Hidden Agendas In Addicted Family Systems - A House Divided

One of the biggest hurdles that you are facing if you have an addicted loved one is not just how do I get through to my addicted loved one? But how do I get everybody in the family on the same page? Because pretty frequently, if not usually, everybody is coming from a different camp and everybody's gonna have a different way that they think is the best way to deal with it. Some people in the family are gonna say, hey, their life is their life. Just let go of them, just cut them off, just kick them out, whatever. Let them do what they're going to do. Other people are going to want to take care of them and make sure they don't suffer too much. And then, you know, you have all these camps. But one of the things that can be the most difficult to overcome is when family members start to blame one another. And this happens all the time. So. And it happens all the time because usually because two things. One is the different personality types, which we talked some about last week. I'm going to touch back on that again today. But also because the person with the addiction is usually splitting between the different people in the family, the friends, you know, all the people they know. Everybody knows a little piece of the story, but not the whole story. And it's in the person with the addiction's best interest or the addiction's best interest. Maybe not the person's, but the addiction's best interest for all that not to come together. So what happens is they can keep people enabling by keeping people thinking that the problem is someone else versus their addiction or that someone else is causing them to relapse. I run into this all the time. One of the most common scenarios I see this in is when you have somebody who's married to an addict or an alcoholic, that person who has the addiction, their parents very frequently align against the spouse. Right. Because the person with the addiction almost always, I mean, like 90 plus percent of the time blames the spouse for whatever the issues are going on. So they're obviously, they're going to go to their parents and talk about why their spouse is controlling and critical and never satisfied and always on their case and, you know, just mean to them, basically. And they, they may say, yeah, I'm drinking too much to do with that, or I'm smoking, whatever, but it's because I'm in this horrible situation. How do I know that's happening? Because that's what they tell me when they come to my office. So I definitely know that's what they're telling their friends and their family members. And they're doing that sometimes consciously because they want to split these people apart. But a lot of times it's subconsciously. And there's also another layer of it where they're just looking for validation to validate their point of view. So they're going to tell the story in a certain way to get a certain response from other people. So you get people blaming each other. You get parents that blame each other. That's the other most common scenario that I see this in. When you have two parents who have an addicted child, like an adult or young adult, addicted child or adult, the mother and father, the two parents, whatever, they usually blame each other. One of the parents is going to be the one that's like the bad cop, which is the one that's very vigilant about the problem. They're constantly trying to find the evidence. They're staying on them. They're constantly worried about it. They don't want to talk about anything else. They bring it up to everyone who will listen. They bring it up to the person with the addiction. And there's usually a lot of conflict, if not outright conflict, at least tension and stress between that bad cop parent and the person that's struggling with an addiction. And then you have the other parent who usually takes the other side. Because what their motive is, what their agenda is, is that they are trying to de escalate the conflict between this parent and this kid because it stresses them out. The conflict that these two people are having stressed this person out. So the way that they usually deal with that is a couple of things. One is when they're talking to the other parent, they want to minimize the problem because they think, you know, you're so worried, you're so upset, you're so stressed, and you're trying. And they're trying to make them feel better about the issue, but it backfires because it doesn't make them feel better. It makes them feel unheard. It makes them feel unsupported, and it scares them to death because they're like, oh my gosh, our kid is over here running their life, ruining our life, going to kill themselves or somebody else. And you're not taking it serious. When usually the other parent is either trying to manage their own anxiety about it, like they don't want to admit it to themselves, or they're trying to help the other person feel less stressed about it, but it doesn't work. It only ever makes them feel more stressed, and it puts them more in that backup role, and they're even more like totally set on the idea of finding the evidence. And they start driving everyone around them crazy because they're trying to prove it. And some people just don't want to see it for various reasons because of the stress it puts on them. So you get this good cop, bad cop dynamic that goes on between two parents. You can also have this between siblings, you can have this between friends. There's always going to be mixed opinions and mixed agendas about how to deal with the situation, about how bad the situation is, about how to help the situation. And that conflict that happens between the family members is actually a much bigger barrier than the addiction itself. It's a much bigger barrier