Family Meeting: Helping Family Members Solve the Puzzle of Addiction

Abstract

While family members share the misery of living with an addict, many have an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the causes of addiction, or how to mitigate its deleterious effects on family interaction, in order to help the addict on the path to recovery. Governments around the world have published a wealth of information about many aspects of addiction science, but the magnitude of the data is such that families looking for actionable information may feel overwhelmed and consequently may be unable to find the tools that they need. For-profit treatment centers publish materials that present information in more digestible formats, but the information tends to be skewed toward the treatment approach of the particular facility and profit motivations are often disguised to appear purely informational. As a result, many families attempt to deal with the numerous difficult facets of addiction while not understanding several crucial points: that addiction is a brain-based disease, that addicts’ actions are consequently driven by physiological factors, and that addicts regularly manipulate family sensibilities to feed their dependencies. Family Meeting is a website based on these basic tenets that serves as a safe, unaffiliated community for family members of addicts to share resources, experiences and information to help their addicted loved ones. Its featured video, Understanding Addiction: A Guide for Family Members, encapsulates these concepts in an easily-understood format.