So, about 20 years ago, when I was early in my recovery from family addiction journey, I reached out to my sponsor for support around some awful thing my mother had done. Side note – I know very well that 12 Step recovery is not for everyone, and I’m not trying to endorse it here. It just happens to be part of my own story, so I am sharing about it in that light.

At any rate, what I was calling my sponsor about was something my mother had done some version of a million times before. And I continued to just get totally rocked by it each time she did it again.

And my sponsor could see that, even though I’d been in this support program for awhile, I was still stuck essentially thinking my life was over unless my mother changed.

And she said something to me I’ll never forget. She said, “Madeleine, your mother has the right not to recover.”

And my first reaction to that was like, “Whachu talkin’ ’bout Willis?” And I know that reference is going to age me there, so if you didn’t get that, you’ll have to look the show Different Strokes. But suffice it to say I was absolutely in this totally flabbergasted place, like how could she make such a claim!

But just like a cancer patient has the right to refuse chemo, an addicted person also has the right to refuse treatment, for better or for worse.

And of course, they also have the right to the consequences of that decision.

Now, I know you might be confused to hear me say this because a big part of what I help families do is to learn how to have a positive influence on the substance use, because your loved one does not exist in a vacuum.

You are able to influence them. And doing that in a positive way does improve outcomes.

And I’m not here to go back on that in this video.

But part of having a positive influence on your loved one’s use is to live your own life, to the best of your ability whether they’re using or not. And feeling like you have to wait for them to recover before you can live your life doesn’t actually help anything. In fact it does the opposite.

And my sponsor’s “outrageous” claim is what drove that point home for me.

So let me explain how that works:

One of the things that drives continued substance abuse is shame. Shame may or may not have been part of what started the use, but it is definitely what drives continued use in spite of all the problems it causes.

Because, whether your loved one admits it or not, they are deeply ashamed of their use and of the things their use drives them to do. They are – I promise.

Now, it’s not helpful to act like their behavior is OK, but one of the ways you can help them with the shame is to live your life to the best of your ability. It not only helps you better weather this scary and chaotic journey, it also relieves your loved one of the the fear – and the shame – that they’re totally ruining your life.

So, what’s one very teeny-tiny way you can start to reclaim your life? Can you go back to your book club? Can you call a friend you haven’t talked to in a long, long time. Get you get back out on the golf course with friends? Even if you only did one little thing once a month, it would make a difference.

So what can you do? Let me know in the comments.

But before we wrap up this episode, I want to address one more thing that I’m sure you might be thinking. Maybe you’re feeling like living your life means that you don’t care what your loved one is struggling with, or that you don’t care what happens to them, or that you don’t that the severity of the problem that seriously.

Not at all. You can life your life and still care. You can live your life and still fully understand what’s at stake.

A loved one’s struggle with substances is a completely horrific journey to have to navigate. It’s full of grief and fear – and there’s no way around that, even if you do live your own life to the best of your ability.

And if your loved one doesn’t recover, or God forbid, loses their life to the substance, your heart is absolutely going to break. I’m not pretending it won’t.

But the only way to navigate this journey with your psyche relatively intact is to create a space for your own life, too.

It’s not easy, and I don’t claim to have done that perfectly myself. It was a very up and down journey for me. Every step of the way I’ve had to grieve for the mother I never had.

And my mother passed a little over a year ago, so then I had to grieve for the mother I never would.

But through my own recovery journey – which included living my life to the best of my ability – some days well, some days not so well, I discovered that, yes, my heart was broken over my mother. But there was so much more that my heart could hold.

A number of years ago when I was working at a family recovery program, I told the story of how my sponsor insisted upon me all those years agon that my mother had the right not to recover.

And after that session a mother came up to me and share that she’d been putting her life, and all the things she wanted to do, on hold for years waiting for her son to recover.

She didn’t realize that she had permission to live anyway.

