Siblinghood of Recovery
Siblinghood of Recovery
Lessons from Recovery: Self-Regulation, Parenting Styles, and the Power of Resilience
Embarking on a personal journey of recovery from family dysfunction and substance use challenges can offer invaluable lessons. Through our effort to understand why our children are using substances, we must focus on the essential concepts of self-regulation, the impact of our parenting styles, and how we can become better parents through building up our own resilience. I offer up my own experience of learning how crucial it is to manage emotions and learn to focus on the present moment in order to create a safe emotional environment for my Family. Together, as a Siblinghood of Parents in Development, we can navigate through the storm, learn from our past, and pave the way for a healthier future for our children and us.
9:35 - From Parents.com, 'What's Your Parenting Style?'
12:20 - Newport Academy's, 'Resilience Toolkit'
OTHER RELATED LINKS
1) Authoritative Parenting: The Pros and Cons, According to a Child Psychologist
2) What's Your Parenting Style?
3) From the Parenting for Brain website, 'Emotional Regulation in Children | A Complete Guide' - as seen on the American Academy of Pediatrics website, and an excerpt here specific to Substance Use: A child who has poor emotion regulation skills throws tantrums constantly and puts a strain on the parent-child relationship. This can impact the climate of the whole household, including siblings or everyone around them, and lead to a negative spiral.
Similarly, for friendships, kids who don’t have the ability to control their big feelings have fewer social skills. They have a harder time making or keeping friends. The inability to self-regulate big emotions can lead to traits like anger, withdrawal, anxiety, or aggressive behavior.
All this can snowball into further negative consequences: Children who are rejected by their peers are at increased risk of dropping out of school, delinquency, substance abuse, and antisocial behavior problems 1 . Those who are withdrawn and rejected by peers are also more likely to get bullied 2 .
Thank you for listening and please visit www.siblinghoodofrecovery.com for free resources, links to organizations, groups and individuals who can offer help in the Journey of Recovery towards healing from substance use disorders. If you like this Podcast, please leave a rating on wherever you're listening. It will help to get the word out.
If there is one message I can leave you with, the best you can offer your loved one battling addiction is love and a healthier you.
Walk gently, my friend.
My name is Angie Reno and I'm a mom on a recovery journey from family dysfunction, addiction and perhaps all that simply comes with the human condition. I'm not a licensed therapist, although I will always encourage seeking out professional help. I know therapy has changed my life for the better. There are many of us on this path towards recovery, so let's walk gently. Welcome to Siblinghood of Recovery.
Speaker 1:Hello recovery community, I am back and yet again I'm going to focus on you. Look, I get it. This is such a crazy journey and if you've landed here, you know it's due to the subject matter that you're searching for. Right, you search on a podcast for substance abuse and childhood and thinking you know, how am I going to deal with this? How am I going to get through this time? Because I've been there. It's incredibly challenging and this podcast talks about you, the parent, and concentrating on you, so I can imagine this is frustrating.
Speaker 1:When I was looking at all this information in the beginning of this journey, I wanted to know what's going on inside my kid's head. I wanted to know why this was happening, which is a great start. I didn't get the sense that I had to focus on myself until the third person, who was a recovery expert, and I was speaking to licensed therapist who were well versed in addiction and substance use, and I was also speaking to people who were networking for me to get my son into a treatment center. They would start the conversation off with how are you doing? And by the third time, the third conversation I'm like, okay, all right, they want to know if I'm crazy or not, and at the time, I did feel like I was. To be honest, I believe what becomes of this journey is the mirror, and the mirror is hard. It's hard to look at yourself. It's hard to assess what you're contributing to this whole process. In doing so, though, there is great opportunity to become not only healthier for your child, but healthier for yourself, and that is definitely the priority, so I want to focus on three concepts at a very high level of self-regulation, parenting styles and building up resilience. Self-regulation is really the ability to control one's emotions, and I don't like to use that word control, or to manage. I think that's a better word for me personally to manage one's own emotions and own thoughts.