than how do we get this person out of denial or how do we get this person in treatment? Because as long as you got all these other characters in the story here who can't agree, who are arguing, her, blaming each other, who are in denial, enabling, you know, playing the bad guy, all the things, then the addiction is going to continue to grow. It just nurtures it, it gives it the room and space because everybody else back here arguing and fussing and fighting and blaming and being mad at each other, meanwhile the addiction is flourishing, right? It's just going crazy. It's just growing and growing and growing. And the more it grows, the more all these other loved ones get pitted against each other. And it's very difficult to get out of that because when you're wherever your opinion and your agenda is coming from, it's probably coming from a fear based place. And maybe everybody just handles their fear differently, right? So because it's coming from a fear based place, it's a very strong emotional reaction which is very difficult to override. Even, even when you're conscious of it. A lot of you are going to be able to relate to this. Like a lot of you who've been following my videos for a long time, you work really hard to get out of the bag of roll. You totally understand the philosophy. You guys are like, you guys know it better than I know it by now. But sometimes you still fall into the role because you're a human being, right? So even when you know you need to be reacting differently, even when you know you're enabling, even when you know you're playing the bad guy roll. You know, even when you know you're putting your head in the sand, sometimes it's just hard to override your own fight flight, freeze. Fun response in relationship to what's happened with your loved one. People's reaction is rarely because they don't care. It's either how they're managing their stress about the situation, how they're trying to manage your stress about the situation, how they're trying to manage your stress, about the way you're coming at them. Because the person, it's usually the closest person to them, the spouse, the parent, the best friend, the sibling, whatever, they're usually on high alert about it. So they're running around stressed out, and they're stressing everybody else out about it. And that's pushing those people away. And they're pushing those people to do certain things about it, whether they're pushing the other people to confront the person or stop enabling the person or help the person, or pay for treatment or get involved in this intervention technique. And the other people may not be ready for that for various reasons. And so it creates this cat and mouse dynamic. And the more that goes on, the more this main person over here feels freaked out, scared to death, unsupported, and they get more and more desperate. The most important thing, before you even really try to start helping your addicted loved one, if you've got this kind of dynamic going on in the family, you need to start with the family dynamic before you even start with a person. So maybe you're trying all of my techniques and maybe you're having some success, but somebody else in the family or maybe multiple other people, they're just not on board or they don't get it, or they think you're handling it wrong. If you're using my techniques, other people probably thinking you're being soft, but you guys that follow, you know, you're not being soft. We're being strategic here. We know what we're doing. We're not. We're not being in denial. We're not letting them get away with things. We're being strategic, right? But other people on the outside looking in are not going to understand that. They're going to be like, you need to tell them, blah, blah, blah, you need to kick them out, you need to set the boundaries, you need to get an interventionist, you need to cut them off all these things because they think you're being soft. If you're being really hard and you're arguing with the person because you're in that panic mode, you're in that bad cop role, then other people are going to be thinking you're being too harsh, you're being too mean. They're just doing it to rebel against you, or they're just doing it because you're stressing them out, or maybe they're not even doing it that much, and you're just overreacting. So a lot of times the other family members start very much reacting to this main person in the addicted person's life. So it's like this. It's like this domino effect. Basically. Addiction wreaks havoc on the entire family system. And not only do you have all these players in the game arguing, disagreeing, having different agendas, but then you have these other little players in the game who. And a lot of times these are kids or siblings who become like lost children. They get lost in the shuffle. They get their needs are being ignored, or they're trying to keep their needs to themselves. They're not asking for what they need. They're not saying anything because they know everyone's so stressed out. And it's their way of trying to help the family manage stress is to not add stress. So they're trying to do everything right or be really quiet or just stay in the room or just stay out of it. Or maybe they're even trying to figure out how to just leave home and get away from it because they can't take the chaos of it all. But everybody starts to have some kind of emotional reaction to a situation. Because families are systems. I like to think of them like. Like when you look at the insides of a clock and you have, like, all the little wheels that connect to all the other little wheels. There's no way to take a person in that system and let them start falling apart the way addiction makes you fall apart. And it not affect all the other