Last week I told you something happens when families get in a room together. Something I’ve watched for years and still can’t fully explain.

Here is what’s happening.

It’s the first time most of them have ever been in a room where they don’t have to explain themselves. Where the shame lifts because everyone around them is carrying the same thing. Where they can say the true thing out loud, and instead of shock or advice or pity, they just get: I know. Me too.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Community with people who actually understand changes something in the nervous system that nothing else can touch.

But before they can get there, they have to get through the door. And most families are stuck well before that.

Because every family I’ve ever worked with is caught in at least one of these three traps. Most are in all three.

Trap One: Waiting for them to want help.

Most people in active addiction are not capable of fully wanting (or being able to hold the want long enough to do the things needed) to get better. Not yet. Many don’t start to want recovery until we start to actually get better. It’s a catch-22, and their brain is too hijacked, our self worth is too tanked, to be able to hold a want long enough.

Treatment is actually designed for people who don’t want it.

So if you’re waiting for them to be ready, you’re giving the disease exactly what it needs to keep growing.

I know, you might be thinking then what DO YOU DO? That takes about 2 months for me to teach, which is why I created our program.  

Trap Two: Believing there’s nothing you can do.

This one gets perpetuated as a common narrative in the world. It sounds humble. It even sounds healthy.

It isn’t. 

It’s one of the most dangerous lies in this space, and it’s keeping families, and their loved ones, sick.

What I think it’s intended to mean is that you can’t MAKE someone do something. That’s entirely true. But to say there is nothing you can do is just false. 

There is so much you can do. You just need to know where your power actually lives and how to use it without accidentally making things worse.

Trap Three: Caring more about upsetting them than doing what may save them.

The fear of making your loved one angry, uncomfortable, or upset keeps families completely paralyzed. They stop living. They shrink. They disappear into the waiting.

Here’s the truth: your loved one’s feelings about what you do are not more important than their life.

That sentence is hard to hold. It becomes possible only when you’ve done enough of your own work to stand in it without flinching.

When I ask families in my workshops which trap resonates most, the chat fills up immediately. 1’s and 2’s and 3’s and then, over and over: all of them.

That’s where most families are living. In all three. Simultaneously. For years.

Next week I want to tell you about a woman named Lindsay. Her husband had been to five rehabs. She was tucking her car keys under her mattress every night so he couldn’t get to the liquor store.

And then something changed.

Her story is why I do this work.

Talk soon,
Kate

P.S. If any of these three traps landed for you today, sit with which one has the tightest grip. That’s exactly where we start.