Editor’s Note: We end Recovery Month with a deeper look at the importance of family recovery. 

Today’s post is part of an ongoing series calling for greater attention to family recovery from the negative effects of problems with alcohol, drugs, and other substances or processes. I believe the best way to slow down the obvious and hidden effects that can extend across generations is to better connect individual and family recovery. This requires widening the lens through which we view recovery and being open to new possibilities in what we say and do to advance recovery for all.

For today’s post, I’d like to introduce readers to a recent article by Bill Stauffer. Bill is a person in long-term recovery, a nationally recognized writer and researcher on recovery, and executive director of the Pennsylvania Recovery Organizations Alliance. For decades, he has worked with William White and other leaders in recovery research and practice. Bill has also conducted his own series of interviews with leaders on the topic of family recovery. His recent Recovery Is A Transformative Process Extending Beyond the Individual makes a compelling case for broadening the lens to include families and ultimately communities.

I will summarize here some of the key points and encourage readers to read the entire article. For those who want to go deeper, Stauffer’s article links to a groundbreaking article by William White that reinforces the case for shifting our paradigm from overcoming disease to working for wellness and what he calls “recovery flourishing.”

Stauffer begins his article with a simple assertion: “There is a compelling reason to shift our attention from individual recovery to family recovery: addiction does not occur in isolation, nor does recovery.”

He goes on to make the case for a wider lens in very practical terms:

“When one person experiences addiction, the family system reorganizes around it. Members experience fear, shame, secrecy, accommodation, conflict, disrupted roles, financial strain, and chronic uncertainty. When the individual begins recovery, the family dynamic does not reset to where it was before addiction. In many cases, recovery itself becomes a period of transition and stress as family members learn to trust again, renegotiate roles, establish boundaries, and develop new ways of relating. The process of recovery involves each member separate and distinct from the person who is using destructively. So should our interventional and recovery support structures.”

Part of the ongoing challenge in addressing family recovery is our culture’s obsession with individualism. We are largely self-reliant, bootstrapped people. Sadly, this can result in isolation and families living silently in shame as they experience the many ways alcohol, drugs, and other problems can affect and emotionally wound those in the orbit of the person struggling.

From the outset, and still today in many situations, when there is attention to family recovery, it is intended primarily to better support the person struggling with substance use or another problem. William White states this challenge clearly in his book Pathways from the Culture of Addiction to the Culture of Recovery. Written in 1996, White writes:

“While Al-Anon provided the historical foundation upon which a holistic approach to family recovery could be based, the treatment field still reflects the historical exclusion of the family. A radical rethinking of the role of family in the treatment and self-help culture is clearly indicated.” (p. 253)

While there are treatment programs that include a family component, the larger shift to seeing recovery as a developmental change process for the whole family is still taking root.

Stauffer’s article lays out the fundamental shift needed to move toward a view of recovery that goes beyond the now-acknowledged trauma and pain to incremental wellness and, ultimately, flourishing for the whole family.

This direction excites me because it directly addresses the pain I have seen in my own family and in many others when the family is left out of recovery. And the joy and improved lives that can emerge when multiple members of a family find their own recovery path.

As Bill Wilson and the A.A. founders encouraged at the beginning, there is a “way out.” Widening our understanding of recovery to include the family offers another way to strengthen that path, not only for the person struggling, but for everyone whose life is touched by the problem.