Amber Hollingsworth explains how addiction destabilizes the entire family system. When one person's mental energy, money, and time get consumed by substance use, they can't meet others' needs. The family then spends all its energy trying to stop them, creating secrets, mistrust, and broken roles that spread dysfunction through everyone.
Chapters
While the family member's discovering their secrets, guess what's happening? Family is keeping secrets of their own. This isn't just a one-sided issue. Everything in families becomes twisted up because everybody starts to keep secrets, not just the addict and the alcoholic. The reason why families get so dysfunctional is because everybody gets caught up in all of this secret keeping, and everybody's pitted against each other. And family systems are supposed to work together as a team for the most part. I mean, sure, all families have their issues, but for the most part, family members are there to meet the needs of themselves and the other family. When you have addiction going on, the person with the addiction becomes less and less and less able to meet other people's needs because that takes more and more of their mental energy, their money, their time to keep this addiction going. And so their energy starts to go inward. The family begins to get frustrated with them for various reasons. And so then the family members' energy is going towards getting this person to stop. Guess what happens to the running of the family? It just falls apart. And the family secrets can be just as damaging.
