Category: Family

Part of our recovery work entails looking at our childhoods, our families and our home environments to explore some of the hidden factors in our mental and emotional health issues. Our addictions are sometimes rooted in the family roles we experienced and witnessed when growing up. We might have had parents or caretakers who were […]

There are a great many things we regret about our experiences with addiction. One of the most difficult among them is when we miss out on our kids’ childhoods because of our struggles with addiction. Many of us find that our dependence on addictive substances and behaviors is so strong that we make regrettable decisions. […]

When addiction runs in our families, or when we fear addiction might develop in our children, we instinctively want to protect them and safeguard them from harm. We want to do everything in our power to keep the addiction from developing, or if it has already appeared, worsening and further overtaking their lives. When we’re […]

Confronting our children’s addiction is one of the hardest things we’ll ever have to do. We want what’s best for them. We want them to be happy, healthy and whole. Learning they are struggling with addiction can be shocking, troubling and heartbreaking. Our instinct is to want to protect them and to lessen their burdens. […]

When our loved ones are suffering, our instinct is to protect them and shield them from harm. We want to take away their pain and prevent them from experiencing yet more suffering. Our intentions are to support our children, but we can fall into patterns of enabling them instead. We enable other people’s addictions in […]

Confronting addiction in our families can be a grueling and painful process, full of unforeseen mental and emotional challenges. We can feel as though we’ve let our children down and can therefore be filled with shame and regret. We can find ourselves analyzing all of the mistakes we might have made, all of the ways […]

When we have a loved one struggling with addiction, it can be extremely painful to watch them suffer. For many of us, we feel compelled to stage an intervention to try to convince them to get help. Confronting someone on such a sensitive issue as addiction can become contentious. Emotions are high, and a lot […]

When one of more of our family members is struggling with addiction, we are all affected and the negative impacts extend to all of us. We perpetuate toxic patterns of enabling, denying and exacerbating each other’s addictions. We are all hurt by the negative consequences, the arrests, accidents, abuse and self-harm. To feed our addiction, […]

Addiction is sometimes referred to as a family disease because it affects everyone in the addict’s life and also because underlying issues and contributing factors are often shared among family members. How does addiction function as a family disease? For some families, addiction is genetic, and we pass the traits onto our children. Families with […]