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In this podcast, we answer the question... How is the family affected by addiction?

In the same way that "no man is an island", so too, is the addict or alcoholic part of a family seriously affected by his disease.

It is true and proven that addiction is a family disease, a concept often denied by family members themselves.

Here is the background to that idea and how it plays itself out:

1. The rooms of Al-Anon, a 12-step program created over 50 years ago to help families themselves recover, are full of people who first come there to seek education on "how to make the alcoholic stop drinking".
2. What they soon learn to their astonishment is that they are just as sick as the addict, save the abuse of drugs or alcohol. They suffer from anger and resentment, gripped by an intense fear of what the future may hold.
3. They engage in unhealthy, controlling and enabling behaviour: lying to cover for their loved one, searching for and discarding alcohol and drugs, attempting to control where their loved goes and who he hangs out with.
4. They learn that they are obsessed with their addicted loved one. Those who recover come to understand that they "didn't cause it, can't cure it and can't control it\u201d. In other words, they are as powerless over the disease as is the addict himself.
5. So, without professional help and/or the help of others in a recovery group, the family continues its slide down to more dysfunction, more co-dependency and more insanity created by a relentless disease.