tools for everyday living
Al-Anon teaches families detachment with love Al-Anon, a self-help program for family members and friends of alcoholics, stresses detachment with love. And the essence of this skill is responding with choice instead of reacting with anxiety to the addict's behavior.
How do we translate this into a tool for everyday living? One approach is a five-stage model used at Hazelden's Family Center. Here the overall goal for family members is to look inward at themselves instead of shining a relentless spotlight on the addicted person.
Stage 1: Calm down and think. In the first stage, family members practice lowering their anxiety level. Anxiety only fuels the family's distress and escalates the addict's symptoms.
A simple place to begin--and one that's easy to overlook--is physical exercise. Moderate exercise is inherently pleasurable. It sends calming messages to the brain and promotes relaxation. What's more, exercise redirects anxious energy that might normally flow into criticizing or blaming a family member.
In addition, family members can work with the mind. One way is to practice new habits of thinking--thoughts that help family members distinguish between what they can and cannot control.
Carolyn W., author of "Detaching With Love," a Hazelden pamphlet, gives an example. "As I learned more about detachment," she writes, "I began to learn acceptance. I learned to accept the fact that I could not change the past and had limited control over the present, even if I didn't like that idea. I also realized that I can control my reactions to other people's behavior, but I can't control their behavior."
Remembering three "C's" helped Carolyn live out this idea: She had not caused her husband's chemical dependency, she could not control it, and she could not cure it. Stage 2: Identify patterns of family behavior. Families are often hampered by outworn concepts of cause and effect. An alcoholic husband, for example, may be firmly convinced that he drinks because his wife nags. His wife, in turn, can easily hold the opposite: "I nag because he drinks." Through this kind of thinking, family members get trapped in a mutual gridlock. Blaming one person for "causing" the family's emotional distress becomes pointless.
In contrast, Al-Anon takes a "no-fault" approach. From this viewpoint, speaking of one person as "bad" and the rest of the family as affected "victims" is inaccurate. A more effective strategy is to step back and see the family's patterns of behavior as a whole.
Stage 3: See your role in the pattern. This stage brings the pattern closer to home. This aim, however, is not for family members to blame themselves. Instead it is simply to open up an avenue for change.
When Carolyn W. explored her family patterns, she discovered some key words and phrases that readily came to her lips. One was the simple question: Why? "When you ask why," she notes, "you go back to the past to try and figure out how you can fix things so they won't happen again." However, this is wasted time, because past events cannot be changed.
Self-confrontation comes before confronting another, said Rosemary Hartman, supervisor of the Hazelden Family Center in Center City, Minnesota. "Rather than seeing the chemically dependent person as the problem, we all need to see our own part in things."
Stage 4: Plan a simple change in yourself. This fourth stage involves setting a realistic goal. Sometimes family members, driven by anxiety, will set unattainable goals. Failing to reach them only creates more tension. The alternative is to make a limited plan with a clear chance of success.
One of Carolyn W.'s goals was to replace "why" with two simple questions: What can I do? And, what can I change to make this situation easier to cope with? This shifts her emotional lens from the past to the present, where she can exercise some choice.
Stage 5: Carry out the plan. At the Family Center, people experience some relief of anxiety and make a personal plan for change. This is an important place to begin. Yet it may not be enough to break old family patterns.