You, too, have permission to live anyway. Not because you don’t care, but because you do. And just because we are experiencing this kind of really heavy problem that we didn’t choose, doesn’t mean that we can’t still choose moments of joy where we can.

Our lives, our psyches, our emotions, hold multitudes. And making whatever room we can for all of it will help both us and our loved ones.

First, without effective support, family members develop unhealthy codependent coping mechanisms in an effort to cope with the fear and mitigate the pain of the situation. They are an understandable reaction to this situation, even though they are not productive.

The fear is understandable, and the pain is very real and may be overwhelming without some kind of support. The unproductive behaviors actually support family members in the face of the fear and the pain in the short term, but they don’t fix the heart of the problem.

If family members wish to address the heart of the problem, they need a kind of effective support that will both support them in the long term in the face of the fear and the pain, and help them address the heart of the problem.  

Second, the addicted person is not likely to respond lovingly to family members’ efforts to change. And because addiction can also easily divide other family members, it is quite possible that even other family members will not respond positively to your efforts to change the way you respond to your loved one’s use.

Sadly, other family members are not likely to provide the kind of support you need to change. You need another source of effective support if you’re going to be able to change in the face of this resistance.

Third, when family members stop covering up the problems their loved one’s substance use creates, unfortunately, they ultimately have to face the pain of those consequences: the embarrassment, the financial difficulties, the loss of jobs, the separations or even divorces, and tragically, sometimes even the death of their loved one.

In other words, they have to walk through the grief they may have been using their ineffective codependent coping mechanisms to avoid.

Effective support is essential for family members to have the courage to walk through these problems, to fully grieve, and remain emotionally and spiritually whole on the other side, even though the situation is heartbreaking.

Fourth, one of the things that is essential to healing from our own codependent coping behaviors is to feel our feelings and, again, ultimately grieve a loved one’s substance use and the problems it creates.

Family members need people who are safe to feel these feelings with. Family members need to learn to be vulnerable again. And effective support is essential to this process.  

An effective support person can also help family members identify feelings they struggle to name. This in turn helps family members better identify their needs and determine if boundaries need to be set and what those boundaries should look like. 

Fifth: Following number four, an effective support person can also help family members determine how and when to express their feelings with their loved one. They can help family members work through the feelings and then move beyond the pain so family members do not stay stuck in unproductive coping behaviors.. 

Sixth, effective support is even more necessary if there has been physical or sexual abuse from your loved one. It is not unheard of for the loved one or even other family members to find any possible exposure of that abuse so threatening that they turn the victim of that abuse into a scapegoat, denying or minimizing experiences, or placing the blame for the abuse on the victim. 

Seventh, change takes time. Recovery from substance abuse takes time. And family healing takes time. And you will never do all these things perfectly. Effective support is necessary to have the patience, compassion, realistic expectations, and continued energy to make the changes that will truly make a difference over the long term.

Eighth, just as addiction often comes with other co-occurring emotional disorders, it is not uncommon for both loved ones and family members to have their own emotional disorders beyond family addiction that impact the dynamic of addiction in the family.

Effective support is essential to addressing these other factors. These factors may also require a professional specific to the disorder. 

Ninth, living with addiction slowly undermines our ability to trust ourselves. We need support to rebuild this faculty. 

Tenth, fear and anger will take over and completely replace any love you might have felt if there is no effective support. Effective support will help you keep your heart and your humanity intact.

Eleventh, One way to have a positive influence is to allow your loved one to face reasonable and compassionate consequences for their use. But this is difficult to do and painful to watch them go through. You need effective support if you’re going to be able to do it anyway. 

And twelfth, accusations of others who don’t have a good understanding addiction, and who may be guided by the scores of cultural myths out there, can also unfairly make you feel guilty for your feelings and / or your decisions regarding the substance use. You need effective support in order to be able to stand your ground in the face of this. 

In sum, without effective support, the work of supporting your loved one in a way that actually improves their chances of recovery will be too difficult. Healing yourself while having the compassion that is so important to positively influencing your loved one is utterly impossible without it.

