselves time to see that healing is in fact possible. Once we’ve done some important healing work, we’re able to focus on the love we share and use that to help us overcome whatever issues we still face.
At The Guest House Ocala, we have personal recovery experience
and over 12 years in the recovery industry.
We have helped countless people recover, and we’re here to help you too.
Call 855-483-7800 today for more information.
theguesthouseocala.com
3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488