Has Your Addiction Hurt The People You Love? ( if so, this video is for you)

So let's talk about how do you take care of yourself and take care of your family at the same time? Now, a lot of people will actually tell you not to do this. They'll tell you things like, hey, recovery is selfish. Just focus on you. Just focus on staying sober. But in order to do that, you have to like avoid your family, who's on your butt, who's watching you like a hawk, who's maybe putting down a lot of boundaries and controlling. And so you're trying to ignore that and ignore that, which actually triggers your family because it feels like you're ignoring them again and makes them do all that stuff more, which is triggering for you. So, so I say you really don't want to ignore the family piece for a long time. Is helping them feel better is actually going to make your life a lot easier because it's going to get them off your back. They're going to stop spying and controlling and snooping and question and all the passive aggressive comments. Let's get rid of those too. Can you imagine how much easier getting sober is going to be when you don't have your family breathing down your neck every second? Exactly. Now, the first thing you have to do is stick stop the addicted behavior. You can't heal the family if the addiction is still happening. So you want to make sure that you're really committed and you probably want to make sure that you have a little bit of sobriety in there. I'm not saying that you have to have months and months. I'm just saying that you have to really be trying if you know in your heart you're going to use tomorrow or next week. You probably don't want to do this yet because you're really going to cause a lot of damage if you do what I'm going to tell you to do. And then you just stomp all over it next week. So not do that. Now, I know you can't say that you're going to be sober forever. That's not what I'm asking you to do. I'm just saying, like, you know when you're solidly committed and you know in your heart that you're really trying and you want your family to know that that's when you need to do this. So once you have the addictive behavior somewhat stable, you want to move on to the second step, which is going to be to acknowledge how your addictive behavior has hurt your loved ones. Like specifically, and I recommend when you do this step to actually maybe even get out some paper and put the names of your loved ones. One sheet of paper, one name at the top. You can think about how your behavior has affected that loved one specifically because you want to avoid general blanket apologies. And I'm sorry, and I know my behaviors affected y' all negatively. You can say that stuff, but it might actually backfire on you because I'm guessing you probably said it before. And sometimes when you say that again, families can respond negatively and say things like, yeah, we heard all that before and what's going to be different this time? And like I said, we don't need any more passive aggressive comments. We already feel bad enough, so let's get this done the right way. Now, you may be having a hard time thinking of how your behavior has hurt your loved one, but hang in there, because I'm going to give you a lot of examples. Make sure you have those pens and pencils ready, because it's going to help you a lot. But before I even tell you what they are, write this at the top of each of those pieces of paper that you got out. Ready? You have to acknowledge how you've hurt them specifically without any of these things, without justifying, rationalizing, defending yourself or minimizing your behavior. And that's where it's going to be really hard, because it's our instinct to do that. Those are ways that we are defending against our own shame and our own guilt about the situation. But if we say things like, well, I'm sorry, but, or it wasn't that bad, or it never was as bad as you thought, the other person's gonna think that you're not very sincere. Your family really only wants two things. They want to know, number one, that you get that it is a problem. Like, really and truly and deeply get that whatever that addictive behavior was, is an addiction and is a problem. And secondly, they want to know that you get that it's had a negative impact on them. Basically, they just want to know that you get it. And so all you're trying to communicate here is, I get it, and I'm working on it. And if you can really effectively communicate that to them, it's going to bring their anxiety down about 100 levels, which is going to bring your anxiety down about 100 levels. Now, I know the thought of doing this may sound kind of scary, but here's what I want you to think about. It's kind of like if you have a splinter in the bottom of your foot and you just keep on walking on it and you don't deal with it and it's in your sweaty nasty shoe and eventually it gets like all infected and now you can't even walk and it's like turn funny colors and it SW swollen and it hurts if you breathe on it. That's what happens when we don't deal with things. But if you've ever had a splinter in your foot or anywhere else and you've taken it out, yes, it is painful to get in there and get it out. And sometimes it's even ugly and nasty. But almost as soon as it's out, you feel better. And the healing happens pretty quick after that. So all that avoiding is just keeping you sick and uncomfortable longer. So let's put a stop to that. So you got your paper out, you got your family members names up there, you've written on there. I'm not going to justify, rationalize and minimize. None of that stuff. Stuff. Now you might already know exactly how your behavior has impacted them. In fact, I think if you stop to think about it for just a few minutes, they've probably told it to you a bunch of times. In fact, they probably screamed it at you, several of them. So that's a good place to start. If they've said something to you over and over and over, that's probably the big daddy. Go ahead and put that at the top of the paper. But if you're having trouble articulating exact ways that your behavior has been hurtful to them, here are some things for you to think about. Have you been gaslighting your family member? If you don't know what gaslighting means, it means like making someone think that they're crazy, specifically on purpose. Like if they've caught you doing things and you said no, I have not and you're wrong and you always think I'm doing that. And you're just controlling and you've made the other person feel like they were crazy or it's their fault when you know good and darn well it was true, that is gaslighting. Maybe you've just not been very present for your family. It's like, yeah, you're there but you're not there. You're not engaged with them, haven't really been in the game. Maybe some things you've done have really embarrassed, embarrassed or even humiliated your loved one. It's possible that you've even blamed your loved one for your addiction. That's a big one to own. You probably put your loved one in some really awkward situations and just acknowledging that will help them feel very seen and heard. If you're really honest with yourself, you know that you've probably been pretty unpredictable and maybe even unreliable. We've broken promises, we've not taken care of our responsibilities. We've definitely not pulled our fair share weight in the family. Maybe we've probably told some lies or been deceitful in some way, split family members against each other, just trying to keep everyone from finding out what's really going on. Maybe we've been manipulative to our loved ones. We've done things to try to control their emotions, to get certain responses out of them, either good responses or negative responses. We've not taken their concerns seriously. Maybe you've been irritable with them and maybe there's been a lot of financial deception. That's just a list of some really common ways that when we're in active addiction, our addiction impacts our family. The more specific you can be, the better. But whatever you do, stay on your side of the street. When you do this, I want you to get a big star and put that right by this sentence on your paper. Stay on your side of the street. Now take your highlighter and highlight it. Most of you know what I mean already when I say stay on your side street. But just in case you don't, what I mean is you're only focusing on my bads. We're not focusing on what they did or didn't do that contributed or their bads. I'm not saying they're not there, I'm just saying now isn't the time to deal with theirs. This is about getting it off your shoulders so you don't have to avoid, you don't have to feel shameful and guilty and resentful anymore. And it's also about helping them so their anxiety can go down and then that'll help your anxiety go down. Now, as we're going through this process, you may be thinking to yourself, well, there's some people I'm just not ready to do this with. And you might be right about that. If you know you're not ready or they're not in your life every day right now, then it's totally fine to wait on this. But if this is your spouse and you're living with them, if this is your parent, if this is your child and you're still in an everyday type relationship with them, the faster you can get this done, the better they're going to feel, the better everything's going to be. Now, if you're really ready to do this and you want some like step by step guidance. Then you can look at my rapid relationship repair online course. It is for people in recovery, either early recovery or even later recovery, who've done a lot of damage to a relationship. And you really want to heal that. I'm going to put the link to that right up here and in the description. And up next, I want you to watch this video which is more on building trust with your family.