Addiction and/or Codependency & Meeting in the Middle

My friend Delaney is a doctor and a writer and a filmmaker. Her primary creative topic is mental health, writing and filming about her father's battle with schizophrenia and her kids' addiction to screens. 

Recently, she wrote a blog post with which I whole-heartedly agree: When We Judge Moms About Their Children's Mental Health. She writes about three sisters, one who has a child with mental health issues. The other two sisters blame and judge the mother for her child's problems, saying if she hadn't gotten a divorce or been such a free spirit her kid would be fine, which is of course, bullshit.

As a parent of a kid who was in treatment for two years, I agree we shouldn't blame or judge the moms. Delaney said we should have curious compassion, which is a great way to treat someone who is in the depths of a struggle instead of blame. This is all well and good.

Yet, I don't think parents should be let off the hook or get a free pass when their kid has problems, even in "good" families. And what do we mean by "good" families? They are affluent, well-educated, polite, civilized, professionals? Not that that are warm, kind and sweet?

Since Pedro has been home and since my visit to Montana a few weeks ago, I realized a few common denominators of many of the families in Pedro's program.

• They come from "good" families where at least one of the parents is (or was) a leader in their field.
• At least one parent has an addiction or co-dependency from growing up in a house with addiction or other dysfunction.
• The parent with the addiction is high achieving, thereby making it easier to mask the addiction. 
• Perfectionism is part of addiction, and as much as it is hard to live with a perfectionist, sometimes the right type of perfectionist can be very successful professionally.

It is hard for a high functioning, high profile person with an addiction to hit rock bottom. There is no vomit. They show up at work on time, ready to go. They might be loved by their colleagues and friends who don't see the addiction. I had a friend years ago who had an addiction to pain killers and whose husband was a narcissist/psychopath. She was kind and lovely and her family life was a complete shit-show. I saw her every day as our kids went to school together. It took me two years to figure out she had an addiction and her husband was a nutjob. Two years. I don't know if addiction is easy to hide or that I was blind to it. Nevertheless, her son had a truckload of problems and they got him into all of kinds of therapy, none of which worked because the root of the problem--addiction and psychopathy in the parents--was never addressed.

Not all kids collapse in a house with addiction. Some kids are like canaries in the coal mine: they wilt and struggle and suffer when they are raised with addiction. Other kids survive better. Think orchid versus daisies. Orchids need specific conditions to bloom--the proper amount of light, water, temperature. Daisies need water, sun and a patch if dirt. They are hardy and survive all kinds of conditions. The kids in treatment are orchids. They suffer without stability and consistency.

Back to my friend Delaney. I agree with her that we shouldn't blame or judge parents when their kids struggle, but families and parents need to look at themselves. What pain are they trying to avoid? What unhealthy ways are they trying to cope?

What happens when parents get better and do their work along side their kids? The parents get better and the kids get better. Pedro told me that the kids who do the best in his program are the kids whose parents do their own work. Part of me felt bad about not finishing all of the parenting books I bought before he came home. Instead, I was working on my own co-dependency problems. I was cleaning up my side of the street. And it was the better thing to do. I am sure those books have lots of wisdom, telling the parents they need to change. But do they ever spell it out for parents, in black and white, and say "YOUR ADDICTION AND/OR CODEPENDENCy IS PART OF THE PROBLEM. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND LIFE WILL BE BETTER. Life won't be perfect, but you need to leave your perfectionism at the door. Don't bring it in the house."

No, they never tell parents this.

Why? Because we don't want to blame or shame or judge parents of kids with mental health issues which is all well and good, but because of that we are closing the door on honest conversations about how families and people and emotions work.

So how do we bridge this gap, between not blaming the parent but getting the parents to honestly look at themselves and see that addictions and co-dependency are killing their families? 

Why did teen anxiety and depression gone up during the pandemic? Why did alcohol consumption for adults -- especially women -- rise during quarantine? Is there a possible correlation between families who spend all day together now exposing each other to their addictions and co-dependencies? Are addictions in general on the rise for parents and therefore more pressure on kids to cope and therefore the kids become more depressed and anxious? 

What can we do as parents to support each other when our kids fall apart? Perhaps is having honest conversations about how we got to the other side, that my son didn't come back from therapy fixed and problem solved. I did my work, he did his work and we met in the middle.