Campbell: Surviving Addiction
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[00:00:00] I'm your host Amber Hollingsworth. I'm an addiction specialist and I've been helping people beat addiction for more than 20 years now. This podcast is for people who want to know how to get through to an addicted loved one. For people who are tired of being told that they just need to stand back and wait for their loved one to decide to do something about it.
Subscribe to this podcast to learn how to outsmart addiction and put this whole mess behind you for good. Today, we're going to be talking about parenting children with addiction. And I am asked all of the time, why do I, as the mom or the dad, why do I need to change? And it's weird because I always think, why do you not want to change?
Do you like being angry and sad and mad and resentful and full with grief? Angst frustration, like, do you like how you feel right now? Because I think if they could sort of understand that the change is going to be beneficial for how they feel and the way they interact in general, I think [00:01:00] they wouldn't fight it so much.
Most of us don't like to change. We have to sort of go through sort of internal struggles so that we can change ourselves. And in this instance, with addiction, it is imperative that we change ourselves. Or else we don't begin the process for our children to start to change. And obviously, that's what we want is for our children to change.
So this requires, you know, our own internal struggle, sort of our own bouncing act, sort of, like, how do we handle this? We tend to fight that and we get stuck in this whole denial bargaining process, the whole. They actually worry all the time we catastrophize, we circle back our wagons to avoid, like, we tighten up.
We keep trying to do the wrong things. And this keeps us in what I call the reeling stage. Um, and I'm going to refer to a couple of these stages. Later, and these things are really very important. And if you join our [00:02:00] membership, then that's under the positive parenting group where you can really learn how to identify where what phase you are in with your child and his addiction or her addiction and then how to move forward.
So that you eventually get to the thriving phase, which is what we'll talk about tomorrow. So I highly recommend you guys think about that because it was, it's been super helpful for a lot of people. And I think there's a link that you can click on to get into the membership for the discount. Since we're at a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube.
So, all right. So what we have to do as parents to, to start this change is we have to do what I always tell kids, the person starting with addiction is that's imperative for them is we have to get humble and willing. We're not humble and willing, we're going to keep fighting ourselves and we're going to keep doing the same negative things that are not helping.
And what I mean by that is what we do as parents is we inadvertently feed the disease. [00:03:00] We think very unhelpful thoughts, like how did this happen? What kind of did I screw up as a parent? Where did I go wrong? Why is my child doing this? We sort of, that's that catastrophizing I was talking about earlier.
We just feed the problem. We over love. And I talk about this all the time. Like lots of people are like kind of shake their head. Like, can you really over love? And yes, you actually can over love. And what overloving means is that we. Solve their problems. We talk to their teachers. We talk to their counselors.
We talk to the police. We figure out what their problems are and then we take over them. And this is sort of intuitive parenting, which is to make our children's lives easier. Take the struggle out for them. But that's really that's overloving. It's not good parenting and it will not work with addiction.
Just won't work. So we have to sort of figure out how to stop over loving. We have to [00:04:00] definitely stop fighting and arguing and cajoling and begging and crying. 'cause that's not gonna work, obviously. And we have to stop punishing, taking things away, making deals, um, making bargains. I have so many parents who make bargains all the time.
They're like, if you, um, Go to school, then you can go to the party and the kid will go to school, but they'll do just what mine did, which is they'll walk right on through the school to the back door, go out and do what they're going to do. But you just basically gave them the information they wanted, which is I can go to the party.
So, this sort of trying to manage it, the circling the wagons that parents do, I did it. We all have done it, but it doesn't work and it really just feeds the disease because that's what we're focusing on. So the tricky part of this where really parents struggle on this is that we have to allow the unmanageability in our children's lives.
We have to be able to let them fail a class, let [00:05:00] them get in trouble at school. We have to let them. Get into legal trouble. We have to let their life become unmanageable. And for a kid, unmanageability can come pretty quickly for an adult. It's a longer process because adults really have what I call safety nets, like big jobs, good houses, cars, all kinds of things that keep them from seeing they have a problem.
But for kids, these things go away pretty quickly. So, you know, obviously we talk about this all the time. Safety trumps everything. So you don't let your kid. Do you know what's drinking? You're doing drugs, drive the car. It's just not smart. So then they don't have a car. Then they fail school and I don't even have school to go to.
