- Hi, there.
I'm Andrea Arlington.
And welcome to Ask Andrea,
where I answer questions and offer solutions
to questions about relationships, family healing, and more.
I hope you enjoy this episode.
(soft music)
Dear Andrea, I'm an adult child
of alcoholic and narcissistic parents.
I also have a 32 year-old son who is married
with three children, ages 12, 7, and 6.
I try to be a positive presence in their life
and love them all so much.
Over the last seven or eight years,
my son has become addicted to drugs.
He was prescribed meds, which led to street drugs.
He goes through a cycle of complete mania for two weeks
and then is more himself.
The entire family is affected by this cycling behavior.
I'm 54 years-old with the lesser half of my life left.
I wanna live it out with happiness and meaning
and this is not that.
It's fearful and anxiety ridden and sorrowful.
I know there's no easy answer
but I'm desperate to feel good again, but how?
Hi, Desperate-to-feel-good-again.
All of the trauma that you suffered and endured
with parents who struggled with substance use disorder
as well as mental health issues,
and now dealing with it from your own child
and seeing your grandchildren being impacted
the way you were impacted as a little person,
that's really tough.
Feeling good again is something that I promise you
is possible even while your son is using.
So, if you can find someplace inside of you
that can appreciate your son holding up a light for you
to take a look at the unmet needs you had as a child
and how they might still be impacting you today,
how you might still be feeling pain from your own childhood,
that if you decided to you could work on and heal.
I'd also like for you to consider
that everything that we want
for our loved one who struggles
with mental health and substance use disorder issues,
meaning a sense of inner wellbeing,
a sense of self-worth, of being deserving,
that it's okay not to be perfect.
All of the messages that would support our loved one
in maintaining or creating or moving toward mental health
and wellbeing and giving up their substance use,
those are things that we also will have to do ourselves
if we want to, like you have indicated you do,
have a sense of mental health and wellbeing
that actually is the breeding ground
for more positive emotions.
And I always tell the families that I work with
that what we expect our loved one to do
to recover their own wellbeing,
is likely what we need to be doing ourselves.
So let's get started with some things
that have worked for me
that I believe will help you as well.
So I'm going to give you some tools and some strategies
to start developing new brain circuits
that are related to positive belief systems,
positive thoughts and therefore positive feelings,
which create those positive endorphins.
And at the end, I'm gonna give you some books
as references as well that I've read
that have made a huge difference in my life.
So let's begin.
The first thing that will help you a lot is
to take the focus off of what's going on
in the areas of your child's life
and in your grandchildren's life,
which I imagine is not going to be easy to do
because you, again, have brain patterns circuits
that have been reinforced for years now
about worrying and being in fear and feeling traumatized
by the things that have been going on,
and so, it's important for us to quiet those down
and that requires focusing on a new area of our lives.
And in this case, what you're going to do is every night
before you go to bed, Sunday through Thursday night,
you're going to write down three things
that you're going to commit to doing the next day.
So Monday through Friday, you'll be doing these things
that are going to help you move your life forward
in a direction that you know intuitively you want
to move toward.
And that might include reading a couple of paragraphs
from the books that I'm going to recommend.
It might include getting exercise.
It might include taking an online program
to help move your career forward.
Whatever it is that you feel compelled
inside of your heart to do
to make your life feel better for yourself
and focus on you is what we're looking for.
The other thing you're gonna write down,
one thing that you're gonna do the next day
to nourish your heart.
And by that, it could be baking cookies.
It could be going to the gym for a swim.
It could be sitting in a jacuzzi.
I don't know what that will be for you.
For me, it's lighting candles, taking bubble baths,
listening to my favorite music,
maybe even doing a meditation.
Every day, you're going to, at night,
write down those four things essentially.
And the next day you're going to wake up,
you're gonna look at your list
and you're going to schedule them in for your day.
That's gonna create a sense
of balance and wellbeing in your life
and it's gonna take the focus off
of what's going on in other people's lives.
On Friday and Saturday night,
you're going to write down the opposite.
You're gonna write down three things
that you're going to do on Saturday and Sunday
that are nurturing, nourishing,
just to make you feel good.
And then you're gonna write down one thing
that's gonna move your life forward.
So it might be, again,
just reading a couple of paragraphs out of a book.
And all of this depends on what your schedule is like
on a regular basis,
so you're gonna have to determine
exactly what those time commitments are gonna look like
for you.
But you're gonna do the opposite.
So you're creating a sense of balance and self care
that's going to really start to make a difference
in the brain circuits that are going to be active
in your life.
Okay, so that was the first strategy that I recommend.
The second strategy that I'm going to recommend to you
is what's called square breathing.