The shame and the isolation associated with addiction affect family members as profoundly as they affect the addicted person. And making changes that will improve your life and positively influence your loved one is not easy. Your chances of being able to do this in isolation are slim.

This is why you don’t need just any support – you need effective support. You will notice that I use the word  effective pretty much every time I mention support. Lots of people will think they’re genuinely offering support when what they’re actually doing is far from it. 

So we need to know exactly what effective support is. So here are four elements of effective support:

One: It comes from someone who does not judge, and who understands the immense challenges of a loved one’s substance use

Two: It comes from someone who understands your experience, either because they have their  
own experience with addiction, or because they have learned about addiction, or because they have professional training around the issue.

Someone who has no understanding can certainly offer compassion, and that can be helpful, but they probably cannot offer the kind of support that will assist you in effectively changing the way you respond to your loved one’s substance use. Compassion is somewhat helpful, but it will not get you where you need to go.

Three: It comes from someone who advocates for your own healing, not just your addicted loved one’s recovery.

Sadly, this is an area where a lot of family support services out there fall short. For example, many treatment programs do not offer any meaningful family recovery services, and of those that do, many of those programs focus solely on actions that support your loved one’s recovery, and ignore the family members’ need for healing themselves.

This means that family members cannot assume that, if their loved one seeks treatment, the treatment center will be an adequate source of support for them, too. Very few treatment centers provide any family support.

Four: When it comes to the challenging choices faced by family members, an effective support person does not tell you what to do. So for example, they won’t tell you to kick them out or to let them move in, to give or not to give them money, to pay or not pay for treatment, to stay in contact or sever contact.

They simply support you in arriving at the decision that feels the best for you and a decision that you most feel you can live with.

Now, there is one caveat to not telling family members what to do: an effective source of support will tell you that you need to take action to protect yourself if you are being subjected to violence.

As the source of support you have in front of you right now, I am going to tell you, if your loved one is using violence or the threat of violence to keep you from responding to or interfering with their addiction, you need to take every action possible to secure your safety.

Pay attention to the cues that they are about to become violent and back off if you see them. Stash money away, hide a set of car keys, find an alternate source of shelter with a family member, friend, or domestic abuse shelter so that you can leave if you need to. Have these things ready ahead of time so if the threat of violence arises, you are fully ready to take care of yourself. 

Nothing else I tell you here will have any effect if you are trapped in a violent situation. You must take action to ensure your safety first.

I hope you are not in that situation, but if you are, please take action right away.

OK, so the next question is, where can you find this kind of effective support? If you have friends and/or family members who meet these criteria, that is a beautiful thing.

Many family members don’t however. Even if you do, you might find a wider support network to be helpful.

So, in the next episode, I’m going to discuss several places you can find that kind of support and the pros and cons of each source of support.

But before I close out this episode, I invite you to share in the comments, to what extent are you finding effective support in the people you may have already turned to? In what ways are the sources of support you’ve turned not as effective as they could be?

Will it be difficult for you to turn elsewhere if you’re not finding the kind of support you truly need in family or friends? Just a note here: It’s perhaps best not to name names in the comments.

• Believing family myths. My family has this myth going that they’re all creative geniuses and that the mental health and substance issues go hand-in-hand with that creative genius. And to be fair, many people in my family are genuinely highly creative. But they would narcissistically argue that the creativity somehow justified the damage of the substance use and other abusive behaviors driven by mental illness or personality disorders.So step one was to stop believing the myths that propped up the family dysfunction. They may be creative people, but they’re mentally and emotionally sick and need mental health and substance use support.

• Sacrificing safety and well-being for convenience or cost savings. This is really about the things that kept me from being able to leave the gathering when things started heading south. Things like agreeing to stay with family members who are “only trying to help me out” financially, when in reality, that offer came with added expectations of putting up with the chaos. Or driving down with other family members which left me without an easy means of leaving and potentially jeopardizing my ride back if I didn’t scratch the chaos and dysfunction up to “par for the course.

