Sept. 21, 2016. Bill will be a keynote speaker on the topic: “Recovery Skills for Families: Tools for Managing the Stress of Addiction” at the University of Northern Texas Recovery Conference being held in Denton, TX. The Recovery Conference is a national 2-day event that brings together behavioral health professionals, educators, researchers, students and industry leaders. For more information go to: https://recoveryresearch.unt.edu/content/recovery-conference
family alcoholism
Your loved one is in treatment for alcoholism or addiction – now what?
By Mary Gray Johnson
Maybe this makes me a bad person, but during the first month that my brother was in treatment I didn’t miss him. In fact, I was glad he was there. I could take a sigh of relief knowing that he was alive and safe – one I’d been holding in for the last five years.
After catching my breath, the reality of his absence set in. I began to miss him, and I started thinking about his return home. This would be great! My brother was sober and healthy! Everything would go back to normal!
Do you see where I’m going with this? When someone gets out of treatment, things can’t just go back to “normal.” And that’s a scary realization for most people – like my Dad, who had literally maintained the same daily routine for the past 25 years.
We realized that if my family kept living our lives like normal, we would be making it significantly harder for Fitzhugh to stay sober.
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Family intervention: Escaping the chaos of drug addiction and alcoholism
The morning after my last exam of sophomore year of college, I woke up to a phone call from my mom saying that my brother was in a drug-induced coma and the doctors didn’t know if he would wake up. She didn’t assure me that everything “would be okay.” My normally unshaken mother couldn’t fix this.
My brother is one year younger than me, and at the time we were both attending colleges in Virginia about an hour from each other. He drank a lot. He smoked a lot of pot. And he also took a lot of anxiety medication, as far as I was aware. In retrospect, his incessant substance use clearly showed signs of addiction and/or alcoholism. Since early adolescence he had caused my family huge amount of pain and embarrassment. I knew that his habits weren’t healthy, but I justified it because he was in college. I thought that one day he’d outgrow it. Little did I know, he didn’t know how to stop using.
The one-hour drive to the hospital, knowing that my baby brother might be dead was the worst hour of my life. I was physically sickened because I knew that I could have done something to avoid it.
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