What No One Tells You About Having an Addicted Sibling...

Most of the time on this channel, we talk about addiction from the point of view of either the person that has an addiction or the family member. And we most commonly refer to the family member being either the spouse or the parent of the person who has an addiction. But today we're going to be looking at things from a totally different point of view, which is the sibling point of view. Having a brother or sister who's addicted is a whole different ballgame. It affects you in different ways, and you naturally have a different response to it than you would if you were the parent or the spouse. And my advice to you as a sibling of someone who has an addiction is different than what it would be if you were in one of those other family roles. To be honest, I've kind of avoided doing this specific topic for a couple of reasons. One, because it's pretty close to home, to be honest. Most all of you know that I am an addiction counselor. I've been working in the field for a very long time, and some of you know that I actually come from an addicted family. Multiple people in my family have struggled with addiction, so I've got a lot of professional and personal experience. But looking back, I'd have to say that my sister's addiction probably had one of the biggest impacts on me. The other reason I've kind of avoided this topic is because it's very hard to give you one way of looking at it that really fits for siblings, because a lot of times it depends on was this your older sibling? Was it your younger sibling? Was it your brother? Was it your sister? Was your sibling addicted like when you were a kid growing up, or did they only become addicted after you guys were an adult or after they were an adult? There's so many different Variations as far as age, how long it's been happening, and that kind of thing that really plays into how you're going to feel or think about the situation. So it's really hard to come up with a way of explaining it that's going to resonate. So I'm going to be explaining it from the point of view of growing up with an addicted sibling and also having an adult addicted sibling. And before we get much further into this topic, I do want to tell you that today's video is actually sponsored by one of our regular viewers and subscribers. Now, I'm not going to mention their Just to protect their privacy, but I would like to send a big giant thank you for your kindness, your positive feedback, and your support. This video is for you. Now, if you have an addicted sibling, maybe you're an adult, you have an addicted sibling now, but they weren't always addicted. You may have had a very very close relationship with them, and then suddenly that relationship changes at some point along the way. And I feel like when that happens, you have a lot more grief associated with it because maybe you were super close and now it feels. Feels like you've lost your brother, you've lost your sister that you used to have that strong connection with. If your sibling has had an addiction since you were pretty young, then it may not be as much of a grief situation, but you may experience a lot of what I'm going to call over-responsibility. Now, that can obviously happen even if the addiction occurs in adulthood, but it definitely happens when addiction comes into your family when you're still living in your parents' house. What tends to happen is, is that when one of the children develops a problem, and this actually even goes for maybe if you have a sibling who has a disability or some other kind of issue, you'll see this same kind of family dynamic. But if you have a sibling with a substance abuse problem or any kind of addiction, really, probably what's going to happen is more and more and more the parent's attention is going to go towards the child who has the problem. That codependency is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. There are going to be conflicts between the parents on how to deal with the addiction. There's a lot of conflict. Between your brother or sister who has an addiction and the parents. It's more complicated than just how do I view my sibling who has an addiction? There's also this second layer of the parent dynamic. As the parent becomes more and more fixated on the child who has an addiction, the other kids can feel kind of subconsciously get the message that there's really not room for any other crisis or problems or drama in this family. So you don't even realize it's happening to you at the time, but you begin to be The good one, the responsible one, because you can feel this tremendous pressure on your parents. You can feel that your sibling is very vulnerable. Your parents are very vulnerable. And so you learn to cram your own needs and your own problems really far down because you know that the last thing your family needs is more drama and more crisis. Some people do that by just fading into the background. They may become what we call like the lost child. And in this kind of situation, the sibling may— you may stay in your room a lot. You may just play play video games. You just try to fly under the radar. Other times you may fall into this more hyper-responsible, slightly more codependent realm where you're trying to fix the family or you're trying to manage things that normally parents would manage, either with your sibling or with the household because your parents are so busy dealing with the other addicted sibling. You might think that you would have the most problems if it's still in your house when you're growing up in Problem is happening. But actually, I find that from a sibling perspective, more problems actually start to show themselves