Parallel Recovery

[Upbeat Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting, the Kenosha County Substance Use Disorder Coalition, and by a grant from the state of Wisconsin's Dose Reality Real Talks reminding you that opioids are powerful drugs and that one pill can kill. As usual I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: No one has a substance use disorder in isolation. Their family, their friends and colleagues, all experience, my guest today says, feelings of anger, fear, and shame that fracture relationships with loved ones at a time when they're needed most. My guest, Lisa Katona Smith, is a certified peer recovery specialist, family consultant, TEDx speaker.

Mike: An author inspired by her personal experience navigating a family member's addiction and motivated by the limitations of traditional support models she created Parallel Recovery. Parallel Recovery is a structured, compassionate framework that gives voice to the untold side of recovery. Redefines how families support a loved one through substance use disorder.

Mike: Lisa has over 20 years of professional experience and advocates for a family-centered healing process that fosters the relationships needed to support addiction recovery. She has a recently published book, Parallel Recovery, A Guide to Those Who Love Someone Struggling with Substance Use Disorder, and it is terrific.

Mike: It's available and the link to purchase it and to Lisa's stuff is linked in the blurb to the podcast. So please feel free to order it.

Mike: Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa: Thank you for having me.

Mike: I'm so glad you're here. This is absolutely one of my favorite topics in the whole wide world, so I was so pleased to read your book and it is really good.

Mike: But let's go backwards for a second. When you founded Parallel Recovery and wrote the book, you went through a lot of us family addiction in your family?

Lisa: Yeah, I did. With my oldest son.

Mike: Yeah. What was he using?

Lisa: Everything.

Mike: (laughs) Yeah, there you go. And how long did it take you to figure out that he was using?

Lisa: I think that, honestly the journey started when he was an adolescent.

Mike: Yep.

Lisa: Began with marijuana use and alcohol use and probably some stimulant pill use, kind of stuff like that. And like many families where you think. Okay, I don't like this, but is this typical?

Lisa: Is this what they're supposed to go through? And then. I would say that it, this is, and I'm not proud of saying this, but I bet it would, I say it would take a couple years for me to really face what I knew earlier, which is this doesn't feel okay, this doesn't feel like something he's going to just grow out of or get sick of.

Lisa: Like it has a grip on him and it was escalating for sure.

Mike: Hey, I think if it's a couple years, you're on the plus side of the learning curve. I know people that haven't figured it out after 40 years. So g ood for you. Early in your book you used a phrase I liked a lot, but I want you to talk about it.

Mike: You talk about is this hard easy or easy hard. What do you mean by that?

Lisa: Yeah. So notice there's a hard in both of those equations.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: And the truth is like families come to help, professional help, and they want to be over. And when we're talking about brain disorders, there isn't an over ever.

Lisa: There really isn't. And if we're gonna be honest there's a way of managing and there's a way of things being sustainable, but, and the hard, hard, hard, hard, terrible does not have to continue to repeat. However, this is a part of your life and so do you wanna address the hard things now and then be able to exhale?

Lisa: Notice I don't say hard. It should really be hard easier.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: Not hard, easy. Because it's not hard gone. Or you can pretend like maybe it'll get better and you're just punting the hard down the road. So whether that's a hard conversation, whether that's me two years in going, oh, this might not be what I was hoping it was, which was just typical adolescent experimentation.

Lisa: Or it is i've gotta look at myself and figure out how I'm navigating this with my person and how I'm showing up in the relationship and not proud and do some personal work. All those things are hard.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: And they're going to have to occur whether you do them now or later. And I don't know if it's just my personality and how I approach life or not, but why not do it now and then have the exhale on the other side?

Mike: We could talk for hours about that 'cause that is the key, right? Why not do it now? And uh, you know, there's well, you're right. You know, And I always get Oh, you're right, you're right. We don't, we do punt it down the road. We forget this is progressive and chronic and it's just gonna get harder if you punt it down the road.

Lisa: Absolutely. And one of the things I point out with that though, is. I don't let families off the hook. They can make that decision, but I want them to understand they're making that decision.

Mike: Yes.

