Don't Mask It, Deal With It Part 2

For those of you who are family members listen to this episode on stopping the masking of addiction, but learn to deal with it. 

Transcript

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Ray coming home that same night. The night that he was sitting outside that liquor store. Somebody else was awake too. His wife. Different room, different weight. She didn't know he was three miles away with the engine running. She just knew something felt off. Text that came late. The voice that had changed, she can't explain. But she could tell. That gut drop before your brain even catches up. She got up, stood at the window instead of laying in bed, watched the driveway, told herself she wasn't watching the driveway. You know what 11 months of recovery is supposed to do for a wife? Let her sleep with both eyes closed. And sometimes it does. But 11 months doesn't erase nine years of learning how to read a room before he even walks into it. Learning the smell test at the door, learning which kind of quiet is fine, and which kind of quiet means get the kids upstairs. That's not paranoia. That's training. Something trained her to do that. It just wasn't a person. It was survival. Tired, kissed his wife, went to bed. Never told her where he'd been sitting for 20 minutes. She still didn't sleep. Not because anything happened, but because her body doesn't know the difference yet between something happening and something almost happening. Nobody ever taught it the difference. Nobody taught her that lesson at all. Ray had a door in the back of his head that night. Turns out so that she had been shut for nine years. Hers has been built one bad night at a time for as long as his addiction ran that out. Nobody hands you a manual for that kind of exhaustion. Nobody tells you loving an addict is its own anchor. So today, we're going to the other side of the water. Not the addict story. The families. This is Doc Jock. Stick around. This is Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jock DeBurke, a licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. And this podcast exists for one reason: to walk that road with no sugar coating, no magic pills, just the truth about 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. You know, if you're the loved one of an addict, you've been through a lot. Uh the fact that you would be even listening to this podcast is testament to that. So let's just talk about what that means for you and what it's like to uh to deal with that. You know, you have an anchor too. It's not why did he use? That's not where you should go with this. It's why do I still flinch? Why do I still react? One of the more common things that happens when people have a loved one uh who's an addict in their family is they begin to develop a sense of hypervigilance around that person. And it's a trained reflex, it's not a weakness, it's something that you've learned to use as a means to understand better what's going on in that instant. Um it's it's the late text, it's the raised voice, it's the silence, these things that you react to, and you begin to understand that there's a pattern to it and there's a rhythm to it. So uh the loved one who's an addict can come in the room and you automatically, because your hypervigilance is telling you immediately like what's going on. And even sometimes when you just hear the beginnings of the sound of the entrance into the room, you automatically turn your attention to what's happening, what's about to happen. And it's that uh that thing that that anchors you to the expectation of whatever is about to happen. It certainly was the case uh for me in my in my parents' home, uh walking in the door, um, coming downstairs into the kitchen, and there'd be my mother or my father or both of them, and I'd learn to um instantly kind of take in everything that was going on. And this is what happens when you have a loved one in your house that's an addict, an alcoholic, a drug addict, the sounds, the smells, the sights, the rhythm of of what's happening. So you begin to look for that. And it makes your life very difficult. There's a lot of cortisol and adrenaline that can get kicked in in your brain uh because of those things, and and it's very difficult because you had that experience and and it part of it is like what how you know what's it like to love an addict? What does it feel like? What does it feel like to have that love when you you really are not sure what to expect? Well, the hypervigilance thing, that that's you walking around on eggshells, constantly scanning, constantly looking. Love has become something where you become the protector and the victim of of whatever abuse is coming at you because of the addiction. And that walking on eggshells, that's that's where the hypervigilant lives, hypervigilance lives. It's it's just constantly on guard, constantly paying attention. I even see it with people that come into my office when the person hasn't been drinking. There's this expectation of something that needs to happen, and they the the uh the addict sits sits in the chair across from me, and the loved one is sitting in the chair across from me, next to the addict. And a lot of times the attention goes towards the addict. I I will see sometimes the loved one come in and just literally turn in their chair and stare at the addict and wait for that person to do something because they're in the presence of somebody who's supposed to clinically help them, and the loved one is now they're in the arena. Now they're in that place where that can happen. And so you just that constant scanning, the constant paying attention, it results in you grieving someone who's still alive. They've changed so much that you are not able to actually engage with them like you would in a normal situation. The anger you don't feel that you need to feel allowed over time. You need to have that time to have that anger, and you you don't allow yourself to feel it. And that's the problem because that is one of the bricks in that wall that separates the two of you. The pattern that goes on in in these situations is quite interesting. It's very consistent, it's almost a hundred percent of the time, and it doesn't matter if it's husband and wife, it doesn't matter if it's parent and child, it doesn't matter if it's siblings, brothers and sisters, or brothers and brothers. It's pretty simple. There's love, there's control, and there's enabling. This is where there's a shift. You love the