cogs in the system. It just affects them differently. So if you're. If you're in this kind of situation and you're trying to get on the same page, the first place to start is to have empathy for the other people's opinions and fears and concerns and strategies for what's going on. You have to stop fighting with the other people, trying to get them to see it your way. Just exactly the same way as I tell you to stop fighting with the addictive person to get them to see your way. The more you fight, the more you're prolonging it. The more you fight, the more people dig in. So if you're wanting someone to see it your way and understand where you're coming from, then you need to approach people with empathy and understanding and do your very best to understand their point of view and to validate the parts that are valid. Right? Because I guarantee you, everybody's point of view has some validity in it. So Find the parts that are valid and, and acknowledge those. And what happens is then the barriers between you and the other family members start to dissolve and fade away. And now you can get on the same page. You have to handle these situations delicately. And you need to understand that the addictive person is probably playing into this quite a bit. It's not completely their fault for the splitting. Like, you know, we all have our different personalities and agendas, but they're probably not helping anything because as long as the addictive person can identify this villain, then they can get all the other people to think that the villain is the problem, which gets everybody else off of their case and onto this person's case. And maybe they're not outwardly like confronting this other person, but they're secretly sabotaging this other person by validating the addicted person's rationalizations and justifications and feeding into a storyline that's probably not completely true and not holding this person accountable. Right. And they're not doing that on purpose. You're doing that because you just don't have all the pieces of the information or. I want to kind of touch on. I said I would touch on this a little bit about the different personality types. How many of you were here last week or saw last week's video? When we talked about the Enneagram, we had our Enneagram expert on here, Dr. Lahe. Right. He was awesome, wasn't he? I love the Enneagram. But if you think about each other, the other people in the family, you think about their personality types even without knowing much, if you know what their Enneagram personality types, you can almost guess the way that they're going to cope with the issue. For example, if one of the other family members is an enneagram type 6, which is a fear based type, they're gonna be very emotionally reactive to it one way or the other because they're gonna be freaking out, they're gonna be panicking because they're just. Baseline status is thinking of worst case scenario. And this is a serious situation that definitely can end badly, like legitimately. It's not an irrational fear, it's a rational fear. And so the six in the family, the loyal skeptic, the questioner, they're going to be. They're going to be the one panicking. They're going to be the one rallying everybody. Either rallying everybody to kick this person out or rallying everybody to confront this person or have an intervention, their anxiety is going to be so high. Let's say you have a type 7 in the family. Some of y' all know I'm a type 7. Sevens have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. It's not that we don't have anxiety. It's just that we cram it down really far and we put a lock on it and we ignore it. And we have all these skills to try to distract ourselves, basically. So when you have this anxious person coming at you, coming at you, coming at you, the seven doesn't deal well with that. Like, they're more of a let me be busy or let me just be productive or let me think about something else rather than to get into this, oh, my gosh, worst case scenario place. So you got the seven over here, maybe, who's probably might be trying to minimize it or might be trying to just stay away from the stress of it. Maybe they're not minimizing it, but maybe they're just like, I just can't deal with all the stress of this. Like, y' all need to count me out, right? They're gonna be pulling away. Maybe you have a type 2 in the family, the helper, the giver, the nurturer. What do you think they're gonna be doing right? They're gonna be trying to love and support and take care of this person. And they're probably gonna be the one that, like, falls into that, like, more traditionally, what you think of as, like, a codependent role, like trying to fix things for this person, trying to care, take them. But they can also, because of that, they also can fall into this resentful bad cop role really easily because they over help and they over give, which can lead them to a place of resentment and frustration and feeling taken advantage of, rightfully so, in a lot of cases. And so they can either become this bad guy role form of enabling, or they can become like the traditional form of enabling, like trying to overly help, trying to call all the doctors, trying to push them into getting this help and calling this person, because it's their nature. So you can see why there's so many different agendas, points of view, perspectives about the situation. It's about how we deal with fear as people, and it's also about what information we have and don't have. And it's also about what the addictive person is telling or revealing or that you get to witness. Right, Because. Because no one has all the puzzle pieces, even me as the counselor. I try to get as many puzzle pieces as possible. I probably get more puzzle pieces than