GROWING UP IN THE FAMILY WITH ADDICTIONS

*This article came from an interview with an X member of the ARGO therapeutic community. The parts that are in the first person are parts from the interview that were extracted authentical from our recorded conversation (with his permission).

This article is from the perspective of a child that has had addictions in his childhood, teenage and grown up life. It feels like it’s “normal” and every family has it but they don’t actually. Not the same kind of addictions at least as he is, there are so many types of addictions nowadays but people don’t believe they are real. Gambling is one of the most growing addictions, since betting companies started advertising on television. More common addictions such as alcohol, internet, porn and cigarettes that are harder to quit because they are legal substances or not.But in the case of this article the addiction involves drugs, smoking, gambling and alcohol.

Growing up inside addictions, you naturally adopt addictive behaviors without being an addict yourself. That happens because you mimic the way your parents act so you adopt the behaviors of those who are already addicts, creating a vicious circle of behaviors. These behaviors are, not saying your opinion, being pessimistic, not believing your opinion matters, not being able to communicate feelings such as anger, happiness, sadness and romantic feelings. Also, having bursts of anger for the wrong reasons with the result of losing your justice because of overreacting to insignificant things that made you get over the top of your head, since they were the tip of the iceberg.

Inside a family with addictions there is a lot of codependency in between the family members and influence in between the family members on the mood shifts that are momentarily due to the characters of the addicted. These mood shifts happen oftenly and for insignificant things such as who will have the control of the television remote, who will take the kids to their after school activities and whether they attend or not social gatherings. Creating such dynamics that the kids won’t want to express what they wanna do but sit quietly and allow themselves to act as their parents would wish them to act, in order to get the much needed affection that a kid needs.

This also can continue to not express their reality in school, such as bullying just because they will be afraid that will get their parents out of their comfort zone and they might have to act out of their character or out of their “everyday normality” to defend them. The kids also bring these behaviors with them outside their house, with the result of trying to make friends but be afraid to ask their friends to hang out at their place because they are afraid of their parents’ reactions. Other kids take advantage of these behaviors and put them in roles that they don’t want to be, but because they don’t know how to react correctly to get out of these roles they sit in them and be unhappy and depressed. They do favors to classmates, “friends” just because they feel that they will be more accepted, but don’t understand they are being used. All these things are so easy to make a young person, teenager, become depressed and start acting out with heavy alcohol drinking to escape reality and furthermore drug use.

Continuing, the children that have addictions inside the house feel comfortable around them so when the time comes to go to parties they feel at home. So they join in and find people that use drugs, because that comes naturally. When the time comes and they are being asked whether they wanna do drugs themselves, they think that since their parents use them they can’t be so bad, even if they are being told to be careful and never do drugs. But the problem starts if the drugs make you feel more comfortable and happy at the situation you currently find yourself in. In that case, you search for the drugs and hold on to the people that allow you to use them freely without thinking about the psychological or money cost of them.

When the costs are becoming high or finding them becomes more difficult the teenager or young person might turn to the user parent(s) and ask them how to find and whether they can use them together. When that happens the children of addicts might get confidence because they start connecting with their parents in a different way and having more common ground and feel more comfortable expressing themselves near them. But it is a terrible cycle because on the parents’ side you have three options. In the first option you can start using with your kid and embrace the fact that he or she has the same addictions as you, but make sure about what they are using so they don’t get hurt. Second option, is to tell them no and risk pushing your child even more away and become even more distant, with the quite real possibility of them searching for the drugs in the street. Third option is to quit using as a parent and take yourself and your child to a rehabilitation center to talk about the issue with people that already have some knowledge about dealing with this kind of situation. These options of course exist if you already think that there is an addiction and you are willing to do something about it.

In this case, addictions in the family are many as previously mentioned, but the problem is that not all parties involved are recognizing the problem of addictions. Currently “I am a member at the therapeutic community of ARGO but unfortunately I might get support out of most of the addicted members of the family but not all of them”. “In my family I have several different addictions and quite different perspectives from different family members”. Currently “I have gotten away with just one addiction which is a single drug that is not legal, but it is getting legalized pretty soon or at least the authorities are in the process of legalizing it”. “For me, removing these addictive behaviors is so difficult because I didn’t even realize I had them, until people started pointing them out to me since I joined ARGO”. “The hardest part though is the removal of childhood friends from my life” because inside the rules of rehabilitation is to stop having any kind of communication with any person that is using any kind of drugs even if you learned and hung out with them before you started doing drugs with them. Imagine how difficult it is to stop seeing your parents because they are drug users, while you are trying to quit, and that they don’t believe the drug you and them are addicted to is a drug or that it is addictive!

So growing up in a family that has members that have addictions, is difficult to avoid becoming a drug user yourself. Also it is difficult to go unaffected by the various mood swings that different family members show. It is also quite common to have more than the normal fights in a family when inside the family there are addictions. Which results in the children inside these families to try to avoid conflicts at all costs in order to avoid bringing back repressed memories. Those memories though are being remembered from the moment they start to get clean and come to haunt him. It is important though to remember that if you don’t face them and don’t work them you will never get over them. At the same time you need to know that you can’t change your past but you need to move on without being afraid of it, in order to be able to live a healthy life in the future. Because you can’t let your past define you, but you can decide your future despite your past and that the true meaning of healing through trauma and getting over addictions.