Addiction Expert Amber Hollingsworth Answers All Your Questions About Addiction Recovery
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[00:00:00] Hello, everybody, we have a special live stream in store for you today. I am going to be answering as many questions as possible today. Just trying to get as many of your addiction recovery questions answered as we possibly can. And we got a lot of things happening today. I have actually a copilot here with me today to help me manage all that.
And that is my son Weston, and maybe we'll get him to pop on here and say hello to you in just a minute, but he's going to be helping moderate the chat comments and put in. He's going to be picking the questions to put up here on the screen. So you guys give. Weston some really good questions to pick but to get us started so I thought maybe we would start out by I want to share with you an email that I got just recently. And it's a email a story really that I think should leave you feeling hopeful. And there's just a lot to unpack in this email. So we're going to call this person. Amanda. Her name is.
Not Amanda, because anytime I share someone's story, I always change their [00:01:00] identifying details for privacy purposes, but that's what Amanda says. I just wanted to let you know that your methods truly work. Living with addiction is really difficult, and this past week has been tough too. Your videos and teachings make it a little easier for us to navigate these uncertainties.
I keep trying to do all you teach and slowly things are starting to get better. My husband never even touched alcohol until 2016. He started drinking socially in 2017 and things really started to escalate during COVID and it became really noticeable by 2022. It's taken so many things to catch his attention, like feeling bad all the time, missing work, fights with his family, financial strain, feeling sick in the morning, losing weight, a DUI, and blackouts. But I can tell that things are finally starting to shift. I'm hearing a lot of change talk and I know in my heart, he wants to quit alcohol.
Recently, my husband quit for a couple of weeks, but yesterday he had a bad day at work and [00:02:00] drank alcohol to cope. He ended up in a blackout and I had to have friends. Pick him up. I don't know if that was the right thing to do, but after that, he agreed to go and see a psychiatrist. The doctor feels like he's really trying to quit, but he's having a tough time with cravings and stress.
So the doctor prescribed him a medicine that actually makes you sick if you drink, and I'll tell you guys what that medicine is in a minute in case you don't know. I can tell that husband's truly committed to starting his medications and conquering this alcohol problem. I know that things won't fix overnight, But I think he's on the right path, which is helping calm my anxiety.
Again, thank you so much for everything. I would not, I would have been lost without you. You're touching lives around the world with your videos. Now let's see here. There was another piece that this person sent me.
There was another piece that Amanda sent me and I tried to put it all in writing here so I could read it to you. But basically Amanda said that she wanted me to tell you guys that things aren't just like All of [00:03:00] a sudden, she started doing the techniques and things were better immediately. There was still a lot of ups and downs.
There's still some fighting occasionally, but it used to be they would fight all the time, and now it's just occasionally, and she tries to get it right back on track after those fights. But progressively, she's seeing a shift out of the bad guy role. Her husband is taking things more and more seriously.
And so I want to break down some of these things, not only just To tell you Amanda's story and what she's seeing, but I want to show you why that this is such a hopeful story and how things progress in a real life recovery way. Things just don't get better recovery. It's not like all of a sudden somebody realizes there's a problem and they go from sick to well in a straight line and neither does the family.
It's two steps forward, a step back, two steps forward, a step back. And that's okay. And I want you guys, if you're watching as a family member, to have that kind of grace and patience with your loved one, because you're going to have that kind of grace and patience with yourself.
There, there is some trial and error [00:04:00] involved in this process. And just because you may be relapsed back and get yourself in the bad guy role and lose your cool or something, it doesn't mean That it's not working. It doesn't mean it's over. And the same thing for them, just because they have a lapse back into the substance use doesn't mean it's not working.
It doesn't mean it's not trying. Everybody's trying to change habits that have been going on for a very long time. And obviously that's not easy now in this particular story with Amanda's husband, this. He's in that phase where he's trying to get sober and it's like working sometimes, like you'll get someday sober and then back and forth.
And that's pretty normal in the process. And it's okay to just allow that to happen. So if you're, if you have a loved one who's doing that, and they get a couple of weeks over and then they lapse back, it's going to make you want to panic. And that's a natural because you're thinking, I just can't do this again because it's been so horrible, totally get it.