in adulthood. Maybe you're not even living in the same household with your addicted sibling anymore, but what happens is, is you learn some pretty drastic coping skills when you were growing up with addiction in the family, and then you're going to see that play out in your adult relationship. I'd say the strongest emotion that you struggle with is something that I would call Guilt-resentment, which is not a real emotion. It's kind of a made-up emotion. I kind of made it up, but it's a combination of resentment and guilt. You have this resentment for having to be the responsible one. Maybe you have a resentment because all of the parents' attention is always going towards the addicted person. Maybe you have resentment towards your sibling because they're causing so much chaos and heartbreak for your parents. But at the same time, you have all this frustration and anger. You also have this feeling of guilt or responsibility—not guilt like you feel guilty because you caused it, but more like you feel guilty for feeling resentful about the situation. Because you also have empathy, and you care, and you understand why your parents are so preoccupied with this. Like you really get it—it is a crisis, and you feel bad for your sibling, and you really do want better for them. So you have this empathy part that's there, and that empathy when it mixes. mixes with that resentment, it creates that guilt resentment situation. In adulthood, you may find that you continue that over-responsible role, and because of that, you start training other relationships that way. You start naturally taking charge of things, naturally trying to be the responsible one, doing all the right things, taking up all the slack, over-functioning. And then you can end up in that guilt resentment place even more, not even just related to your relationship with your sibling, but in your other relationships. And it's— and that's because you've taken that on as a coping skill that you're doing automatically. Now, if you're watching this video because you're wondering, how do I help my addicted sibling? My answer to that is the same as all the other videos I create. Helping an addicted person is pretty much the same. You can watch my videos about how to support someone, how to get someone outta denial. All those same tactics absolutely work. But I want to say to you siblings out there that it's okay not to have to fill in all the gaps. It's okay not to have to over-function. It's okay just to take care of yourself and not to have this overwhelming need to save the situation, fix the situation, protect your parents, get your sibling into treatment. All this uber responsibility that you feel, I'm giving you permission to let it go. Now, if your parents are still living and they're the ones that are still mostly codependent, With it, then you may feel more anger and frustration. Your parents are doing the codependent part where they're constantly trying to help or chase the addicted person, and you're frustrated about how it's impacting your parents. If your parents are either not alive or your parents have said, "That's enough, I'm backing out," then you may have found that you have moved yourself into that codependent role where now you feel like you're the last one that maybe your addicted sibling has burned every bridge, and now you feel like it's all fell on you and you can't let. And it is absolutely exhausting. And we haven't even talked about the money part. Well, when you have an addicted loved one, period, there's usually like a money part to the situation. Not always, but usually. Not only do you feel more emotionally responsible and logistically responsible, but more financially responsible. You may be either feeling like you're trying to keep your sibling afloat. I know that I did that for many, many years. Or if your parents are pouring all their money into it, then you may end up feeling like you have to take up the slack for your parents. So it can be sort of a layer back. We've certainly had clients who were dealing with that, and it's an unfair place to be because if your parents, every bit of their money is going to help your addicted sibling, and then you're in a position to, do I help my parents out financially or not? You can feel quite frustrated with that because of course you want to help your parents out, but you're also frustrated with them for overly enabling your sibling and getting themselves in a bad financial position. I know for me, the financial enabling was probably the biggest part. I always felt this need to fix things for her financially, because for as long as I can remember, that's been the struggle. She got pregnant as a teenager, and I can remember having a job at about 13 years old. I've always worked. Usually I've had 2 jobs, but I can remember giving money to cover bad checks, and that kind of thing continued up until well past when I was an addiction counselor. You get the call that says, hey, can you help me pay my electric bill? Can you help me turn my water back on? Can you help me put down a deposit to get into a place to live. And this is what can trigger that guilt resentment button because you would feel terribly guilty to just leave them high and dry. But you also feel resentful because it's probably an ongoing situation where you're being put in this position all the time. I know for me, it got to the point where if I saw my sister's number come up on my phone, I would feel sort of almost like sick to my stomach and I would just have this really panicked kind of reaction. Most of the time I couldn't even answer the phone. I would have to like wait and get myself in a good position and then call back because you know that they're going