The family program was actually very difficult for me. I arrived on Thursday night at the hotel that Hanley pays for one family member to stay in and it was very nice. The next morning, Hanley arranged for the family members attending the program to be picked up at 7:30 am. Originally, my brother and sister were both going to attend with me, but they bailed at the last minute.
The idea of family program is to teach the family members how addiction is a family disease. It's like dominoes: the substance (alcohol, in my mom's case) knocks the addict down and then the addict knocks everyone else around them down.
Other helpful things we learned about addiction:
-addiction is about compulsivity (always worrying about the next drink)
-the first 12-18 months after quitting are the hardest
-alcoholism is a holistic disease (physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual) & therefore so must the solution to the disease be
Anyway, I'll update more about what I learned later. But for now, I wanted to just say how hard the weekend was for me. I was SO immensely worried about my mom (rehab was not working for her...she had no intention of trying to stop drinking) that I could not handle the conversations about addiction and recovery. I sobbed through the entire weekend. I'm so glad that I won't see any of those people who attended family weekend again because I really embarrassed myself. I was way too emotional. It wasn't a tear or two, it was the kind of crying where you can't speak and you get all red and blotchy.
I still haven't processed why exactly it was so hard for me. Was it because I'd never openly talked about my mom's addiction? Or what it was like for me? Was the it group/crowd aspect? Was I just nervous?
Any ideas?
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