When Sobriety Breaks Up The Family

 Getting sober was supposed to fix everything, right? The family reunites, the credits roll, everybody hugs. Yeah, well — nobody told your wife, your kids, or your brother who hasn't called since Thanksgiving. Turns out recovery doesn't come with a guarantee that the people who survived your addiction will stick around for your sobriety. Today Doc Jacques tackles the uncomfortable truth that sometimes getting clean costs you the very relationships you got clean for — and what you do when the happy ending doesn't show up on schedule. 

Transcript

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A man gets out of residential treatment after 90 days. He's done the work. He's got a sponsor. He's going to meetings. He comes home expecting things to slowly get better. And within six months, his wife files for divorce. His oldest kid won't return his calls. And his brother hasn't spoken to him since Thanksgiving. He didn't pick up. He didn't relapse. He did everything right. And still his family fell apart. Today we're going to talk about what happens and what you do when sobriety costs you the people and the relationships you got sober for. This is Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is harder than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jacques DeBrucker, licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason: to walk that road with you. No sugar coating, no magic pills, just the truth of what recovery really looks like. Quick note: this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it. And uh recovery culture sells the idea that getting sober fixes everything. Marriages heal, families reunite, everybody celebrates. And sometimes that's true, but nobody in rehab sits you down and says, hey, getting clean and sober might actually trigger the end of some of your most important relationships. But that's not a sign that you failed. It's a sign that the system is changing. And it's that lack of information that gets you into trouble sometimes because you're expecting the best and you might end up getting what seems like the worst. The family that you're in, whoever they are, husband, wife, brother, sister, mother, father, they've been operating in a very dysfunctional way for years. Everyone had a role in that addiction. The addict was in chaos, everyone was organized around that chaos, and their lives were around managing that chaos. But when the chaos stops, the whole structure loses its purpose. In the family systems theory, what we call what we say is that when one person changes in the family, the entire system has to reorganize around that. And not everyone survives that reorganization intact. I explain it as when somebody changes, they're probably going to be in recovery. When they get into recovery, they're probably going to be about six months ahead of the family, the loved ones, in their recovery. Because nobody's believing what they're seeing and the change is occurring, but you know, maybe even had an accident or two, and that kind of reaffirms that you're not really changing or whatever. So the entire system has to reorganize. The person who gets sober is not the same person who left for rehab. The family signed up for that old version. Some of them don't want the new one to come back. So when you when you come home, a different person, the problem is they were waiting for the old one. Marriage Marriage is a tough one. I've experienced this in my office so many times. This is the hardest one for people to really understand. The spouse who stayed through the addiction, they were the ones who fought with you, they cried, they threatened, and they they held everything together. They held everything together. Sometimes they can't stay once the addiction is gone, which doesn't make any sense on the surface, but it makes a lot of sense if you start digging into it. So there's different different roles that people serve. One of them is as a caretaker. Now that's the person that, you know, not necessarily the enabler, but they were the caretaker. They built their entire sense of purpose around managing that addict. And I've seen this so many times in families. There's usually one key person, sometimes two. Mothers and fathers fall into this role more so than spouses do, I find. But they are troubled because their whole identity, their purpose, everything they did almost every single day was around the chaos that you as an addict brought into their lives. So when that ends, when that crisis is over, they don't know who they are anymore. But that's not your fault. It's your reality. Resentment creeps in in these relationships, and at first it's kind of hidden, but then it becomes more and more dominant and predominant in the in the relationship. And it it unfortunately there's a long memory attached to that resentment. Think about it. If you're an addict, you've been lying to people, manipulating people, you you broke your promises, you missed birthdays, there was financial destruction, there was relationship destruction, there was embarrassment for both you and for the family members. All of that doesn't just evaporate because you picked up a chip, you got your one-year chip. For some people, it actually gets louder once those problems go away. That fog lifts from you can see, because now they're finally safe enough to feel it. The intimacy problem is from the years of addiction that uh creates a profound emotional distance. Some couples that I've worked with simply just don't even know each other anymore. And rebuilding from that from zero requires both people to want that change equally. Sometimes only one of them does, and it is you as the addict. The first year of sobriety is statistically one of the highest risk periods for divorce. But it's not because recovery failed, but because the relationship is already on borrowed time. It was already struggling. And sobriety is the thing that lifted all of the chaos. And so the person who then kind of is on that verge of like, I'm done with you. Sometimes they hang on because that is their purpose. They feel like they need to stay, because if they don't, it's going to create problems that are worse for you as the addict than you were experiencing. So they will hang on to the relationship longer than they should have. Some marriages were only surviving because everyone was too exhausted and too scared to do anything else. Recovery gave them both enough oxygen to finally make a decision. And sometimes that decision is to leave. Children are a different matter. Children of uh any age, really, they they are very special in the relationship of of addicts. And kids, especially teenagers and adult children, have been often hurt in ways that the addict you may not even remember, you don't even you don't even know the extent of it because you might