person, you care about them, then somebody's going to be exercising control, and I can assure you, you're both trying, but the one that actually somehow wrestles control in that power situation is the addict because the loved one is enabling the addiction. This is where care turns into managing. You care about the person and you're trying to keep them out of harm's way, and you're working exhaustively to do that. You're trying so hard to keep them out of harm's way. And so instead of instead of caring for them and understanding that they need help, you end up managing them. You're trying to manage their life, you're trying to manage their time. You're doing everything you can to keep them from getting arrested or getting fired or ending up in the hospital, and you become frantic in in that effort. There's a lot of frenetic energy, that that energy that just comes radiating off of you that you're trying so hard. And the other person, the addict, is living this carefree. I don't care. Yeah, I do whatever I want kind of lifestyle and mentality. And the person who's the enabler, the loved one, they're the one that is turning all their attention towards managing day-to-day efforts with the kids, with the job, or with whatever. And that over monitoring, it backfires. A huge a huge backfire. Because the more that you are managing them and managing what they're doing, you become uh the the the caregiver, the person who's what but the backfire is it just creates more of the bad behavior because now you've figured out this ability to balance how much you're managing them as an addict, but at the same time, they realize they they've lost the need to do anything. They don't have to drive the kids in the car because you don't trust them with the kids in the car, so they don't have to go anywhere with the kids. You do. The they can show up late and everybody still gets fed, everybody still gets their homework done, everybody still gets the laundry done, everybody, everybody else except for them, because you're trying to just keep it together. And so this over-monitoring of the behavior it backfires because it ends up where you become the chief enabler and then you're compensating for everything that's going on. That creates that codependency. They rely on you to be able to take care of everything because they can't, because they're an addict. And at the same time, you are taking care of them because you're trying to keep them out of harm's way. It's a survival pattern. This is what happens with codependency. The survival pattern happens, but that's not a verdict of guilt or innocence or anything else. It's just this is what addiction does to you. It dismantles the everyday existence of your life and your spouse's life or your loved one's life, your your sibling's life, your friend's life, your your parents' life, your mom, your dad, whoever's the addict, it creates that that uh that dynamic and it grows into this increasing amount of dysfunction that just goes on. I I said in a previous episode that isolation is addiction's best friend. Well, isolation is a family's best friend, too, because that isolation is necessary, and it becomes necessary because there's more and more and more of the addiction that starts making it embarrassing and upsetting to be around other people. So you as a loved one, you're experiencing this because your addict, loved one, shows up drunk or high or whatever, and it creates this sense of shame. So it's the same shame, it's just in a different room, so to speak. You you you don't want to air the family's dirty laundry, and so you just end up not showing up for things. You find excuses to not participate with your friends, with other family members, because you never know what this volatile, unstable person is going to show up, or if they're gonna be perfectly fine. And again, you know, I've said this before many times. One of the greatest uh positive aspects of somebody who's an addict is that they're very charming. They're very charming, they're usually pretty intelligent. That charm is what allows them to be the addict. And so when they're not using, they are charming. And so sometimes what happens is nobody gets the fact that this person is a chaotic, dysregulated, out-of-control addict because they tend, as a survival technique, to hide that in plain sight because they change their behavior when they're not drunk or high around other people. So these stories that you tell your friends and your family about how horrible this situation is a lot of times don't match what those people see. Because the addict isn't showing it. They're doing it privately. The shame is the thing that's the driver for everything that you do eventually. And it's that I don't want people to know. There's there's something you can do about this. You have to fix you have to fix it. You have to find one safe person, and it's very hard because the shame keeps the family from talking to anybody. I cannot begin to tell you how many times people come into my office who are loved ones, and they have absolutely no idea what it's like to go to an al-Anon or a Nara-non meeting, or even sometimes to talk to a therapist, because they don't do it. They they're so focused on the other person, the addict, they're so focused on that person and that person getting help that many times they just neglect their own traumas and their own situation. So I'll say to them, have you ever been to an Al-Anon meeting? And they just look at me and they say no, or they might say, One, and I didn't want to go back. And I'm like, Well, you you need that support. You need to find one safe person that can help you with your repair. And so fixing that one situation is really important. Get in with other people who are suffering the same thing that you're suffering as a loved one. Another aspect of the family uh or the loved ones um fix for this is boundaries without self-betrayal, detachment with love. Al-Anon is a space where you can detach from um detach from the person and you can explore what you're experiencing in the presence of other people. They Al-Anon has their own 12-step steps that they use. They have their own uh book. It's it's much thinner than the big book from Alcoholics Anonymous, but they have their own book, they have their own steps, they have their own uh sponsors, their own work working the steps process. It's just different because it's not AA, it's not alcoholics anonymous, it's al-Anon. So it's for the loved ones. I I want to go over something, I want