Is your loved one dealing with an addiction? For them, the experience can be very lonely and isolating. They may think they’re the only person struggling in the family. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Addiction is a family disease, after all. Addiction can even be rooted in issues among the family, such as family dysfunction. Whatever the contributing factors, it can have a damaging impact on family members beyond just the loved one struggling with a substance use disorder. You may be feeling the effects of your loved one’s choices right now.
Just as addiction can hurt family relationships, it can be healed with the family’s help. In many ways, the family can become the hero that comes alongside their loved one throughout the recovery process. That’s why we take a family-centered approach to addiction treatment here at The Blanchard Institute, empowering you as a family to help your loved one live a happy, healthy, more connected and fulfilled life, free from addiction.
Addiction is a Family Disease
When we describe addiction as a family disease, what does that mean? The concept refers to the reality that your addicted loved one isn’t the only person negatively impacted by their substance abuse. Addiction and family often get caught up in the fallout. Your loved one’s addiction has a ripple effect throughout the entire family.
Each family member can be impacted in unique ways, including:
- Unmet developmental needs
- Impaired attachment
- Legal problems
- Emotional distress
- Violence
- Increased risk of addiction among children
SOURCE: Social Work in Public Health
The effects of addiction on family can spread to your loved one’s children, spouse, parents, siblings, extended family members, and beyond. And without the right addiction education and support, family members can unknowingly make a loved one’s addiction worse. They honestly may be unprepared or not know how to help someone with addiction. Some family members can inadvertently negatively influence their loved ones as they try to get sober, as well as the efficacy of their treatment. Others may actually sabotage any treatment progress as they feel threatened by the changes happening in their loved one’s habits and routines.
Consequently, treating your loved one without any family involvement may limit the effectiveness of addiction treatment — especially if they’ll be returning to the family home. Because addiction is a family disease, the family needs to be part of the process. After all, the family is key, serving as a built-in system of support for change.
Rooted in and Exacerbated by Family Dysfunction
While the family can be a change agent in their loved one’s lives, they can also be part of the reason why a loved one is struggling with addiction in the first place. Though addiction on the surface appears to be a behavioral issue, it’s often rooted in the lingering mental and emotional effects of unresolved past trauma. The impact of trauma may have even been the result of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that happened well in the past.
Whether the cause of trauma was from childhood or occurred in the recent past, dysfunctional families can often be the culprit. While no family is perfect, some struggle with family dysfunctionality that can put family members at risk for addiction. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines family dysfunction as impaired communication or relationships within the family, which then prevents family members from attaining closeness and self-expression.
Signs of a dysfunctional family may include:
- Perfectionism
- Abuse or neglect
- Addiction
- Unpredictability and fear
- Conditional love
- Lack of boundaries
- Poor communication
- Lack of intimacy
SOURCE: Mental Health America
The impact of family dysfunction can lead your loved one to experience trauma, either from one singular event or smaller traumatic events over an extended period of time. Because of trauma’s effects, your loved one may seek out substances to self-medicate their stress or negative emotions. As these provide temporary relief, your loved one needs to use them again and again, leading to dependency and addiction. And if they’re still surrounded by family dysfunction, your loved one may be driven further into addiction, compounding their issues and causing more challenges within the family.
How Addiction Affects Families
Family dysfunction may or may not be the source of your loved one’s addiction, but their issues can still hurt you and your family in multifaceted ways. Because addiction is a family disease, here are some key challenges that your family may experience as a result of a loved one’s addiction:
Codependency and Addiction
In understanding how addiction affects families, codependency is often one of the first resulting family dynamics that can arise. In fact, codependency and addiction are very much interconnected. Codependency develops when family members prioritize the needs of others in the family over their own healthy well-being. It’s a sign of family dysfunctionality, so it may have already been occurring before your loved one’s addiction started.
Where codendency happens, setting boundaries in a relationship isn’t a priority. While it may look like love on the surface, codependent family members can become too dependent upon each other emotionally and psychologically. As someone bases their entire existence and validation around another family member’s view of them, their independence gets replaced by interdependence.
