When you find out that a family member has a drug problem, what do you do as a family? Do you drop everything to address this addiction crisis? Do you stage an intervention? Do you seek treatment for them?
When addiction in the family has caused your home to be shaken and wrecked, what do you do?
Avoid enabling behavior
For many families who has someone addicted to drugs, alcohol, or behaviors such as pornography and gambling, enabling is common. Families, for example parents, would enable the drug dependents in their lives by continuing to give them money, which end up being used to buy drugs and alcohol or support their behavioral addictions.
Another form of enabling behavior occurs when you protect them from the consequences of their addiction. You may also make excuses for their behavior, even blaming yourself for the drug use.
What families can do to help the addict in their family is not by directly helping them. It is by making them accountable for their actions.
How to stop enabling in your family
The dynamics of having an addict in the family can be difficult. As a single family member, you may stick to your guns. However, there are other family members who will keep enabling the addict and therefore prolong or support the addiction.
In order to stop enabling, you have to break down the system that makes it possible. To stop enabling, you have to destroy the things that make it possible for the addict to use. And this will only be successful when everyone in the family is on board.
Furthermore, when talking to the addict, everyone in the family should be on the same page about constructive criticism and avoiding blame. The end goal of this whole process is to allow the addict to hit rock bottom so they can realize how much they need help or that at least see that their addiction has really gone too far.
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