Category Archives: Alcoholism

Who Needs a Recovery Coach? Who Wants Sobriety?

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Melissa Killeen

The following is a reprint of a previous post of years past. Given that the holidays bring with them an increase in alcoholic drinking and the ravages of that addiction, it seems very appropriate.

Who Needs a Recovery Coach? Who Wants Sobriety?

Are you:

  • A high functioning alcoholic leaving treatment and frightened by returning to the outside world.
  • The established leader who needs assistance in balancing recovery, work and life.
  • An alcoholic facing their third DUI.
  • The highly competent business woman that refuses to go to an AA meeting because someone there may recognize her.
  • The high potential person that missed out on learning what it takes to become a great leader, because of the addiction.
  • The mother that has to balance work, family and a social life, that must include recovery but is finding it difficult to say “no.”
  • The sober person that has gone through incredible changes in your personal life, but still have not seen the changes in your work life?
  • Someone in transition, returning to work after a leave of absence or a stay in a treatment center and is encountering more adjustment pains than you expected.
  • An executive woman who wants to break the glass ceiling by learning the invisible rules of the game that do not include drinking.
  • A talented manager who is a candidate for leadership but continuously acted out because of experiencing friction with a boss or subordinate.
  • A social drinker/recreational drug user that just can’t seem to adjust to “work” on Monday morning, like they used to.
  • A technically proficient individual who is acting out on the computer during work.
  • A newly sober, yet inexperienced female manager whose development is paramount to organizational and personal success.
  • A parent who hid behind their addiction, resisting intimacy with their partner and their children.
  • The strategic thinker who wants to plot new initiatives for their life, to create a new business and now sober, doesn’t know how to achieve these goals.
  • An entrepreneur whose effectiveness is inextricably tied to your ability to lead and motivate your team, and as a sober person you are ready to face that challenge.

Or are you:

Sick and tired of being sick and tired? 

You can achieve the goals you’ve always dreamed possible, with confidential, convenient and effective ways to achieve sobriety, accelerate success, and giving you the major competitive edge you need to recover and succeed. Contact Melissa Killeen for a FREE one hour consultation and discover what recovery coaching can do for you.

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Angry Birds—Part 2- The conflict between a young adult and her mother in recovery

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Melissa Killeen

In my last post, I touched on the subject of how a mother in recovery can cope with the conflict and rage her 21-year-old young adult daughter expressed during a family holiday get-together. In this post, I am exploring the difficulty parents of emerging adults have coping with their separation. I must admit that I am a parent of an emerging adult, a 25-year-old son, so as you read this post, you will see I use the term “we” quite often, we meaning parents like me. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, is one of the country’s foremost authorities on the transitions of young adults. Based on a longitudinal study he conducted of more than 200 families, he found forty percent of his parent sample suffered a decline in their mental health once their first child entered adolescence and young adulthood. Parents reported feelings of rejection and low self-worth; a decline in their sex lives; and increases in physical symptoms of distress. It may be tempting to dismiss these findings as by-products of a midlife crisis rather than the presence of young adults in the house. But Steinberg’s results don’t seem to suggest it. Steinberg’s research was better able to predict what the parent was going through psychologically, by looking at the age of his or her child, rather than by knowing the parent’s age.

Young adults who are attempting to launch are especially rough on parents who don’t have an outside interest, whether it’s a job they love or a hobby to absorb their attention. Parents who have been planning that perfect wedding or expect their child will be a doctor or a Nobel laureate, since the kid’s bar (bat) mitzvah, need to stop that. It is time to separate what they ‘make up in their heads’ with the reality of the situation. I may over emphasize this a tad, but for every parent there is this overarching desire for their kids to fulfil the American Dream: to do better than their parents. Today, post the Great Recession, this may be a bit difficult to achieve for most 20 to 30 something’s. It also raises the bar for these launching young adults who already have too many goals to realize during this decade. These goals include: separating from their family, leaving the childhood home, attending college, finding a job, moving into a new home, excelling in that job and finding a mate.

There are more responsibilities laid at the feet of a 20-30 year old in this decade of emerging adulthood than in any other decade preceding or following this age. A person might expect that sitting, chilling out and playing a video game can take some pressure off of the emerging adult, wouldn’t you think? Knowledge that wasn’t around twenty years ago, when most parents were rocking out to The Police or Nirvana, attests that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—including the ability to reason and control our impulses—is still undergoing structural changes up until the age of 25. Complicating matters more, dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is very active in young adults, which is why they assign a greater value to the reward they get from taking risks than older adults do. Of course, in the face of observing such risk taking, our first parental response is to step in, control and make things right.