to be real clear about this. Boundaries. That's one of the words I use probably the most with loved ones of addicts is boundaries. Shame drives the inability to set a boundary because what happens is when you start to use a word like addict or drug abuse or alcohol abuse, you use those words, or you set a boundary, you talk about boundaries as a loved one. What happens a lot of times is the addict will then push back against that. They will try to deflect, they'll use straw man arguments, they'll try to find ways to make it so that you end up having to apologize for their bad behavior. They try to use you to make you feel guilty. The other thing they'll do frequently is they will turn themselves into a martyr. You just don't like me, you just don't want me around. You just and it's like these are deflective, manipulative situations. Setting boundaries can trigger that a lot of times. But it's not an ultimatum because, you know, just like I've talked about the the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter, the prodigal son and the prodigal daughter have to have a place to return to. They can't just be um uh I don't want to say condemned, but you know, it can't be pointed out that they have a problem and then they have no way to come back, they have nowhere to return. Because when people get into recovery, yes, they will lose some relationships. However, if you are in a loving, compassionate, caring relationship with a person and they have an addiction issue, when you set a boundary, they have to be able to come back. There has to be a return. If you have an ultimatum, ultimatums never work because you're not going to stick with it. And that's what they've heard many times. If you don't stop drinking, I'm leaving. That's it, you know, and then you stay. That's an ultimatum, and you didn't follow through with it. So ultimatums have to be the final straw. So this is like this is what we do in interventions. If you don't accept help today, I'm not going to continue to support your addiction. I'm not going to be part of that problem. So you can't ask me for money, you can't ask me for housing, can't ask me for food, don't ask me for support because you need to get into recovery. That is about the only time you're actually going to use anything that would even remotely look like an ultimatum. Boundaries are important, ultimatums are useless. Set a boundary. You cannot be around me if you're drinking or you're high, or you have been, and you come in drunk or high. You're not going to use in front of me, and I'm not going to have you around me when you're like that. So don't come here when you're like that. That's a boundary. That is a boundary. Don't call me at three in the morning crying and telling me how sorry you are when you're drunk or high. I'm not going to answer the phone. That's a boundary. That's not an ultimatum. Boundaries protect both people. It's not a punishment. It's not something you use to attack the other person. It's protecting you. It's protecting and trying to, you're trying to preserve the relationship. You are now trying to get the the person who has the addiction, you're trying to get them to turn and face the enemy with you, right? Not face you, but face the enemy, the enemy, and it that's addiction. You know, the idea that the body keeps the score from Bessel Vanderkohl. Well, the body keeps the score for you too. You are not being abused by chemicals, you're being abused by addiction. Chronic stress raises your cortisol levels. It's part of that destruction of the body. You cannot have chronic stress, your adrenaline, your um, your cortisol, those are chemicals. Those are hormones that course through your body. You have to have a decrease in those because it does actually cause damage to your heart, causes damage to your brain. But you have to be able to rest. So you have to have permission to actually rest once the crisis passes. And that's part of what the hypervigilance doesn't allow you to do because you're always waiting for the next thing. And it's it's an important part of how you get the body to not be so reactive. It's going to take time. It takes an addict a year and a half to two years to really become clean or sober or both. A year and a half to two years. And that is with accidents here and there, step work, meetings, counseling, maybe it's IOP, maybe it's rehab, but it's a year and a half to two years. You are going to take just as long. But my belief is that everybody who is a loved one of an addict is about six months behind the addict in their recovery. They are recovering from their addiction. And by the time they get to month sixth on working on that, by month six, the family has probably started on their recovery from the addiction. So if you calculate that out, a year and a half to two years for the addict, it's about it's about two years to two and a half years for the family to fully recover from their addiction. So you have to do your own work. You have to do your own step work. You have to do the fourth and fifth step of searching moral inventory and then saying it out loud. Your inventory, resentments, fear, over responsibility, not self-blame for the addiction itself. So you have to work your own steps as a loved one. It's really important. It's a valuable thing to be able to work those steps. And t to triggers aren't your fault. It's not a blank check either. Relapse is not the same as being your fault. Relapse doesn't equal your fault. It's not your fault. Still not required to absorb everything because it it's the trauma talking. You know, the trauma talking is the thing that gets you in your head. Not not the addict's trauma, but your trauma. The things that you've been exposed to because that person has addiction. Relapse does not equal your fault. It's not your it's not because you didn't do something or you did something. That person is struggling with addiction. It's their addiction, it's their work. And if they f feel like they've, you know, they've got to use, they use, okay, fine. It's what happens after they've used that you have to deal with, which is your feelings about their uh their accident, meaning they've they drank one day or their relapse if they're drinking for two or three weeks. Like it's part of part of what you've got to do is work on your trauma of that experience and how to recover from that. So th this brings me to one of the last things, which is when to stay and when to step back from the relationship. It's it's something that you've