Families, where addiction is present, are often unpleasant to live in, which usually is why those who live with an addict may become traumatized to varying degrees by the experience. Broad swings, from one end of the emotional, psychological and behavior spectrum to the other, characterize the addicted family system.
Living with an addict can put loved one's members under unusual stress. Normal routines are continually being interrupted by unforeseen or even frightening types of experiences. What exactly is being said, often doesn’t match with what a family senses and feels beneath the surface. The drug addict, as well as family members, try to bend, manipulate and reject reality while attempting to maintain self-control and family while order gradually slips away. The entire system becomes consumed with problems and slowly spin out of control.
What's crazy is that little things become big problems, and the pain overshadows big things that will eventually cause the family to go into denial and slip away.
During early child years, living in this intense, emotional environment can set up feeling or styles of attachment filled with anxiety and procrastination. Children of alcoholics or drug addicts (COAs) may feel overwhelmed with uncontrollable thoughts that they lack the developing sophistication and family help to process and deal with it.
Consequently, they become intense and defense. They shut down their feelings and deny there's a problem. They rationalize things, intellectualize and over-control, go into withdrawal, and begin acting out their frustrations by self-medicating as a way to manage their inner experience of chaos. The COA may be difficult to recognize.
An Addiction Family Atmosphere: Emotional Disconnection
Families have an amazing ability to maintain what family therapists call homeostasis. Nevertheless, when alcohol and medications come into a family system, the family’s ability to regulate the emotional and behavioral workings are severely challenged.
Families will reach as a unit to be able to balance itself. The alcoholic home may turn out to be a dysfunctional sort of stability. Family members can come to be subsumed by the illness to this kind of extent they lose their sense of normal. Their life will become about hiding the fact from themselves, their young children plus their relational world.
Relying on faith in the midst of disorder and chaos can be a challenge, as family life becomes disorderly, promises get broken by those they depend upon for support and stability - behaving in untrustworthy ways. Children and adults within this family may lose their sense of safety within the family and those they have come to rely. And, because the condition is progressive, family users slip into patterns of relating that become increasingly more dysfunctional.The children are often left to fend for themselves and any person bold enough to face the addiction get branded as the family traitor.
Families and individuals will withdraw into their private worlds or compete for the small bits of love and attention that are available. In the absence of reliable adults, siblings will become “parentified” trying to offer the care and comfort that is missing.
The sense of guilt and shame that family members feel at the particular erratic behavior inside them surfaces, along with the psychological defenses against seeing the particular truth, often keep this family from getting help.
It is no wonder families such as these produce a range of troubling symptoms in children of which can lead to problems in the present and later in life. Decide today to take the addiction out of your home and away from your children. Get help, now.
What's crazy is that little things become big problems, and the pain overshadows big things that will eventually cause the family to go into denial and slip away.
During early child years, living in this intense, emotional environment can set up feeling or styles of attachment filled with anxiety and procrastination. Children of alcoholics or drug addicts (COAs) may feel overwhelmed with uncontrollable thoughts that they lack the developing sophistication and family help to process and deal with it.
Consequently, they become intense and defense. They shut down their feelings and deny there's a problem. They rationalize things, intellectualize and over-control, go into withdrawal, and begin acting out their frustrations by self-medicating as a way to manage their inner experience of chaos. The COA may be difficult to recognize.
An Addiction Family Atmosphere: Emotional Disconnection
Families have an amazing ability to maintain what family therapists call homeostasis. Nevertheless, when alcohol and medications come into a family system, the family’s ability to regulate the emotional and behavioral workings are severely challenged.
Families will reach as a unit to be able to balance itself. The alcoholic home may turn out to be a dysfunctional sort of stability. Family members can come to be subsumed by the illness to this kind of extent they lose their sense of normal. Their life will become about hiding the fact from themselves, their young children plus their relational world.
Relying on faith in the midst of disorder and chaos can be a challenge, as family life becomes disorderly, promises get broken by those they depend upon for support and stability - behaving in untrustworthy ways. Children and adults within this family may lose their sense of safety within the family and those they have come to rely. And, because the condition is progressive, family users slip into patterns of relating that become increasingly more dysfunctional.The children are often left to fend for themselves and any person bold enough to face the addiction get branded as the family traitor.
Families and individuals will withdraw into their private worlds or compete for the small bits of love and attention that are available. In the absence of reliable adults, siblings will become “parentified” trying to offer the care and comfort that is missing.
The sense of guilt and shame that family members feel at the particular erratic behavior inside them surfaces, along with the psychological defenses against seeing the particular truth, often keep this family from getting help.
It is no wonder families such as these produce a range of troubling symptoms in children of which can lead to problems in the present and later in life. Decide today to take the addiction out of your home and away from your children. Get help, now.