Families can recover from addiction. Jake LeClair founder of the Emerge Center for Addiction Recovery, joins me to discuss the importance of getting more in touch with our own truth and our own feelings, for a family to recover from addiction.
When caught up in the chaos of an addictive family system, it is not comfortable to get close to those truthful feelings. We have our own discomfort, but we also get uncomfortable with other family member feelings, especially when codependency exists.
Listen in to this episode as we talk through how families can build a healthier love, with a whole lot of honesty and recover from addiction, breaking the family cycle in the process.
Here’s a glance at this episode:
[7:17] How much do you think honesty is a part of, you know, a healthier form of love? I get it. Well, first of all, it’s almost impossible to be highly honest and highly caught up in an addictive family system at the same time, high honesty and addiction can’t really hang out with each other. I do want to stop and say though, cause sometimes the term honesty can sting a bit, could get a little moral for folks to receive because the opposite of honesty is dishonesty. But I just want to invite folks into the possibility that this isn’t a moral conversation.This isn’t a lecture and it’s just the idea of getting in touch with whatever is your truth.[8:34] I get that that’s not very comfortable to get close to those feelings. They’re quite chaotic. They’re quite painful. The other thing that’s coming to me actually is seeing codependency. We start to enmesh and we start to also over feel other people’s feelings. So not only do we have our own discomfort, but we start to become overly uncomfortable with other people’s feelings.
[14.03] And my experience is showing that if one person in a family system has some commitment to interrupt you in the cycle, there’s actually a lot we can do most often in my world today that shows up as a mother or a wife. And she’s usually saying somebody in my life drinks too much alcohol, or does too many drugs, or is an alcoholic, or even labeling an addict. And there’s a vernacular that’s longstanding around rock bottoms and having to want to acceptance. And I think that narrative is changing. I think that narrative is changing because what we actually know is there’s a whole bunch of actions, actions that mother or wife can take today to start interrupting the cycle.
[17.56] You mentioned taking committed actions as being paramount to achieving that a whole lot of honesty about how you’re feeling and having that desire for healthy connections. Those are the three things that I’ve, that I’ve taken away to help me understand what you know, healthier love means, and the whole outcome of this as being interrupting, interrupting the cycles incredibly powerful,
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Links mentioned in this episode:
Family Assessment, a free resource.
The Emerge Center for Addiction Recovery website
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