Addiction Treatment Support: Helping a Loved One Without Losing Yourself

Hey everyone, it’s Lainey and Natasha. We are back from Impact Wellness Network just to continue to provide you with support, education, and guidance throughout this process. So one of the things that, you know, Natasha and I just did one of our family retreats for one of our seven locations. And one of the questions that came up during that retreat was, you know, okay, you know, this information is great. And you’re telling us all about our loved ones and all the things that your facilities do for them. But what do I do? Right? Like, okay, you know, I’ve been doing it for a long time, right? A lot of us have kind of been, you know, taking care of our loved ones for some time. Um, or maybe we haven’t, and we’ve just been riddled with fear about hoping that they do something to take care of themselves, right? Um, but whatever the case may be, I think that that’s a it’s a solid question, right? Of asking, you know, okay, well, great. I’m glad that they’re getting all of this care and all of these things, but what do I do? So if I was a family member who just dropped my loved one off at treatment, and I got a call from you, and you’re telling me all this, and I say, okay, what do I do? What would you say? My first order of business is to breathe.

SPEAKER_01 1:16
Oh. Take a deep breath.

SPEAKER_00 1:19
So everybody listening right now, just breathe. Take a deep breath.

SPEAKER_01 1:24
For real. For real, for real. Because I don’t think up until this point we’ve been breathing. We’ve been too busy surviving and focusing on our loved ones. And again, I want to put a disclaimer out there. What we’re what we will say in these podcasts, um, and in this episode and future episodes, there’s no right or wrong, or there’s no good or bad. So we want to remove the judgment. I think that’s super important. You know, we talk about that all the time. Yes. We’re not here to judge each other, we’re not here to judge others. It is what it is, right? So I would encourage you to breathe first, and then I would ask you. You had mentioned in one of our previous episodes about getting some rest, you know, crawling back into bed, you know, and just maybe taking a nap. You know, now someone’s gonna look at me like, but my loved one is sick, and I understand that, but your loved one is also in a safe place, and they are resting. Remember, we said first to seven to ten days, they are in detox resting. So why can’t you follow the same protocol? And for the first seven to ten days while they’re in treatment, you also take rest. Yes. So that would be my first um recommendation to someone.

SPEAKER_00 2:34
I love it. And our brains work together so well. Um, because anytime I talk to families, I usually say, you know, I want you to think about the process that your loved one’s going through and just take yourself through the same process. Absolutely. So that first week, you’re gonna rest. You’re gonna take care of yourself, you’re gonna do something for you that you haven’t been able to do in a while, right? And that can be literally as simple as taking a shower. And I know that for some people listening, they’re probably thinking, like, Lainey, what the heck? Like, I shower. There are some people out there that are not able to, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:03
Some people are not showering, some people are not eating, right? Some people won’t even step outside just long enough to take a breath of fresh air.

SPEAKER_00 3:11
Yep. And so, you know, if you’re asking the question, right, okay, I just dropped my loved one off, what do I do? You’re gonna rest, you’re gonna take care of yourself. And I want you to focus on that for just the first seven to 10 days. After you do that, um, well, in that process, you’re gonna hear from our family program coordinator who’s gonna get you plugged into services, right? And by that next week, there’s gonna be a group that is available to you. Um, so research out there actually indicates that the best things that families can do for their loved ones is to get educated. Um, and so that after you rest for that first week, and you’re gonna continue your rest ongoing, it’s not just gonna stop after the first week. Um, what I want you to do then is take some time to educate yourself. Just start understanding what is addiction, what is mental health, how does this affect me as a family member? Um, you might already know how it affects you, but we’ll, you know, give you some more education on that. Um, and I think that just learning to educate yourself and understand um is really the next part of that, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:14
And if you don’t know how to um, if you don’t know what where to go, the resources, right? That’s what our family program coordinator is gonna help you with because our online support group that we offer provides education, right? Another recommendation is Al Anon, right? For a lot of families. And, you know, this is gonna require you, like we mentioned before, for you to be able to step out and connect with others because you guys need connection. Families need connection as well, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 4:45
Yeah. So I think for a lot of us, you know, for family members, we feel isolated. Um, we feel alone. You know, I remember um, you know, when I went through this as a family member, you don’t feel like you can talk to anybody about it.

SPEAKER_01 4:58
One no one understands, no one gets it gets it.

SPEAKER_00 5:00
No one understands, no one gets it. Um, you know, and that’s what we wanted to create, you know, with this family program is to give you a space of, you know, so you can feel connected, you can have someone to talk to. And um, you know, I know a lot of times when people ask the question, what can I do to support? They want a tangible black and white answer. Yep. They want instructions, they want things, you know, I can go buy them this, I can go, you know, drive them to this, I can set up this appointment. And and you don’t have to do that. Um, and actually, I’m gonna encourage you to not do that. Um, you know, and that’s something that I think a lot of families need to understand that the best support you can offer for your loved one um is to take the take the focus off of them and put the focus back on you.

