Family Addiction Recovery Services
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Family Addiction Recovery: A Blog

Encouraging Change Talk

11/30/2015

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When you are trying to help someone decide to make a behavioral change, it’s more common than not to experience a back and forth process of openness and resistance to the change being considered. Change is hard and ambivalence is normal. As family members, friends, and treatment providers we can contribute to the change process moving along (and maybe even speed it up) or we can contribute to it grinding to a halt. If you know what to look for in conversations, you can help build up a person’s motivation to change.

“Change talk” refers to statements that suggest there is a window of opportunity for change to take place. They happen all the time and often spontaneously. They aren’t usually declarations of change (“that’s it, I’m done drinking forever!”), although they can be. Often they are much more subtle statements that suggest that the person you are working with or care for is contemplating making a change. How you react to statements like “ugh, I hate feeling hungover” can open or close the door to a larger discussion about the possibility of making a change in behavior.

Let’s start by looking at a typical exchange where change talk is noticed, but not necessarily encouraged.
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​Tap here to cont.

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Shopping for a Good Therapist? 4 Questions You Must Ask

11/29/2015

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Finding the right therapist is right up there with finding the right spouse when it comes to securing happiness and serenity. And while friends and siblings can help you screen candidates for a permanent place at the Thanksgiving table, you’re left solo when recruiting a therapist.

Marriage and family therapist Ilyana Romanovsky offers four helpful questions to start with in her book, Choosing Therapy: A Guide to Getting What You Need. It may be helpful to keep these in mind when shopping for a therapist…

1. How do you stay current in the latest research?Therapists are obligated to attend a number of workshops a year in order to keep their licenses current; however, they don’t have to stay up to date with the latest research. Romanovsky encourages clients to ask therapists whether they have attended recent conferences, conventions, consultation groups to ensure that they are familiar with the latest well-researched treatment methods. A therapist is limited by his current knowledge and skills when trying to meet a client’s need. More information, then, increases overall effectiveness.

2. Do you consult on cases with others and, if so, how regularly do you consult?One of the reasons I feel confident that I am getting the best treatment for my bipolar disorder is that my psychiatrist regularly consults with a team of doctors from Johns Hopkins. If she’s unsure about what to do next with one of her patients, she has a set of heads ready to help her.

​Tap here to cont.
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4 Secrets for Setting Rock-Solid Boundaries

11/29/2015

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Setting and sustaining boundaries is essential to our lives. “Boundaries give us a say in how our life goes,” according to Jan Black, author of Better Boundaries: Owning and Treasuring Your Life.
Without boundaries, we are an island with no sea wall, she said. “We are at the mercy of and must deal with whatever the ocean dumps on us.”

​Tap here to cont.


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How Long It Takes to Form a New Habit

11/29/2015

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“We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle proclaimed. “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state,” William James wrote. But how, exactly, do we rewire our habits once they have congealed into daily routines? We already know that it takes more than “willpower.”

​Tap here to cont.
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Learn to Like Yourself

11/24/2015

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​A fun animation on learning to cope with your looks—and a mindfulness practice for cultivating a better relationship with yourself.
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​How often do we neglect to treat our own faces with the kindness we would extend to friends, family, and even strangers? At the same time, there are reasons why we care about what others think we look like: people judge each other by how they look—it’s a first response. This video from the The School of Life offers wisdom for being comfortable in your own skin. For instance, personal appearance is a lottery that most people cannot win. It has nothing to do with you, nor is it to the beautiful person’s credit either. Also, you can let your disappointment at what you don’t have—beautiful, thick hair, the perfect pair of ears—fuel your appreciation of beauty around you. Instead of saying appearance doesn’t matter, we can start to get interested in seeing beauty in new places—in a kind chin, for instance.
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Dealing with that onslaught of negative internal commentary (“My nose is too big/too small.” “I wish I had more hair/less hair!”) can actually help us be more compassionate overall. Try this mindfulness practice from Mindful magazine: “5 Steps to a Better Relationships with Yourself.”

Tap here for article source.
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How Enlightened Families Argue

11/23/2015

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How Enlightened Families Argue

How Enlightened Families Argue

Posted by Kyle Cease on Sunday, November 22, 2015
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ALL IN THE FAMILY (RECOVERY RESOURCE REVIEW)

11/22/2015

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Throughout the history of addiction in America, family members have been castigated more as causative agents and sources of recovery sabotage than as recovery resources or individuals deserving services in their own right. Given this history, it is not surprising that family members have most often found healing and purpose when they banded together for their own mutual support and political advocacy.—White & Savage, 2005

The effects of addiction on the family system and the family addiction recovery process have been enduring themes within the resources posted on this website.  This week’s blog is a reminder of a few of these resources. 

For reviews of history of the addiction treatment field’s attitudes toward, and services to, affected families, see White & Savage, 2005.  For those interested in how treatment programs and recovery community organizations might more effectively address parenting in addiction recovery, see White, Arria, & Moe, 2011.

Also of interest may be interviews with some of the most influential advocates of family-focused addiction treatment and recovery support.  I particularly recommend the interviews with Dr. Claudia Black, Dr. Stephanie Brown, Dr. Robert Meyers, Jerry Moe, and Sis Wenger.  Also of note are interviews or blogs on family-focused recovery advocacy, including those with Jim Contopulos, Gary Mendell, Karen Moyer and Brian Maus, and Bill Williams.

An issue that has obsessed me for decades is how we might break intergenerational cycles of addiction and related problems.  Those interested in this issue will find several papers of potential interest (see here, here, and here).
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And for the history buffs among my readers, the Chronology of Mutual Aid Groups for Families Affected by Addiction and the Chronology of Al-Anon may also be of interest.
More family-focused interviews and resources are planned.  Stay tuned.

