Amber Hollingsworth (master addiction counselor) presents a YouTube talk about repairing family relationships damaged by addiction. She argues that technical fixes (saying/doing the right things) are insufficient unless one's heart and values are aligned—what the source calls "self-betrayal"—because justification and subconscious patterns push people onto the drama triangle (victim, rescuer/hero, persecutor). Her practical prescription: identify and let go of defenses, approach interactions from genuine love and care, and study common justification categories (see companion video) to stop perpetuating conflict.
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If you want to feel better about yourself, if you want to fix your relationships, it's not good enough to say the right things and do the right things or even be on good behavior. You have to be coming at those situations from a good, loving place in your heart. When addiction enters your family, it's pretty much like a Category 5 tornado just came through the middle of your household. It's going to leave everything in a wreck. Your sense of self is going to be destroyed. Your relationships are going to crumble. You won't have any trust left in you. You'll constantly feel vigilant and afraid. And your finances might even be in a mess too. Sometimes addiction causes so much damage that you might be thinking, even if we beat the addiction, there's no way we can put this family back together again. But before you give up, watch this video. Because I'm going to show you how to sort through that wreckage, find the salvageable pieces and slowly begin. But to build a better life. If you can do what I'm going to teach you in this video, not only can you repair your relationship with your loved one, you can actually repair and improve every relationship that you have. If you're new here, welcome. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, master addiction counselor, and you're watching Put the Shovel down, the YouTube channel dedicated to helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you can stay five steps ahead of it at all times. If that sounds like something that you need to do, consider subscribing. Alright, back to our topic. A lot of the information I'm going to give you today comes from a book called the Anatomy of Peace, which was recently recommended to me by a friend who's also in the recovery community. I'll put the link to the book in the description below. Okay. So the foundational piece to putting your life and your relationships and yourself that back together again is going to be getting your heart in the right place. Because over the course of time that this addiction has been wreaking havoc in your life, you've made some decisions along the way that you're not proud of. You've done some things, you've said some things that you know in your heart of hearts wasn't the right thing to do. In the book, they actually call that a self betrayal, and I think that's an excellent term because what's happening is you're betraying your own value system. And when you do that, it immediately puts your heart at war with the other people around you. Because let's face it, we have, like, fragile egos. And when we do things that are disconnected from our value system, when we betray ourselves, we almost immediately, on a subconscious level, begin to look for ways to justify our behavior, our actions, our thoughts, and our feelings. And unfortunately, all that justification usually leads to more bad decision making. Now, eventually, all these subconscious processes actually calls us to what the book calls collude in the conflict that we're having with the people around us. And essentially, what that means is we are triggering inadvertently, probably subconsciously, the negative behavior from the other person that we're saying that we don't want. So basically, that's a fancy way of saying you're feeding into the problem. In fact, even if you don't know it and you don't mean to, you're probably triggering a lot of those negative responses that you're getting. Because, you see, when you've betrayed yourself, you've gone against your values and your heart is at war. And you've justified your own thinking and decision and behaviors. That's gonna lead you straight to the drama triangle. Now, if you haven't seen my video, if you're not familiar with that term, I'll put a link to it in the description. Or actually, I'll put a card to it right up here. You can click on it. But essentially, it's all about, you're gonna be coming from one of three places when you're at war in your heart. You're gonna be coming from a victim, men, or a hero mentality or rescuer, they'll call it on the drama triangle. Or maybe even the persecutor role. Now, all of those roles are unhealthy and involve bad boundaries. And all that comes from these immediate psychological processes that happen as a result of trying to keep our own egos intact. Now, in another video, I'll go into more detail about the ways that people tend to justify their behavior, causing their heart to go to war, causing them to get on the drama triangle. But for now, what I really want you to understand is that if you want to feel better about yourself, if you want to fix your relationships, it's not good enough to say the right things and do the right things or even be on good behavior. You have to be coming at those situations from a good, loving place in your heart. I know. Pressure, right? It's not good enough just to be good. You gotta feel the right way about it. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm telling you. Because I know you've had experiences where you've interacted with Someone else who may have said the right things, they may have done the right things, but you knew that in their mind, they were like stabbing you with knives. Now, if you're from the south, you probably have extra superpowers at doing this, because in the south, we know how to be super sweet, say the nicest thing, but say it with an ill intent. I'm not saying that's a good thing to do. I'm just saying that it happens. Passive aggressiveness is the language of the south, for sure. Of course, you can't change everything. You can't control all the circumstances and you can't change someone else. But if you change the way that you interact with the people around you, they will automatically change the way that they interact with you. So if you're upset, if you're frustrated with how someone treats you, how someone acts around you, instead of being angry with them, instead of trying to make them change their behavior, try to identify what it is inside of you, how you're interacting with them that could be propagating the problem. You know, most of the time, we make bad decisions based out of fear, and that fear leads us to do all sorts of things that ultimately are a betrayal to ourselves. So if you want to get your heart in the right place, you're going to have to let go of your defense mechanisms, let the wall down, and focus on coming at all of your interactions with from a place of genuine love, care, and concern. If you can do this, if you can shift your heart like this, you will see an immediate shift in your relationships. Now, I'm not telling you that immediately things will change 100%, but I am telling you immediately, things will start to get a little bit better. And if you continue to do this consistently, the people around you will take their walls down as well. And from that point, things can drastically change. Things will get better. And best of all, this works in any relationship. Now, your next step is to watch the video about the typical, really common ways that people tend to justify their own bad behavior. Because once you know the categories, you're going to be able to identify it in yourself and put a stop to it.
