12 Step Family

Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the eighth in a month-long series on Key Four. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror (BALM) takes motivation and understanding. Last month we learned about the three relationships (that with God, self, and others) and how to develop them to help you regain your peace and sanity. Next, There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to experience the sanity of family recovery. This post, One Family Member’s Story is part eight of a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

One Family Member’s Story

From the time she was a little girl, Mary was affected by addiction. Her dad was an alcoholic, her mom an overeater (though in those days it was just called ‘being fat’) and she was an only child often given the job of taking care of things in the house. The older she got, the more she felt like she was raising her parents rather than them raising her.

Dad was too sauced to make many decisions and mom too scared, so often she got to give her opinions and find solutions for things well beyond her years to find. She cleaned up after her parents, got involved in their arguments, broke up fights, and brought dad home from the bar on the nights when he was one of the last ones to leave. She tried to get him to stop drinking and mom to stop overeating, but no matter what she did, nothing worked.

Still she tried.

After all, wasn’t this what good children did? Helped their parents? Made things right?

When Mary grew up and got married, she found Tom. He was tall and handsome and sober. He didn’t drink or smoke or overeat and neither did she. He seemed as perfectly capable of taking care of himself as she was and together they’d make a perfect couple.

Only, when they got married, something wasn’t right. Tom didn’t want her hovering over him, telling him what to do and how to live all the time, and she didn’t feel she had much of a role in the relationship since the only way she knew how to relate was to take care of the people she loved.

After awhile, she noticed something was amiss. Tom wasn’t coming home as much or as early from work like he was in the beginning and once the children were born, he would go on trips by himself, stay out late in the evenings and she kept finding evidence of his having been with other women – as if he wasn’t even trying to hide it… Mary went into full gear to deal with the situation the only way she knew how.

She began tailing Tom after work to find out where he was going, monitoring his phone and Internet usage and eventually even hired a private detective to find out what was going on. No matter what evidence she found, he denied wrongdoing.

She was determined to win him back. And did whatever she could to get her husband to stop his addictive behavior to other women and liaisons. But nothing seemed to work and while neither one of them wanted to leave the relationship, their relationship with each other had deteriorated to an angry growl of good morning and nothing more.

By the time their children were teens, one of the girls began acting out with drugs and alcohol. This gave Mary a whole new focus. She began care taking, enabling, and trying to fix her daughter’s behavior just as she had been with all of the people she had ever loved.

Only now it was different. This was her child’s life we were talking about and Mary started to get desperate.

After months of dealing with the situation on her own, searching for drugs in the bedroom, grounding her daughter for being out late at night, screaming, yelling and pleading with her teen to stop risking her life and her health, Mary reached out for help.

She hired a family recovery coach who specialized in working with families affected by addiction. Together they worked through the 12keys to sanity for family members of addicts and she learned new ways of being in relationship with her daughter that started to help her daughter look at herself and take responsibility for her own behavior.

With the support of her coach, Mary also started going to family recovery meetings. She chose Alanon and Naranon to help her cope with her daughter’s behavior. After awhile, she also joined S-Anon to help her gain serenity around her husband’s sex addiction.

One of the first things Mary learned was the Four C’s. Once she realized she couldn’t change the addicts around her, she was free to work on herself. This liberated her to begin having a life she enjoyed.

No longer centering all of her thoughts around her sick family members, she learned ways to behave that would not contribute to their illnesses, while focusing the bulk of her energy on building a purposeful, meaningful life of her own.

Coaching Questions to Ponder:

1. How has guilt affected your relationship with the addict or addicts in your life?
2. In what ways have you tried to control your loved ones, attempting to fix them or manipulate their behaviors?
3. How well have your efforts to cure your loved one of their addiction worked?
4. How can understanding the Four C’s allow you a new freedom and sense of appropriate responsibility in relationship to the addict(s) in your life?
5. What will you be looking to learn in the chapters (and blog posts) ahead that you feel will be most helpful to you on your journey?