Lisa: This decision isn't being made for them. And I can sit compassionately with someone who's just saying, I'm not ready to do that yet.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: And I'll say, okay. We'll put it over here. It's gonna still be here, so when we revisit it, let's just know that we're revisiting it. It was a choice not to address this.

Mike: You used the analogy of a house fire and unfortunately you lost yours to a fire and I can't even fathom that. But there are some things you just with the analogy you can't control.

Mike: And I also thought it was interesting, this is fascinating, but it says a lot that you were allowed back into your house for an hour while the fire was raging just a few blocks away.

Lisa: Yes.

Mike: And what did you choose to do during that hour?

Lisa: Vacuum. (laughs)

Mike: Okay, I get it. You can control that. But what?

Lisa: That's exactly what it was.

Lisa: So we had been evacuated about a week and we were told that we could go back in for an hour. And we were given slots and all kinds of stuff, it was very managed. And so showed up, went to in my house and I was like I'll just clean up, I'll vacuum. No one had even been in the house for a week.

Lisa: But that's what it felt like. I walked in and it was silent and it was, it didn't know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. And what felt controllable was i'll tidy up. I'll make it so that when we come back, it feels like cozy.

Mike: It's funny, but it's not because I think you, you pick something like, okay, how can I reclaim this space?

Lisa: Yep.

Mike: And that's what we do with our people too. So what can I do in this moment?

Lisa: Is it was also, yeah, it was also a sense of denial because, you know what I didn't do, Mike, is I didn't grab my Christmas ornaments. I didn't grab photos. Which I didn't, I don't have, I don't have a wedding photo.

Lisa: And I didn't get those things because that would have meant radical acceptance. That the truth of what might happen might happen.

Mike: Yeah. You weren't caught that house wasn't gonna be there. So vacuuming, oh, everything will be okay.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. I get it. W hen somebody has an SUD, when loved one has SUD, I think one of the things we leave out is embarrassment.

Mike: You have the neighbors, you have the relatives, and you know how God am, my, my son has an addiction. It's hard.

Lisa: Yeah, it is hard.

Mike: Emotions are hard.

Lisa: Yeah. And it's, I think it's a double-edged sword because there's the embarrassment of what does that say about me? How did I screw this up?

Lisa: And it also says, what if they don't love my son? He's a lovable person? And I don't want them to think bad things about him either. There's a dual embarrassment or shame. Like there's a dual weight of carrying attachment of the disorder to the people involved.

Mike: One of the more interesting parts of your book, and I think this is it for people's lives too is the relationship between you and your husband. If we can talk about that for a minute. It's easy to say you gotta be on the same page. Nobody's on the same page.

Lisa: No.

Mike: So how do you get on the same page?

Lisa: I think it's really identifying what the North Star is. And what is our goal to get him better. Okay. Pick another because you can't control that goal. So pick another goal. And you like, my invitation and ultimately my invitation to families, but ultimately, our communal invitation to each other was.

Lisa: How can we support each other to love our son who is struggling because that's what we can control. And I'm thankful that I didn't have a husband who was like oppositional of that. He was feeling just as desperate and unimpactful as me, and he's like, all right, let's try something. Let's go, let's do something different.

Lisa: And neither of us are perfect and sometimes we tag team, I'm out, you're in and and we do a good job of that and we did a good job of that. But it is identifying as a family, what do we want our impact to be on our son, on the person who's having a hard time.

Lisa: And how can we stay aligned and keep each other accountable and also supported around that North star?

Mike: You have to get to the point where both of you recognize it's a problem, and during those couple of years, there had to be discussions like, is it a problem? I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, right. You weren't both on the same page of identi. You didn't wake up one morning and both go, oh, our son has a substance use disorder.

Lisa: And I think we both approached it a little differently. I probably have more of a negative viewpoint and he goes a little bit like extra positive like we'll just smile our way through it.

Lisa: Yeah. And I probably was like we need to yell our way through it. (laughs) And it's yes it took a long time. It took a lot of uncomfortable experiences and fear and just a lot of time of watching our son spin his wheels and struggle.

