Can Your Relationship Survive the Addiction Recovery Process?

This is the couple's survival guide to addiction. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that the divorce rate of couples who struggled with addiction is four times higher than the national average. But you might be surprised to learn that most of those divorces actually happen after the addicted spouse gets into recovery. But believe it or not, that is the case. And in this video, we're going to talk about why that is and what to do about it. I'm going to share with you 33 very critical skills that a couple must master if you want your relationship to survive this crisis. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel down. I am Amber Hollingsworth, and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track. It's my goal to keep you five steps ahead of addiction at all times, and today is no different. We've got some very, very important information out there for anyone who's in a relationship where addiction has caused problems, whether that's you, you're the person who struggled with addiction, or your partner or your spouse is the person who has struggled with addiction. If you want your relationship to survive the please pay special attention to what's contained in this video. Now, you might be thinking, why in the world is the divorce rate higher after the individual struggling with addiction has gotten into recovery? Well, I think there's probably a number of reasons for that. For one, when the addiction is going on, the couple gets locked into this system of crisis, and both people are navigating a crisis, and someone's like, while you're in the crisis, you're just stuck navigating that, and it kind of creates this almost like trauma bond together that keeps you together trying to figure this whole thing out after the fact. Once someone begins a recovery process or gets into sobriety, believe it or not, there is not a lot of help and resources out there for couples to navigate through the recovery process as a family unit. And because of that, all the trauma that both partners have experienced doesn't get addressed, and it's just lingering out there. And typically, couples are not treated for that trauma, and they don't get any help about how to move past those problems, how to communicate, how to resolve couples issues, and the whole system just falls apart from there. I've seen this so many times, and it's always surprising. You know, I'll be working with a family or a couple, and the addictive person struggles and struggles and struggles, and it feels like Right when they're just about to get it, or right when they finally got it, the whole couple falls apart. And honestly, it makes me feel pretty devastated because I'm like, oh, my gosh, we just got here. What's going on? And I don't want that to happen for you. So let's talk about the three really critical shifts in thinking that you must wrap your head around if you want to get through this and stay together. Number one, it's very, very helpful if you will both wrap your head around the concept that this addiction, this, this outside force has come into your relationship and caused harm for both people. So instead of villainizing each other as good guy, bad guy, all that kind of stuff, you realize that this problem out here, this external force, is the problem and not necessarily any one person in the family system. When you do that, you can stop doing all the blame shifting. And you can start to wrap your head around the fact that everybody has been hurt by this issue. Once you realize that, then you can start working together as a team to do a lot of damage control, to clean up all the messes, and get busy with the process of recovering as a family or couple. Which brings me to mind shift number two that you really need to wrap your head around. And that is you need to shift your thinking from the idea that either I'm in recovery from addiction, or I'm in codependency recovery into a concept of we are a couple in recovery, or we are a family in recovery. You see, for way too long in the whole, like, addiction recovery world, we have separated couples out or families out to try to get this recovery process done. And the reason for that is because there's so much chaos going on in addicted family systems. And that you sort of have to separate it out a little bit at first to get the whole thing to kind of stabilize. So, Pete, the person with the addiction gets their support group, they get their treatment, they get all of their help. And the family members, usually the spouses or the parents, go to a completely separate support group. And they get their own sponsor and their own help. And both individuals are working on themselves separately. But. But where in the process do you work on the connection? Where do you work on your relationship or even your family as a whole? You see, there's just not a lot of resources out there for that. And it is a major lacking component. Once you realize that this outside force has caused all this trauma to both people. And you realize that you are a recovering couple as a unit together, then the last thing I really want you to wrap your head around is the idea that it is okay for both people to be able to express how they feel, what they think and what they need. And for me, family recovery and couples recovery is all about how to help the members of a family do that in a productive way, how to help each person hear the other person, how to express yourself, and in an assertive but effective way. Basically, it's like, how do we get our needs met better in this relationship? You know, I hate to say it, but a lot of the traditional recovery wisdom is all about detaching. Any of you who are in like an Al anon or a partner or spouse support group, you know this. It's like, detach, detach, detach. And if you're the person that's trying to get into recovery, you're the person that has had an addiction, then you hear, you know, like, recovery is a selfish process, and addiction is a selfish disease, and you got to focus on yourself. And so you get all this messaging that pulls you apart and tries to get you to focus on yourselves, which in some ways is a little bit helpful because typically the whole system has become so emashed and messy and toxic that you do need to pull the pieces apart and work on them a little bit individually. But please don't forget that you've got to put those pieces back together and work on the. The unit itself. Otherwise those pieces will, when they do come back together, they're not going to work together. They're not. It's just not going to work right. Unless you address the systems issue. Now, if you're watching this and your spouse is still in active addiction and you're trying to get to the recovery process, then I would recommend our invisible intervention online program for you, because not only is it going to teach you how to intervene and get your loved one to take steps towards sobriety and recovery, but in the process, you're going to already be starting to heal that relationship so that when your spouse does start the recovery process, you're already halfway down the road because the relationship is already going to be working about 100 times better when they get there. And if you're watching this and you are a person, you recovery yourself and you've done some work on getting sober, but the relationship is still a mess, and there's a lot of distrust and just a lot of toxic behaviors that are still going on, then I would recommend for you our rapid relationship repair course, because that's all for the person who's in early recovery or in recovery in general. And that needs to address the family dynamics. Like build trust. Like be able to communicate assertively what your needs are. Like how to make honesty and truthful communication a safe issue within the relationship. Rapid Relationship Repair is all about that. I'm going to put the links to both of those online courses in the description below. But up next, your very next step in being able to work on the relationship issue. I've got these two videos for you. I'm going to put them right up here, which specifically focus on the relationship part of recovery.