• Leaving myself with no other options. Part of this goes part and parcel with numbers one and two, but there are other emotional and psychological ways I was left with no other options. There was another part of the family mythology that had me believing that I was nothing without my family, and so the thought of not being part of these significant family gatherings left me feeling like a total loser, small and alone. Like I was totally unworthy of love when in fact the total opposite was true.Unpacking this required me to get Effective Support and to stop isolating myself in the face of the family addiction. I still had to grieve the love that was not currently available to me in my family, but effective support allowed me to create family of my own choosing.This gave me viable options during the holidays, not just people who were willing to take in a “stray” or “holiday orphan” during the holidays, but again, that chosen family that truly wanted my company during the holidays.

So that was how I started to change my experience of the holidays. So I would love to know about you:

If you’re in the U.S., was your Thanksgiving also a shit show? And is a part of you dreading the remaining holidays? Thanksgiving is already under our belts. And so I invite you – if you feel comfortable – to consider how you could support yourself in doing something differently around the holidays.

If my experience above resonated with you, you might consider doing some reflection or journaling on the following three questions:

• What family myths keep you sucked into the family dysfunction, and thus keep you doing the same thing and hoping for something different? What keeps you believing them?

• Are you sacrificing you safety and well-being for convenience or cost savings? If so, how? Can you brainstorm other options?

• Have you created your own mythology around you self-worth or my worthiness that is somehow tied to tolerating the chaos in the family? This can become its own perverted form of FOMO in my experience.

Before you answer these questions, I highly recommend you have a trusted, supportive, and non-judgmental person – who is NOT a family member – with whom you can share what comes up when you answer these questions. Not that you have to share any of it, but I say this because what comes up might feel really heavy, and you may need someone to help you process. This can be a friend, a clergy person, a support group or a therapist. But I don’t recommend sharing what comes up with family members unless you are absolutely sure that what you share won’t be used against you.

So that’s a start. But there are a few other things you can do as well.

• Acknowledge your feelings. If your holiday was indeed a sh*t show, then it will be important to acknowledge whatever feelings you feel about that, whether that’s anger, disappointment, sadness, frustration or something else. For better or worse, all healing is on the other side of feeling feelings. Which sucks, I know.
  
  But there’s the catch here. There may actually be a step that you need to take before this one, if your family is anything like mine. And that is to believe that you actually have a right to these feelings. As in, they’re valid and there’s nothing wrong with you for having them.
  
  I didn’t have a right to my feelings growing up, and when I got upset or objected to anything I was told I was too sensitive and I just needed to get over it. It was no big deal, and I was now creating problems for making a big deal of it. And if I didn’t get over it, I was told I just needed to leave that in the past.Coming to believe you have a right to these feelings requires effective support. And if that’s the case for you, I’ll put a link in the blog to an IG reel I have on what constitutes effective support. And there are links on my resources page to where you might find it.

  But if you feel like you don’t have a right to these feelings, that could be one of the things that keeps you brushing them under the rug year after year, and, like I did for so long, continuing to do the same thing over and over every time the holidays came around and hoping for a different result.

  And you know, the holidays would go “relatively” well just often enough to keep me hoping. But it never, ever, stuck.

• There’s another thing you can do, but before I mention that, I think a little context would be helpful.
  
  So, I often do a little ChatGPT work before I write blog posts. It’s a great tool for identifying what the dominant narrative is on the interwebs about any given issue. And when it comes to addiction and family addiction, what comes up often makes me want to hurl.
  
  To be fair, the previous point did come up, but what ChatGPT had to say about acknowledging your feelings was completely devoid of how difficult that can be and what actually gets in the way it for families. And the next point was to initiate honest and open communication. Theoretically, a good idea.
  