Some common signs of codependency related to addiction include:
- Excessive caregiving to the point of neglecting your own needs
- Controlling behavior toward an addict’s decisions and recovery process
- Denial of the severity of the addiction problem
- Emotional reactivity to the addict’s behavior
- Difficulty in setting and maintaining healthy boundaries
When a family member is struggling with addiction, their codependency on others can create an unhealthy relational balance among the family. Soon their needs take precedence over anything else, leaving other family members behind. And often, other family members begin to enable the loved one’s addiction just to maintain normalcy or protect others in the family.
Enabling
What is enabling, exactly? Enabling behaviors are those that support your loved one’s substance use. While your family’s intentions may be good, you’re not allowing your addicted loved one to face the consequences of their actions. That means your enabling ultimately keeps them from getting the help they need to heal.
Some common enabling behaviors include:
- Denial of the addiction
- Accepting blame for your loved one’s substance use
- Using substances with your loved one
- Justifying your loved one’s actions
- Minimizing the situation
- Protecting your loved one’s image
- Treating your addicted loved one like a child
SOURCE: University of Pennsylvania
As the enabling continues, your other family members can be affected in various ways and even feel neglected. Some may act out to get attention, while others isolate themselves or try to act as if everything is fine on the surface.
Emotional Distress and Broken Trust
Your loved one’s addiction can cause an unstable home environment that generates emotional distress throughout the family. An addicted family member’s substance use and erratic, unpredictable actions can cause both fear and conflict in others. Some may feel embarrassed or ashamed by their loved one’s addiction. Children may witness their parents fighting or getting into dramatic arguments; they may even become victims of abuse themselves.
As these situations and interactions add up over time, lingering trauma may ensue, leading to further emotional distress and other mental health challenges — and additional family dysfunction. Children may develop unhealthy attachment disorders as a result of substance abuse in the home, as well as poor emotional regulation skills. If this is left untreated, children are at greater risk of turning to substance use when they get older, furthering the cycle of addiction and trauma.
At the same time, addiction can sever strong bonds and break established trust between your loved one and other family members. Your loved one’s addictive behavior may have made them unreliable, so family members may no longer feel comfortable counting on them to fulfill family responsibilities. Relatives can experience family manipulation from your loved one firsthand as he or she uses anyone to feed his or her addiction, leading to emotional distance and mistrust in previously close relationships.
The Sphere of Influence and Family-Focused Addiction Treatment
Though addiction may have negatively impacted the family, your family can make a positive difference in your loved one’s life and play a role in their healing (and yours!). According to BMJ Open, family involvement in treatment can reduce harms, and improve treatment entry, treatment completion, and treatment outcomes for someone coping with an addiction. At The Blanchard Institute, we call this family involvement the “sphere of influence,” often consisting of family members who are closest to the addicted loved one.
Because addiction is controlling your loved one’s life, their brain is in an unhealthy place, often taking 18 months to two years to fully heal. During this vulnerable time, your loved one’s sphere of influence has the greatest ability to support their recovery. Ward Blanchard, Founder and CEO of The Blanchard Institute, explains why: “When the sphere of influence establishes the healthy boundaries around their addicted loved one needed for them to comply with treatment, the loved one can achieve the best prognosis long-term.”
Knowing the importance of family to lasting recovery, we offer a variety of family-focused educational resources for the loved ones of someone getting treatment for addiction.
Our extensive recovery support for families includes:
- Family counseling
- Family support group options
- Family workshops
- Family education resources
As a family-focused addiction treatment center, we’re here to educate, support, and empower you as a family to help your loved one overcome their addiction and reclaim their life. We also offer an outpatient mental health program to address any co-occurring mental health disorders alongside addiction issues. After all, we understand that families can be impacted by mental health disorders just as much as addiction in their loved ones. If you’re ready to help your loved one change their narrative, call us today to learn more about our outpatient treatment programs and at-home detox options.