Your life has mostly centered around your child’s or drinking partner’s addiction. You have made it your primary goal to control your loved one’s addiction. You try to mitigate the effects of drugs or alcohol. This article will help you understand why and when this happens. Are you a co-dependent person, what is co-dependency, when does it occur and what is the treatment of a co-dependent person.
Just as the life of an addicted person revolves around the substance they take, the life of a codependent person revolves around the addicted person, which causes them to forget about their own needs.
My experience of working in the Treatment Center and in the office shows that living with a person struggling with the problem of addiction affects the whole family. Each family member adapts to this situation in their own way and copes with the emotions of anxiety, fear, uncertainty and helplessness in different ways. Parents/partners justify, look for reasons, causes of addiction. During the session, there are sentences: “He’s a good child, just his new company … If it wasn’t for them, she wouldn’t be taking drugs”, “Husband has such a stressful job, so it’s no wonder that he drinks after work.
I know he has a problem, but if he doesn’t drink it, it’s even worse, so I pour it myself. He drinks and goes to sleep, and we have peace at home”, “My child certainly does not use drugs, he is too smart for that, others do, but he does not. I believe it. What I found is definitely his colleagues. He said he only kept it because they asked him to, “He’s 14 and he kicked me out of the room, he called me names, but that’s the age, he’s growing up.”
It is often the case that while living with an addicted person, family members adapt to destructive behaviors and behave destructively towards themselves and the addicted person.
If you want an addict to stop using/drinking/gambling, you first need to look at what works and what doesn’t work in your family system.
Therapy allows you to understand what is happening, why you keep repeating the wrong behavior and how you can stop it.
My therapeutic experience shows that the fastest and most visible change in the child’s behavior and his desire to be treated and be sober occurred in teenagers whose relatives also attended therapy or support groups for co-addicts. “My mother stopped smoking cigarettes. I can see that she cares about me and tries. I will also try not to go back to drugs and persevere during therapy.”, “My parents got rid of alcohol and decided that there would be no drinking in our house. They too, even on birthdays, believe me?” These are few cases, but they are always happy and motivating.
WHY IT IS WORTH TAKE THERAPY AS A PARENT/PARTNER OF AN ADDICTED PERSON:
You can gain knowledge about the addiction of a loved one and how to help them and yourself. The knowledge you gain will allow you to look at the situation with a distance and find the best solution. The principle here is: “If something works, do more of it.”
During the session, you will be able to find out which behaviors of your child / partner are the result of their addiction and why the addicted person behaves so self-destructively.
- You will learn what you have and cannot control.
- You will learn how to talk to an addict to motivate them to start therapy.
- You will learn how to support an addict in sobriety.
Often parents or partners of addicts ask what codependency is, how it manifests itself and whether it can be treated.
Codependency is a fixed form of functioning in a difficult, destructive and long-term situation related to the pathological behavior of a loved one.
Below I present sentences characteristic of the situation of a co-dependent person, the symptoms of co-dependence are harder to see and are not as visible as in an addicted person.
Resources: Feinberg Consulting
See if they match you, your feelings and experiences:
- Family and friends do not know what is really going on in my house.
- I can’t concentrate on work.
- I don’t tell anyone that my child is drinking or that my husband/wife/partner is drinking, that there are fights, and when someone asks, I lie, I look for excuses, justifications.
- I cut myself off emotionally from what is happening, from the emotions I feel (anger, sadness, regret, shame, powerlessness, helplessness, loneliness).
- I don’t talk to my family members about my child’s addiction or my husband’s/wife’s drinking.
- I have emotional swings, I feel chaos, emotional confusion, guilt and shame.
- I feel emotionally dependent on someone close to me who is addicted.
- I think and worry for the addict – their problems become my problems.
- I hear “You’re the reason I’m drinking.”, “You’re a lousy mother, I’m taking.”, “If you hadn’t gotten divorced, I wouldn’t have taken.”
- Physical and psychological violence is used against me (challenging, humiliating, pushing, pulling).