Tap here for source


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B.A.L.M. Family Recovery Program Sample Recordings

11/18/2015

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Families from all over the world participate in this safe, supportive, online, over the phone, affordable, & professionally facilitated recovery program.

Families can be their loved one’s BEST chance at recovery! 

Families learn what it takes to become a loved one’s best chance at getting and staying in recovery, including: the role of denial and enabling in the addictive system; the power of calm involvement; setting and sticking to boundaries; reacting vs. responding; when to get outside help. 

1. Lesson (lesson 4 of 12 lessons on the Daily BALM Recorded in 2013): How to Be Your Loved One’s BEST Chance at Recovery - A family member can either contribute to a loved one’s addiction or their recovery. You will learn about enabling their addiction vs. helping their recovery; how to stay out of denial; the importance of setting and sticking to boundaries; making conscious decisions about your own behavior; and when to get outside help.  With case histories, examples and guidelines, you will learn what it takes to become your loved one’s best chance at getting and staying sober!

Tap here to listen
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2. Audrey (March 2015) – a BALM wife has been working the BALM program intensively for almost a year and the change in her and her family has been palpable. Other BALMer’s also share their understanding of how this program is helping them.

​Tap here to listen

3. Guest Speaker Dr. John Kelly (Spring 2014) In this powerful call, Psychiatrist Dr. John Kelly of Harvard shares brings the research on addiction and recovery to the Daily BALM. His work and that of his colleagues all over the country provides scientific confirmation for the Be A Loving Mirror method, the importance of having a long term recovery plan in place, the importance of early intervention, and the importance of the family in a loved one’s recovery process. Dr. Kelly also discusses the research on the importance of mutual aid recovery peer support groups and provides statistics on the average amount of time it takes for an addict seek help and actually get and stay sober.

Tap here to listen
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CLEANING UP OUR MENTAL HOUSE

11/17/2015

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“Your mind can be likened to a house that has been cluttered over the years with thousands of unnecessary pieces of furniture, pictures, ornaments, and other things, all strewn around and piled everywhere. The result is that, although the outside of the house may present a good appearance, the inside is a mess of confusion and disorder. It is impossible to accomplish anything under such conditions, for you cannot go after one thing without stumbling over another. There is no order. No purpose. No progress. The first necessary thing to do, then, is to rid that house of all but the furnishings that are essential to your success.”
—John McDonald from The Message of a Master

​Imagine a house that looks pretty good on the outside, but when we open the front door and take a step in we see it’s cluttered with thousands (!) of useless and unnecessary pieces of furniture, pictures and other junk piled everywhere.

Welcome to a disorganized mind.

It’s time to clean up!

Modern neuroscientists say that the way we clean up our brains is by “pruning” the old, less useful patterns and “sprouting” new, healthier patterns of thought and behavior.

How do you declutter/prune?

QUIT thinking the same old thoughts and doing the same old things.

START doing healthier things and having healthier thoughts.

It really is pretty much that simple. Not particularly easy to do, but the mechanics are shockingly simple.

Do YOU have habits of thought or behaviors that no longer serve you?

What negative thoughts and behaviors are currently cluttering your mind? Seriously. Pause for a moment and capture a few sub-optimal thoughts + behaviors that just aren’t serving you.

These thoughts + behaviors are no longer serving me:
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________

Fantastic.

Time to move that junk out of our mental house as we clean up and optimize!

Source: brianjohnson.me
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Turn families' desire to rescue into a positive 

11/14/2015

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Many of us are all too familiar with the concept that came out in the 1980s that described how family members perpetuated the vicious cycle of addiction. “Enabling” behaviors offered examples of how families responded and coped with their loved one's struggle with addiction and how it fed the destructive path of the addict. We have come to understand reasons why families continue to engage in these behaviors, many times knowing full well how detrimental it could be to the recovery process. Nevertheless, this concept warrants further inquiry to improve our understanding of families' resistance and the dilemmas that keep them from changing despite their better judgment. A better appreciation of this struggle may serve to elicit more cooperation in working with these families.

Doing for people what they can do for themselves is a common definition of enabling in the addiction world. Do we always know what the addict is capable of, especially under the influence of mood-altering chemicals? The ultimate family fear is pulling out of this enabling process and having the loved one die as a result. This is a very real and valid fear. The longer the rescuing has occurred, the greater the chances of this.

Tap here to cont.
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    Timothy Harrington is passionate about helping family members of the addicted loved one awaken to their own power and purpose.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Lead Family Recovery Support Specialist >
      • Endorsements
  • Resources
    • An Exercise
    • Stigma
    • Trauma >
      • Signs of Unresolved Trauma
      • Gabor Mate on Trauma
    • Grief
    • Shame
    • Anxiety
    • Addiction >
      • What is addiction?
      • Addiction, A Family Challenge
    • Self-Compassion
    • Mindfulness
    • Treatment Partners
    • Coaching vs. Therapy
    • A Consumer Checklist for Checking Out Rehabs
    • Spiritual Resources
    • Apps
    • Mental Health Resources for Teens
    • Denver Community Resources
  • Services
    • Interventions >
      • Enabling, Rescuing and Controlling
      • Identifying and Establishing Personal Boundaries
    • B.A.L.M. Family Member Recovery Program
    • Testimonials
    • Family Questionnaire
  • Connect
  • Blog
  • Referring Professionals
    • Education & Inspiration for Professionals
    • License The B.A.L.M.
    • Speaking to Your Families