Helping The Addicted Family System

Posted by Gregory Koufacos, Outreach & Family Services on May 24, 2016

This is the problem. The mainstream philosophy used in addiction and mental health rehabilitation can best be described using the following story: A family goes for a drive and gets into a severe car accident. The paramedics arrive at the scene...and only the driver gets taken to the hospital for treatment. In our scenario, the "driver" is the addict. The rest of the family is left at the scene of the accident: left with their pain, their fear, their rage, their hopes and their dreams. They are just as affected, and in many ways just as responsible, but only the addict gets whisked off for help.

Here is the other problem: if that treated individual moves back into an untreated system, the individual will quickly return to their old selves. Anytime you have a weakened individual up against a large, powerful system, solidified through years of adaptation, the individual is going to lose that battle.

What constitutes a "addicted" family system? Let me give you an example. I recently met with a father who brought his young adult son in for treatment for alcoholism. His gently leaned over and confessed his main fear: "If something happens to me or my wife, I am afraid my son will be so devastated that he will never recover because he will feel responsible." This statement, while understandable, has elements of co-dependency. I focus on you, what you are feeling or doing, might feel or do, etc. My feelings, and my sense of security and happiness, are based on your actions and emotions, real or imagined. This can be a sign of impaired spirituality: relying on others' feelings and actions to regulate ourselves. This might be natural and healthy as a child, but not as an adult. So, with this father, I tried to help him see that he was focused on his son's potential reaction instead of his own reality, his own feelings, his own wishes. What would a non co-dependent stance look like? That same man would come in and state that he has had enough of his son's life running and ruining his and his wife's life, and that they deserve to be happy and want to know how to do it. That attitude is what drives a stuck addicted and mentally ill system to change its dynamics, and this is a large part of the "treatment" that an addicted family needs.

At Evoke we advocate a simple philosophy to families: own your own journey. Take your own inventory, find your own path to happiness. Dr. Brad Reedy refers to this as The Heroic Journey. And we offer a number of services designed to help support that journey. First, we offer monthly parent support groups all over the country in major cities. We also offer focused webinars that can be accessed by all families, our leadership team is involved in research and have published both scholarly articles and self-help books on family dynamics in recovery, and we offer parent workshops and intensives around the country. In addition, we are connected to great professionals around the country and can help connect people to those services before, during and after their experience at Evoke.