The Family and Addictions
Family Involvement and Benzodiazepines
Benzodiazepines are wildly accepted due to being prescribed by doctors. Once something is prescribed by a doctor, no one-second guesses about the possibilities produced by medications. Benzodiazepines are known as medications that have a calming effect on the central nervous system. This helps tremendously when young adults deal with anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, panic attacks, seizures, and other mental health disorders (Murray, 2020). In 2016 16 million young adults were prescribed pain relievers, tranquilizers, or sedatives, and many of these prescriptions were benzodiazepines (Murray, 2020).
If someone cant is prescribed these calming medications, they turn to other places to get them. These places can be the streets, their friends, and their family members. When this happens, individuals are not aware of these medications' serious side effects on their systems. According to Klein (2021), young adults who use benzodiazepines are getting them from their parents' medicine cabinets rather than getting them from their health care providers. If their parents aren't aware of their medications' negative side effects, how do they expect their children to stay away from them? They see how well it is helping their parents. It can only help them in the same way. According to Klein (2021), young adults with symptoms are anxiety who may be clinically anxious will try to self-medicate with benzo's since they see their parents using it, and it works well for them.
Families as enablers or codependent
Dealing with substance abuse as a family is hard. Substance abuse can come between family members instantly.
Families supporting individuals in recovery
Having support from family is everything, especially when it comes to some of the hardest times someone can possibly go through. Addiction, on the other hand, can make families become distant and torn apart. When someone finally admits they need help due to their addiction, they must have a support system behind them. When that support system is not there, individuals can go back to their old ways because they believe no one cares about them anymore. It is important that families set boundaries when they begin the process of recovery with their loved ones. It's hard seeing a loved one in pain or struggling. Still, there is only so much someone can do for someone until they realize how exhausting that is for family members to have healthy roles and behaviors to encourage their loved ones for their recovery (Murrary, 2020). Parents may have to play two roles, such as supportive and firm, due to their loved one needing to hear the truth and be encouraged to attend and make a positive change (Murrary, 2020).
Loved ones can be placed in an inpatient setting to have a distraction-free zone to work on themselves and get better. Their families, on the other hand, can attend support groups. Support groups can help parents understand why their loved one went down the path they did and hear similar stories and feel what another family did. They can also learn healthy boundaries and coping mechanisms for helping a loved one through addiction (Murrary, 2020).
Banyan Treatment Center. (2021, January 12). The effects of drug addiction on family members. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q7-gOUondA&feature=emb_logo
Behavioral Health. (2020). The effects of drug addiction on family members. https://www.bhpalmbeach.com/recovery-articles/impact-substance-abuse-and-addiction-families/
Klein, Y. (2021). Why benzodiazepines are dangerous for teens. Evolve. https://evolvetreatment.com/blog/benzodiazepines-dangerous-teens/
Murray, K. (2020, November 20). Teenage Substance Abuse Prevention. Addiction Center. https://www.addictioncenter.com/teenage-drug-abuse/teenage-substance-abuse-prevention/
Murray, K. (2020, April 29). Teenage Benzodiazepine Addiction. Rehab Spot. https://www.rehabspot.com/benzodiazepines/who-addiction-affects/teenage/
Murray, K. (2020, November 20). What is the role of the family in addiction recovery? Addiction Center. https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/role-family-addiction-recovery/
Ted Talk. (2018, March 18). Wasted: Exposing the family effect of addiction. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qI-Qn7xass&t=248s
Courtney: Great job in going the extra mile with your research, citations, and video-links, you were really quite thorough. I did stumble over the 1st line in your 2nd paragraph, and feel bad when proof-reading is the only flaw to an otherwise excellent paper. With the Family Systems topic, even with the slight differences afforded by the drug types, the relationships and factors seemed pretty generic and universal in most Blogs, including mine, but you really shined and grabbed my attention by sharing information about the Six roles and definitions that family members might assume in the family dynamic – I love this stuff, and find it fascinating. These make total sense, and remind me of Carl Jung's Archetypes. Jungian archetypes are explained as universal, primitive symbols and images that derive from the collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung (Jung Archetypes, 2021). They are the psychic equivalent of instinct (Jung Archetypes, 2021). In other words, they are a kind of inborn vague idea, derived from the sum total of human history, which hardwired and instigates conscious behavior (Jung Archetypes, 2021). An Archetype means original pattern in ancient Greek. Jung used the idea of archetype in his theory of the human psyche (Jung Archetypes, 2021). He pointed out 12 universal, mythic characters archetypes reside within our collective unconscious, and Jung explained twelve primary types that represent the spectrum of basic human impulses, with every person tends to have one main archetype that dominates our personality (Jung Archetypes, 2021). People hate the state of uncertainty, so it makes perfect sense that when a drug user introduces their behavior into a family system, that the other members realize their preexisting roles will no longer work, and the resulting uncertainty would make each one subconsciously gravitate towards a new role (one of the six you described) because of their innate views and abilities. Assuming a different role is a form of adaption-type functioning, but the role chosen is not guaranteed to be the correct one. Having an awareness of this, and explaining it to family members, would seem like a great asset to the therapist, and the resulting therapy.
ReplyDeleteJung Archetypes, (2021). My Curious Moon. https://mycuriousmoon.com/jungian-archetypes-zodiac-signs/
Your blog was very informative. You included very in-depth descriptions of the roles of the family and describes the different roles that exist in the family of an addict. I also especially enjoyed the Ted Talk included in the blog. It was very interesting to listen to the young lady talk about her accounts of experiencing addiction as the family member of an addict. Listening to the young lady talk about the journey the family experienced was eye opening and she brought up some very valid points. For instance, her question about why do the names of the nationwide groups include anonymous in the title of the name is very eye-opening. On the AA website, it states that it allows a person to “place principles in place of personalities”. However, it does make a person not involved with the organization think about the reasons a person and their families may want to be anonymous. As the young lady indicated, stigma is one of the reasons family do not want to expose the loved one. Not only is there stigma for the person who uses but there is stigma for everyone in the family. People begin to wonder if other people in the family use or if there is something going wrong in the family. Overall, addiction is a family disease and it talks a lot of work for both the family unit and the substance abuser to get back on the right track.
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