Our Guest Bloger today is Kelly Miller. Kelly's specialty as a counselor is helping parents who are having to deal with teenage alcohol and drug abuse.

RELAPSE AMONG TEENAGERS

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Men Leave Treatment Because of Their Codependency!

     I am writing to propose some level of cooperation between professionals writing about and treating codependency and the professionals staffs of treatment centers in order to improve retention and ultimately long-term recovery for clients by providing some missing pieces for families whose lives are being ravaged by the co morbid diseases of addiction and codependency. Here is a quote taken directly from the back cover of our book written by Dr. Joseph Moons, C.P., Retreat Director, Holy Name Retreat Center , Houston, Texas;

“There is a need for this book for codependent men. In my association with the many men and women who attend 12-step retreats at Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center, the codependent men have the greatest fear and the least knowledge or understanding of their relationship with the addicted person in their life.  As the man in the family, they are supposed to have the answers and they don’t. This book begins to give some answers.”

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Stop Helping Them To Death!

     Nothing changes until something changes. If one member of the family changes, that changes the whole family dynamic. As a practicing codependent you can make the changes necessary to allow the other (s) in your family suffering from addiction. The way you do this is; allow them to suffer!

     Stop the little things first. Stop picking up after them. Stop preparing lunches in advance if you are doing that and they could be doing that for themselves. Stop “taking up the slack” every time the addict does not fulfill his or her obligations to the family. Yes, you will catch some flack, and yes you will have to experience the discomfort of not having those chores completed. Everybody will. But do not allow the flack to pull you back into the helping role.

     Next, openly ask the addict for help with larger issues, such as managing the family finances, doing the “running around” to places like the laundry, the grocery store, the post office, and the bank. In my case, I picked up eight bounced checks one weekend after working out of town all week that my now X-wife had written. I then told her that I was never going to do that again, AND I DIDN’T!  Yes, it was a hard week after I opened a new checking account the following Monday morning in only my name, but she learned that I had set a boundary, and no matter how much screaming, silent treatment, dirty looks, or jawing she gave me, I would never spend another Saturday picking up her bounced checks!

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Who Am I, REALLY?

There is a great line in an old Paul Simon song ("The Boxer") that says "...a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

We codependents take that one or two steps further. We "do what we want to do and call it by what sounds best."

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Just A Little Willingness

Despair is the basic "affect" of the newcomer to recovery. Affect is what psychologists and psychiatrists call the basic emotion projected by a person. By the time we finally "hit our bottom" as a result of the ravages of addiction we have truly surrendered. We have given up on other people, on ourselves, and even on a God of any kind!

Recovery, from day one, becomes a matter of possibility. Possibility is just a glimmer of light flickering through the ink-like darkness of our soul. During our first meeting we experience other people demonstrating that they too walked through that door at some point in the past, that they stayed and began their own recovery process, and that IT WORKED!

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My Son Is Still Writing His Story.

Sometimes at a meeting words are uttered that are so simple and yet so profound that I leave the meeting going deeper into myself. That happened recently when a woman spoke about her  own codependency, and how it had trained her to focus on her son instead of herself. 

First, she made everybody laugh when she told us about how easy it was for her son, who was her "qualifier," to CON HER. She said;

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Why is it enabling to the outside world looks like someone who gives the addict money when they are unable to pay their bills?  In fact enabling is so much more that we become blind to how it has infected our daily living.  An addict feeds off every little bit that is given to him or her to the point to where consumption of those little things becomes a part of the addiction that fuels it without any chemical consumption. 

Enabling is the little things.  Little things such as doing the laundry for the addict when he is she is passed out because we don’t want the addict to go to work with stains on their clothes because we need the additional income.  Little things such as making the next day’s  lunch so that the addict won’t be so stressed in the morning or because we feel guilty for the fight earlier in the day.  Little things such as taking the addict’s car to get the oil changed because the light has been on in the car for weeks now. 

Enabling can become big things such as paying all the bills because the addict is not responsible enough to remember when the bills are due and the budget is too tight to afford overdraft charges.  Enabling means, taking and self-appointing ourselves, the loved ones of the addict, to ensure all the normal duties in maintaining a family are flowing to the outside eyes of our neighbors while on the inside the walls are rotting and our lives are on a fast flying train to the land of serial mental breakdowns.  Enabling means being consumed by the disease of addiction without any mind/body altering chemical entering our bodies to render us addicted.  Yet enabling itself, can become an addiction because our lives are unmanageable unless we manage someone else’s life.  The life of our addict loved one.
              If this all sounds too familiar, YOU NEED TO REACH OUT TO SOMEBODY FOR HELP! There are weekly meetings fo Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Codependents Anonymous right in your community. Start by locating a meeting. Call Al-Anon at 1-888-4AL-ANON, or access www.al-anon.alateen.org.

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“Why Can’t Mom Go With Us To The Museum?”

This is a real life scenario depicting a family trying to function with an alcoholic wife and mother. Read this, and if it sounds familiar, learn at the end where you can turn for help with this seemingly impossible situation.

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A Man in Al-Anon’s Reactions to "When Love Is Not Enough," the Hallmark Movie.    

As a man with over 30 years in Al-Anon I watched Hallmark’s production “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story” with tremendous ambivalence.

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Why, where, when, and how?

Why. The value of a Men’s Al-Anon Group.

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