If you would like to listen to a teleseminar on the four C’s in which I shared my own family recovery story and answered questions from family members, click here .

Keep in touch!

Best,

Coach Bev

Beverly Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC
Family Recovery Coach
www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

Click here for a free complimentary consult!

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Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the sixth in a month-long series on Key Four. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror (BALM) takes motivation and understanding. Last month we learned about the three relationships (that with God, self, and others) and how to develop them to help you regain your peace and sanity. Next, There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to experience the sanity of family recovery. This post, Recovery for the Addict and the Co-Addict is part six of a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

Recovery for the Addict

This is what every family member dreams of, prays for, and works for: recovery for the addict. So, just what is it, how does it happen and, and though we know we are powerless over a cure, how can we help it occur?
Recovery for the addict is a process. While some addicts appear to simply stop one day, there is a whole lot going on under the surface that made that action possible (see the chapter on The Six Stages of Change).

Recovery often happens when the addict ‘hits bottom’, but this isn’t always necessary. Education can lead an addict to recovery as can smaller consequences along the way. The miracle of recovery is seen in the restoration of body, mind and relationships, at least with those who are willing to forgive the addict for all that happened during the active days of addiction.

Here’s what is important for you to know: your addict’s recovery has a better chance of happening and maintaining, when you and the family are supportive. But, an addict can get and stay sober without any family or friends around. What I’m saying is that an addict’s recovery is totally between himself and his Higher Power, but:

• Can be slowed down by dysfunctional behavior on the part of the family
• Can be hastened by the functional behavior of the family members
• Can be responsive to outside input given at the right time and in the right way (see chapter 3 on the six stages of change).

Family Recovery

So, now let’s talk about your recovery. By now I hope you are beginning to see why it might be a good idea to consider pursuing your own recovery. Just as in the addict’s case, family recovery is a process. It takes times to restore sanity, to heal relationships, to gain the capacity to respond serenely and quietly to previously enraging situations.

While there is no guarantee of what will happen to the addict if you do recover, make no mistake about it: You are your addict’s BEST chance of recovering and staying recovered…just not in the ways you previously thought! (and you will learn more about that in Key 7 and a later chapter of the book!)

If you would like to learn more about the 4 C’s, join me for a conversation this Wednesday evening, September 21, 2011, for my Monthly Free Loving Mirror Teleseminar. To learn more and to sign up for the teleseminar and a free recording, click here. . Looking forward to sharing my experience strength, strength and hope on the 4 C’s, hearing yours, and answering any questions you may have about how to stop contributing to your loved one’s addiction and how to start contributing to their recovery!

Until then,

All the best to you and yours,

Coach Bev

Beverly Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC
Family Recovery Coach
www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

Helping families blaze the trail to sobriety in their homes.

Click here for a complimentary consult with Coach Bev

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Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the fifth in a month-long series on Key Four. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror (BALM) takes motivation and understanding. Last month we learned about the three relationships (that with God, self, and others) and how to develop them to help you regain your peace and sanity. Next, There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to experience the sanity of family recovery. This post, Beginning to Understand Addiction and Co-addiction is part five of a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

Understanding Addiction

Addiction
As explained in previous posts, and as newly understood by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), addiction is a brain disorder, not a moral or behavioral problem.

It is biological in that compulsive use of a substance or compulsive repetition of an addictive behavior often changes the way the brain responds to stimuli. It is often environmental in that you can find families where addiction of one sort or another has been present for generations.

And in many cases, it has shown to be genetic, in that when separated twins have been studied where alcoholism, for instance, was present in the family of origin, often both twins are afflicted, regardless of the alcoholic predisposition of their adopted family. The Alcoholics Anonymous textbook quotes their founding physician Dr. Silkworth who called alcoholism “an obsession of the mind and an allergy of the body” In other words, for whatever reason, alcoholics have become unable to metabolize the alcohol and yet cannot stop seeking it out and drinking it. Sadly, over time this compulsive use of the substance destroys the body and the mind of the addict. The AA text also refers to the alcoholic as being “like a hurricane” running through the lives of the people around him or her – as any co-addict knows from their own experience to be true.

