How to Help Someone With a Drug or Alcohol Addiction

Today we're gonna go deep in this video to take a look at the underlying issues. How do you help someone who has a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction to get to the underlying issues? I feel like almost everyone I come in contact believes most of the time, you know, pretty much buys into the idea that when people have addictions that there's probably some kind of underlying cause. Do you guys feel like that? Do you guys think that now identifying with that underlying cause could be a little bit more difficult? And understanding what to do with it can be even more difficult than that? I got this question from one of our family Recovery Academy members this week, and a lot of times that's exactly how I pick the topic for these live videos on Thursdays. I try to identify a question I've gotten over the course of the week, either from some of the YouTube videos in the family Recovery Academy, or maybe even just a question that I've got asked with my clients or in our office over the course of the week to give you some kind of relevant information. So anytime you guys think of a topic, you put it down, put it in the comments, let me know. Because if you're thinking it, other people might be thinking it too. It might be a good topic to address. So I got this question from one of our family Recovery Academy members, and she was asking about could I make more videos on how to address the underlying issues when you're dealing with an actor and alcoholic? And my first thought was a little bit of kind of like a guard. I was like, oh, I don't know about that. And I had to really kind of process through my thoughts on that, because sometimes those underlying or not sometimes, most of the times those underlying issues are murky and complicated and deep. And even though I have this whole YouTube channel, we have Family Recovery Academy, and I pretty much teach you, like, DIY family intervention, what to do if you have an addicted loved one, either before treatment, after treatment, all that kind of stuff. I can teach you the DIY of that, but I'm not sure that you're ready for or you would even want to get into the murkiness of things like trauma, things like attachment. That can be pretty complicated. So I'm not necessarily going to teach you how to treat trauma. I feel like that's not something that you want to mess around in in a DIY project at home. That's something you want to let someone else do. Because if you start digging and someone has major traumatic wounds and you open them and you don't know how to close it back and you don't have, like, help that person feel okay, then you have just like unleashed a hurricane in that person. And it is going to be very hard for them to stay sober, and they're going to be miserable because sometimes you can sort of reactivate an old wound. So I want you to be really careful about. I don't want you to necessarily open these boxes, but I want to kind of help you understand about what those boxes might look like, sort of where they're at in the psychology of the person, so that you can sort of get what's going on in there and you can kind of identify, put your finger on it and maybe say, maybe we'll go talk to someone about that. And I also want you to understand how that does connect to addiction. Most people know that trauma and addiction are heavily linked. And so when you experience trauma, it actually changes your brain. You know, our brains are naturally wired to produce connection with other people. That's how human beings survive. We have to have one another. And I think a lot of times people really, really, really underestimate how important of a need that is. You know, we. We know we need, and we get taught this in school. Food, clothing, water, air. You know, can you remember that in like, elementary school? You get taught those are needs, the other things are wants. But you know what didn't get taught to you in elementary school? You should put in those little boxes. Connection is a human need, and people get really sick without it. And we're really seeing that now with the whole, like, quarantine and everything that's going on. It's. It's causing major problems with people in early recovery and addicted families. Because connection is really like the medicine that fixes addiction. And so that need for connection is there. But when you have trauma, when you experience trauma, then your brain gets rewired, and it sort of overrides that need for connection. And it's. And it sort of rewires into like a need for protection. And so you get this hyper vigilance about you, and you have all these trauma symptoms that can prohibit you from connecting because your brain is trying to protect you against threat. Because that's kind of what happens when you experience something really traumatic. It's like a sledgehammer goes in your brain and like, smashes in a million pieces your warning bell system that we all have, which is good, we need it, but it kind of breaks it. And so sometimes it can get stuck in the on position. And it's really hard to connect with other People, when your warning bell system is constantly going off, your brain is different, your body is different. Your limbic system, which is the part of your brain where the emotions live, is like on fire. And when it's on fire in there, it can't be calm enough to feel the rhythms of other people. It really, like, biologically can't let you connect the way that you could connect without it. So I just want you to kind of understand that that's why that's there. But you might be thinking about someone who, you know that's addicted, who either you don't know of or maybe even that person can't really identify, like this big, major bad thing that happened to them. And so let's look at trauma in a couple of categories. Like, what qualifies as that? There is, in sort of the clinical world, trauma that we call post traumatic stress disorder. That's what we call the diagnosis. And so it's like this event that happened to you that was so scary that you either thought in the moment that you were going to die or someone that you loved was going to die, or someone else. It doesn't even have to. Someone you loved. I shouldn't say that. Just it could be a stranger on the street, but it was terrifying. Let's put that word on it. When you have an event that was terrifying, like being at war, like an earthquake, like being robbed at gunpoint, like being abused, all of those things kind of qualify as that sort of terrifying experience. When that happens, most of the time the person realizes what that trauma is because it kind of comes down to a moment in time and they know when the button got smashed. Other times, it's not quite so evident. Other times the trauma isn't like this big horrific event thing that happened. It's other, smaller traumas that either get compounded together or don't get processed in a healthy way. Or our brain can just be overstressed. Overstressed. Overstressed to the point that. That you can actually sort of break your stress button or your alarm button just by the constant putting yourself under pressure constantly, all the time. And in those cases, the person feels like, well, nothing bad really ever happened to me, because they may not recognize it as one of those, like, PTSD kind of traumas. If you grew up in a house that did not have healthy connections with one another, like your family didn't, people were detached, or you had an alcoholic or an addict parent, or there was a lot of turmoil in the house, or maybe one of your siblings had some kind of Major medical issue or disability or an addiction, then it kind of. That