a lot of addiction counselors because we are so involved in the family. So I usually get more than just the addictive person's perspective. But even the family doesn't have the whole perspective. So most of the time, what I go on isn't even anybody's perspective. It's if I have a few pieces of information, like if I know what the addiction is and kind of how far into it we are, Then I go on the perspective of what I know is true about addiction. Basically, I can guess about what's happening because it's very, very predictable. So I usually go based on the truths I know about how addiction works. To make my decisions about what's probably really going on behind the scenes. Now, that doesn't mean I don't take in anybody's account. I take in the account of everyone. To try to figure out what is the addiction and how bad is it. And then I sort of layer on the top about what I know about the predictability and what's probably happening. And then I also try to layer in what I know about the different personality types. And this is how I start to conceptualize what is going on with this person, what is going on with this addiction. What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? How is the family helping? How is the family sabotaging, and how do we start to unravel this whole mess? But in order to do that, you really got to step back out of your own emotions. It's easy for me to do. I'm like the counselor. I'm not the one being hurt by all the decisions and all the things that are happening. I'm just this outsider looking in. So it's easy for me to say. I totally get that. I come from an addictive family, so I've been in all those positions before, and I know what it's like. But I'm not personally experiencing it with your specific loved one the way you are. But you have to kind of back up out of it and start to collect the puzzle pieces, not just about what's going on with your addicted loved one. Because a lot of you have gotten pretty good at that. Those of you that follow this channel you gotten, you guys are like, you guys are on it. You got it. But you may not be doing that same thing for the other players in the game. And once you start to put those pieces into play, your strategies become, like, a hundred times more effective. Right? That's why in our practice at Hope for families, that's the name of our practice, we do it the way we do it. Right. I can understand Addiction all day long. But if I don't get the other family members on board to help me, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm not powerful enough to do it without you. So for that reason, we have our family specialists who engage the family to get everybody on the same page. So if I can't do it without getting everybody on the same page, you're probably not going to be able to do it without getting everybody on the same page. So if you're trying these strategies and they're not working, it could be. I mean, there are other reasons it could not be working. But a large part of why it might not be working is because you're not backing up and doing first things first, like prerequisites. Right? Before you start invisible intervention in your addicted loved one, you might have to be invisible intervention in the other people in the system. And that's not an easy thing to do. But if you follow my strategies on how to back out of those conflictual roles with the addicted person, you can take those same exact strategies that I teach you on how to deal with the addicted person and use them on the other people in the family. Right? You come at them with humility. Hey, you know what? I haven't handled this the best. I haven't always really taken you seriously or I haven't always been super helpful for you. Go to the other family members, express this humility and, and figure out where they're coming from. Express empathy, express humility and get on the same page with them because you need them. Because if you don't have them on your team, they are going to be working against you right now. You can bet that the addictive person has, like, using friends. You're probably not going to get them on your team. So you got people on the other side of this, like pulling your loved one in this other direction. You don't need other family members contributing to that. But if you haven't taken these steps, I guarantee you you have other family members contributing. Maybe you're trying to do positive reinforcement because you're maybe doing the invisible intervention, but there are other people in the family who are just ticked off and they just keep engaging this person or triggering this person over and over and over again. And it's like, I'm just not getting anywhere because I'll get two steps forward and 10 steps back, right? Because we're working against each other. You gotta untangle these family dynamics first. And I'll be honest, it's not easy because by the time you get to the point to understand, you need to untangle these family dynamics. It's already tense. There's already stress between you and everybody else, and there's some bad feelings involved. There's some resentment. There's some hurt. There's a whole lot of stuff going on on top of just people's regular coping skills and personality, right? There's some stuff, and you got to overcome that. In fact, in our practice, because we deal with whole family systems, we have to be very careful on our team not to get pitted against each other, because this happens. It doesn't happen a lot anymore. I mean, it can happen a little bit, but not the way it used to happen in the beginning. Because, you know, it's like, I'm here in one perspective. Kimball or Kim are here in one perspective. We're totally buying into our person's perspective, and before you know it, at lunch, we're