But. That learning process is quite necessary, and I just want you to understand it doesn't mean that they don't mean it. It just means they're learning and they're [00:05:00] trying to figure it out like riding a bike. You're going to fall down sometimes and that's not to give them an excuse or to give them a free pass.
I'm just telling you that's the way that this process goes. And if you understand that, you'll tolerate that better. This. Past time when the husband had the really bad day at work and then he drank and then it ended like really badly, it was a blackout, the friends had to go get him, that was obviously a wake up call and what he's learning is, okay, I need some additional help.
I'm trying to do this on my own. I really mean it, but it's not working. I need to take the next step. This is the example of when you apply the empathy and the love and the care and the concern, and you let the natural consequences happen. That's when the learning really starts to take place. One of the things that Amanda said to me, which I thought was just spot on.
I'm just totally going to steal it from her. If she said in her own mind, she's gone from trying to like tell her husband that he loves her, but make him feel loved when he's around her. That is the shift [00:06:00] because. We say all the time, I love you, I just want the best for you, but it doesn't feel great when someone says that to you.
Maybe you've been on the other side of that at some point, and you know what I'm talking about. It's almost there's this burden or expectation, but if you help someone feel loved, it calms that frontal lobe and actually allows the learning. To take place, so I hope that gives you guys a sense of hope and understanding about the process.
So that every time you see a little bump in the road, it does not mean the end when we're seeing those good things and a little bit when good things a little bit. That means we're moving along. We're learning and we're growing. All right, let's take some questions, Weston. All right. Here is our first question Weston has for us. Amber, why doesn't my daughter care about us? Yet alone, her son and her daughter, she's already had treatment, came back within two weeks and had a relapse.
And this, was back in March and she's still at it. I have her two kids and I'm desperate and broken and very lost in all of this. Thank you for doing this. I Actually have a [00:07:00] video called can people with addiction really love you? And the thing of it is to understand, I think you have to divide love into two different categories. Most people see love is like a feeling of affection, but I try to think about love as an action, right? Can someone behave in a loving way? Now, and An addicted person can have love in their heart for you. They can feel affection for you and care about you.
But most of the time, if they're an active addiction, that active addiction part of their brain overrules that feeling as far as their behavior is concerned. And so a lot of times that addiction will cause them to act in not loving ways towards you. So if you mean love is in the feeling. Yes, they can. If you mean love is in the action, the consistency, the putting your needs first, looking out for you, caring about your feelings and stuff.
It's not that they can't do that, but they probably can't do that consistently. And that's where it feels why doesn't my addicted loved one love me? Now. [00:08:00] That's just the start of it. You got to layer in on top of that there's a lot of rationalizations and justifications, maybe the person saying they're just better off without me.
My kids, I'm probably just running their life. Anyway, might as well just leave them with the parents, so there's just a lot of complicated processes that go on in here and, if you will think back, you probably remember your daughter before the addiction after the addiction, and it feels like 2 different people.
And when your daughter comes out of this and gets clean and sober, she's going to be another person
weston, give us another question.
All right, thank you so much, Amber. What can I say to calm my, is it addict husband or alcoholic husband, when he insists I'm lying? Paranoia, marijuana vape pen, impossible meth use. This is a great question, , because when you're dealing with someone with paranoia, that Means they're having some delusion and psychosis, usually when it's paranoia to the level that you're describing here, which does come along with the substances that you named and a delusion.
The literal definition of delusion [00:09:00] means it's like a falsely held belief. Despite evidence, which means there's no rationalizing with someone that has a delusion. Like you can't give them evidence and then them change their mind. You can't have a discussion about it and have them see it clearly. And I know that is like very maddening on your end because.
The more you actually talk about it, it almost makes it worse. I call it like a spiderweb effect. If you try to give them a piece of evidence, look like here's my mom, she can back me up. She can say that's exactly what happened, whatever it is. Then they're going to spiderweb a new branch to make their own delusion make sense in their mind, which is well, you told your mom what to say before you came, and it can get even really bizarre sometimes with like really Crazy beliefs, if you try to say , the government's not watching you.