Co-Addiction

Co-addiction shares many of the traits of the addiction itself. It shows up in brain studies as a behavior that changes how the brain reacts to stimuli. In other words, the codependent behavior itself becomes an addiction that the brain rewards and its absence creates a longing and seeming withdrawal in the reward pathways of the brain that can make the co-addict feel particularly anxious unless behaving co-dependently.

It is often environmental in that parents married to or who are children of addicts model codependent behaviors that their children pick up on and pass down through the generations.

There has not been a genetic link found to codependent behavior…yet.

Co-addiction, too, is an obsession of the mind and over time becomes as difficult to stop as any addiction as it has become the way the co-addict thinks about and relates to the addict. And, ultimately, because codependent thoughts chain us to a need to fix others, co-addictive behavior is harmful both to the addict and the co-addict him or herself.

Of course this brief introduction is just that, brief and an introduction to addiction and co-addiction. But it is only meant to help you further understand why the 4 C’s are so important for you to understand. In our next post, we will talk about recovery for the addict and the family member. See you then!

This Wednesday evening, September 21, 2011, from 8:30 to 9:30 PM, I will be leading a discussion on the Four C’s on my free monthly Loving Mirror Teleseminar. Please click here to participate in what promises to be a lively, informative discussion. Bring your questions and let’s look at this important Cornerstone of Family Recovery: The Four C’s. Would love to ‘see’ you there!

–
Beverly A. Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC

ICF Professional Certified Coach

Recovery – True Purpose – Career – Life

www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

“Imagine a world where every addict has the opportunity and support needed to build a sober lifetime one moment at a time, and every family has the benefit of a coach to help them blaze the trail to sobriety in their home. Imagine a world without relapse.”
Join an ongoing coaching group and practice your Loving Mirror skills. Go to www.beverlybuncher.com/lovingmirror/ to register today!

Author of the forthcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity

If there is a using addict in your life, download my free e-book on how to transform the chaos to sanity at www.theempowermentcoach.net and read my blog at www.12stepfamily.com

Enjoy my weekly newsletter Life Purpose in Recovery delivered right to your email and gain access to materials on the 12 Keys to Sanity for Family Members! Sign up here: http://forms.aweber.com/form/11/885999311.htm

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Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the fourth in a month-long series on Key Four. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror (BALM) takes motivation and understanding. Last month we learned about the three relationships (that with God, self, and others) and how to develop them to help you regain your peace and sanity. Next, There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to experience the sanity of family recovery. This post, BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONTRIBUTE TO IT is part four of a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

But You Don’t Have To Contribute To it

By now, perhaps you are feeling a combination of relief and hopelessness. I’ve told you it’s not your fault your addict uses (Whew! What a relief!) But I’ve also told you that you can’t control or cure the using no matter what you do (Oh no! So now what do I do?).

The way you may be feeling right now, is why I’ve never felt the three C’s are enough information to help family members in their recovery. Fortunately for me, when I first got into recovery I learned about the fourth C and it has made ALL the difference in my life and the life of my family. Once we understand that we didn’t cause it, we can’t control it, and we can’t cure it, it is time to look at our own behavior.

When family members first come in contact with a recovery coach , coaching group, treatment center or Alanon meeting, they can often be heard saying, “Why do I need help? I’m not the one with the problem?” My answer in response to that can be found in the 4 C’s, especially the fourth one: You don’t have to contribute to it!

Though we didn’t cause it, can’t control it and cannot cure it, there are things we can do that could either make the situation better or worse and it is our choice as to whether we want to contribute to our addict’s disease process or to their potential recovery.

