Does your addicted loved one ever tell you... "you just don't understand"?

I want you to hear my little voice in your head translating that for you. The translation is, I feel like you're judging me. When you're an addiction counselor, oftentimes one of the first questions that you face is, are you in recovery? People want to know if they can trust you, if you're going to understand them. And to be honest, early in my career, I used to be really scared about this question. I was actually pretty insecure about the situation. And honestly, I would try really hard to avoid it, because not only am I not in recovery, but when you go to counseling school, they teach you basically nothing about addiction. Okay. Actually, you do take one class that's on addiction. And what I can remember from that class is I do remember we learned the Jelinek disease model of addiction. And I do remember that we had to go to some 12 step meetings and kind of like write a report on it. But that's basically it. Are you serious? So just imagine it. Here I am, a baby counselor, barely, like, probably like 24, just out of grad school, and one of my first assignments is to build and implement an intensive outpatient program for adolescents. Essentially, that's dealing with teenagers who have drug problems. And guess what? I was pretty much thrown into that by myself. Yeah, just me and a big old group full of teenagers who have drug problems. Sink or swim. Chuck her in the deep end. Not only. Not only am I not in recovery, and I really don't have much education about addiction, but here's a little secret. You ready? I've never even been cool. Never been one of the cool people. I've been around a lot of drugs. I've been to my shit fair. I've been to my fair share of parties and stuff, but I've just never been that girl. So I was a little insecure about it. I can remember thinking to myself, how am I going to deal with these teenagers? And what I decided to do, which really worked very well at the time, was just try to build a relationship with them. And that was it. My motto for that group was, we care about you more than they care about you. And that actually worked pretty good. And I had a secret system for. When the kids asked me if I was in recovery, when they would ask me that question, I would say this. I would say, you know what? I'll tell you my whole story when you graduate this program, because when kids graduated, the program I ran, they got to come back as mentors. So I basically am like, when you're a mentor, I'll tell you all about it. It's a hilarious story. I'll tell you later. Okay. Now, by the time they got to be a mentor, it really didn't matter to them much anymore because they were pretty bonded and connected at that point. So if they asked me once they were mentor, I would tell them that's how I secretly bypassed that little landmine. Luckily, on the adult detox unit, a lot of what you did was, like, education, because they weren't going to be there very long. You weren't going to get into deep therapy. But it was my job to educate them about what they were dealing with. And luckily, I have pretty good skills of standing at the whiteboard, teaching about addiction, because in my previous life, before I was counselor, I was a teacher. So I kind of had an ability to engage people that way. And at the time, that worked out for me pretty well. People really liked me. People really liked coming to my classes. And at that time, I knew so much about addiction, I was teaching them things they had never even heard before. They're like, wow, she must be in recovery, because she knows everything about addiction. I just let it pass. Now, I will tell you this one little side note. I do come from a very addictive family. So it's not like I've never been around addiction. Oh, I've been around it. But people, they don't usually care about that part. In fact, if someone asks you in your recovery and you say no, But I come from family, and some people in my family have drug problems, it might even make it worse because they're thinking, oh, now you're gonna judge me because your mama, your grandmama, or whoever. So I knew that wasn't a good answer. I got kind of good at skirting this question, and I had other skills to win people over. Now, eventually, I went out on my own. I started a private practice. That's the one I still run now, where we treat whole family systems. And these days, I'm actually not insecure about the question at all, because I've come to understand something really, really important. When someone asks you if you're in recovery, what they really want to know is if you're going to judge them and can you understand them. And after a long time, I've actually come to feel that not being in recovery is really my superpower. Now, let me explain, because I know that's quite a big shift. I think not being in recovery actually helps me a lot. Number one is I didn't feel like I knew everything. So, literally, I studied more, read every book like, literally know the science of it, like, way more than most people, because I felt like I had to do something to compensate. But more importantly, I think being not in recovery helps me because I actually have to really listen to what my clients tell me. I really have to figure out who they are and what they're struggling with. And I don't have my own personal experience, like, confusing that all up. Because let me tell you a little secret. I find that a lot of people that are in recovery, that are addiction counselors, have a hard time separating their story from their client's story. I can't believe you said that. Because they project everything they went through onto the client. Now, I'm not saying that people in recovery are bad addiction counselors. Actually, some of the best addiction counselors I know are in recovery. I'm just saying that this is a pitfall that if they're not careful of, they can fall into. I've seen it happen a million times. In fact, I've trained a lot of addiction counselors, and I've seen this a lot. Because when you recover, you come into the situation thinking, you know everything. You've been there, you know what they're thinking before they say it. And that can actually be a big block causing you to not listen. When I get a new client, my entire mission is just to understand them. I am looking to understand who they are as a person, not so much about their addiction, because, to be honest, they're not going to tell me that much about that anyways. I get that from my family counselor who's done seeing their mom or grandmama or their neighbor or something and told me everything. I got that information coming this way. When I'm talking to a person, I want to know who they are, what they care about, what they value, what they see as their roadblocks, where their struggles are. I am very deeply focused on understanding each person as an individual, not just as an addict or an alcoholic, because it's those individual characteristics that I build on to pull someone out of addiction. And you know what? No one ever even asked me that question anymore. I haven't been asked that question. I can't even remember when the last time I got asked that question. Maybe it's because I have it on my website that I'm not in recovery, so people already know that. Or maybe because once they meet me and they get in there, they feel like I'm trying to understand them and that I get them and that I'm not judging them, so they don't need to Ask. I don't really know why they don't ask, but it doesn't seem to be an issue. The truth of it is, if you're struggling with an addiction, you feel really bad about it and you feel shameful about it, and you're worried that someone that has not had that struggle might judge you or expect something out of you that you can't give. And so if you just address that fear right out the gate, it becomes a non issue. It's really kind of interesting because the clients that I see, their lives are so different than mine. Am I just like them? No. I see mostly men and like young guys, like teenagers and college kids. I don't play sports. I never was cool. I'm not in recovery. But I have no problem connecting to them because I am 100% just trying to understand them as people. And I think that comes across pretty strong. So if you've got an addicted loved one and they have a tendency to tell you that you just don't understand, maybe what that really means is they want you to just understand them more as a person. The next time someone tells you that, just say, you know what? You're right, I don't, but I want to. Once again, that's the right answer. And ask questions and be curious and try to see them for more than just an addict or an alcoholic. Maybe you haven't had an addiction, but you've probably been through some really hard stuff. And you can use your experience going through really hard stuff to connect to them. And you probably even have problematic behavior patterns that you do over and over and over. And even though you know you shouldn't, you keep doing it. You can find something from your life to help you connect to the difficulty of overcoming these patterns. The next time they tell you that you just don't understand what they're going through, I want you to hear my little voice in your head translating that for you. The translation is, I feel like you're judging me. Once you understand what the person's really trying to say, then you can address the real issue. Now, once you've built a connection with someone and there's a level of trust there, then you can kind of move on to the work of helping them to overcome that addiction. And in order to do that, you're going to need to know how to motivate them, which is why I want you to watch these videos next. I'm putting them right up here, all in a nice, neat playlist for you.