gotta decide if you are in a situation where it is so destructive and they don't seem to be on a path of recovery, they don't even seem to be looking at the path of recovery, they're not even they are just not concerned about that. You being there and enabling their existence is going to ultimately result in a disastrous outcome for them. So you have to figure out when do I stay and when do I step back from the relationship? Support looks different for active use versus early recovery versus sustained recovery. In in the active using phase, you probably are full-blown in the enabling addiction cycle. That looks very clumsy, horrible, confusing. And that's usually when somebody comes into my office. That's usually where they're at. There, the person who's an addict is probably engaged in active use. Maybe they started to work on recovery a little bit, maybe not. Um, but what happens is you, as the person who's the loved one, you're in that phase of the frantic, you know, trying to figure out how to get them to move away from it or whatever. But you got to be able to recognize when early recovery is happening. And that's why it's really important for you to be an al-Anon and to be working with a counselor who's trained in addiction. They have to be trained in addiction, they have to have experience in working with addiction. And if you have a counselor who is aware of that, they're gonna be able to help guide you through and understand what early recovery looks like. Early recovery does not mean that the person has stopped using their drug of choice completely and they're never going back to it. That is a fairy tale. That doesn't exist. They stop, then they might use and have an accident, they stop again, they have another accident, then there's longer periods of abstaining, and then there might be an accident. That is what's called normal recovery. It happens. You have to be able to recognize as a loved one and turn off your hypervigilance and your enabling and recognize when that early recovery is happening, because it's gonna shift, hopefully, eventually, into sustained recovery. And when it shifts to that sustained recovery, that's probably about the time that you're gonna be actually moving into the beginning steps of your recovery from their addiction. So if you can't distinguish between active use, early recovery, and sustained recovery, you're gonna be lost and you're gonna be very frustrated. There's a trust level, there's a shame recovery level that happens in these stages when you're going through this that I work through with families. Um teaching them the model of forgiveness and repair when it comes to addiction. And it's very challenging for people when they go through this. So it it support for that looks different, and it's different on each of those three stages, and you've got to be able to distinguish those. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about what is necessary, what's needed for you to get into recovery from somebody like Ray and his wife, where he started it and he's in he's in that that sustained recovery, but it's the beginnings of the sustained because he's not in early recovery. He's been doing it for a while. He should be able to come home and talk to his wife and say, you know what? I know you're worried about me. I know that you were concerned, I see that you were up. I am actually okay. And you know what? To be honest with you, I sat out in front of that liquor store for 20 minutes and I didn't go in. That story should be comforting to the wife. It should not be a threat to the wife. If she actually understood addiction and was working with somebody who understood addiction as a counselor, she would be able to take that to her counseling session and tell that story and have the counselor say, you know what, that's great. He's being honest with you, he's open with you, he's not feeling shame, and so he's feeling support. You have to be able to deal with the fact that he has those feelings. People who are addicts have addict brains and they operate differently and think differently in interactions with the world. And that's my advice about recovery with uh loved ones is that you be able to distinguish when somebody can be open and honest and you don't get filled with shame or upset and you don't kick into uh the the anger or the shutdown because they're talking about their experience in recovery. If the person is working on recovery and they've been working on it for a while, they're gonna have some struggles. They're gonna have times when they wanted to use, but they didn't, and those should be celebrated, not shut down, not put into uh secrecy, because that destroys relationships. So your next step, if you are a loved one of an addict and you're listening to this, is to get into the recovery community, which means the loved ones of addicts. So go to Al Anon, go to Naranon, get into the community, and please get the support professionally because you need it. You need it, and it and it most times it gets hidden. If a couple, if somebody calls me and they say, Hey, I'd like to make an appointment and come in. I don't know if we need couples counseling or if the the my husband or wife who has this problem, they need the counseling. I I say, you both need the counseling. The couple does, the relationship needs help, you need help individually, and your husband. Think of it as a traumatic, tragic, horrible, chronic condition that needs to be treated, no different than a heart attack or cancer or anything else. So please get that help. So get into professional help, get into the community, and get a way to get that support that you need. And just like in the last episode, you don't mask this either. You deal with it too. Well, that's it for this episode of Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard. I hope you've gotten some out of this episode and have been able to show you some direction, give you some directions recovery. If you are in need of help, you can reach out to me through my website, docjock.com, and give me a hollow. You can send me an email and ask me questions or if you like this episode, please like, subscribe, and recommend button and will you pretend to support. And if you need help, please come to a meeting. Go to a greenhouse. Get a real good addiction. This is crazy to end your life if you're trying to stay there. And if you're a loved one of an addict, you can help you something out. Until next time, this is Doc Joc, your addiction lifeguard saying.