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Addiction: A Family Disease
One in four adults suffers from alcohol or drug addiction. That reality impacts one in three families and millions of family members. “An estimated 38 million Americans or 15 percent of the population are chemically addicted to alcohol, drugs or both. If each addict affects 3 family members, then 60 percent of the population is directly or indirectly affected by substance dependence”. How does addiction alter the healthy family unit? Personal responsibility, the ability to express feelings, modulate reactions, make healthy, self-directed decisions, empathize with others, maintain a healthy self-image, and engage in healthy family rituals all define the working dynamics of a stable family unit. When a family unit has one or more members who are active addicts, regardless of the nature of the addiction, the balance within the family unit disintegrates. Once addiction infiltrates a family, the healthy qualities of both the individual and the family unit are replaced by negative coping skills that can destroy the family’s physical and psychological well-being. Family members will adopt a variety of mechanisms to deal with the negative behavior and consequences of an active addict. Generally, these coping mechanisms do not foster health. Rather, these behaviors tend to become self-destructive; ironically, these copying behaviors usually help the addict to continue his or her using. Such negative coping behaviors often seek to control, hide, or manage the person’s addiction. The attempt to control behavior or feelings of others is called codependent behavior.
A major New Zealand government study focused on families who received treatment for addiction. These families reported, “low self-esteem, behavioral and social withdrawal; parental unavailability; difficulty developing trust in adult relationships; concerns about [family member’s] own possible addictive tendencies, and becoming comfortable with dysfunction….Families [were] also …dealing with addiction-related financial, legal and/or justice crises….” The study identified common mechanisms or strategies in these families for coping with addiction: minimizing, making allowances, turning away, and carrying on or living as if the reality were different. Treatment helped these families break through the destructive or unhealthy patterns in the family unit and provided family members with the skill to cope with addiction in healthy ways. Changing the behaviors of family members can help change the behavior of the addict. Changing behavior can be looked at as a three phase process:
Attainment of sobriety--The family system is unbalanced but healthy change is possible. |
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