Mike: Speaking of uncomfortable times. You detail something where you're in therapy during one period and you had to do this, oh, God, mirroring your spouse, which by the way, if you're a therapist, is just asking for... whatever. And your husband says a quote when mirroring you.

Mike: I'm Lisa, and I want things just so, which you detail in the book how that made you feel. So I won't go into that, but did he realize that he played a part in your coping? There's a yin and yang, like if you don't do it, I gotta do it, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: So if he wasn't gonna vacuum during the fire, you had to.

Lisa: Exactly. I use the term sharing the burden of change in my book, meaning sharing the burden of the change process with your loved one but also within a family system. Like being able to disperse the problem to all the people, for them to all pick up their part in this. A lot of times I'll talk about if we look at this like a business and we're all sitting around a boardroom table with a problem, we put the problem on the table and we're all sitting around it.

Lisa: Notice we're not holding it. We're not hoarding it. We're not doing weird things with the problem. We're putting it on the problem when we're saying, Hey, we got this problem. All these people have different skill sets. What are we gonna do? And everyone picks their part. Then we see what's left over and maybe we, support people or get other people to help us with those leftover parts.

Lisa: But that's part of it, right? Like you're not wrong. I had to be over controlling because he was avoidant on some level and he knows that. He absolutely knows that. And, when I become over controlling, I'll ask for support for him to step forward a little bit more. Or, we've learned how to yin and yang a lot better.

Mike: That's hard. Because it's hard to do without acrimony and feelings of resentment. Could you can just hear it. Could you do something for once? It takes a lot of communication.

Lisa: Yeah. It takes understanding. I work with families on genograms. And understanding family patterns and like how did we start behaving or how did we learn to behave the way we're behaving right now?

Lisa: When you can see it in the rivers that come, the streams that come down to you downstream, it's really much easier to be able to look at each other in the family and say, Hey, look, I know that this has been how you guys handle things. I know this is what you learned. And we're gonna try and do this different, and I'm gonna support you in that.

Lisa: And I know it's gonna be hard, but this way you're not resentful when someone falls back into those old patterns. 'Cause they're going to, they're going to.

Mike: And speaking of that, you and I are having this discussion in English, right? 'Cause that's the way we grew up. You grew up in a let's say a dysfunctional family. You learn all sorts of communication techniques. Who talks to who? Who doesn't talk to who? What topics are avoided, what feelings are avoided? And I don't think most of us are aware of those things. We can be from the outside when watching people, but when we're in the middle of that, I think it's really hard to notice that.

Mike: That's why it's important to get into some sort of a program, I think.

Lisa: Yeah. It's also hard. I think sometimes we notice, but it feels like we're denying our family of origin to acknowledge the patterns that don't work anymore. And that's the beauty of genograms because you can look back three or five generations and say, man, those people had to do this.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: Like women who were married to a spouse who was an alcoholic with children had to be pretty codependent. She didn't have a choice. She couldn't raise her children if her partner didn't get up and go to work. Like that had to happen. But today, are those patterns necessary? No. And are they hindering our personal and relational growth? Yes.

Lisa: So being able to bless the patterns that were survival techniques in the past as opposed to being blameful. We have very well-meaning respect of elders which it should be that way. And it's also okay to analyze that's no longer working for us. So here's gonna be the stop gap and where we flip that pattern of codependency or that pattern of secrecy to patterns of empowerment or patterns of asking for help.

Mike: Is that where the Parallel Recovery came in?

Lisa: Yes.

Mike: So how did you come up with that and tell us about it?

Lisa: I think it wasn't that specifically, but that's a part of this process is really learning how to nonjudgmentally look at all of the aspects that got us here. We have a lot of days and hours and relationship dynamics that allowed us to arrive at where we are today in our lives. And who we show up as people.

Lisa: And if we can look at all of those things, we disperse the blame, we disperse the change, responsibility. And we take control of what we can take control of. For example, in my family system, there has been a deep pattern of secret keeping. Secret keeping keeps people safe when necessary, sometimes.

Lisa: And today, asking for help helps people get better. So you can't keep a secret if you ask for help.