have been so checked out and you didn't receive the feeling part of that destruction. The parents think they're coming back, but the kid thinks you left a long time ago. And so it's harder for kids, especially the teenagers and the older adult children, because they have lived things and they were doing it during their formative years, and so the impression and the and the trust that they invested or were looking for that trust, it wasn't there, right? And so when a child doesn't trust you, it's much more damaging to them later in life, as teenagers and and younger adults, than it is for adults who experience the same thing. I don't trust you as an adult, I can kind of deal with that intellectually and emotionally. Kids can't do that. The kids, they just kind of figured you checked out a long time ago. They might have given up on you. Children of addicts learn pretty early not to trust the good version of you because it doesn't seem to stay. They've seen that cycle, you know. I when I remember when I was a kid and I had an alcoholic mother and an alcoholic father, I would walk in the room and I would immediately take the temperature of the room because I'd I'd listen, I'd smell, I'd see, and I could sense when they'd been drinking, and I would avoid that. Um I would just like walk in the room, and there's my mom, and she's been drinking pretty heavily, and I can hear the lazy tongue, I can I could smell it, and I'm like, I'm I'm 13 years old, I don't want to deal with that. So I would just duck and hide and disappear. They the kids believed in a in the comeback before, but then they got burned. And I certainly was one of those. Sobriety didn't happen in my house, unfortunately. Um, and it ended up it ended up killing my mother at a very young age, she was 51. So I didn't get to see this, but sobriety isn't the proof of change to kids. It's just the latest promise, and they're just waiting for that other shoe to drop. Adult children, especially, um, have done a lot of their own work to detach and protect themselves because they've already gone through this. And if you have children and you're older, you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s, and you're getting into recovery, you're going to experience something very different with those adult children. Recovery in the in the parent, in the example, can feel threatening to the wall they built, and it's not welcomed. And so they've built all these protective mechanisms around you, and uh they they don't want to engage. So this requires a lot of patience that that almost seems superhuman at times. You you don't get to demand forgiveness on your timeline, their healing is theirs. When I have people working their steps, and they gotta go to that that step eight, making the list of people that they've done things to, and then step nine, going out and trying to make amends whenever possible. It's sometimes not possible, and that's just a reality. And again, it shouldn't cause you to not try to get sober with the idea that somehow that might be something that happens. It's just a reality. Your kids don't owe you a relationship because you got sober. You owe them the time it takes to earn one back, and the clock runs on their schedule, not yours. As far as the family, so let's talk about the families that prefer the chaos. It's an interesting kind of a dilemma. Some families, unconsciously or consciously, they were more comfortable with the addict using than the addict being sober. Why? Well, because the chaos gave them power, purpose, or an excuse to do whatever they were going to do. And I'm not talking about the addict, I'm talking about the family members. That chaos is where they tended to start to feel an identity, and they also felt the purpose, which means that they were thriving in the chaos. And so now you get sober, and now that throws that all off. And so what is their role? Like they're not the king, they're not the one who people go to and seek advice, and because there's nothing to give advice about, or shelter, or protection, or whatever it is you're providing as a as a family member of the addict who's now sober. And you none of that has any purpose now. You have weapons that are not going to be used. That's that's just any family member. It could be anybody in the family, first degree family members, mother, father, brother, sister. Siblings who are always the good one, that's the one that was successful, the responsible one. That identity only works if there's a bad one. When you as an addict, you get clean, suddenly the comparison disappears. And some of those siblings can't handle losing that. They are not the golden child anymore. And maybe, even conversely, the golden child has become you because you overcame these horrible things, and now you've been put back together, and that's amazing. And maybe there's that kid who's your sibling who doesn't like that. There are parents who used your dysfunction as a reason to stay involved in that adult child's life. It became their purpose. Recovery means independence, and independence means they're you're no longer they're no longer needed. I've seen this over and over in my practice, where a parent who is quote unquote an enabling parent, giving money, giving shelter, giving advice. The this the person who they're doing that for is a is a is a basket case. They can't function in reality. Now you're sober, you're employed, you have stable living, you are responsible, you never show up drunk or high, you're just doing what you're supposed to do. Now that parent, they don't have a reason for rushing in, like ever checking in two, three times a week, or going to your house to make sure you're not unconscious, or whatever. They don't have a purpose, they've lost that. You become very independent, and they who were dependent upon you being dysfunctional, they need to be independent. That's a tough one for them to do. But this isn't about blame. These situations are unconscious dynamics. They are real, they really do happen, and they'll sabotage your recovery, either consciously or unconsciously, if you don't name those uh problems. And that's the part that you need to be able to do, is be able to identify those problems that crop up. Some people in your life needed you to be broken. That is the saddest sentence I say in my office. It is, it is so frustrating to me. But I say it more than you think I do. So how do you how do you survive? How do you get through this? Not not uh not going crazy, not losing things you know, more than you would want to. Well you have to grieve. You're allowed to grieve the relationship that didn't survive your recovery. You must re you must actually grieve it. That grief is is real and it deserves to be processed, not suppressed. And by process I mean that's what we call it clinically, or the uh the layperson uses