Were alcohol and drugs part of your childhood home? If so, this may have heightened your risk for developing your own addictions. Families so heavily influence our choices and opinions, and although we might not like it, we can’t avoid it. What we can do, however, is learn new ways to cope, to live authentically — and hopefully better — than our parents and other family members who came before us. At Alpine Recovery Lodge, we can help you learn how.
Few would disagree that the manner in which you were raised as a child has an impact on the decisions you make as an adult. But how much and in what way?
The answer is nuanced, and it’s different for everyone. We all know someone who says they keep their home spotless because that’s what their mom did, and others who are much less fastidious because they always chafed at what they viewed as their mother’s obsession with cleanliness.
In some cases, the root is biological. With mental health issues, you may grow up to wrestle with anxiety or depression, and not just because of what you witnessed, but because of your genetic makeup. But is that true for addiction too? It has yet to be proven without a doubt that addictive tendencies are hereditary. But the manner in which you develop an addiction can be insidious.
If alcohol was part of daily life in your home, you may believe that having a few drinks after work every night is normal. In this way, you could start early on down the road to addiction without even realizing the danger. In other instances, you may know that what happened in your home when you were a child was definitely not normal. A chaotic upbringing leads to a childhood filled with fear, anxiety, depression, uncertainty and more. If you learn that the way to relieve pain is through using alcohol or drugs, you may start in your teen years, precisely because you are suffering due to a parent’s addiction. One day you may wake up and realize you have inadvertently created the life you always wanted to escape.
While it doesn’t happen to everyone this way, it happened this way for you, and now you need a solution. The professionals at Alpine Recovery Lodge have the answer.
Many addictions are rooted in mental health issues. While it’s true that some are biological, others are more situational. Of course you are going to be anxious and depressed if your parents are alcoholics and you constantly worry if they will be fired again, if you will have clean clothes to wear and lunch money or if someone in your household will turn violent again and harm other members. Medication would help tamp down the symptoms, but it wouldn’t fix the problem.
If you grew up in a home with substance use disorder, you never learned how to cope with problems. Each disappointment was treated with alcohol or a drug, which seems to help, but only for a few hours, and then it gets worse again.
When you enter inpatient rehab at Alpine Recovery Lodge, you will meet regularly with licensed therapists who will help teach you how to cope with life’s disappointments — without the aid of an intoxicant. Additionally, we have a medical doctor on staff, so we provide dual diagnoses of mental health issues and prescribe medication if necessary. And while the need for medication might be temporary, the need for learning how to cope with the ups and downs of life is permanent.
We discover in therapy sessions that some of our clients have an aversion to what they see as “blaming” their parents for their addictions. We don’t encourage blaming, but it’s important to acknowledge an upbringing that was colored by addiction. Whether you had a parent who was given to violent, drunken rages or one who just slept through a lot of your childhood, these events affected you, and the sooner you recognize it, the easier it is to understand how you got where you are now (and how to get out again).
As difficult as it is to confront your troubled upbringing, a second set of hurdles emerges if your family members are still addicted. They may not support your getting clean. They may argue with you, gaslight you, deny reality or worse. As part of our treatment program, we work to shore up your resistance to these aggressions. Family members in particular can pull at our heartstrings and send us into spirals of guilt, shame, fear and more. You may yearn for an apology for the ways that they made you suffer, but that apology may never come.
One of the main reasons for choosing inpatient rehab is because it gets you out of the environment that has kept you addicted — in this case, possibly your family home. Part of rehab can be like deprogramming someone who joined a cult. You have to learn new ways. You have to agree that your old ways aren’t working. Establishing patterns and cultivating habits creates pathways in your brain, and the more you repeat the action, the more entrenched the behavior becomes. This is what is often meant by the phrase “stuck in a rut.” But in this case, your old rut of using is the problem, but the new sober path you’re creating is the groove, and it needs to be deep enough so that you can’t easily slip out of it when you leave the supportive environment of rehab.
Your family helped make you who you are today. We can help you change into the person you want to be. Call us today.
Alpine Recovery Lodge