By the end of this month of posts, you will know exactly what those things are! Meanwhile, as background to understand this, stay tuned to my next post, where we will begin to understand addiction, co-addiction, and recovery for both the addict and the co-addict.

If you are finding yourself unable to wait, click here for the full chapter (in an older edition) and lots of other 12 Keys handouts, recordings, and information.

–
Beverly A. Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC

ICF Professional Certified Coach

Recovery – True Purpose – Career – Life

www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

“Imagine a world where every addict has the opportunity and support needed to build a sober lifetime one moment at a time, and every family has the benefit of a coach to help them blaze the trail to sobriety in their home. Imagine a world without relapse.”
Join an ongoing coaching group and practice your Loving Mirror skills. Go to www.beverlybuncher.com/lovingmirror/ to register today!

Author of the forthcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity

If there is a using addict in your life, download my free e-book on how to transform the chaos to sanity at www.theempowermentcoach.net and read my blog at www.12stepfamily.com

Enjoy my weekly newsletter Life Purpose in Recovery delivered right to your email and gain access to materials on the 12 Keys to Sanity for Family Members! Sign up here: http://forms.aweber.com/form/11/885999311.htm

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Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the third in a month-long series on Key Four, which is the first of the Four Cornerstones. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror (BALM) takes motivation and understanding. Last month we learned about the three relationships (that with God, self, and others) and how to develop them to help you regain your peace and sanity. Next, There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to experience the sanity of family recovery. This post, YOU CAN’T CURE THEIR ADDICTION is part three of a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

You Can’t Cure Your Loved One’s Addiction

After awhile, a person trying to fight off a fire with a glass of water gives up, just as does a person trying to swim upstream. In the case of someone who loves an addict, trying often goes on long after hopelessness sets in. After all, there MUST be a cure for this. You knew this person before they got crazy, addicted, mean, etc. And you LOVE them. If anyone can solve this crisis, it is you.

And so, you start on a quest to solve the problem: to cure them of their addiction. Though well meant, these efforts are often misdirected. To help you understand how and why, it is important to understand the construct that guides the ideas in this book: the disease concept.

As the American Medical Association, SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse/Mental Health Services Administration) the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and most other health and human services agencies and experts see it, addiction is a disease that, at this time in history, can be arrested but not cured. That being the case, you may want to accept that if the greatest medical minds cannot yet cure this disease, maybe you can’t either.

Here is a recent quote for you to ponder as well:
“After four years of work involving 80 experts, the American Society of Addiction Medicine is redefining addiction—to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, and more—as a brain disorder, updating its former classification as a behavioral problem, reports Live Science. Addiction is also now considered a primary and chronic disorder, meaning it is not the result of stress, abuse, or other causes, and it needs to be treated over a patient’s lifetime, just as one would deal with a chronic disease like diabetes.

ASAM officials were swayed in part due to advancements in neuroscience over the last 20 years, which have shed light on the fact that the brain circuitry that regulates impulse control and judgment is altered in addicts’ brains. “We have to stop moralizing, blaming, controlling or smirking at the person with the disease of addiction,” said an addiction researcher. “The disease is about brains, not drugs.” ” www.newser.com

This new official categorization of addiction as being about the brain and not a moral issue, is crucial to our understanding of this C – which Alanon wrote so many years ago! YOU cannot cure it!

This disease is an inside job for the addict to work on. For some, that will mean finding a Higher Power of their understanding to heal and guide them. For others, recovery meetings will be the answer. For others still, in-patient or outpatient treatment.

For others, it may mean going through a process of trying to control their consumption or finding that they cannot handle even a drop of alcohol or drugs and reaching a bottom that makes it more painful to pick up their drug of choice than to not do so.

You can force circumstances sometimes, but you cannot force results. It’s a process of discovery they have to go through themselves. When family members try to cure their addicted loved ones, the family members often find themselves getting sick and making things worse for the addict.