There's no cameras here. And then they might say something like, yeah, but they're visible cameras and only I can see them. So it's if you try to reason with it, the delusion sprouts more [00:10:00] legs and it weaves itself back in there in a more complex way. So the answer to that is you cannot convince them of something that they believe in a delusion.
It is either going to the delusion will either pass on its own if it's substance related illusion. And if it doesn't, sometimes you need like medication to help that pass. And sometimes people need medical help to get that to happen. But I'll go ahead and tell you this. Alisa is that even after the delusion goes away for people and they come back to themselves.
You got to remember that experience was real for them. So sometimes they still like linger did that really happen? Like , was she really lying to me? So don't be surprised if even after they get better, that's still lingering. And so I will tell you just to try to honestly sidestep it.
Because you're not going to therapy it out of somebody. I don't have any power to make a delusion go away. No one does. You cannot reason with it. That's what makes it a delusion. What's in our next question, Weston?
You got us a question, Weston? There you go. All right. My son has narcolepsy, ADHD and major depressive disorder. [00:11:00] And substance use disorder and the psychiatrist doctor won't increase his adhd meds until he gets another sleep study last one in 2022 And the ua which i'm assuming you mean is urinary analysis so basically there's multiple problems here going on and they all are tied in together But the doctor is i'm not going to i'm not going to increase The ADHD medicine to have a sleep study and you can't have the sleep study until you pass a drug test.
So this doctor is hesitant to Give more stimulant medication probably because the doctor probably has an idea that this person has a substance abuse issue and they want to make sure That the med increase is needed actually and is not just a symptom of the substance use disorder So this is a doctor being cautious Which I totally get is frustrating, but when doctors are not cautious and they give your addicted loved one everything they want, it's even more frustrating when they don't have a discerning eye when they won't require them to take a test or something.
So it's [00:12:00] frustrating on both ends. I totally get that. But if the issue is ADHD and substance abuse, and you're like we need to get the ADHD better. You're not really going to get that ADHD better anyway, whether the doctor increase it or not until the substance use disorder is. is stabilized.
That's just all there is to it. It's if someone's depressed and they're drinking, you can't just, the drinking can't just continue and then you treat the depression and depression go away. It just won't work that way. You really do need to treat the substance abuse first. And I'm not saying that they can't take ADD medicine and be in recovery.
It really just depends on what the addiction is. It's questionable, but I'd have to have a lot more history of that, but I am saying you have to treat the addiction first. And I think that's probably what the doctor's holding the limit out on. He's just not saying that. All right, Weston, what else we got?
Let's see here. Okay, Carrie says, My daughter is in treatment for the second time. She wants to change. I know you say for them not to come home, but is there other options? What help can you offer? We strongly advise not [00:13:00] bring adult children back home after treatment.
It almost always ends badly. Even if they're really trying on the recovery, because what happens is it's just so hard for you as the parent not to fall into the monitoring role. Every time she sleeps in, if she misses a meeting, if she's not doing her meditations. You're going to be on edge, right?
Because you're having that front row seat and you're going to be nervous and you're either, and you might start asking her about it or nagging her about it. And even if you can resist doing that, you're going to be feeling it, which means your energy is going to be putting it out. You can't stop being the mom, right?
It's just really hard to get out of that role and it just doesn't work well. The preference , for us is sober living. Going from a treatment to a good women's sober living, that's where that would be the ideal setting.
If that can't happen, then if it's time for your daughter and she's well enough, she's leaving treatment and maybe she's ready to get a job, part time job or something. And if she's working and helping support herself and you want to maybe help a little bit, even financially or [00:14:00] whatever, , as long as she's helping herself and you're helping, then you're fine.
You're helping. I still think that's a better scenario than having them back in your house. Because. It doesn't even work well when things go well with the addiction is what I'm saying It just doesn't usually because they want to be adults. You can't stop being the parent.
It's just hard. But if things start slide backwards as far as the addiction then it's going to be really bad and Once they're in and it's really hard to get them out So if you can think of something else to Do the something else if she can find a roommate in recovery. I understand that sometimes there's absolutely no other option and I get that but Whatever other options there are, I would look at those first.