SPEAKER_01 5:43
Lady, I’m gonna tell you right now, that is hard. If I have spent years where my focus has been on my loved one, yep, you are asking me to do something that A is hard to do. B, I’m not sure that I know how to do that. So can you give me an example? I know you gave me some ideas of like, you know, to take a breath and to rest, but how do you how do you stop taking the focus off of them? They’re the one that’s sick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:10
Okay, well, first let me just say this, and here comes a throat punch. They’re not the only ones who are sick.

SPEAKER_01 6:16
Oh, lamey.

SPEAKER_00 6:18
I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Keep listening. Don’t turn us off. Don’t turn the radio down. Actually, turn it up, please. Um, so some suggestions for that is um, I’m gonna take you through the same process as your loved one, right? So the for the first week, we rested. Um, that’s all you need to do. You don’t need to look into anything, you don’t need to, you know, analyze all the things. If you need to cry, cry, if you need to scream, scream, right? You’re just gonna kind of let yourself be that first week. Then you’re gonna jump into our family support groups, and you’re gonna start educating yourself. Um, you’re gonna go into that support group, and you’re gonna ask questions. And here’s the greatest part of it. In that support group, you’re gonna be given skills and tools of what you can do to start taking care of yourself so that by the time your loved one gets to that third level of care, you can start practicing with them, right? So remember, if you listen to our last episode, if you didn’t, you can pause us and go listen to it and come back. But remember I said pause, not stop us. We got to be very clear. You’re gonna rest that first week, right? That’s your detox. You’re gonna gather some information during residential, right? So while your loved ones in residential, you’re gonna do the same thing. You’re gonna gather that information and we’re gonna give you some skills and some tools and some things to do. And then when they go to PHP, because you’re gonna say, honey, I love you, but you need to go to PHP, right? They’re gonna call you and say, No, I want to come home. And you’re gonna say, No, no, no, you got to go to PHP. And while they’re there, you’re gonna have an opportunity to practice these skills alongside while they’re practicing their skills, and you’re gonna know what those are by then.

SPEAKER_01 7:49
So here’s what’s coming up for me.

SPEAKER_00 7:52
Oh gosh. I’m about to get throat punched, y’all. No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 7:57
I hear you saying that I need to come to group and get educated. But Lainey, I’m busy. I got I have work, I gotta work late, I have dinner with friends. There’s a I can’t make it that night. And so while my loved one is going through the program, that’s great. And you’re, you know, you you want me to get educated. I just can’t because I’m too busy.

SPEAKER_00 8:18
Interesting because I know right now that if your loved one called, you would stop our podcast to talk to your loved one and you would make plenty of time for them. Let’s just be for real. Facts. Facts. Right? So I understand, right? Like when your loved one goes to treatment, there probably is a lot more things kind of added to your plate. And also, let’s be truthful that those things were already on your plate before they went to treatment. You just thought that they weren’t because there was a physical body there. So here’s what I will say to people who say that they don’t have time. You will make time for what is important to you. And if it is important to you, and let’s just start, we’ll start off easy here. If it’s important to you to learn how to support your loved one, let’s start with that. Let’s get you in there for that. And I promise eventually throughout this process, you’re gonna end up making time because you’re important to yourself. But if right now the only thing that’s gonna get you there is that supporting your loved one is important, by all means, let’s keep going.

SPEAKER_01 9:16
Well, I think it’s important to highlight, we’re asking, how can I support my loved one? And then we say attend the online support group so you can get the education. And then you don’t want to because you’re too busy. But you just asked us, how can you support your loved one? Correct. Right? So there’s a little bit of a, I’m not sure if it’s an oxymoron, where you’re asking me for help. You want to know how to help. We’re giving you an opportunity to show up so you can learn how to help, but now you’re too busy to do so. And then you get a phone call that your loved one wants to come home, and you’re like, I’ll be right there, and I’m gonna come get you, right? And you know, my concern for families out there, and again, this is no judgment, you’re you’re picking them up and bringing him, bringing them back to an environment with what’s changed. Right. Do we have any new skills? Have we learned anything? Have we understood what the disease of addiction is? Have we really understood what support looks like? And I think we’re gonna get into that, if not in this episode and in another episode, that many of us think support is about doing something. But what I’m hearing you saying is that in order to support them, we have to learn to emotionally regulate. We have to find to stabilize ourselves emotionally. We have to get ourselves out of crisis mode. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Right. And so coming back to levels of care, the same way my loved one is detoxing from substances, I actually need to detox from the from the crisis, right? Because the crisis has had me highly emotional, right? I’m hyper-vigilant, I’m hyper-focused, and I’m I’m not even thinking about myself. Right. I’m thinking about my loved one constantly. So I need to detox and help learn somewhere, somehow, how to reshift that focus so that I can learn to support them emotionally. Is that is that what I’m is that what I’m hearing?

SPEAKER_00 11:08
Yeah, absolutely. And I think like, you know, one of the big things too, like when it comes to like what does this support look like is recognizing that you can’t fix this.

unknown 11:21
Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:22
That’s hard. If you could fix it, it would have already been fixed. And we can’t. We can’t control it, you don’t like that we can’t fix it, right? And so I think it’s important for us to understand that like we need to define what support looks like for us, right? And you know, and we get to do that, you know, through a number of different ways. And I always say that really support looks different for every person. Um, but the bottom line for every person of what support looks like is taking care of yourself, educating yourself, and being open and willing to do the work, right? And doing something different. Doing something different, right? You know, I always use the example, you know, if you do the same thing over and over again and you expect a different result.