Mike: There's families I've worked with, a lot of families I've worked with, for lack of a better phrase, are hooked on the chaos. Two steps forward, one step back.

Mike: They feel comfortable with the norm. That's that multi-generational stuff you're talking about.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: I have a pillow up on my bed, but it probably needs to be replaced. But it's used to my head, right? So I'm not buying a new pillow. And so it's hard to teach people new stuff.

Lisa: Yeah. So sometimes I call it the box that you're in, right?

Lisa: I have a need to be heard or a need to be valued, or a need to be important. Someone recently said to me, everybody wants to be needed. And I looked at them and I said, I don't wanna be needed. They looked at me like I was a terrible person, and I went on to explain that. I wanna be valuable to people.

Lisa: I want to insert my gifts and want people to feel loved by me, but I don't need to be needed. I don't want that for myself. And there's a part of me that does. I think women on some level are trained to, to have value in being needed as a mother. But I really challenge some of those messages that we get, that it's important to be valued, but needing to be needed interferes with the relationship. And that's on you. If you've got a need, you need to figure out how to fill it, not putting that weight onto somebody else. I talk about that in my book about the heavy coach. Your loved one who is struggling with addiction is carrying a ton of their own stuff.

Lisa: They are hardly making it through their day, and they're also carrying a lot of your stuff. So how about if you take your baggage back? And share in that burden by saying, Hey, this is what I'm gonna do for me, this is hard, and what you're doing is impacting me. I'm also recognizing that I have a role in this and that I have a responsibility in my own wellbeing, and I'm gonna take care of that.

Lisa: It's a gift to the other person. It's a gift to yourself, and it's a model to them what they need to do, which is you've got your own responsibilities. I'm gonna take mine so that you don't have to carry that, and then you can take care of yours.

Mike: That's such a huge step for people, isn't it?

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: It seems, that makes so much sense.

Mike: Everybody who's probably listening to is probably nodding their head yes. And then you say how do you get there? Because in the middle of all the chaos, the natural thing is to just go back to what you're used to doing. How do you get people to take time to reflect on what they're thinking, what they feel what they need?

Lisa: Yeah. Recognizing, first of all, who did I become in this relationship and am I proud of that person? I was speaking to a mother yesterday. Leading up to a holiday who was questioning whether or not she should reach out to her son who is not in a good place. And she has a lot of anger right now, and that's okay.

Lisa: And, I gave her permission to have one of two options. That either she say nothing or the words that come out of her mouth need to provide her son the opportunity to experience something from her. And I asked her, what would you want him to feel, not hear, feel deeper than here. Right?

Lisa: Not the words but what would you want him to feel from your words? And she had to really sit and think about that. And I think what she wanted him to feel and what she felt like she could express, were not in alignment today. And I said he's going to feel less harm and you're gonna feel less bad about yourself if we say nothing.

Lisa: And then maybe next week or next month you can say what you want him to feel. So I think that's a big part of it, is slowing down to understand that our words create an experience, that our behavior and our presence creates an experience, and that's the impact with people, not our words.

Mike: Boy, that's a challenge, isn't it?

Mike: Because we all have arrows in our quiver just waiting to put into the bow. And, when you're partnered with somebody, you don't see 'em coming. And you're in the middle of a discussion. All of a sudden you get hit with. What about that time, three years ago? And it's holy moly.

Mike: It's difficult. We strive for equilibrium where we feel safe, and sometimes we feel safe in chaos.

Lisa: Sometimes we do. That's a hard look in the mirror.

Mike: That's what I was gonna ask that. So what do you do when you're making progress? So you're looking in the mirror, you feel pretty good about where you're at.

Mike: Your partner, the person you live with isn't gonna be exactly the same place. It may be ahead of you, but they may be behind you. How do you get to, how do you assert yourself that I need to do this? Even if you're not?

Lisa: Are you speaking if you are a parent and the other parent isn't engaging with like your adult child, or young child?

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: I think it's just separating the need for everybody to be in alignment. Everyone's in their same space or in their personal space. Everyone's on their personal journey and acknowledging somebody else is not ready and then saying, this is what I need to do for me. So this isn't a conversation that we can talk about. Here's the decision I'm gonna make.

