Coming Up for Air — A Toolkit to Help with Your Loved One's Recovery from Addiction & Mental Illness

It's smart to avoid giving unsolicited advice. If you receive it, hold  your ground, knowing that you're dedicated to upholding the CRAFT model.  Consider telling the advice-giver to look into CRAFT to understand what  you're doing.

Guest Meme English, a former family therapist and consultant in the legal system, discusses family dynamics. When it comes to substance use, family dynamics are complicated. There are many layers of trauma, from generational to personal, and competing  needs among family members. Balancing all these factors and personal  situations means deciding whose needs get most clearly met. Trauma  therapy also requires time and commitment, and is harder to find since the pandemic.

Let's look at shame and negative thinking and discuss how to slow down, gain awareness, and soothe your system. Our hosts focus on the essential tool of empathy -- especially for yourself -- as a way to  understand what story you’re making up, and change that story by looking for the positive even in difficult moments.

Dominique shares a family’s question about a loved one who’s addressed the most pressing substance use. Should the family now focus on their loved one’s cannabis use? Our hosts discuss harm reduction and the role of the “functional analysis” in CRAFT to address such questions. The analysis involves reviewing what’s changed, patterns and dynamics, and making sure your own behaviors support reduction of use. These actions are subtle, and their subtlety makes them more effective. Even with multiple substances, they recommend addressing one at a time. The functional analysis should keep happening with different drugs, so that you know which behaviors to reward and which to walk away from. The Allies site includes cannabis resources discussing withdrawal and tolerance, and the more-concentrated form of use called “dabbing. 

Even when love is not conditional, there sometimes must be conditions regarding people’s behavior. Love in romantic relationships may change if you break up, but with family members, conditionality applies to behavior, not love. What we as family members can modify is how we react and our expectations. Conditionality goes back to boundary issues – there are edges someone comes to where they must stop what they’re doing. It’s important to note that wishing someone would go away is a normal, protective reaction to difficult feelings.

What do you do in those difficult moments when you feel ramped-up? Laurie and Kayla discuss strategies to back away and not go with the emotion of the moment.

What are the obstacles between knowing what to do and putting that knowledge into real practice? In part 1, our hosts focus on  avoiding a "crisis" response, and slowing events down to avoid being reactive.

Laurie and Kayla discuss change -- how to manage it, how quickly it can or can't happen, and how to focus your efforts.

An overview of the first twelve weeks of CRAFT, discussing what it can accomplish quickly, and what becomes a lifetime practice.

So what are boundaries, really? Who are they really for, and how do you use them well?