SPEAKER_01 12:05
That’s the definition of insanity.

SPEAKER_00 12:07
It’s the definition of insanity, and that’s what most of us live in. And again, no judgment here, right? And so now you’re, you know, you’re you’re wanting to know what support looks like. We’re giving you the direction of what that is, and then you’re not willing to do what we’re asking you to do. And I’m gonna be real transparent because when you were saying that, all I could think about is how many family members out there get frustrated because their loved ones don’t do what is recommended for them to do.

SPEAKER_01 12:32
Agreed. Yeah, we get upset because, well, they’re supposed to go to meetings, they’re not going to meetings, they were supposed to work the steps, they’re not working their steps, they were supposed to call their psychiatrist or make a doctor’s appointment or stay on their meds, and they’re not doing all these things, right? And I’ll simplify this simple as a meeting. They didn’t go to their meeting last night. And I want to turn and ask someone, did you go to your meeting last night?

SPEAKER_00 12:57
Correct. Yep. So, and I want to bring that up because we see it a lot, right? And I’m assuming if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re hopefully looking for support, or maybe you just want to hear our voices, which I mean, good for you. If you do. Um, but right, like if if you’re asking someone a question and you’re asking someone for guidance and they give you that guidance, and you say, eh, I don’t have time for that. The next time your loved one tells you that they don’t have time to go to treatment, to go to their meetings, to do their recovery, you can’t get upset. That’s right. You can’t get upset because you yourself just did the same thing, right? Um, so just learn, right? Or I don’t want to say just learn, right? But I just want you to hear, right? Hear us when we say the best thing that you can offer to anyone in your life in terms of support is learning how to support yourself first. If I don’t know how to bake a cake, I’m not gonna be able to teach someone else how to bake a cake.

SPEAKER_01 14:01
And so I want to break that down just a little bit when we use the word support, because I know it helps our families in our in our family support group. It’s in recovery, the individual is in need of emotional support. They don’t need the physical, tangible support, meaning they don’t need you to pay their rent, they don’t need you to pay their bills, they don’t need you to buy the pay for the attorney to get them out of jail-free, the getting out of jail-free card, right? We don’t need to be paying for their responsibilities. What we need to do is learn on how to show up for them in a healthy emotional way. And if we are holding on to resentments and anger and shame and guilt, then how if we’re asked, if we look at that carefully, how can we truly show up in a healthy way for them when we are carrying all of those emotions? And coming off our weekend retreat, we have a lot of families that didn’t even realize that they were holding on to so much uh of these unhealthy emotions. And so what happens is when I’m carrying those emotions, that comes out in an unhealthy way in the way I speak to them or in the way that I respond to them, or I find myself fixing, controlling, managing, enabling, problem solving, rescuing. Yep. You know, and I know we’re gonna get into that later on, but I just when we break down support, understand you have to learn on how to be emotionally uh regulated and emotionally stabilized so that you can be that emotional support for your loved one, which is ideally what they need when they are discharged from the program.

SPEAKER_00 15:36
Absolutely. Um and we definitely, yes, can for sure break that down in a future episode. And I think to kind of, you know, I guess maybe let’s summarize, sure, right? Um, let’s think about, you know, if you come to the question, what do I do? Great. You do all this, what do I do? Um, I think the biggest thing here is follow the process of your loved one to a degree if they’re in treatment. Let me clarify. If they’re in treatment, okay? You’re gonna rest, you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna practice, and then you’re gonna be able to show up. Rest, learn, practice, show up, right? Love it. Um, if your loved one maybe isn’t ready to get help yet, you don’t have to wait around for them to be ready to get help. You can start now. You can rest, you can learn, you can practice, you can show up.

SPEAKER_01 16:21
You see me shaking my head, Laney, because now you now and that maybe this is gonna go into our next episode. You’re telling me that I can actually rest and show up and be good and live my life when my loved one is still sick and suffering.

SPEAKER_00 16:35
You absolutely can. And maybe, right? Because if your loved one isn’t ready to go to treatment yet, you might not have the opportunity to join our support groups with Impact Wellness Network, and that’s okay. That’s the purpose of us doing this podcast so that you can keep listening, you can keep coming back, and we will be that support for you to teach you that it’s okay to rest, it’s okay to learn, it’s okay to support yourself and practice that so that when they do get ready, you can show up.

SPEAKER_01 17:00
Because in future episodes, we’re gonna talk about that your emotions are your emotions and their emotions are their emotions. Their recovery is their recovery, and your recovery is your recovery.

SPEAKER_00 17:11
Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, that’s all that think we have for this one. Do you have anything else to add? No, no. Perfect. Well, I hope you all keep coming back because we will be back and we will continue to be your support until you can take the courage to take that step and find your own support. So Till next time. See you then.