What's our next one, Weston? I like it, you're on top of it. My husband has been an alcoholic now for 15 years. He's successful at work and supports us. No one believes he has a problem because of his success. I feel so much raised. Plus, I'm a caregiver to my son.
Is there a second part of that? If there's not, that's okay. I can speak to that. This is exactly the kind of [00:15:00] alcoholic that I see in my practice all the time. It's I call them like, a high functioning alcoholic. That's not really a clinical term. That's not like a real thing, but we all have an idea what that means.
Most of the people I see in my office that have alcohol problems, they're very successful. They're business people, they're doctors, they're lawyers, they're run iron men, like they Have a lot of their life together in a lot of ways And the first place the alcoholism is going to show up is at home And the first person that's going to see it is the spouse and so It creates this bad dynamic because the person stays in denial They see you as the problem because they're like, what are you talking about?
I make money. I take care of this family You know all this stuff is what they see and literally if they told other people in their life, like I think I have an alcohol problem those people would probably say No, you're crazy. I drink more than you. And then you have other people like validating it the wrong way.
And so it is very difficult for them to see, to listen to just you and take you seriously. I always say it like you have to let the [00:16:00] consequences happen somewhere beside you, if you're the primary family member, like if you're the spouse, if you're the parent, if you're the main one. You need those consequences come somewhere besides you because they discredit you as oh, she's always upset.
Oh, she's never happy with anything I do. Oh, she just worries all the time. They just find a way to dismiss you and minimize your concerns. So it's like that. comment we had a while ago where I said you're going to have to let some of those things fall through the cracks. And as crazy as it sounds, if you can align with your loved one and be empathetic when that happens, don't fix it, but be empathetic, let them know you're on their side, he'll see it faster.
What else we got Weston? MS. Redinger Stepdaughter 32, habitual drug user for 10 years is in rehab again. She has no car, job, phone, or money. What should she be responsible, still paying for phones she lost? She will want it all. Okay, so [00:17:00] basically your adult I think daughter you said is not adulting, right?
She's in rehab again, probably hasn't been adulting for a long time and pays for no things. Like I said earlier, if your daughter gets out and she's being sober and she's contributing, like she's working and she's paying for some things, then I think it's okay for you to jump in there and help.
I like to say, if they take a step, you take a step. They take 10 steps. You take 10 steps. As long as. they're doing their part, you're not going to, you're not going to be resentful about it. You're going to feel like you're actually helping, which usually is an indicator that you're actually helping and not enabling.
When you feel resentful and you feel like they're not doing their part and you're doing everything, when you feel resentment about helping someone, That's when you know you're enabling. So that's probably how I would gauge that. If she wants to help some, you help some.
Dylan says she's using around half a gram to a full gram a day. How do I go about setting financial boundaries with her? If she is the one [00:18:00] currently working, her job is basically just paying for her use. Now, you're not going to be able to do that. Dylan, if she's the one making the money, even if she wasn't the one making the money.
You're probably never going to be able to set some kind of budget for someone's drug use because it just doesn't play by those rules. I hate to say it, but Dylan, but the answer here is for you to figure out how to get yourself some financial independence. I'm not saying you have to leave this person.
I'm not saying you have to give up on them. But you need to create some financial safety for yourself. And I know that may be complicated and hard, but that's what you're going to have to do. You will not be able to set some kind of limit on the amount of money that person spends on their drugs. I know that seems more than reasonable and it is reasonable, but addiction just doesn't play by reasonable rules.
Clearly, if this person is already spending all their money on the substances, then it's just not working. The addiction is overriding any kind of self preservation, paying bills, any of that. What else we got, Weston? [00:19:00] qUestion. How do I best approach the subject of addiction with my 30 year old son who is addicted to marijuana and other drugs and alcohol but is high functioning running his own CBD shop?
You don't if you if he's really high functioning, things are working really well for him. There's no other evidence in his life. He's seeing that there's addiction and it's just coming from you. All you're going to do is get yourself in that role where you have no credibility because he's going to literally think you're out of your mind.
You're crazy. You have to wait until. Not until they hit bottom, but you have to at least get to where the cons start to outweigh the pros. The scale does have to tip. If it is still mostly working for them, there's just no way you're going to be able to get through to somebody and say, this is a problem.