What would it take for you to admit that you cannot cure this disease? That it is beyond your skills and capabilities to heal this person who you love so much? In the 12 step program Nar-Anon, the difficulty of this admission is reflected in the first step: “We admitted we were powerless over the addict, that our lives had become unmanageable.” After trying and trying, many family members report that eventually they found that curing their addict was a hopeless endeavor for them to pursue and that in fact, tearing themselves apart trying to stop the drinking or drugging often ended up:

• Destroying any semblance of a relationship they had left with the addict
• Giving the addict an excuse to blame them for his/her troubles
• Turned the family member into an obsessive person with no interest in anything other than fixing something that could not be fixed. As a result, the family member became boring, depressed, isolated, and alone.

In our next post we will continue this serialization of the 4 C’s chapter with the 4th C: But You Don’t Have to Contribute to It. Stay tuned!

Feeling impatient and want to read a first edition of the whole chapter on the 4 C’s? Click here and you will receive this article and other 12 Keys information, recordings, and handouts.

–
Beverly A. Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC

ICF Professional Certified Coach

Recovery – True Purpose – Career – Life

www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

“Imagine a world where every addict has the opportunity and support needed to build a sober lifetime one moment at a time, and every family has the benefit of a coach to help them blaze the trail to sobriety in their home. Imagine a world without relapse.”

Join an ongoing coaching group and practice your Loving Mirror skills. Go to www.beverlybuncher.com/lovingmirror/ to register today!

Author of the forthcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity

If there is a using addict in your life, download my free e-book on how to transform the chaos to sanity at www.theempowermentcoach.net and read my blog at www.12stepfamily.com

Enjoy my weekly newsletter Life Purpose in Recovery delivered right to your email and gain access to materials on the 12 Keys to Sanity for Family Members! Sign up here: http://forms.aweber.com/form/11/885999311.htm

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Welcome to the 12 Keys series of blog posts which will, month by month, explain the 12 Keys of Sanity and give you detailed ideas and activities to help you bring them alive in your life. This post is the first in a month-long series on Key Four, which is the first of the Four Cornerstones. This Key is known as the Four C’s: “You Didn’t Cause It, You Can’t Control It, You Can’t Cure It. BUT, You DON’T Have to Contribute To It.”

The ability to Be A Loving Mirror takes motivation and understanding. There are four cornerstones to help you build the understanding you need to move forward through the four foundations to the goal of Being A Loving Mirror. The first cornerstone is the Four C’s. Learn the 4 C’s well. They will play a KEY role in allowing you to enter the sanity of family recovery. The next several posts are a serialization of my chapter on the 4 C’s in my upcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity.

Did you ever walk into a room that was burning? Perhaps the stove was on fire or a pot was shooting flames. You did not start that fire and you may not be able to stop it, but there are things you can do that will make it stronger or weaker. Did you douse it with oil or water? One makes the fire worse; the other helps put it out. Sometimes, when the fire is completely out of control, the best thing you can do is get out of the room and the house and call the fire company. Staying and trying to put it out will only kill you.

When it comes to being in relationship with an addict, the parallels are not exact, but in some ways, you are dealing with a fire you did not start and you will probably not be able to put out. The question is, will you fan the flames or help distinguish them? Do you know which actions will hurt and which will help? This chapter will let you know what is meant by the 4 C’s and the rest of the book is here to show you which of your actions will contribute to your loved one’s addiction and which could help bring about their recovery. (You’ll notice I wrote ‘could help’. There are no guarantees that the principles you learn in this book will bring about recovery for your addict. The only guarantee is that if you apply these principles to your own life, your own chaos will transform to sanity. But, just as chaos is catchy, so, too is sanity. So, by working on increasing the peace in your own life, you give your addict a better chance of ‘catching’ your new way of life, of wanting what you have and moving forward to get it.) So, let’s get started.

