I have to make a video today about why I am making this film, The Family Recovery Documentary, to share on the website and socials. Family Recovery Documentary is the working title. For a little bit we were calling it “The Ripple Effect.” That’s because a ripple effect is what happens when someone in the family begins the work of educating, regulating and healing themselves. The practice of wellness sends ripples out into the whole family ecosystem. It causes change. What that change looks like is unique to each ecosystem but change happens none the less.
The trickiest part of addiction/substance use is the stigma. It shows up in insidious ways. Part of the recovery process is recovering from the impact and outcome of stigma. Maybe someday that won’t be true anymore.
Stigma: a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person.
Historically, as a society, we’ve treated addiction/substance use as a personal problem, a personal failure, a moral issue, when the science has always proven out that the body and brain are suffering from an adverse chemical reaction to substances which I might add are socially acceptable and/or prescribed (until your physiology can’t handle it, you get sick and there is a cascading of negative side effects) We’ve blamed the individual, the parents but not the substance and the culture itself for promoting, marketing and capitalizing on addictive substances.
Part of recovery is recovering from the lies we’ve been fed and operating from about substance use in general. Recovering from the ways in which mental and emotional harm has been caused because of a “war on drugs,” “law enforcement,” “get more religion,” “conversion style” response or treatment plan when someone gets sick. Imagine being gluten-free and being shamed that your body finds gluten intolerable. Imagine doctors withholding care because when you ate bread you got sick. Imagine your family treating you like a failure because you just can’t eat the pizza. Imagine getting locked up because drinking alcohol caused breast cancer and you kept drinking.
It’s so weird to me that this social construct around how a family, how the culture responds to addiction/substance use exists or has existed at all when the research and stories bear out that the medical interventions work and that psychological health and support from the family makes a signficant difference.
Six years ago my friend Pam Lanhart and I decided we’d try to shift the culture by making a different, loving, compassionate, actionable narrative more accessible. Intuitively we knew that the addiction/substance use was treated needed to change. The way we spoke about it, responded to it, sought help for it and were supported in the processes surrounding it. We did that with the first ever Family Recovery Conference, a virtual event, long before virtual events were happening everywhere. We knew that families weren’t traveling to conferences to learn but she and I were learning loads that way. So we brought the conference speakers to families where they were, at home.
That conference sparked change and the seeds of recovery have proliferated in families all over the country. Here we are again with a bigger plan with some additional friends.
Making this film is about showing the way a family recovers and people get well widely accessible so that the suffering ends.