Speaker 1:I was listening to an interview with Eckhart Tull, and he was talking about being the moment. There's so much focus on the future or what people are going to think about this. If I post that or if I react a certain way, you know what's going to be the response to that reaction, what is going to be the response to what's going on in my household as we deal with substance use challenges and the community starts to learn more. So when you're worried and when you're thinking about all those challenges, what happens is you miss out in the moment, at the time, like at the dinner table, say alright, a crisis is being dealt with and discussed. Sometimes the worry, the anxiety, the fear, the anger clouds our ability to see what's going on in front of us and it clouds our ability to listen. I mean, this just happened to me last week and I'm in a recovery journey. All the time my youngest said you know, hey, I think I'm going to do X instead of Y. I'm like, okay, here we go again. And I was just so upset with myself for saying something like that, that sentence, and I did apologize and we had a good conversation and I said look, I'll promise to slow down and listen and wait and not overreact. Basically, I promise to self-regulate.
Speaker 1:And the reason why self-regulation is so important is because we're modeling. Parental modeling is vital to our children because that is how they are going to perceive the ability to engage with the world around them. And I know I created, too, toxicity in the home. I know that my contribution was equal to, you know, reacting zero to 60. I would be pretty calm and then something would trigger me and you know what's going on, what's happening Blah, blah, blah, blah. And that inability to self-regulate definitely contributed to anxiety and walking around going. Okay, it's calm right now, but when's the next storm going to come right? So there's a lot of focus on in this recovery journey, on your own self-regulation and what you are modeling as a parent to your child for behavior.
Speaker 1:So now I'd like to turn the focus to a parenting styles and the attachment theory at a very high level. When you do speak to your therapist, talk about what it means in your mind when you go back to understanding your own childhood how did you feel your relationship was with your own parents? And as you can pull the thread to attachment, it really comes into. Are you providing a safe environment for your child, and not just physically. Are you providing a safe environment for your child emotionally, for them to be who they are, to express how they feel, to allow them opportunity for a big conversation. And you know, in that small example that I just relayed for me last week, yeah, I shut down the conversation with just one sentence and I recognized it immediately afterwards and I did make amends.
Speaker 1:But my goal as a parent is to take a few seconds of pause and maybe you know, breathing exercises are actually fantastic. I have a friend of mine. I reached out to her once on text and literally she talked me through a moment via text where now, when I see her name, I actually take in a deep breath, you know. And what a fantastic examination into the neuroscience of me breathing, taking in breaths to call myself, and I'm associating it with a friend's name. So If I can take that reaction and impart it to anything I'm experiencing with my child, you know, then I'm winning and that's a win.
Speaker 1:So, in addition to attachment and self-regulation, consider our parenting styles. Oh man, this was hard part for me when I was in therapy. Honestly, it was like this is the Peter Gabriel digging in the dirt. This was tough because I did have some of the no do as I say, not as I do, leftover I'll just say that from previous generations because that's how it was, you know, 50, 60 years ago. And I do remember. I actually remember my dad saying once well, children should be seen and not heard, right, and that's probably what he was told. So you take that memory and talk about it with a therapist and then you understand really how you were taught to parent and how you were taught what is expected in the parent-child relationship. And here's the cool thing If you're working with a good therapist, you can then pull the thread on how to support the parenting style that you want to emulate as a parent so you can facilitate a good relationship with your child.
Speaker 1:The goal, even when your child is in the throes of substance use, is to begin building a pathway to be the parent you want to be. It helps you begin to set a vision right of what you want to bring to the table. I will be honest with you in this recovery path it might take a while, a long time. It could take months, it could take years for your child to see that you're bringing a different type of behavior to their relationship, that you're bringing a different type of engagement right If you've had years of being, for example, an authoritarian in the household or a permissive parent in the household. Both of these, statistically and based on research, hinder the development of children. It's going to take a long time and lots of work to change, for example, to an authoritative parenting style.
Speaker 1:There's a really cool description of authoritative parenting styles on parentscom. It's high level. I'll forego the research articles which are very supportive of this style. Some comment traits are cited as, and I quote allowing kids to fail, but providing support and guidance when asked. Emphasize well-roundedness in their children. Give their kids opportunity to discuss household rules regularly. Place a high importance on fairness and respect. Prefer to empower their kids rather than intimidate them or befriend them. I think at the end too, the befriending. You know I said to myself several years ago I can't be their friend. They have enough friends. I am their mom.
