02/02/2022
For everyone that knows someone. 🙏
7 Things You Should Know About People Who Struggle With Addiction.
If you’ve never struggled with addiction, you’re lucky. You'll never know the hopeless feeling of being addicted and wanting to stop but not being able to. Imagine som**hing so powerful that it uses you. It’s like that for those of us who are vulnerable to addiction. We voluntarily take our first drink or drug, and then it takes over. This results in psychological dependency–an emotional and mental process that goes hand-in-hand with addiction. Our inebriated state of mind becomes our brains' new normal.
Our body becomes physically dependent and we need higher and higher doses to create the same euphoric effect. As tolerance builds, signals are sent to our mid-brain, overriding our frontal lobe–the area of our brain responsible for executive functions such as planning for the future, judgment, decision-making skills, attention span, impulse control, and inhibition. The mid-brain is the area responsible for survival. It's our fight or flight response and the signal it receives says, get high or die.
The addicted person’s brain responds differently to chemical influence than non-addicts do. The majority of people will use drugs or alcohol with few consequences. They don’t over-indulge because they don’t like feeling out of control. However, people like me who struggle with addiction don’t feel out of control. We feel in control, maybe for the first time in our lives.
When we’re sober, we're uncomfortable in our skin. Imagine wearing a sandpaper suit that chafes all day long, resulting in misery, irritability, and anxiety. Imagine feeling like som**hing is missing but not knowing what that som**hing is. Imagine longing for connection but feeling empty inside. We try to fill our emptiness with food, shopping, relationships, work, exercise, gaming, p**n, drugs, or alcohol. Our first experience with substance or mood-altering behaviors offers us an escape from ourselves. This euphoric release is so intense it changes the way we feel about ourselves and our perception of the world around us. We will chase this feeling throughout our addiction.
Before you judge us, you should know these seven things first.
1) Addiction lies to us in our own voice.
Becoming addicted is easy because no one knows that’s what they’re doing. We tell ourselves we’re having fun or we need help to relax. We minimize our addiction's severity by focusing on what we still have, not what we have lost. The alcoholic says I only drink beer. The co***ne abuser says I don’t use m**h. The m**h addict says I only smoke drugs; I don’t inject them. The pill-popper says, at least I don’t use he**in. Addiction denies itself in the scariest voice of all–your own.
2) Addiction is not a moral failing or weakness.
Addicted people aren’t bad (although they do hurtful things to maintain their habit). They're sick. Addiction is a brain disease that rewires the cerebral cortex resulting in poor judgment and impulse control. It manifests in compulsive substance use despite harmful consequences. It’s progressive in nature ending in jails, institutions, death, or recovery.
3) Addicted persons need help to stay sick.
Well-intended family members often confuse helping with enabling behaviors. Enabling is doing what someone can and should be doing for themselves. The enabler co-aides their loved one’s addiction by making excuses for them. They clean up their messes, loan them money, and keep their secrets. The enabler believes they know their addicted loved one better than anyone else, but in reality, they’re often the easiest person in the family to manipulate. This one-sided relationship allows the addicted person to under-function in all their affairs while focusing solely on their relationship with drugs or alcohol.
4) Shame is our second skin.
Addicted persons experience high levels of shame. We may mask this with sarcasm, jokes, or a grandiose attitude of entitlement. We have a love-hate relationship with ourselves and our drug of choice. We love how we feel when high but hate what we do to achieve this feeling. We judge ourselves harshly, calling ourselves a loser, ju**ie, or waste of space. We may believe we’re too weak to quit using, and our families would be better off without us.
5) Love won’t make us better.
You’ve nursed us back to health. You’ve watched over us as we've slept. You’ve loved us even when we weren’t very lovable. You’ve done everything in your power to help us get better. But instead of thanking you for it, we push you further away. Now you’re exhausted and left wondering if you did som**hing wrong. While you may have made mistakes, please know you didn’t cause our addiction, and you can’t love us better.
6) Addiction is a family illness.
When one person struggles with addiction, it affects the entire family. Trust is broken, hurt accumulates and builds, exploding in an eruption of emotions and regrets. You may find yourself protecting the addicted person or blaming them for your own unhealthy behaviors. Parents may turn on one another in their frustration. The family walks on eggshells around the substance abuser, fearing they may upset them. In healthy families, everyone can get their needs met. In addicted families, the only one getting their needs met is the substance abuser.
7) If you’re doing the right thing, your addicted loved one will probably be mad at you.
The line between helping and enabling can be blurry. But boundaries will protect you. They say what you’re okay with and what you’re not. When you stop enabling, addiction becomes threatened. Your addicted loved one may be angry with you and pull away, but stay the course. Learning to set boundaries is the best way to maintain your health and, ultimately, encourage your addicted loved one to become responsible for their illness.
It's important to note that you're not alone. One in seven families will experience addiction, and although you can't make your loved one well, you can positively influence their chances while maintaining your own health and peace of mind. But here's the twist; change doesn't start with them. It begins with you. Because statistics show addicted persons are most successful when their families are educated and in recovery.
Lorelie Rozzano
www.jaggedlittleedges.com
