One of the first things I do when families come to me for help is ask them to tell me in their own words what the problem is.
Their response is almost always along the lines of…
- My loved one won’t admit there’s a problem.
- She says she’ll never go to treatment.
- He gets out of treatment and keeps relapsing.
- She manipulates me into giving her thousands of dollars each month.
- He had a wonderful childhood.
- I didn’t raise her that way.
- My mind is so scrambled that I don’t even know how this could happen!
Can you relate to any of these statements?
These are problems — very real ones that you, as a loved one of someone with addiction, are forced to deal with every day.
Living with it is maddening. I know from personal experience as both a person who has had family and other loved ones with addictions, as well as being a recovering addict myself who hurt everyone around me during my addiction.
Addiction drops a bomb in your house, and you feel alone in the resulting fallout and darkness, while your addicted loved one denies anything is wrong.
So, when I ask families what the problem is, they tell me the problem that they see—the behavior they are observing every day—and how they feel about it.
Problems and feelings.
And while all of that is incredibly valid, none of it is the real problem.
So what is the REAL problem?
It’s not the drugs and alcohol.
In fact, substances are your loved one’s solution to their internal problem. One that they’ve lost control of and is now harming them.
At the root of it all, addiction is a complex, multifaceted disorder that is still widely misunderstood by most of the world.
I’m talking misunderstood not just by the average person but by many medical professionals, emergency departments, law enforcement officers, and even to an extent by the addiction treatment industry.
And without understanding the real problem, we can’t provide a real solution.
Addiction impacts not just the whole of a person but the whole of their family as well. Addiction is a family system disease.
Which means a real solution needs to address (long term) not only the underlying factors impacting the person—physical, mental, emotional, etc.—it needs to address the family as well.
Right now, we take a person out of the family system, drop them into treatment for a few weeks or months, and expect them to come home with all the tools and know-how to practice lasting recovery without anything else changing.
What we need is a comprehensive, holistic approach to recovery.
How we respond to addiction needs to match up with what we now know about it as a complex condition, because continuing to do things the same way we did fifty years ago isn’t working.
That’s what Tipping Point Recovery is all about helping families do:
- Understand the real problem
- Understand how you’ve become caught up in it
- Do something different
By looking at addiction through the lens of a family disease and helping you, the family, heal alongside your loved one, lasting recovery is not only possible but proven.
Next week, I’ll share the key principles to unlocking recovery that our family recovery framework is built on.
If you’re ready to get started, here’s how to work with us in 2025:
- Get my book, Dear Family, Why Your Loved One Won’t Accept Help and How To Help Them Anyway. It’s a comprehensive outline of our Dear Family Framework.
- Join our Stop the Chaos training to help you integrate the teachings into your own practice (and join the waitlist for our LIVE Bootcamp experiences held throughout the year).
- Book a connection call to explore how we might help your family.
Share in the comments 👉 What is the biggest struggle you personally face when it comes to addiction? (Either your loved one’s addiction or your own.)
Tipping Point Recovery is the ONLY reason my husband is now sober. It works!