And eventually they were going to run out of friends. And sometimes we even have to say, Hey, you can't live here because you're just out of control. And I, I can't live in this chaos anymore when we allow this unmanageability, not necessarily those things, but whatever the child will determine is unmanageable.
Then they can [00:06:00] sooner or later turn around and say, this isn't working for me. Now, they will test you on that. 1 of mine tested me for months on that living. God knows where doing God knows what, but even he, Did tap out and say, I can't function like this anymore. Can I please come home? Can I please go to treatment?
Can I, can you please help me? So that means we got to stop fixing, solving. I call it snow plowing. We can't snow plow their, their life to prevent the problems. We have to let them. So what I like to use as a metaphor here of stop pouring into what is a colander. So we're pouring ourselves with all these things I've talked about is we're pouring our energy.
Our emotions, our time, our mood, the whole way our house is running, our ability to function, our jobs, we're pouring us into what's just a colander. And you guys know, a colander just has a billion holes and everything just goes [00:07:00] right through it. That's liquid. And we have to start pouring into our bowl.
And by what I mean by that is, is that we will now sort of by pointing into our bowl is, I kind of think it's now we're moving to what I call the learning and the planning phases of parenting someone with addiction. And I have the question is, what do we do with adult children or addicts? So I'll go back and answer that question scarlet, but.
Anybody who lives in the home with you or has you have financial input over they can kind of stuff that I'm talking about right now can work for that too. Okay. So let's go on to these next 2 phases. And basically what there's a great quote that I found the other day and it says sometimes loving is an art.
Not an action, and that supports kind of what I've been talking about, which is sort of this intuitive parenting of solving, fixing snow plowing. And we're not going to do that [00:08:00] anymore. Now, we're going to move into the art of loving. And by that, we're going to talk about us learning, figuring out, like, what is addiction?
What are treatment options? What is the money going to look like? You know, What's going on? What's happening in the brain? Why is this doing? Why is he doing this? What resources are available to me? Who's out there like sort of begin that form of learning so that can take you into planning. Let me go back for just a second to sort of this, not solving their problems, not snow plowing their lives.
There's two types of wisdom. There's There's explicit wisdom, which is 1 plus 1 is 2, the capital of South Carolina is Columbia. These are things we can teach children, anybody. Explicit wisdom can absolutely be taught. The other type of wisdom is called tacit wisdom, and tacit wisdom cannot be taught. It's sort of the how's and the when's and the why's.
It's the [00:09:00] consequential part of living that we cannot teach. And good God, you guys, as parents, we spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to teach tacit wisdom to no avail. I remember very clearly, like it was yesterday, being 17, getting ready to leave for college. And my dad sitting down and saying, Campbell, the way to succeed in college is to take your classes at 8, 9 and 10 in the morning.
All week long. Meet your friends for lunch. Then say goodbye to your friends, go back to the library and study, or go to the library and study from 1, 1. 30 to 5. Then you can go to your dorm and you can play and you can have friends, meet your friends for dinner and you can do what you want to do. You can stay up late, you can play backgammon, go to parties, but you will have your day so defined that you will succeed in college.
That's tacit [00:10:00] wisdom right there. Perfect example of it. How to go to college. Did I listen to that man? What did I think? I thought, oh my God, how old are you? How do you even remember what it's like to go to college? Like, you're like 40. Good God, Jim. Didn't listen to him. Went to college. Did the opposite of that.
Didn't, I don't even think I knew where the library was for half the semester. Absolutely did not take an eight o'clock class. And my grades reflected my choices and my study plan, which was not as good as my dad's. But then I learned by the hard way by the struggle that I should probably take an eight o'clock, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock class, meet some friends for lunch, go to library, study, go back to the dorm.
And guess what? My grades were way up everything, just like dad said it, but I had to learn it a hard way. If you can lock this into your head, it will [00:11:00] really help you parenting all your children, parenting anything, niece and nephews, friends, you cannot teach. Tacit wisdom not possible. So bear that in mind and that sort of does help you sort of give the permission to now we're going to move into the art form versus the action form.
Less talking. So we talked for a 2nd about the learning, which is gathering information about addiction and treatment in general, but it's also. Learning different ways to interact with our children, trying new patterns of relationship with them so that it involves less talking and less tacit information effort when we interact with them differently, we can keep the connection, which we talk about all the time.
