How Family Therapy Can Help: Overcoming Struggle through Connection
I recently wrote on key family life cycle stages, events, and experiences, to help families understand and love one another better. As a family therapist, I visit with families at many moments in their lives, whether just wanting communication skills or working to repair years of damage. I feel it is relevant to discuss how therapy can also help with harmful behaviors; such as: what to do when a family member struggles with substance use, how to overcome shared family trauma, and how better communication can influence in the healing process.
“There are no individuals in the world, only fragments of families.”
-Carl Whitaker
Coping with Substance Use
Substance use and addiction are highly stigmatized in the U.S., despite the fact that these issues affect nearly all of us in one way or another. The struggle with substances and other numbing agents is often packaged as an individual’s lack of emotional strength, self-control, or love for those around them. There is much to unpack around these stigmas, but the core of the issue is that it is a community problem – the first community being the immediate family.
If you are a parent, you know intimately the stress of raising children, upkeeping the household, and sometimes, simply surviving the day. Many of us rely on substances such as caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs to cope with stress, decompress, or even escape from some of the pressure. Families without emotional or physical resources are more likely to succumb to the harms of substances while searching for temporary relief. Whether this describes you or you are a co-parent witnessing the destructive effects of substances in the life of the father or mother of your children, addiction affects your family all the same. You might wonder how to protect yourself and your children from the often chaotic environment of living with a family member with addiction.
Family therapy can help your family through…
Seeking understanding of the problem by learning more about the underlying factors that fuel addiction and mental health.
Learning to set boundaries with your time, emotions, and energy.
Providing books or other informational resources, and through it, affirmation of your lived experience.
Helping the family member connect to resources and seek help if they’re willing to accept it.
Negotiate what you are willing to help with yourself, which includes supporting your teens.
Healing from Shared Trauma
Family trauma is a broad term, but how I define it in this context is a shared experience of an event that has caused distress, inspired post-traumatic responses, and happened outside of just one family member. This includes but is not limited to intergenerational family trauma (e.g. immigration), secondary trauma from one family member, or experiencing a collective loss (e.g., death in the family, long-term separation of a family member).
Trauma is a transcendent experience, one that can defy your expectations of healing or sense of safety. When it happens in a family, it can disrupt a once “normal” pattern of communication or closeness and change the culture of a family.
Therapy helps families heal from shared trauma by…
Creating balanced space for each member to repair their memories either within the family therapy or through additional individual therapy sessions.
Allowing space for reconciliation to happen, if needed.
Encouraging families to construct a new narrative that both honors the trauma and welcomes change.
Communication & The Harms of Not Hearing
You might have realized by now that “the way out is through,” usually with words and action. Communication is one of the leading reasons couples, families, and individuals come to therapy. When you listen to respond instead of listening to understand, it is so easy to get caught up in your own protectiveness and personal conclusions.
In therapy, I challenge families to recognize and hear their own narrative by speaking it aloud to one another. What are the messages you hear most often in family arguments? What leaves you or your family members feeling frustrated? How often do you find your own family of origin patterns replaying in your new family?
These are all questions to ask and identify within yourself and discover here within the safety of family therapy so that the core of the issue can begin to surface. This issue can be a lack of shared understanding, family members feeling invisible, blaming behaviors that create defensiveness, or unresolved reconciliation following trauma.
Bringing It All Together: Having a “Haven”
In my mind and heart, these concepts are all interconnected. When we slip into substance use and addiction, it’s often to cope with perceived isolation or self-medicating to alleviate the stress, guilt, or shame associated with trauma. Addiction also manifests when we aren’t well-integrated into our surroundings or armed with resources. Therapy can be a miraculous space to speak out your inner battles, work on self-compassion and intimacy, and rally the troops to walk alongside you. When we choose connection, we let go of what it feels like to walk this world alone.
For more information about trauma, how substance use impacts the family system, and how family therapy can help you re-connect, please visit us at www.havenfamilytherapy.com.
