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The Trust Crisis of Addicted Families

8 Jul 2024 · 1 min

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Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) introduces "the trust crisis" in families affected by addiction. She explains that mistrust is widespread and reciprocal: not only do family members often distrust the person with an addiction, but the addicted person frequently distrusts at least one close family member (often the spouse or parent). This extreme lack of trust between the addicted person and their closest family member generates conflict, arguments, silent resentment, and dynamics that ripple through and negatively affect the wider family system.

Chapters

And you might anticipate this one, but you may not really fully understand the depth of it is the lack of trust in addicted family systems. Might be obvious that the people in the family may not trust the person who has an addiction, but it's really a lot more than that. What a lot of people don't realize is that the addicted person also does not trust the family members. Usually it's at least one specific person in the family, and it's usually the person that's closest to the addictive person, whether it's the parent or the spouse. Maybe it's a grandparent, but whoever's the closest and most involved. There is an extreme lack of trust between those two people. And that lack of trust causes a ton of conflict, difficulty, arguments, silent resentment. And the dynamics between those two people trickle down and into every aspect of the lives of everybody else surrounding that system.