that term now all the time, but processing means I just felt my feelings, and I felt them until I was done feeling them. Suppressing those feelings is is a huge problem. Suppressing grief is a relapse trigger, and you know this. So if you're in recovery and you've got to be able to process your feelings, you've got to find a place to do that. If you're a family member who's listening to this, you have to grieve too. You have to grieve that the old enemy is gone and now you've got a new purpose and you've lost your old purpose. But you don't use the loss as a proof you were right to use. You know, the enemy will try to make that argument. Kind of like, see, you got sober and you lost everything anyway. Might as well drink again. That's a lie. The loss existed because you, the addict, got in got into a destructive lifestyle, not because of the recovery. That loss is about the recovery and the and the increase in provision in your life and healing, and that's what you're that's what you're grieving, is that I might my destruction, the things I did, um, I'm letting them go, and now I have to be another person. So you gotta invest in relationships that show up. Not every relationship will survive, and s but some will, and those deserve your full attention. Don't let your grief over what's gone blind you to what's still there. This there's just no reason to do that. You've got so much in your life that you're gonna be gaining, and it doesn't happen in immediately in recovery. It it really doesn't. Therapy for that whole system is what needs to happen. And in the family, I'm talking about the family system. Family therapy isn't just for while you're using, it's arguably more important in early recovery than it was before. So, as an example, I regularly encourage families to meet when the person's working on their recovery. And some of them I'll meet with maybe once a month for the first three or four months of working on that recovery or sometime in that first year, because they've got to be able to process openly and they've got to do it in a safe way and in a safe environment. Hopefully, as a therapist, I can bring that to them. But I can I can find a way for them to be able to talk to each other and work through those issues. So you've got to address the system. And remember, you getting sober became a new unbalancing of that relationship. So you got, and and the, you know, as somebody in recovery, you've got to build a new community. The recovery community is not a replacement for family, but it is proof that you're not alone. And that's what I want people to do is go to meetings and experience being in the rooms so that you can feel your feels, and you can experience non-threatening, non-negative feedback acceptance, like total acceptance from within a community of people that have gone through exactly what you're going through. The people in the rooms get it in a way that your blood family may never be able to do, which may not always be the truth. In some instances, if, like, you know, if I'm in recovery and my mother, father, brother, sister, my children uh is is working on recovery. Oh, I get it. And I'm gonna say the right things, and I'm also gonna learn, I I know from my experience, I'm going to not say when I shouldn't say something, whereas a loved one may start saying something when they shouldn't. Or they may say the inappropriate thing, because they don't understand recovery at all, other than what they've seen you go through, and that's a very limited experience. Recovery was never guaranteed that you'd get your family back. It's a guarantee that you'd get yourself back, not your family. And from there you rebuild. And that rebuilding is slow, it's honest, and it's one relationship at a time, honestly. Some of them will come back around, some of them won't. But you'll be sober for both experiences, and that's key to your recovery. In your recovery, you have to remember the enemy wants to strip away everything from you and then kill you. So it wants to destroy your relationships, it wants to destroy your financially, it wants to destroy your safety, your health, everything that you have. And it will do that before it kills you. And unfortunately, in my practice, I see this frequently where it's that destruction starts, and I see the enemy just, and it does it a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time. Don't lose that fight. Understand that this is the long game, it's not the short game. Getting into recovery isn't going to rehab for 30 days or 60 days and getting out and saying, okay, everything's fine now, because it's not. You really begin the path of recovery once you get out of rehab. Rehab is so that you can understand that you actually have to work on things and how to do it. They do it by example. But the real deep, deep-rooted, hard work that you got to do in recovery does not happen in rehab because you're only going to be there for 30 days. That is a multi-month process, as in years, one or two years. Rehab is 30 days. You're in rehab for a long period of time, true, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 30 or 60 days or 90 days or whatever. Yeah, that's a long time. But once you get out, you're not going to have that anymore, and you're not going to have access to those counselors and that support. But they what they have done is they've shown you where you can get that help and that support. So if you're going to rehab, understand that's not the magic pill. It's the beginning of the change. The real work happens when you get out of rehab and you can then begin the process of digging deep into those problems, whether you were molested or you were abused as a child or neglected, whatever the you know, the forms of abuse, uh physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and abandonment, the big five. If you had any of those, you got to work on that, and that's gonna take a while. So you just hang in there and you keep working on it, and you'll get there, my friend. You will get there. Well, I hope you got something out of this episode of Doc Shock, Your Addiction Life Guard. If you did, please subscribe, like, recommend me to your friends. If you want to reach out to me, you can do so on my website, Docjock.com. Docjock.com. Your addiction lifeguard. That's me. Hey, if you need help, go get it. Get a therapist, go to rehab, go to some meetings, get a sponsor, do something crazy to end your life if you're trying to stay in your addiction. Show it the other way around. Don't let the enemy win. And remember, if you need help, you can reach out to me. If you'd like suggestions on direction or whatever, I'll answer your questions. And if you've got suggestions for the show, please, I'd love to hear from you. That's all. This is Doc Joc, your addiction lifeguard. Saying until the next episode, see ya.