like, button heads with each other about who's really the problem and what to do about it. When that happens, we have fallen into it. We are not being helpful because we have literally now we're just being controlled by the addiction, right? We're just being controlled by all these dynamics. But it's not easy, right? You've got to sort of back up and realize that this other person is seeing a piece that you cannot see, and you just need to accept that. Not that you're right and they're wrong, but probably you're both right. Usually that's the case. You're both right. So find the piece of everybody's perspective that is on target and then collect those pieces that are right and put them together and decide who in the family can play what role in the team. Sometimes you can strategically have a bad guy role, but you can strategically have a good guy role. But it needs to be purposeful when it's good guy, bad guy, because we're just emotionally reacting. That doesn't work when it's good guy, bad guy. Because somebody's gonna push, because they know when they push, this addictive person is gonna run to the good guy, and the good guy's, like, ready? It's almost like throwing a ball to you. Right now. You are strategically deciding how you're gonna play these roles. You know, if somebody has to lay down the law. But somebody needs to kind of, like, nurture and be the empathetic one. Somebody needs to collect the intel, and somebody needs to deliver the hard conversations, whatever it is. Like, now you can be on a team, and everybody doesn't need to play the Same role. Everybody can't play the same role, but you can decide what are the strengths and weaknesses and perspectives of each person. And now you have, like a whole army to deal with this. And that really is going to work for you about a million times more effectively. The reason I figured this out is because traditionally in addiction treatment land, you send the addictive person to treatment. The counselors, the sponsors, the peer support groups, everybody else is trying to help this addicted person, but no one's dealing with the family. In fact, in the treatment world, even in the AA world and the rest of those community support groups, there is an active keep the family out of it, right? And we'll say you need to go to Al Anon, and then Al Anon's going to tell you to back out of it. And we just need you to go away because you're not helping, which is unfortunate because all these other people actually can be of great help. They just don't know how to help, and what they're doing is making it worse. And so we just say, just go away. Just stop. Just detach with love. Just live your own life, do your own thing. Just go away. Because you're making it worse. But actually, those other people are a huge asset that you're not accessing, right? But it takes a lot of work to do that. It takes a ton of work to do that. Which is part of the reason why I have this YouTube channel is because I teach you guys to do the work. Because it's going to be hard for you to find, like, a counselor that's going to be willing to get everybody involved, to talk to everybody, get everybody on the same page. And even if you could find a person willing to do that, it's going to cost you a lot of money. It's going to take a lot of time to get it done that way. And you have the front row seat. You can get it done faster and more effectively and certainly for a lot less money than if you're trying to pay a professional to do it. If you're. And you can have a professional help you out. I mean, we help families out all the time. But if you're doing a lot already at home and then you have the professional, now we got like a combination. Now we can get moving in just a second. I'm going to take some questions, comments, concerns, because I know you guys are dealing with this. I don't think I've met many families where everyone was on the same page. And if they are, it's been years of not being on the same page before they go here. Okay, so this is just literally a symptom of the problem. You can tell if someone's addicted by what their family members are doing. It's symptomatic. It's predictable. You can tell what's going on by how everybody's reacting to the situation. All right, if you have questions, comments, I would love to hear about your experiences with this and what role do you play? Or is there someone in your family that's working against you, who's sabotaging? What have you tried that's worked? Not worked, all that kind of stuff? Put it in the chat. If you're watching live, if you're watching the playback, you can put it in the comments. And Bree is about to go through and give us some questions. Comments. So get them up there. Put question marks beside of them if they're a question. So Bree knows that you're trying to get our attention. All right, Bri, what do we got? Debbie says, what if the family is truly the cause of the addiction to begin with? There are a few cases, Debbie, where that happens. Like sometimes if the parents have an addiction themselves and they literally get this person onto drugs, or like the boyfriend or the spouse has a problem themselves, and they get this person on the drugs. If they also have an addiction, they're probably not going to be able to be helpful. You're going to have to put them in the use and buddy category and get the other people on board. Other than that, if they're not addicted, then there may be some things that they could be doing to contribute or maybe not be helpful to the addiction. But I don't know that you can really say they're the cause of the addiction. I mean, there are some circumstances, but even then, I think it's a little bit of a stretch. And when we get in that spot of thinking someone else is the cause of it, the first