It's going to have to start to cause some uncomfortableness. So I would not have any conversations about it until, he is experiencing some level of uncomfortableness. And when you do have that conversation, I would avoid using the word addiction unless [00:20:00] he uses the word addiction, because he's going to think you're overreacting because that's.
Because in his mind, it's like I'm fine, I'm running my business. I'm doing this and doing that what you're crazy That's what he's going to think if you bring it up and there's no other evidence And don't send any articles about being bad for you. Don't do that. What else we got Weston?
Sarah says my spouse is in treatment what is my role while he is there and when He first comes home things to talk about and not talk about. This is a really great question
I think what your role is to stay out of the bad guy role, be the teammate, and probably the most helpful thing you can do is not make every single conversation about the addiction. Try not to be weird. Try not to be all like walking on eggshells because that makes them feel weird and uncomfortable.
Treat them normally, still a normal person, still a grown up. You still talk to him. There's this one I used to work in detox. One of the other co counselors there, his name is Doug. He'd been in recovery for a hundred years, Doug had. [00:21:00] And he's just funny. He would talk about when he first got sober and he'd come home.
I don't know if this is true. This is a story he used to tell in the groups we were in, but he said, I'd literally pick up the newspaper to read it and there'd be holes cut out because there could be stories that they thought might trigger me if I read them or something. I don't know if that's true, but you get the point, like try to just be normal and regular and talk about regular things, whatever you would normally talk about and then.
If you can do that when the subject comes up of addiction and recovery, and you can be like calm about it and you don't talk about it too long, you don't push it to further than they want to push it, then they'll get more and more comfortable talking to you about it. Your goal is to number one, not talk about it all the time.
And number two, when you do make sure it is not an uncomfortable conversation. Then they'll see that's safe and that's a topic that can be talked about and it's not going to go over top. It's not going to bring up past stuff. It's not going to start an argument. You're not going to start pushing for things.
They're not ready and all that kind of stuff. So Hopefully that's helpful and definitely check out that other video because there's more things and I go [00:22:00] more in depth into it Hey Weston, after this question, go ahead. You can pop it up there after this one, make sure that we get all of the ones that people posted early and see if you can find one from the lady named Sharon, because I promised her I would answer that one.
Secret says, Hey, Amber, I normally locked myself in the spare bedroom when he is drinking. This is the first time I locked the door and he didn't like it. He said some hurtful things and he doesn't talk to me now. My guess is because you're saying the secret is that he gets nasty when he's drinking.
Is it like I'm locking the door because he gets nasty, says mean things, or maybe he just gets to that like where he's like following you around and pestering you and just bothering you and you just wanting some peace and quiet. iT's okay to just let him be upset with you. If you're drawing the boundary and you're like, no, I just needed some peace and quiet and I was going to sleep, then you're just going to have to let him get over that, I would say.
Unless you're doing that and I [00:23:00] don't get the impression that you are, but unless you're, that his big trigger is like when you would draw from him and you're almost doing it as a punishment or to get under his skin. I don't get that impression because it doesn't sound like it based on what you said, but if that's why you're doing it, then don't do that.
But probably you're just trying to get some peace of mind or whatever. What else we got Weston?
I'm going to pop one up here. How do you know if someone is really close to conquering their addiction? And if this disease is predictable, then can you truly determine how far away they are when they find long term recovery? That's a great question. I do think addiction is predictable in the way that usually people can tell me what's going on right now.
And I can usually say, What's about to happen. What's coming next. I can't, I'm not good at predicting overall. If you lined up 10 people, addiction problems, I probably couldn't tell you this one, and this one is going to make it eventually and have long term recovery. And this one, isn't like in a big sense, like just saying who's going to get it and who's not, but I can usually tell you.[00:24:00]
If we're on that track today or not, or if we're close to being on that track, the more change talk you hear the more humility you hear, those are all huge signs that someone is in the recovery process. Even if they're, even if they're having some back and forth, but they're, you can tell that they are working on it, that they do know that it's a problem, that they are taking steps to figure out, even if they're not having all the right answers.
That's a really good sign.
If a person has a good ability to have humility, that's also another good indicator that they have what it takes to get recovery.