messes with the attachment of the family. And sometimes in early childhood when that happens, the kids attachment their brain part that does. Attachment doesn't wire, right. Basically. And that's not even something you would remember or necessarily put your finger on as something bad that happened to you, but that's a little trauma that can happen to you. And so what I want you to understand about that is it's not always this big bad, horrible thing. A lot of people who have addiction actually feel guilty about this. It's kind of funny, but I'm getting a message that says, looks like, oh my God. Having connection problems. Does it look like I'm having connection problems on you guys end? I just got a message about that. They'll say they almost feel like, why am I at it? Like I don't even have a good reason. Like they feel shameful because they're like, you know, nothing bad ever happened to me. Why am I doing this? And so that's really what I want you to understand. It doesn't have to be this one big awful moment in time. Now I'd like to give you sort of another way to look at sort of the layers. When we think about the underneath stuff. Think about, I wish I had like a board in here. I would maybe draw it for you. Think about a huge circle. And on the outside of that circle, that's where addiction is. And you heard me say this, you've heard other people say this, but addiction is just a symptom. But it is sort of that first outer layer of getting through to someone. You can't get any further until you address that addiction. Like there's not going anywhere else. So important thing to understand about that, that is the outside layer of problem that must be dealt with. And so when I. When I got this question from the person in family recovery academy, One of the things they said was that they heard that if you get to the underlying addiction, the rest of the stuff, the problems will just sort of fall away. Almost like dominoes. It's just kind of over. The house of cards falls and problem fixes. That's not the case. You can't get. You usually can't get to the underlying problem as long as there's this. It's almost like a force field of addiction around the person. So if your loved one is still in active addiction, you, number one, you don't want to be trying to go in there and deal with trauma because it's messy in there. And you don't want to get in someplace you don't belong. And number two, you can't bypass addiction and get to that. You can maybe do it simultaneously, clinically, but you can't do the underlying thing and expect the addiction to go away. Because that addiction has been going on for a long time. It is now its own problem. It is hardwired in, and it has to be dealt with. It's like getting the force field down underneath that layer of addiction. Think about the next circle inside that big circle, what you're gonna have. There is a whole lot of self justification. Now, I know y' all know what this is. You guys have seen this. You've heard me talk about it, for sure. It's this sort of lay of how a person with an addiction makes themselves feel better about making bad decisions. And we all do that. This is not an addict thing. We all do that. When we do something that doesn't fit with our value systems on a subconscious level, we immediately start to make ourselves feel okay about that by some kind of, well, I had to do that because. Or I didn't have any other option. Or. Or it's a way you make yourself feel better than somebody else. We all do that. It's just that with addicts and alcoholics, they're doing things against their value system so often that they're having to self justify, like, infinitely more than most of us. So their layer of self justification is ridiculously thick to get through. So once you get through that first layer of addiction, then you're dealing with all this self justification. And this is kind of where I come in usually with most of my clients. This is. I already know the addictions there. Like, I'm almost like, okay, yeah, we know that's there. And then I'm looking at this self justification usually. It's almost like a measure of how bad the addiction is. It's how bad this layer is. Because I think I've told you guys before, addicts and alcoholics, like, carry so much resentment. And that's what's under that self justification. That's what's causing it, is they have all this resentment about anything that's happened to them. They don't get over it. They sort of dwell on it. They obsess about it. And because they dwell on it and obsess about it, they make bad choices in relationship to that because they see it's kind of a victim thinking. And sometimes they are real victims of real things. But it's that dwelling on it, that obsessiveness that victim thinking that causes them to self justify the addiction. Can you see how we're getting in these layers of complication? Underneath that resentment is hurt. That's the actual sort of wound that happened to someone. That wound can be one of those PTSD wounds. That wound can be one of those, like chronic stress wounds. That wound can be the loss of a loved one. It can be any kind of wound. It's how that was processed. And you might think, well, I went through that and I turned into a drug addict. And that's super true. It's not necessarily what happens to you. It's how you process what happens to you in the moment. If you are an addict and alcoholic, when the thing happens to you, or when more things happen to you, then I guarantee you, you're not going to process them well. And that's going to drive further and further and further addiction. But even in that initial wound, you guys have heard me say before, like most addiction starts when someone's experienced a major unwanted loss, like loss of a career, loss of a loved one, loss of a marriage, loss of dream, even. It's kind of like this idea that you've built for yourself. Families have that one. Families really experience loss of dreams because it's like you built this family. You worked really hard and you put everything you had into it, and now it is derailed. That is serious loss of dream right there. And so. Or the clinical word for it would be disenfranchised grief. That sounds fancy, doesn't it? So that original herd is under there. I don't want you to feel like you need to do something about it. I just want you to understand that it's there and where it's at in the process of things. And I want you to understand that you can't go straight in there and fix that without digging through those other layers, without digging through the addiction, the self justification, the resentment. You got to go through all that to get there and deal with that. Once you do that, then the need for addiction gets less and less. But someone kind of has to be already in the recovery process to get there. But it means that they're much less likely to grab back and hold on to those things. And if you take that same person and you equip them with better ways of processing conflict, that happens, better ways of resolving issues in relationships, then they're going to be a lot less likely to have continued trauma happening to them, or at least have the ability to process life's difficulties in a way that doesn't necessarily require the drugs or the alcohol. That to me is sort of the recovery process. Getting clean and getting the drugs out, that's one thing. That's the first thing I do, get the force field down. But that all that, like dealing with the hurt and the learning new processes, that is what recovery is. Okay, guys, I appreciate you joining me. Leave me a topic for next week if you want to, in the comments, and I guess that's it. I'll see you next time. Bye, guys.