Lisa: And it's separating the need for agreements and allowing their, it's okay to just be heard. The other person as well. They don't have to agree with you.

Mike: Yes.

Lisa: You don't have to agree with them. You just need to be able to create space so that you can hear each other,

Mike: Which is we don't sometimes. I ask kids, when I talk to kids, how many of you have ever heard your parents arguing and they're not listening to each other and they laugh and they all raise their hands?

Mike: I'm like, have you ever noticed that for the most part, they're agreeing, but they don't even know they're agreeing yet. How many kids do you have?

Lisa: I have two. Two sons.

Mike: Okay. And is your definition of, let's say you, you give 'em a curfew, right? Nine o'clock, is your definition of nine o'clock, the same as your partners, your husband's?

Lisa: I think we are probably pretty aligned, but maybe off by maybe 10 minutes.

Mike: That's not bad.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: That's not bad. Is your definition of nine o'clock that the two of you have the same as your kids?

Lisa: A hundred percent not. And they probably each have their own definition, right? Like one is I leave the party at nine.

Lisa: One is I show up five before nine. One is, who knows what. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Mike: And don't you think that's the fun part of relationships? But it's also what causes the most amount of angst sometimes.

Lisa: Yeah. So I have three words to solution that, and it's a little bit of a hard easy, let's be honest, and it's clear, consistent, and predictable.

Mike: Yes.

Lisa: Which means you probably are going to be less sweet and more assuming of goodness of the other person, but in doing so, you end up resentful and disappointed, which creates the platform for you to show up annoying or not how you wanna be received, right?

Lisa: So if I've got a child and I say, Hey, look. Nine o'clock's the curfew. I need you to be home by nine. And we may even make it looser. I need there to be entry into the household at nine o'clock. You've got a daughter sitting in the driveway with her boyfriend at 8:59 until 11:59. That is probably not what you were thinking.

Mike: No, absolutely not.

Lisa: So clarity is, Hey, I wanna make this really clear. I don't sleep until feet are in the house and shoes are off and teeth are brushed, so what does that mean to you if I say nine o'clock, what time do you need to enter the door and lock it to get what I'm asking for to occur?

Mike: I love that.

Mike: I do that all the time. And that's the hard, now is that hard easy or easy hard?

Lisa: I think that's hard easy because we want to be like, oh, they're probably, they got the right mindset. They're not trying to do it wrong. We don't wanna be too naggy. That's not naggy, that's just clear. And then you can be consistent.

Lisa: So that means you gotta follow through on what you say or you've gotta expect that every time, not just when they're with certain friends and not with other friends that don't fit into your like I like this person box. And then that becomes predictable. And everybody likes relationships where we know how to show up.

Lisa: It's really hard to be in relationships with people where we're not quite sure where the line is.

Mike: Yes. Now we just used the example of nine o'clock. Let's do the topic we're talking about today.

Lisa: Okay. A hard one.

Mike: Your son at some point had a different definition of how harmful marijuana was.

Lisa: Right.

Mike: I'm sure than you did. And that can differ between the parents. I live in a state. Where do you live again?

Lisa: Colorado.

Mike: Okay. There we go. Marijuana. I'll take the alcohol part. I live in Wisconsin. Right. So w here some parents give their kids alcohol at a really young age in my state and I hear this a lot, Oh, it's only beer, right?

Mike: So getting on the same page of the person who's using and your partners, that also takes the same amount of clarity and firmness, right?

Lisa: Yeah, for sure. So that's a tough one, right? And I'm not going to sit and say what's right and wrong in terms of family decisions around that. But what I will say is I bet neither of those parents wants an addiction on the backside of that.

Lisa: And so if that's the North Star, we wanna make sure that our children grow up understanding what healthy relationships with substances use. I'm gonna stop short of saying healthy substance use 'cause I don't actually believe there is healthy substance use. That's a personal belief of mine. I do believe it's backed by science though.

Lisa: But a healthy relationship around substance use. We need to look at the North Star is we want them to have the healthiest relationship with the least risk of a problem later in life. So I think that the conversation needs to start around education and risk factors and understanding what it looks like when parents utilize alcohol or marijuana if it's legal in your state with a fully formed adult brain.