  In practice, it’s much more complicated. In fact, I’m quite confident that you’ve already tried to communicate your concerns, but they have not been heard. And sure, there may be ways in which it would be helpful to shift your approach, but if what you say is not backed up with boundaries, the communication often gets you nowhere, and your words can end up twisted, taken out of context, and then used against you.
  
  So before we talk about communication, I think it’s important to talk about boundaries. Because when most of the literature talks about communication, they are focusing on communicating your concerns. With words. Depending on the severity of the substance use or other dysfunction in your family, words about your concerns often get nowhere.

  When it comes to unacceptable behavior driven by substance use or other dysfunction, boundaries are actually the most effective source of communication there is. But they’re incredibly difficult to set and even harder to stick to. Because you pretty much have to count on backlash.

  This is why I’m developing an entire workshop on setting boundaries with a loved one’s substance use. It is one of the best forms of communication out there when it comes to family addiction, but it’s damn near impossible to do if you don’t have effective support. 

• Speaking of boundaries, one of THE most important boundaries to set around the holidays is to Have a Plan B.
  
  When you leave yourself with no other options, you end up stuck on the ride with the family dysfunction. And for years, I had left myself with no other options, both psychologically with my thinking about being nothing without my family, and also materially with the choices I made during the holidays that left me with no readily available option for stepping away from the chaos.
  
  I personally had to approach this in a couple of ways. When it came to changing my thinking, I needed Effective Support in order to do that. In my case, I found that both through support groups and professional therapy.
  
  Once they family mythology no longer had such a tight grip on me, then I was able to make different choices about if and under what conditions I could participate in family holidays. I would only participate if I had my own transportation and a place to stay that was not with a family member. Sometimes that was a hotel, other times I stayed with friends.

  When I could, I would also connect with understanding friends – usually other members of my support group – and ask if they could be my backup holiday gathering in case I had to leave my own family gathering.

  And when it comes to the holidays, the boundaries for me were the conditions under which I was willing to participate, and the Plan B. And when it comes to the Plan B, it’s important to be very clear with yourself about what type of behavior or situation is going to trigger the Plan B.

  I suggest also making a commitment to an understanding friend that you will trigger the plan B if those conditions are met. If you’re at all like me and are conflict averse, it’s easy to say things aren’t that bad when in fact they are. But the Plan B is how you say that the behavior is unacceptable.

  And when you have a Plan B in place, you don’t even need to get angry because you know you’re not trapped. This allows your communication to be far more compassionate. Because it allows people to be who they are while still taking care of yourself. Then healthier communication can happen after the drama of the holidays has subsided.

But, the thing is, all of this requires support. If you’re looking at the myths that keep you stuck, you’re going to feel some things. And it’s a lot easier to allow yourself to feel those things if you’ve got a reasonably healthy support system outside of the family.

If you’ve never before set a boundary, if you’ve never created a Plan B for the holidays, if you’ve never deliberately planned for an easy exit around holiday gatherings, the first time you do that can feel really, really scary. And the reality that all if this is even necessary will also bring up grief. Which again brings you back to feeling your feelings. Again, knowing there are people who have your back will make it much easier to walk through that fear.

Finally, as with everything around family addiction. Everything I’ve suggested here is easier said than done. And that’s the thing that makes me crazy with a lot of the advice out there to families. They make it sound like it’s so simple. The concepts are simple, but the practice of them is anything but.

I know very well that I’m suggesting things that can be really scary to execute in practice. So I want to close this post by saying, if you’re not ready to execute on all of this, that’s OK. Maybe you just reflect on how you get wrapped up in some kind of family mythology. Or maybe you just take your own car, even though you have no intention of leaving, no matter what happens. Maybe you just start to feel feelings that you’ve never been allowed to feel.

Start with what you can and just keep it in the back of your head that in the future you can take it a little farther.

Family addiction and dysfunction is like a huge cruise ship or a semi. Neither can turn around on a dime. It takes time and often some back and forth.

But if your Thanksgiving was a sh*t show and you’re even considering what you could do differently, that’s beautiful first step.