When Family Members Disagree About How to Help A Struggling Loved One

You did it!

You got yourself a recovery coach, you took a class, you started going to Alanon meetings. And suddenly you find yourself making decisions about your own life in a different way. No longer do you hover over your using loved one. You aren’t scheduling your life around him or making sure she is okay 50 times a day.

In fact, when your loved one gets arrested, you listen to everything he has to say and tell him you will get back to him. You don’t allow his crisis to become yours. You now think about things that happen and things people say and make your decisions responsively rather than reactively.

And the people around you, including your loved one, are watching you closely.

After all, you have always been the one who’s taken care of things, made sure your loved one is okay, taken care of fixing anything that’s gone wrong.

And you just aren’t doing that anymore.

So, you get a call from your brother about how disappointed he is. “At least I knew Ben would always be okay,” he says, “After all, he always had you to smoothe out the rough edges. Now I don’t know…”

And your husband, who hasn’t had to enable because you always have is having second thoughts about your new ‘hands off’ approach.

So, what do you do when the rest of the family isn’t on board with your newfound perspective?

This is never easy, but it often happens when there is more than one family member loving a drinker or user.

And, it points to why it can be so important for an entire family to get help.

Encourage your family members to join you in at least a couple of the options below. And remember, while it is wonderful when everyone is on the same page, the power of one person to make an impact is enormous.  So, invite them to join you but if they don’t, keep persisting in your own recovery work and make BALM® a priority on your To Do List!

Alanon – it’s free, it’s all over the world. There are phone meetings so you can all be on the same meeting and talk about it later. But you can’t talk to and with your loved ones within the meeting about your own situation with your own loved one.

The Daily BALM Telecourse. It’s affordable and consistent in that it provides intensive family recovery education on the phone daily for 12 weeks. It’s convenient in that anyone anywhere in the world can join in – and if you can’t make the call you can listen to the recordings for up to a year. It’s a great way to deepen your understanding of how to handle life with an addict, yet, in addition,  it can help to have the guidance of a coach to work directly with your family to help break through the blocks you may find you have when taking the class. (Two great things about this course: 1. Every class is recorded so you can listen whenever it works for you 2. everyone who registers has access to the course material – recordings, workbooks, handouts, etc – for one full year. So, if a family member is disinterested now but sees your positive results and changes their mind six months from now, you can get them into the family page so they can listen to the recordings then!)

BALM Family Recovery Groups – a reasonably priced way for a family of 3-10 people to get together with a coach on a weekly basis to come up with a plan of how they will individually and together bring family recovery into their lives. The power of an entire family in recovery is one that can have a very positive impact on the user. Combining this with the Daily BALM® provides powerful opportunities for your family to begin to speak the language of recovery and live with a deep recovery perspective.

Individual Family Recovery Coaching – It’s one-on-one. You can work on your relationship with your loved one or on any number of goals you have in your own life.

Any or all of these options work!

By involving your family in the selfsame family recovery education and work that you so enjoy, you will be giving them and your loved one a tremendous boost!

Often, people will take the option of the Daily BALM® Telecourse to learn as much as they can about the topic and will work with a coach individually or in a group to work toward the goals they have set in relationship to their own life and that of their loved one – whether that loved one is recovering or not! By combining education and coaching, you have given yourself the opportunity to learn as much as you can while also working to apply what you are learning in your relationships!

To learn more about how any of these could best serve you and your family, feel free to give us a call to set up a complimentary consult by clicking here.