question we need to ask ourselves, Debbie, is, am I being played into the situation? Why do I think they're the cause of it? Are they literally putting the drugs in their face? If they are, you can have it. If they're not, then I want you to back up and say, am I doing the blame thing? Are they blaming me? This kind of thing. So just look at it with those really objective lenses. If they really they're using buddy, then put them in the using buddy category. Find some other people to get on board. Stephanie says, if my loved one is struggling, is it a good idea for me to try and visit them? When they cancel plans with me often it's hard to be with them when they use. Because I don't maintain connection. Because I don't. Because don't. I need to maintain the connection. Okay, if someone is actively pushing you back and they're canceling plans and you get the impression that they're trying to stay away from you, I probably wouldn't push that very hard. Stephanie. You can make little attempts to maintain connections, send a little text, a funny emoji, but probably if they're actively resisting you, you want to start on neutral ground. Like you don't even want to try to connect to them or get them talking about the problem. Because if they're actively trying to not see that and you're bringing it up, how are you? What's going on? How's your recovery gone? You don't want to do that because they're running from you at this point. So what you're trying to do is create safety. Like when I first meet somebody and I know they're freaked out and they don't want to talk about it. I started them about other things. What are you watching on Netflix? Let's talk about that. You know, what are your hobbies? What are your interests? Create some connection first. Little non intimidating, non invasive ways until they stop resisting being around you and then you can take another step. Susan says my 32 year old son has decided I'm responsible for all the things that have gone wrong with him over the past 10 years. He's in a very toxic relationship which has been fueling his feel. I bet there's more than that, feelings of neglect. His partner has been very abusive to me. They live out of state. How do I respond? Okay, alright, Susan, you're doing exactly what I'm telling you, right? He's blaming you and you're blaming the partner and he's the one with the addiction. You are in it. I hate to say that, I hate to tell you that, but this is what I'm talking about, right? This is the mom blaming the partner. Maybe the partner is acting crazy. Maybe the partner is talking to him like a piece of crap. But maybe they're living with an addict and maybe they're being treated in a certain way. I'm just saying like, you know, like the, the son blames you to the partner and that makes the partner not like you. The son blames the partner to you and that makes you not like the partner. You see what I mean? This a lot of splitting. Like you need to dig into this better. Susan. And even if you think the partner is neglecting them or being bad, if at all possible, can you get them on board with you? Because if not, they're going to be working against you. So if you don't like them, if they have some ability to reason and you can get them on board, you'll still be better off. Mary says, how can I help the daughter of my addicted son? They both live with us, and the mother is not involved in her life. Well, I think there's a lot of ways to help the daughter of your addicted son. Right. One thing is, is you're. If you're not having an addiction, which sounds like you're not, then you have the ability to actively engage and just be there for that child the way that they need. Right. Because you're not chasing an addiction. You can be available and present and aware. I grew up in an addicted family, and my grandmothers were a huge part of my life. One of my grandmothers was a. Was alcoholic themselves. But they still looked out for us and made sure that we had our needs met. We were taken care of, like, very much in a logistical way and an emotional way. And that made all the difference. You know, that's what makes the difference in the success. So as a grandparent, you have a. You have a major influence over the situation. You can't control all of it, but there's a lot you can do. Lynn's world says is, I understand where you're coming from with such and such person, and I'm going to be careful with how I approach things with this person. But I'm still not giving up on this person. A good start. Whoa. I got like, I gotta look at that again, Lynn. That was like. I think what you're saying, Lynn, is like, you're talking about another family member who's upset with the addicted person. This is what I'm imagining. I could be making this up. And you're trying to align with them and say, yeah, I get it. Like, they've acted like a jerk to you. I totally get it. I hear you. I can hear why you ready to cut them out. But I'm not giving up. I definitely think that's a good place to start. And you can even do one better than that. And do. When you say, like, I understand where you're coming from, or I hear you, those are general statements of empathy. But if you really want to hit it home, then actually say specifically how this person is feeling. You must have felt blank. You must be feeling blank. It must feel like blank. To be in your situation. Like, if you can articulate it and you can put your finger on it, that person is really going to be understood. Because you know how sometimes when people say, I hear you, I understand where you come from, but they're really just saying that to bypass everything. But here's what I want to say. Like, you need to start by being able to validate and articulate specifically this person's point of view. Once you do that, their