Lisa: And what it might do to children with a not fully formed pliable, malleable brain. The risks are different and I don't care who you are and whether or not you think it's just beer, the truth is the risks are different. The impact is different for the same reason we don't give little children four Advil, but adults with an arm injury can take four Advil. It's the same thing. The risks are different.

Mike: And going back to your genogram, the risks are different even if you're an adult, if it flows red on your genogram for alcoholism or substance use disorder.

Lisa: Yep. Absolutely. And those are really empowering conversations to have with people.

Lisa: I can't tell you how many families I've talked to or heard in passing on college forums. 'Cause I have a senior in college right now. Where, a parent will say my daughter notices that when she drinks, it doesn't look like what her friends look like. And I'm like, wait, like really catching problem attachment to substance use before it's an actual problem.

Lisa: Those are conversations that need to be had, whether or not you have a family acceptance around underage use or not.

Mike: That's such a great point, Lisa. I've interviewed a number of people who just crashed through those boundaries. I just interviewed a woman the other day like my 20th on this, who was a blackout drunk from an early age on. And hey, if you have that discussion, it's like it is not normal to not remember how you got there. And the first time that happens, that should set off all sorts of bells and whistles. Don't wait another 15 years.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: Okay, so talk about this and then we'll let you wrap it a little bit.

Mike: But that acceptance is not easy. There was a line that I had to go back. I had to stop and think about this. Grieving about when you have somebody with substance use disorder, you have to change where you thought your life trajectory was gonna go. So there's a grieving about what you thought your life was gonna be, right? How it got there.

Mike: And I think your son if I'm remembering this right, he wrote a story or something?

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: Or he drew a picture and he titled it when you had your house burned down, drew a picture of a new house, and it was a house on top of a home.

Mike: Wow.

Mike: So how do you go back? How do you turn that new house into a new home?

Lisa: Yeah. I think when we're talking about relationships, it's creating moments to experience somebody in their flaws, in their whole human experience. And making it safe so that they can have that experience in your presence without you needing to shift it or change it. Just be witness to it. Because if we think about what a home is, it's a place where we can exhale.

Lisa: It's a place where we get to shut the door to the outside noise. The expectations the loudness, the all the stuff we get to put our pajamas on and, just show up. And that's what we wanna create in our relationships.

Mike: Awesome. And we'll end it with, you have to take care of yourself too.

Mike: And not every story has a ending that we prefer, but we still have to accept in order to be healthy, you have to do things for yourself. So how do you do that for you?

Lisa: I covet specific times of my day. One being in the morning. Actually several times a day, but especially in the morning, I have dogs that I have to walk .

Lisa: One is a cattle dog, so she's up and at ‘em’. And I love sunrises. We in Colorado 'cause we're on the east side of the mountains and the sun sets on the west. We don't have big sunsets. It just gets dark. But sunrises are beautiful. And during very dark periods of my life, it was like outside the sun was coming up and I just went, okay, we can get through another day. And I definitely turn things off and am not available to people I work with, my family, during certain times of the day when I take care of myself. I think that's just really important. If it's a 911, I'm not the call.

Lisa: It's actually 911 who you should call, not me. (laughs)

Mike: Yes.

Lisa: And then I can show up later.

Mike: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah.

Mike: And I think going beyond that, getting okay with that is where everything begins to mesh.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Which, what a gift to give yourself to say, this is not your job. This is not your job. Your job is to love them better, not fix them.

Mike: Oh don't say another word. That's the best one to leave it with. Love them better, I think is great. This has been great. I could do this all day. Thanks, Lisa, so much for sharing your experience, your program, your book, your recovery. There are links to Lisa's contact information book attached to the podcast.

Mike: For those of you listening I actually couldn't recommend this book more highly if you're living with somebody who has a substance use disorder. This goes beyond the little catch phrase as you see in a lot of books, well beyond it. We hope that you find hope, courage, support, wherever you are.

Mike: As always, thanks for listening. Be safe and most of all you be healthy.