to ask you to do something that you're probably not comfortable doing. And no matter what you say or how you respond, you're going to leave the conversation feeling bad. You're either going to do the thing and then you're going to be either mad at yourself or resentful that you did it, or you're not going to do the thing and you're going to feel guilty for not doing it. And this really can hold you hostage. I know it held me hostage for many, many, many years. And then layer on top of that, if your sibling then has children, take everything that I've said and magnify it times like 10, because now it's not just a choice of do I sort of leave them out to dry, but if I leave them out to dry, my brother or my sister, then what does that do to their children? Now you really feel on the hook. And you're in a situation where there is no good decision to make. Another dynamic that you might find yourself in is like, let's say you're mad at your sibling. You're just done with it. You're tired. It's been years and years and years. There's bad things that have happened. Maybe you're upset with them, how they've treated the family. Maybe you're upset with them because they've said or done really awful things to you. Maybe they've stolen from you, whatever. You have reasons you're mad. And your parents are so walking on eggshells around your sibling that they don't want you to be mad. And they're constantly trying to make you react or feel different Sometimes it's because they want you to feel better, but a lot of times it's because they're worried that your reaction is going to have some kind of negative effect on your brother or sister. And because they're walking on those eggshells, they're constantly scared. They may be pushing you to forgive them. They may be pushing you to be okay with it. They may be pushing you to enable or do things that you're not really comfortable with. If you're watching this video because you are a parent and you have an addicted kid and, and you have other children, then the message I want you to hear is Your child that doesn't have the addiction is suffering too, and I really encourage you to try the best that you can to put time and energy and connect with your other children the best that you can. I understand that it's hard because you have one in crisis and maybe the other ones are okay. I get that. You know, it's kind of like the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Is that what the saying is? And and you have these other kids over here who maybe are not the squeaky wheel, but they need your time, attention, affection, and love too. And I strongly advise you to let them have whatever feeling or emotion. That they have about it. Don't try to either force them to do the tough love thing, and don't try to force them to forgive or enable. Let the other kids have their own feelings about the situation. Now, the other really common question I get asked about this topic is, should I have my other children in therapy? And my response to that is, if they want therapy or help, then yes, do it. But I would not automatically make the other children be in therapy because they have an addiction. Addicted sibling, because it can just end up being one more resentment of, okay, now I got to go every week and talk to this person I don't even want to talk to because my sibling has an addiction problem. And it's just like one more way their mess is messing up your life. And so in that kind of way, it's not helpful. And the way to say it is, is like, look, I know you have a lot of feelings about this too, and you might feel like you can't say all those things to us. I want you to have a sounding board for that. It's there if you want it, but don't push it on them. The other interesting thing that I find about siblings is a lot of times they have the better, more objective point of view. The parents are usually not always very objective, but the sibling kind of is looking at it from afar. And not only are they watching the addiction, and sometimes if it's like we're dealing with younger people, they know a lot more about what's happening than the parents know, but they're also watching what's happening between the person with the addiction and their parents. And so they have a different point of view on the dynamics. And I have on many occasions when we're dealing with an addicted family system asked for the brother or sister to come in for the purpose of me getting their point of view, because oftentimes they're the most objective. They usually know more than the parents know, and they usually have a more realistic point of view on it. Realize that everyone in an addicted family is going to deal with it differently, and everyone in the family Hurting, but we all sort of grieve and deal with that hurt different. Some of us are scared and we're constantly trying to fix it. Some of us are angry and we don't want to have anything to do with it, and we have to be able to give each other the space to deal with it in their own way. My biggest advice to you, if you are the person who has a sibling who's struggling with an addiction, is it's okay to have your own healthy boundaries. And sometimes that even may even mean healthy boundaries with your parent. It's okay. To ask for what you need and to have that boundary. I'm sure that I missed a lot of stuff here, so I want to hear from you if you're in this situation. If you have an addicted brother or sister, I'd love to hear about your experience with it and get your advice and suggestions on what would you say to someone else in the same situation. Thank you for watching. Like this video if it was helpful and feel free to share it if you know someone that might benefit from it.