Why You're Both Exhausted and Nothing Is Getting Better

Family systems are built to protect the members, and when there is an outside threat, families pull together. They rally. They have each other's backs. Sometimes it comes from inside the family itself. You know, like when someone you love starts drinking too much or using or behaves in a way that pulls the whole family off course, everything shifts. The family still tries to protect itself. It tries to address it, but in these cases, it oftentimes doesn't go well. It actually just gets worse. You know the conversation. You've had it 100 times. It starts the same way. It escalates the same way. Someone shuts down. Someone says something they regret. And both of you go to bed feeling more alone than ever before. And somehow both of you are convinced that the other person just doesn't get it. That cycle is exactly what this channel is breaking. Sometimes the best way to explain it is just to give you an example. So I want to tell you about our clients. We're going to call them Sarah and Mark. Mark was a hardworking guy. He had a good job. He showed up every day. He paid the bills. And by most measures, he was holding it together. Actually, he was more than holding it together. He was doing well. Now, Mark didn't like to admit it, but deep down he knew he was drinking more than he should. He even told himself a few times, I need to cut back. And there were some times he actually stopped for short periods. But his overall stance was just that, yes, it maybe it was a little bit of a problem, but it really wasn't that bad. The real problem was that he was stressed. He worked a lot, the house was tense, and a few drinks at the end of the day just takes the edge off. For him, that was it. But for Sarah, his wife, she saw it completely different. She started tracking how many bottles were in the recycling. She'd lay awake at night listening for him to come to bed. She'd scan his face and smell his breath the second he walked through the door, wondering, is tonight going to be a good night or a bad night? She stopped making plans with her friends because she never knew what state things were going to be in when Mark came home. She was exhausted. She was lonely. And she was starting to feel like she was losing herself. Of course, Sarah tried to address it. She brought it up. She tried to have a conversation with Mark about it, but it always ended in a fight. And it was one of those fights that actually led them to our office. The night it all came to a head for Sarah and Mark, Mark had come home later than he said he would. The kids were in bed, but Sarah could tell immediately. She started out as, we need to talk, but that Of course, that turned into hours of going around in circles. She brought up last weekend. She brought up the promises he had broken. He said she never lets anything go. She started crying and he shut down completely. By the end of it, nothing was resolved and both of them ended up feeling like the bad guy. Now, Sarah called us the next morning. We started working with her and Mark came in a few months later. Here's what we saw when we looked at their situation. They were both completely stuck and they were both making it worse for each other without either one of them meaning to, but that's the trap. The person who's struggling is usually carrying something— shame, stress, pain— that they don't have the words for. Whatever they're using numbs it. It works. It serves a purpose. When people push harder, they confront harder, or they threaten harder, the shame increases, which means the defensiveness gets worse. And all that usually results in actually more drinking and more fighting. Most people in Mark's position generally don't see it the way that their family sees it. A lot of times they're in survival mode, and so they minimize. They protect this coping skill, which feels like it's the only thing they helps because the idea of living life without that coping skill feels completely overwhelming. And from the family member side, like from Sarah's side, she wasn't nagging because she wanted to be controlling. She was doing it because she's terrified. She's doing everything she can to try to hold her family together. She just didn't realize that the harder she pushed, the more he pulled away. This is a very natural response when you're watching someone you care about change or disappear or make bad choices. To make matters worse, everyone around you, in this case, everyone around Sarah, just says, tells you that there's really nothing you can do. You can't help someone who doesn't want help, which then again, just leaves you feeling more alone, more desperate, and eventually you just feel hopeless about the situation. Now, this idea that you can't help someone who doesn't want help, it's partially true, but in a lot of ways, it's a very damaging statement because it's not the complete truth. Yes, it's true that you can't make someone change. You can't control someone. But there's a lot of things you can do to help someone come to the realization on their own that they do want to change. First step in that process is to change the dynamic between the two people because that dynamic, it's not just painful, it's actually making everything worse. And the more that goes on, the less likely you are to get a positive outcome. Every fight, every ultimatum that doesn't follow through, every conversation that ends in shutdown just reinforces the cycle instead of breaking it. Now, once we started seeing Sarah, she started responding differently. She started responding strategically. Instead of focusing on trying to explain to Mark how she felt about things, which was just making him feel defensive, she focused in on trying to understand Mark, trying to understand how he viewed the situation and how he felt about what was going on. Because the truth of it is, your feelings aren't going to make someone change. It's actually their feelings that are going to motivate them to want to change. Of course, it doesn't happen overnight, but when you start to work on these dynamics, the walls on both sides start to come down little by little. The defensiveness drops, and for the first time, there's space for a real conversation. For someone in Mark's position to want to change, that path forward isn't to make it sound scarier. It isn't to magnify it so they can see how severe it is. It's not to tell them that they're ruining their life or that they're ruining the family's life. All of those things only make a person put up more walls and defenses. And the more you come at someone like that, the more they're going to rationalize their behavior. They're going to blame you. They're going to tell you that you're wrong. They're going to tell you that it's not that bad, which just reinforces this idea that families have that there's really nothing you can do, that you have to just Wait for someone to hit rock bottom and hope they decide they want recovery for themselves. And it's true, that could happen. But when this is your family, the whole hope you get the right circumstances and by chance things might get better, it probably just isn't going to cut it for you. The key is helping a person find that part of them that already knows that something needs to change and creating enough safety that allows them to think about and sometimes even talk about that out loud. If somebody feels like they're being pushed into a corner or forced into something, They just grab onto it like a life raft. Now I know Al-Anon teaches us to detach with love, which is true, and that is very helpful. That's half the battle, but there are some active strategies you can take. Now Al-Anon teaches us to detach in a loving way, which is super helpful because when we can do that, we stop making it worse. On this channel, we try to add to that by giving you some active strategies, some ways that you can help influence the situation in the right direction a lot faster than the whole just back up and wait to see what happens. It's all about strategy. Now, for those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth, and I've been working with people struggling with various levels of addiction and their families for more than 20 years now. I've worked with thousands of families with the person who is having the addiction and with the family members. And what I can tell you is this, most advice that people are getting is just not helpful. In fact, it's making things a lot harder and it's prolonging the whole situation. That's the reason that this channel exists, is to change that dynamic, that power struggle that happens in family systems that keeps everybody stuck and miserable. If you can relate to that situation on either side, subscribe to this channel and we'll show you how to get unstuck. Now we release new videos every Tuesday and we go live Thursday at 1. If you catch us live, you can actually join the conversation, ask questions, and get feedback. And if you're looking for more resources, I'll put some links for you in the description below. I'm glad you found this channel. Welcome to our community, and I'll see you in the next video.