Speaker 1:And the permissive style of parenting, where the parent is focused on being the child's friend, is, according to research, not as effective as an authoritative parent. So we're self-regulating, we're focusing again on ourselves, we're working with our therapists and we're trying to balance as we're dealing with our child's substance use. We're trying to balance self-care. It always comes down to self-care and it's hard, especially when things are just off the charts and chaotic and you're looking at social media and other parents are posting my child got on a roll this week. My child got this scholarship. It's hard, it's really, really hard.
Speaker 1:But if you do this work, one of the things that you can begin to develop is co-regulation. If your child comes in, they know they're late, they know that they have broken a rule. They're going to be defensive. If you can actually find something positive like you're home safe, it's good to see you. This approach does two things. In that moment when your child thinks, oh my gosh, my parents are going to be so upset. They see that you're not, but they also see that you're concerned. I do have to be realistic because if your child is using substances, there's a chance that they won't recognize that at the time. But the next morning you have an opportunity to self-regulate again and have a quiet conversation, as quiet as possible and say to the child hey, I'm glad you made it home safe.
Speaker 1:And finally we come to resilience. I also want to say I'm cognizant that not all people have access to therapists and because of that I want to highlight a free resource. I follow Newport Academy. They have treatment centers in California, georgia, texas, maryland I think the southernmost site is Georgia. Their programs focus on residential outpatients IOP, and they have on their site a resilience toolkit. It's such a neat little document.
Speaker 1:The awesome part is it's also for parents, teens and young adults, and I love the acknowledgement there that everybody is going to be different at these stages of life. Right, Teens develop stress resilience in a different way than a parent will. So the top line is you have to focus on optimism and gratitude. We get that, but there's also humor and social connection. This is why it's so important in this journey for parents to connect with other parents that are going through the same thing.
Speaker 1:If you go to your friend who doesn't know about substance use with children, especially as much as they love you, they might not be able to connect to that part of you that is just trying to understand it and trying to deal with it and trying to go through it. A parent with a child who has a substance use challenge there's some nuances to this journey that cannot be described. Hearing, I get you. Hearing I know what that feels like. An parent group is one of the most calming things that I experienced through this whole process. I truly consider some of the parents that I've developed relationships with, some of the best relationships I have right now in my life and it's been such an incredible blessing. So definitely download this document. I have no affiliation whatsoever with Newport Academy, I just follow them. Some of the tools that they give out and the blogs that they post and the educational resources that they provide the public, they're just, they're fantastic, and this is one of those tools that can be easily accessed.
Speaker 1:And, just as a side note, I'm going to steer away from using addict and addiction, because the trend is towards not using addict and addiction, because that moniker, on any person or any family, can install a sense of shame and as we as a society ironically have an increased epidemic of substance use and abuse, we have to start asking why. We have to start digging into what is going on in that person's life, and so I will respect the trend of where this is going in our community of recovery. To recap, understand what you're modeling to your child. At the very least, be self-aware With a licensed therapist, start understanding about the attachment style that you grew up with, the attachment style that you might have provided your child, and understand where you want to go and to improve.
Speaker 1:In most of our situations in life, especially at work, we always strive to do better, from data entry to building a building. We want to move forward. So, with parenting, work with a licensed therapist and understand your goals. It's going to be hard because it's very emotional and your therapist gets that. Because you're developing as a parent. You know we talk about childhood development all the time. I personally believe we need to start talking about parenthood development because we are developing at each stage. It's different At each stage. Our mindset has to change because the child that we're dealing with when they're an infant is not the child that we deal with when they're 12, 13, 14.
Speaker 1:As I implore you yet again to do self-care and self-work. You know you don't have to be perfect, but to be engaged and aware and present is an incredible gift to anybody around you really, especially your child. With that, I'll bid you adieu and, as always, remember, be good to yourself. To connect with me, visit Sibling Hood of Recovery on Instagram or visit my website, wwwsiblinghoodofrecoverycom. Although I'm not overly active on social media, I'll get back with you in the next video. I'll get back with you as soon as I can On my site. I'm committed to providing free resources. You'll find links to information that point towards 12-stop meetings, craft-based therapy programs and much more, but please, most of all, know you're not walking this journey alone, simply from being human. We're a community that is growing each and every day. Be well, and I'll talk to you soon.