‘You Didn’t Cause Your Loved one’s Addiction’

The fact is, unless you sat with your loved one day after day, forcing them to take drugs or drink alcohol; you didn’t turn them into an addict. They picked up their first drug or drink (or whatever their substance or behavior is). They made an initial decision to use and soon, there were not more decisions to make. At a certain point, they were hooked and that was that. The drug was choosing them. It had dug its tentacles into their brain and they were automatically going after it day after day. At first to feel good. Then, just to feel at all, and, finally, just to numb any feelings they had and just survive.

So, if you have been sitting around with feelings of guilt and a case of the ‘if only’s’, as in if only I hadn’t…

• Let him out of the house
• Allowed her to hang out with those kids
• Worked so much

Or if only I had…

• Been a better husband/wife
• Been home more
• Kept a better eye on what was going on

…he/she wouldn’t have started drinking, it’s time to let that guilt go. You didn’t make their disease happen. You’re just not that powerful. And while we are on the topic of your power, here is another light bulb for you to turn on in your head: Your loved one’s addiction is not about you. It is about them. You are not at the center of their universe. They are on their own journey. And the fact that they became addicted is not about you.

Take a look for a moment at the synonyms of the word cause:
source, root, origin, basis, foundation, reason.

While your addict may tell you that you are the reason he uses, I’m here to tell you that what you are hearing is his addiction speaking at you. By bestowing guilt upon you, making you the reason he uses, your loved one is letting go of all personal responsibility for his behaviors. She is saying, “It’s not my fault, it’s yours!”

Perhaps you’ve believed that up until now. This book will show you why that is NOT true and how to take back responsibility for what you are truly responsible for: your actions and reactions to the situation you are in. It will also show you how to give the addict back her personal responsibility for her own life and that starts right here, with your really getting it that it is NOT your fault that he is an addict. You did not cause it.

So if you didn’t cause it, what did?

There are lots of theories about that. Genetics may be a part of the mix. As twin and adoptee studies often show, alcoholism often shows up regardless of the environment in which a child is raised. (footnote) So let go of the guilt. Even if your child inherited the gene for addiction from you, you did not intend for that to happen, so it is NOT YOUR FAULT!

The 12 Keys invite you to look at this entire situation of being related to an addict in a different light: Yes, there is this awful, frightening, life threatening thing happening to someone you love. But, there are also many wonderful things about this person and about the relationship you have (or had in the past) that you may also choose to focus on. There are wonderful things that most likely came out of knowing this person – such as, for instance:

• the great people you met through them
• the children you birthed through your marriage together
• your own growth as a result of being involved with someone who has stretched you to your limit…

I don’t know your details. But I do know there are always many ways to view any situation. Seeing only the sadness in a situation only goes so far, especially if it is your goal to make things better. So, start to look for things that make you feel better about your life and your relationship with your loved one. It is a mental habit that will serve you well.

In our next post we will continue this chapter with “You Can’t Control It” – stay tuned!

Feeling impatient? To read an older version of the Four C’s in full, plus have access to other 12 Keys essentials click here.

–
Beverly A. Buncher, MA, PCC, CTPC

ICF Professional Certified Coach

Recovery – True Purpose – Career – Life

www.beverlybuncher.com
www.12stepfamily.com
786 859 4050

“Imagine a world where every addict has the opportunity and support needed to build a sober lifetime one moment at a time, and every family has the benefit of a coach to help them blaze the trail to sobriety in their home. Imagine a world without relapse.”
Join an ongoing coaching group and practice your Loving Mirror skills. Go to www.beverlybuncher.com/lovingmirror/ to register today!

Author of the forthcoming book Chaos to Sanity: Transform Your Life with the 12 Keys to Sanity

If there is a using addict in your life, download my free e-book on how to transform the chaos to sanity at www.theempowermentcoach.net and read my blog at www.12stepfamily.com

Enjoy my weekly newsletter Life Purpose in Recovery delivered right to your email and gain access to materials on the 12 Keys to Sanity for Family Members! Sign up here: http://forms.aweber.com/form/11/885999311.htm

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