And it is taught to our Navy SEALs
in order to help them reduce anxiety
and deal with the stress
and trauma that they're experiencing out in the battlefield.
And it goes like this.
You breathe in to a count of four.
You hold for a count of four.
You exhale for a count of four
and you hold empty for a count of four.
Now, this calms down the nervous system
and it helps you regulate the way you're feeling.
And I recommend for somebody who's dealing
with constant stress, at least in the beginning,
that you set an alarm on your phone
to go off four times a day, maybe even once an hour,
depending on exactly what you feel would be right for you.
And when that alarm goes off,
you're going to do that square breathing multiple times
during the day.
I recommend starting in the morning
before you get out of bed.
Because, again, you want to create an inner landscape
that feels calm and relaxed,
so that when things are difficult and challenging for you,
which they often are when you're dealing
with family members who are struggling
with substance use disorder,
you'll have a cool, calm internal landscape
which allows you to be more objective
and to have more of a eagle eye view,
a 30,000 foot above perspective,
on everything that's happening that is not in your control.
You can't control it.
You can't fix it
but you can contribute
to your own mental health and wellbeing.
And when you show up, you will not be contributing
to more trauma or drama in conversation and in your energy.
Right?
Okay.
So that was the second thing that you're going to take
into your tool bag, if you will.
The last thing that I'm gonna recommend
to you is a gratitude practice.
Gratitude practices do a lot of good things
for our body and for our mental health.
Science has shown that it improves your immune system
and it allows you to have a better perspective,
to be more objective to what's going on in your life.
The kind of gratitude practice that I recommend is
to do the following.
Again at night, before you go to bed,
you're gonna write down just three things
that you're grateful for
and try to make them different every day.
After you write the first thing down,
let's say it's, "I'm grateful for the sunshine."
You're gonna write down three reasons underneath that,
why you're grateful for the sunshine.
And that might be because it grew the vegetables
that you had in your salad for dinner,
or that it is warming to the inside of your body
when you're out in it and it feels nourishing.
It might be that it provides light
so that you can see the beauty in nature.
I don't know what your gratitude list will be
but when you write down three things
underneath each one of them,
it takes that experience to a deeper level.
You get more of those positive endorphins released
into your bloodstream, and you start to feel better.
All of these activities need
to be practiced every single day.
Or to the best of your ability, practice every single day.
Because, again, what we're trying to do
is create an eternal experience of wellbeing,
which allows us to feel happier in our lives.
We're trying to create new circuits in the brain,
new neuro pathways that lead to positive feelings inside
and those positive feelings and thoughts
create those beautiful chemicals
that get released into our bodies.
There are three books that I would like to recommend to you.
The first one is called "It Didn't Start With You."
Based on the fact that your family of origin
and now your child and grandchildren have all been dealing
with mental health and substance use disorder,
I would like to bring to your attention,
and perhaps you've already heard of this,
something called generational trauma.
It's a real thing
and it can go on for many generations in a family system
that cause people to have all sorts
of unhealthy feelings and beliefs,
things that lead to a sense of being flawed and unlovable
and lead people to wanna self-medicate
or live from the trauma response of fight-flight-freeze
or people-pleasing.
And if you want to do a little bit of research
about how this might be part
of what your family is struggling with
and also learn how to end this cycle,
I highly recommend this book.
It's by Mark Wolynn.
Again, it's called "It Didn't Start With You."
The next book I wanna recommend
is called "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself."
It's one of my favorite books.
It's by Dr. Joe Dispenza.
He really goes into depth
how you can create new neural pathways in your brain
and have a whole different biochemical internal landscape
of feel-good biochemicals,
and to quiet down and shut down the thoughts and beliefs
that lead to the stress hormones being more active
in your life and in your body
and get the results that you want in your life.
The third book I'd like to recommend
is called "Beyond Addiction,"
and it's about how science and kindness
can greatly impact the people we love
who are struggling with substance use disorder.
There's all sorts of tools and strategies
and background and research
on how using a compassionate approach
to loving your loved one into recovery is possible.
And it's based on the CRAFT model of family recovery
which is a science based model of recovery,
that is very compassionate.
It stands for community reinforcement and family training.
It's worked wonders for my clients.
It worked wonders for me.
And I wanna recommend that you give it a try.
The book is really transformational.
Lastly, I would like to say that you feeling good
is going to be the greatest gift you can give
to your son and your grandchildren.
When your son sees you feeling bad,
it reinforces his sense of shame and guilt.
And when people feel shame and guilt,
they tend to want to numb even more.
So let's do your whole family and yourself,
the favor of of finding a way to develop an inner landscape
of wellbeing and calm and even happiness.
And that's what's going to be the greatest gift
you can give to yourself, your son and your grandchildren.
Thank you.