And, I mean, we didn't make it up, but the opposite of addiction is connection. So this sort of does allow us to keep that connection and whether they're. Doing drugs or not, they'll recognize that we're not [00:12:00] trying to teach them every time. We're not trying to punish. We're not trying to ask questions that they're going to lie about.
We're just saying, Hey, I saw this really good show. Hey, I thought you might be interested in this book. Hey, do you want to go watch a movie? Would you like to go golfing? We're going to just do those things so that we keep the relationship as intact as we can. Then the planning is a very important step too.
And planning is first to identify our goal. What is it we want? To achieve here. Are we trying to get them to stop smoking weed? Are we trying to get them to drink less? Are we trying to get them to treatment? Are we trying to get them to sober living? Are we trying to get them to graduate from high school?
Identify our goal and then be able to implement it. And that sort of is, again, we got to get everybody on the same page. We have to make sure mom and dad. Both have the same goal, both understand why we're going to the [00:13:00] goal, and then we have to sort of, can we implement this goal and that's lots of people come in here or talk to us in general.
And, you know, we can sell all kinds of great plans, but then they're like, well, I'm not spending that kind of money, or I don't have that money, or I don't want to, I'm mad and I'm not going to do anything you're asking me to do. So we sort of have to, as the parents is be able to identify our goal. And the implementation possibility of the goal, which is important to do me.
Also, I talk about this all the time and we address this a lot in the content in the membership and every month as well as sort of what's behind that in the positive parenting group or Kim's living with addiction group that's available is. We have to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, but we have to work with our hearts.
Okay. Some it's usually the dad has a softer heart. I don't know why this is, but I've got 90% [00:14:00] of the couples I work with. The dad just has a softer heart and they're like, maybe a little bit of boys will be boys. It's not that bad. It'll be okay. And maybe it's because men like to fix things. And if you can't fix this, you just kind of.
Don't want to deal with it or it's maybe because you turned out. All right. And you kind of were a little crazy yourself there for a minute. We always work to the lower, softer heart, the lowest common denominator is what I say. So moms usually are like. He's going, he's got to get like, I'm not doing this anymore.
I'm exhausted. I'm tired of living in this chaos. And the dad's like, it's not that bad. Like simmer down. You're saying that I've had people sit on the sofa and look off the opposite direction. I've been that Frank was. Definitely the softer heart in our formula. Oh, so much. So I have to do sometimes a lot of work with the parent, the mom to say, you got to simmer.
You got to hold because if we, if you plow ahead [00:15:00] and do something that maybe has a negative outcome here and your husband's not on board or whichever, your spouse is not on board, then there's going to be a problem in the marriage. There's going to be a problem in the relationship. And you guys, you know, this addiction takes everything.
It doesn't stop. It's like lava. It's like lava. It doesn't stop. It will take your mental health, your money, your relationships, your jobs, their health, it just keeps taking. So one of the things that in this sort of struggle to strength is I really want you guys to think about do, how much do you want to give it?
I don't, I frankly, I'm tired of feeding that damn disease. I don't want to give it anymore. So I always say this. Be together. Okay. Someone said, I don't think the dads want to rock the boat. Yeah. That's a nice way to. If you'd like to get access to more advanced recovery skills, consider joining our [00:16:00] private membership program.
Each month, you'll hear from myself, Campbell and Kim about our individual perspectives on an advanced recovery concept, and you'll get access to our members only live calls where you can submit questions and get feedback about your specific situation. To learn more about our membership program, click the link in the description.
Okay. So what I want to do for a second to see what questions are up here and see if I can answer some of those. Tiny technology brain is not going to be as good as Amber at this. So give me a second. We have an 18 year old son who graduated. Thank God. Now he just sleeps in, uses marijuana and hangs out with younger friends.
How do we get him to get a job and go to a therapist or something? Fabulous question. So you're not going to get this by talking. You're not going to say you need to get a job. You're not going to get any of that. You're going to get it by putting some boundaries down. You can start with little boundaries and go to the big boundary.
Like I tend to go to the big boundaries because [00:17:00] I'm way ahead of y'all and I'm also just very self present. Just don't like to live in any kind of chaos. But you can say you can live here. Just like you're doing for another couple weeks, three weeks, but August 4th. I'm making updates here August 4th You need to be paying rent to live here And you want to make it enough rent so that the kid actually has to go get a job.
