Urban Vancouver

More Thoughts on Recovery from Addiction

By rosslaird on July 22, 2004 - 11:56am

As I've been working on the new book, wandering around the Downtown Eastside, talking with counsellors and outreach workers and addicts, I've been making little notes about approaches to recovery and healing: for parents, siblings, spouses. Here are a few:

The various tricks, systems and strategies all distil down to one thing: focus on yourself. You cannot change the habits or behavior of anyone else. If you are a professional counselor or social service worker, focus on empathy and clarity. Understand that the various recovery strategies for substance use (motivational interviewing, medications, cognitive behavioral treatment) are simply means of making contact, nothing more.

If you are the parent of an adult addict, work on your own emotional management your anger, your disbelief, your fear. Stop lecturing your child about their addiction. Offer them resources -- books, counseling fees, a safe place to get away from the clamor and grit of the addiction lifestyle -- but offer these as investments, not conditions. Offer them freely, as open-ended gifts, without the requirement that your child redeem such gifts by discontinuing substance use. If your child is actively using, you will lose any negotiation involving abstinence. Accept this.

Understand that the choices your child is making are beyond their conscious ability to manage. Addiction hijacks the personality (though not the spirit). Express your love, ask how you can help, and acknowledge that you cannot make your child stop using. If you try hard enough to make them stop, you will lose them (though teenagers are a special case, and require special care; the book devotes a chapter to them). As a parent, your task has always been to create and sustain the safe harbor. Keep doing this, and wait for the time that you may be needed.

If you are a spouse, take your partner for a walk -- along the beach, in the morning, making it plain beforehand that you have important business to discuss. Ask them to simply listen. Share your feelings, your fears, your struggle. Do this succinctly, in no more than a few minutes, and conclude by asking for the one thing you need. Maybe it's couples counseling, or treatment for your spouse, or perhaps only a willingness to try. Whatever it is, make a firm deadline by which something must be done. (A week? A month? Certainly not more than a season).

Make it clear what you will do if the deadline is not met: go for counseling on your own, for example (more drastic action, like leaving the relationship, is generally unwise unless several authentic attempts at healing have already been tried). Be prepared to follow through: bluffing may work in poker, but not in addictions. You can't effectively demand that your spouse stop using, but you can give them a fixed period in which to choose.

If you are addicted -- to any one of the infinite number of substances and behaviors available in the modern world -- start to pay attention to the corrosiveness of your addictive experiences. Enter into the labyrinth of your emotional life.

Call someone who loves you. Say that you're in trouble, that you need support. Someone to listen. Forget the history for now -- just for today -- and ask them to do the same. Stop reading and do it now.

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