Staff featured in this video (in order of appearance):
- Dougie Dudgeon, Team Leader and Counsellor
- Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon, Founder and Service Director
- Dan Stanley, Team Leader and Counsellor
Dougie Dudgeon
Addiction invades every part of people’s lives, particularly their closest relationships. That’s normally families and family members.
Dr Cosmo Duff Gordon
I think the reason for that is addiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So, the addict will almost inevitably have a family or family system. And the addiction exists within that system and therefore, it affects everyone in that system. What tends to happen is the family system tends to adapt to try and manage the addict’s relationship with the object of their addiction, whatever that might be, whether it’s alcohol or cocaine or whatever it is. So, there’s this huge adaptation.
We’re very keen at Start2Stop on families being involved in the treatment process. When families get involved, outcomes improve. There’s a lot of literature and research into that.
We have a Family Support Group every week, once a week, on Zoom, which we invite all significant others to attend. That’s really about helping educate them about addiction as a family illness, help them start looking at their possible role within the family system, and be educated really about what’s going to be needed to help support their addict. But also, to have a look at what they may need to change themselves in terms of how they relate to their addict.
The counselling team will do what are called conjoins. A conjoin is a sort of archaic term that means a facilitated meeting between client, Start2Stop therapist, and family member. We’ll typically do the first one in around week three of treatment and we’ll do around one a month, one conjoin a month. Those are opportunities, we’re not family systems therapists, we’re not trying to fix probably many years of dysfunction, but what we are trying to do is help our clients and help the family members just put on the table stuff that needs to be talked about, have to think about boundaries, expectations, what the client needs, what the family needs. Sometimes, you know, clients and their families, it is very complicated and they may need referrals to specialist family therapists and that’s something that we will do.
We also involve family because we will write to family members and invite them to email in their experience of their addict’s addiction. Say we had a client who is a wife, we might well write to the husband and ask him to let us know how he’s been affected by her addiction, what impact it’s had on him, on the family, the children and so on.
I’d really say to the family member you know your alcoholic, your loved one who is an alcoholic, may not stop drinking. You can’t control for that. All you can really control for is your response, your positioning with regard to that alcoholism. That’s why you have some control. I’d probably recommend they went and worked with a good therapist who specialises in helping family members of addicts and alcoholics just to get some support because they’re probably feeling lonely and angry and not really knowing what to do. Some support would be a good thing.
Dan Stanley
We believe that the family members and loved ones are usually the people that have been most affected by someone’s addiction. We feel it’s very important to involve them in the treatment process so that they can also heal. It can give a space where those relationships can start to heal, where trust can start to be rebuilt, where they can start to express the impact that addiction has had on them, what they’re hoping for and also setting boundaries, that if someone continues to do that, what impact that might have.
I’ve seen broken marriages be restored. I’ve seen parents that have been crying their eyes out in despair, seeing their children, young children, adults, killing themselves from addiction really and not being able to do anything about that. Seeing them come back to life and rebuild their relationships and rebuild connection, that has been a real privilege.
If you would like to find out more about family support and how Start 2 Stop can help then please get in touch here.