You don't want to make it a little tiny amount that the kid can actually find in the sofa cushions or by mowing two people's lawns. You want to sort of, you have to create a need for these kids to change. They have to get the message of Tag I'm It, and they have to understand that this is not a sustainable lifestyle.
If I could sustain it on my own, then fine. But at this house, it's not sustainable. Therefore, you have to set up hurdles for him to come to that conclusion. I love to say you need to pay rent. You can also say take over your car payment. You can also say pay for your car insurance. You can do anything. [00:18:00] You have to be able to hold that boundary.
Do people say all the time, you have to take over your car payment in three weeks. And if you don't take your car, then pay for your car. Then we're going to sell the car. Then they sell the car, but guess what they do. They drive the kid to work or they drive the kid to their friend's house, but they drive the kid wherever they want to go.
If you're going to hold something like that, then you don't fix it. That goes back to what we talked about earlier is you don't fix the problems that they have or that they develop. You let them struggle and you let them suffer through the problem.
That's the way to get him to get a job, getting him to go to a therapist. You're not, I don't. I mean, I obviously love therapists, but you're not going to get them to go by saying you need to go. And I don't want you to make a deal and bargain. And if you see a therapist, then that's all you need to do because he'll just go to the therapist and blow smoke up that person's nose or not listen to the thing they say.
But he's technically check the box. [00:19:00] You don't want to put anything into play where they can just check the box and keep going and doing what they want to do. If they say, ma'am, I'm really struggling. I don't know what to do. Like I can't find a job I like, or I'm not motivated. Then you can say, well, if you'd like to talk to someone about that, we'd be happy to pay for you to go to a therapist, but you really want to wait and let that be really more, more their call.
I hate it when people like make appointments for their kids here with, they just don't do well and they don't want to be here and it's just, they're not ready. So wait till they're ready and then offer it if you want to. But. You've got to be able to sort of create the need for them to have to change and the job is one of the basic ways to make that happen is, well, I can't live here.
And you know what, if the kid doesn't have a problem, like, if it's just smoking some weed and hanging out with friends, he's going to figure out pretty darn quickly that if he has to pay rent, he'd really rather pay rent and live on his own. And that's great too, because then he's launched [00:20:00] and he's gone out to his own dwelling.
If he figures out then. And so this is very important. You guys don't pay. Don't get on that lease. Don't pay the rent. Don't. You might want to say we'll pay the first month's rent if you want to. Don't get on the lease because if your child just relocates but hasn't really learned the tag I met message they're just gonna go smoke weed over there and hang out with the younger friends and not be able to pay the rent and you're gonna get stuck with that.
So never ever. Get on someone's lease that you aren't 100 million percent positive is going to pay the rent. I mean, I'm not even on my daughter's lease. She's a resident, like she's on her own. But so that's sort of my long answer for that question, huh? So this person says that the mom has this softer heart.
And I think moms in general have a softer heart like toward kids like. [00:21:00] Maybe skinning their knees, you know, struggling in school, struggling with friends. I think moms have softer hearts for this, but when it comes to addiction, mom's intuition has been onto this a little longer than the dad's. In my opinion, and so they get their fatigue grows way faster than the dad sort of leaving this one to the mom for the beginning because the mom's like, something's not right.
And the dad hasn't even noticed that there's smoke, let alone a fire and the mom's already like, you know, putting on a fireman outfit. So that's why I think the mom's hearts are, they're just tired. They're done with that way before men's. All right. What else do we have going on over here?
All right. The problem we have is we want him to go to inpatient. He'll go live with his other family that lets anything go. You're right. That is, um, a constant problem. We had it in our family as [00:22:00] well. I said, you can't live here. I can't live in this chaos. Like either go see Amber, be an IOP or be going to high school or be working, do something productive.
And he was like, well, that's not going to work. And he did. He went to live with this friend whose mom was. I think using drugs with them, to be honest, like she was definitely supplying them with weed. She tolerated it for longer than I would have, but she tolerated it. And then eventually even that didn't work out.
So then he went to friends and sofa surf for a while, but eventually they do run out of steam. The problem for us though, is that this pushes on our giant fear button because. What if something terrible? What if the untenable happens? And it could. And to be honest, most of the overdoses we've watched in this practice have been at home.
We've had a couple not at home, but a lot of them have been at home. So. If you get to this place, it doesn't really matter. Like if they're going to overdose [00:23:00] at home or out, but you just have to wait for them to cycle, circle back around and say, okay, I know I need help because you can't prohibit that.