As their parents, we see these risky choices based on youth and stupidity rather the researched-based facts of being part of a developmental process. It’s precarious being someone’s prefrontal cortex by proxy. Yet modern culture tells us that that’s one of the primary responsibilities of being a parent. In addition to decisions by proxy, we carry unresolved problems from our past with us into our current situations. At times of disagreement or unexpected crises, conflict and dysregulation arise. Wikipedia describes manifestations of emotional dysregulation as angry outbursts such as yelling, destroying or throwing objects, aggression towards others, and use of all capital letters in text messages (I added that last entry). Regarding the mother and daughter issue referred to in the my last blog, I went to my “go to guy”, Bowen Family Systems psychiatrist, Ronald Cohen and he offered these questions:

(1) What can you do to help resolve the conflict, reduce stress and anxiety, improve communication, and promote active problem solving and healing?

(2) How do you maintain both your autonomy and the connections with the emotionally important person in your  life?

(3) Which behaviors will help make things better no matter what the emerging adult does?

(4) How do you deal with differences without losing connection?

The end-goal is differentiation of self,  the capacity for the individual to function autonomously by making their own choices, while remaining emotionally connected to family. For the for my client, the recovering mother and for the emerging adult, her daughter, this is a goal they both can agree on. This goal will allow the daughter to engage the process of partially freeing herself from the emotional entrapment of her mother. Differentiation can release the mother from her care giver role and all of her past roles as a parent of a young child that are no longer required. In doing so, the young adult daughter may recognize that running away from her mother won’t achieve liberty, but in fact by running away, she will become as emotionally dependent as the emerging adult who never leaves home. More will follow with next week’s post.

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Angry Birds—the conflict between a young adult and her mother in recovery

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Melissa Killeen

Most people have been exposed to the difficulty young adults encounter when trying to separate from their parents, as enacted in the 2006 American romantic comedy film, Failure to Launch, starring Matthew McConaughey. The film highlights a young man’s struggle to detach himself from his parents coupled with the desire to remain a child, and the anger that results from the failure or success of doing either. The anger, however, is not just the property of the young adult; it is also owned by the parent(s) who want the same things for their child; to separate successfully while also wanting them to remain the elementary school child, fully dependent and unconditionally loving them. Things can get complicated.

Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett suggests that there is a new age classification, labeled emerging adults, which bridges the gap between adolescence and adulthood. According to Arnett’s theory, people in their 20’s go through a time of development that’s distinct from other stages of adulthood. Ronald Cohen, a Bowen Family Systems trained psychiatrist from Great Neck, NY, cites that “becoming an adult, leaving home and staying connected is the first stage in Carter and McGoldrick’s formulation of The Expanded Family Life Cycle. This Family Life Cycle transition can be described as beginning with the adolescent’s ‘identity crisis’. It continues through the transition to college and into young adulthood. Some young adults end up never leaving home. Others end up cutting off and becoming estranged and distant from their family. Both of these responses are sub-optimal solutions to the struggles of the launching phase.”

A emerging adult’s tasks in this transitional launching phase are primarily focused on the development of autonomy and healthy interdependence. Interdependence is defined as the mutual dependence between people, places and things, such as how a bee needs to pollenate flowers or when an emerging adult needs to borrow Mom’s car and will agree to take it for an oil change. The goal is to develop differentiation, for the emerging adult to become emotionally and financially accountable to one’s self, while at the same time maintaining connections with their family, without taking on their ‘stuff’.

Case in point, is the situation of my client, a 45-year-old alcoholic in recovery and her  21 year old daughter. The ‘stuff’ is this client’s addiction, the years of enmeshment and the trauma to which her daughter was exposed. My client and her not so perfect sobriety time, which includes two DUIs, an attempted suicide and three stints in a residential treatment center since 2011, is attempting to make amends. The daughter, who is attending college, living with a boyfriend on the other side of the country, is attempting to launch. On the surface, this relationship is like kerosene and water.

Ronald Cohen states “The way to develop differentiation is not to cut off, but to see other family members for who they are and stay connected with them despite their shortcomings.” Sometimes, it is so difficult to stay connected that the emerging adult just wants to run away and not fight this particular battle.

These two were supposed to have some family time together in Philadelphia over the Fourth of July holiday. Let’s just say this, the fireworks were not only in the air over Philadelphia this holiday weekend, but also in this suburban home with explosive interactions including threats, four letter words, the use of all capital letters in texts, and the triangulation of other family members. It was my role to shed some light on the right way to develop differentiation, which is not to cut off all relations to the family, but to see other family members for who they are and stay connected with them, despite their shortcomings.

Many times these shortcomings have caused this young woman significant trauma. How do you cope with a young adult that is very angry that their mother (or father) was a hopeless drunk during their upbringing or has a mental health diagnosis? What happens when recovery changes that parent? Maybe the emerging adult wants the ‘good old times’ to return. How does the young adult grapple with their perceived image of a perfect mother or a placid family life that rivals a TV sit-com? Add to that the difficult reality they are experiencing in their own life, perhaps they are considering a relationship with a partner or developing their own perceived image of themselves as a successful person. Where does the enmeshment stop and autonomy begin? How does this recovering parent deal with the anger and frustration that plays out during these episodes or the grief over the loss of their child if there should be a period of separation? How can any parent predict a ‘successful launch’ ? Can a child perceive what ‘recovery’ is for a parent?

Sounds like there will be some very interesting reading in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

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