barriers come down, and now we're better able to. Teamwork. Mike says, I was guilty of this until I signed up for the invisible intervention and started using craft. All right, good for you. Might you getting everyone on the same page. I love it. Tell us what you did. How did you get the other people on the same page? Because. Because people that look at you doing invisible invention, I'm telling you, they're gonna think, oh, you're just falling for all this junk. But I know you're not. You're being strategic. LKT LKD says for two years, addicted loved one was almost daily drinking and had a couple of scary incidences. I played the bad guy. My addicted loved one reigned it in, but hasn't stopped and is resentful. Do I act like I'm okay with it even though I'm not? This is a really good. This is a really good question. I find myself in this position a lot with clients, right? Like, they're doing things that I'm not okay with. They're literally drinking and driving. They're literally not being great parents. They're doing a lot of things. I'm not okay with it. And I don't ever pretend that I'm okay with it. They usually know where I stand on. It's kind of obvious. I'm like the addiction counselor, right? A lot of times I don't have to say it because it's obvious. But what I can do is empathize and validate the parts of their situation that are valid that I can empathize with. So I can empathize with the situation you're in without empathizing or without validating how you're dealing with it or the choices that you're making. As long as you can understand another person and they're gonna feel heard and understood, and they're gonna have less barriers to you, and they're gonna. And even better, they're gonna care more what you think. And so the fact that you don't approve of the things they're doing is actually gonna matter when they resent you. And they hate you and they don't care what you think. They're literally gonna keep doing it just to hurt you, just to get back at you, just to power struggle with you. So they may stop for a short time because they have to, for whatever reason. Maybe you have leverage over them in some ways or whatever. But again, when it goes down that way, like you're saying, okay, D is they have resentment, and it still doesn't eventually fix the problem. So, yeah, validate the parts you can validate. You don't have to. You don't have to validate everything they're doing. Crystal says, my husband moved out and has been back and forth with me. He was involved with another woman, and that relationship has dissolved. I have been in the good guy role, but the family thinks I'm being too soft and should not give him access to me. Move on and let him fall. Is he is trying to reconnect but sometimes will go no contact. How can I show my family I'm trying to help your family? Crystal probably thinks you're just being naive or you're just being, like, manipulated or you just being taken advantage of. So the way to make them understand that you're not is to be able to verbally articulate to them that you know what's going on. And, I mean, you got to specifically do it, not just say, yeah, I got it. I know what's going on there. Manipulate and say, oh, I know. They're totally saying this to make me think this, right? When they know that you're wise to the situation, they may not completely agree with how you're handling it, but they're going to get off of your back a lot about it because they're. No, you're making knowledgeable decisions, right? Like, okay, she has the puzzle pieces, right? Like, let them know that you know that you're not just being naive, that you're not just being manipulated. Maybe you didn't call a person out. Maybe you let something go down, but it wasn't because you don't see it. It wasn't because you're in denial. It wasn't because you're being manipulated or taken advantage of. It was a strategic decision on your part. Because there's a difference, right? There's a difference between avoiding conflict. There's a difference between ignoring something and strategically deciding not to confront certain pieces of things. Mixed Method Girl says Enneagram resources. Oh, my gosh, there are so many. There are a bazillion Enneagram books. You can get, like, Enneagram for beginners. Enneagram made easy. Those are good ones to start with. I think I have my Amazon link in the description. If you click it, it'll take you to my, like, favorite. I have, like, favorite book list and one of the list is Enneagram books. I also like enneagraminstitute.com I also like Dr. Tom Lehue's channel. That's the one that was on here last week. They're making really good Enneagram YouTube channels. Enneagram is super popular. If you just type it in, you're gonna get all kind of stuff because people that like it kind of like me, kind of kind of like fanatical about it. So there's plenty. Just any, any kind of resource. There's tons of stuff out there. If you want to take the test, I think there's a link in the description to go to Truity and take the Truity Enneagram test. So all kinds of resources. All right, everybody, I think we are about to wrap it up for today. Thank you so much. For those of you who joined live and those of you who watch the playback, you guys are awesome. You asked really great questions. As always. I will remind everyone there are resources in the description if you want to talk to me or one of our family specialists about your loved one and what to do or you're ready or your loved one is ready for recovery coaching, they're ready to take active steps. All those resources are down there. Check them out. They're free resources. There are groups. There's everything. So look in the description if you need more resources. And I will see you guys next week. Bye, everybody.