Yeah. Nancy, her son was homeless, stabbed and still uses. So being homeless and being stabbed is apparently not unmanageable for him, which is like. Really kind of scary because obviously their definition of that unmanageable is way lower than ours. Like, we, we all probably look at our kids and think your life is not manageable now, but their definition of unmanageable is way below ours.
And unfortunately, you just have to wait for that to hit. Um, it is hard. I'm so sorry to this person says as a single parent, I flipped back and forth between being soft and supportive and hard as nails, like get better or get out. Yeah. I mean, as a single parent, it would be tough on one hand because you're the only person who's, you've got nowhere to go with all this grief and confusion and fear.
And so it would, I could see where you would flip. But if you sort of [00:24:00] find somewhere in the middle, Mary, you might be like, Able to stay in that consistently so that you don't at least look schizophrenic. You can just stick in the middle. I think supportive with boundaries is a really good middle place is I love you dearly, and if you are contributing, reliable, honest.
You can live here is would be like the base and if you can't, then unfortunately living here is not an option. I don't know who this person is the 31 year old son, 2nd round of rehab, 2nd round of sober living, very passive. Doesn't really communicate. We have stuff together as parents to let them know. We won't get into the cycle of him drinking.
And us helping into detox again and again. It's hard to know how to stay connected to them, but not getting in that cycle back again. I have lots of clients, not lots, four or five clients right now who are really [00:25:00] stuck and I don't have any way to get them unstuck because their kid uses them for detox and they're terrified that he's going to have a seizure or die.
So I driving while he's going to get more is that they sort of are emotionally blackmailed into the cycle of detox I don't know that I could break that either to be super honest I have one one client particular who's just struggled with this and my heart hurts for her because I don't have I don't have the answer I don't know what to tell her like you fear is a Is the thing we cannot if you thought your child's gonna die if you didn't help them I think we would all help them.
So I think if you get into that like You can have a boundary that we won't, but you have to live with a fear and that's like, everybody has a different place on their seesaw for that ability to live with fear. If you don't have it, that's fine. If you do have it. That's also fine. So I don't think there's a wrong or right.
I just don't think there's a, like a golden, [00:26:00] I don't have the golden words to fix the problem. All right. Yep. Like four more minutes. Let me see here. Kind of address that. My adult son is 32 and struggling for 15 years through hell and back. Struggle to not provide clothes at times and end up spending so much.
I want him to know that he is loved. You know, clothes and food, I'm not really gonna split hairs about those kind of things. Like, I think if you hand them a bunch of money, you're making a mistake, but if you want to put clothes on their back or food in their stomachs every now and then, I think that's completely fine.
We are their parents, you guys. So I wouldn't spend a ton of clothes, money on clothes though, just because he's probably gonna sell them. But if you want to do these little things for your kids, whether they're using or not, it's okay. You know, my son would every now and then just show back at home and want to make Thai food and I let him.
And we enjoyed the night when he would show back up and want to make Thai food. [00:27:00] Don't. It was like maybe twice in four or five months, but it wasn't, we weren't feeding the addiction by letting him come home and make time for it. You're not feeding the addiction by buying your kids some clothes or even buying them lunch every now and then.
If you get into the habit of here's 300 a week for food, you are paying for it. You are buying the addiction. All right. We are running out of time for today. Tomorrow I'll be back and we are going to talk about thriving, which is the fourth phase of parenting. And it's going to be like A whole look at redefining parenting and redefining ourselves as adults, which I think will be really good.
I think that this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, near and dear to lots and lots of clients is that we're tired and we're ready to go on. And so today is a little bit about how to go on and why you need to go on. And tomorrow we'll do it. A more, a deeper dive into what are some specific, some things to do.
Don't forget, click on the link below. [00:28:00] The membership is 30% off. That's a pretty good deal. I tried to talk Amber into 20, to be honest. And she was like, second with 30. So that's, I think for this week, there's a code celebrate 100 K. All in caps, like, you know, those things are, but it should be down below for you guys.
So thanks very much. It was great to spend some time with you. I'm sorry. I didn't get to answer all the questions, but 30 minutes just flies. I'll try to leave a little bit more time tomorrow. So anyway, thanks a bunch. It was nice. And I will hopefully see all of you tomorrow. Alrighty. Bye bye.
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