15 April 2023
This entry was inspired by a loyal member of the SMART Recovery Family + Friends (F+F) group, based out of Oakville, ON. Earlier this year, she realized that people in the F+F group can be in recovery but that, like their loved ones, F+Fs can also lapse or relapse. Last week’s blog focused on being in active addiction. This week, we rotate the lens 180 degrees to look at what it is to be a dysfunctional loved one. There is a lack of terminology here that made ending the last sentence difficult, that is, we don’t have a word for the family members and friends who are pre- or post-recovery from enabling addictive behaviours.
Enabling, supporting, or facilitating addiction is hell. From my experience in this community, most people who arrive in F+F groups, or in Al-Anon or anything similar, don’t know they have a problem. We arrive looking for a solution to the addiction of our loved one not realizing that our own behaviours are part of the same cycle. It can take a long time for us to realize we too are affected by and affecting addiction. We’ll look briefly at an independent study from half-way around the world, Shanmugam (2021), the Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT) approach, and the laundry list of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA) to try to understand this better.
Bio-psycho-social-spiritual is a concept used by Shanmugam (2021). I first heard it in my addiction studies. It’s a whale of a word made up of biological, psychological, social, and spiritual. It is a more analytical approach to the overarching concept of holism or holistic perspectives. This is important for a few reasons. First, the implicit premise is that addiction arises from no one source but from a confluence of sources including genetic inheritance, culture, and socialization. Secondly, the social aspect of the word makes it clear that addiction is a we issue, not just a me issue. That we-ness ties into Maté’s (2018) point, made nearly famous by Hari (2015), that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection. As such, the judgment and criticism we often bring to our loved one throws fuel on an already flourishing fire of addiction. So what do we do?
As the opening chapter of Get Your Loved One Sober (GYLOS) (Meyers & Wolfe, 2004), states, the subtitle identifies our issues: nagging, pleading, and threatening. Those behaviours, typical of the loved ones of an addicted person, come from one fundamental misperception: that we are able to control another person or at least that person’s behaviour. Wrong. The saddest part of that wrongheadedness is that it is entirely avoidable through philosophical education.
Amongst those who stated this truth nearly 2,000 years ago, the one I know best is Epictetus. In the first chapter of his handbook (Enchiridion, Long, 1991, p. 11) he states “Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and, in a word, whatever are not our own acts.” [Bolding added.] The acts of another person are not our own acts.
In SMART Recovery this is made simple through the hula-hoop analogy. Whatever is within your hula-hoop (~1 meter diameter) is yours to control. Everything outside (other people, places, things) is not within your control and is best relinquished. To return to the Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT) approach, nagging, pleading, and threatening are acts designed by us to control or affect the behaviours of another. Because the acts of another human being are clearly outside of our hula-hoop, holding on to them will cause you major frustration, hopelessness, and acts of increasing desperation.
When we look at the increasing desperation of doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result, we have arrived at one definition of addiction. We, the loved ones of addicted souls, are ourselves addicted to acting as though we have some portion of that person’s agency. We don’t. And we never will. And those are good things. If you’re anything like me, self-control (identified by Heraclitus as the highest virtue) is hard on a good day and damned near impossible on a bad one. The point being, you’ve got more than enough in your own hula-hoop.
Which brings us very nicely to the second major premise. (The first: we can control other people.) That second premise is that we have often forfeited pursuit of our own values to such an extent that we have lost touch with our own souls. This is a complex issue and one I’m seeing as an interning psychotherapist and as a SMART facilitator: we become so wrapped up in the wellness (or more typically, illness) of a loved one, that our own wellness evaporates into time forgotten. This is the reason we need SMART’s hierarchy of values: we need to be in touch with those values and to put them front and center in our own lives.
This has (at least) two results. We focus on the content of our own souls and hula-hoops but at the same time we 1) leave our loved ones to sort out their own values and, 2) provide an example of how it’s done. This is one reason SMART F+F says that, as a result of your changes, your loved one may change as well.
As I often do, I have bitten off more than I can chew in one blog, so we’ll continue this next week, resuming with boundaries, the ACoA laundry list, and some of the holistic findings. (And if you didn’t notice, that was me enforcing a boundary (about 2.5 pages of text per blog.) Until next week.
Dan Chalykoff, RP (Qualifying), is near completion of an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his focus is addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
Hari, J. (2015, July 9). Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs
Long, G. (Tr.). (1991). Epictetus’ Enchiridion. Prometheus Books.
Maté, G. (2018). In the realm of hungry ghosts: close encounters with addiction. Vintage Canada.
Meyers, R.J., Wolfe, B.L. (2004). Get your loved one sober: Alternatives to nagging, pleading, and threatening. Hazelden Publishing.
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