Here looking for advice so I can better support my younger sister who has and is having a pretty bad time at the moment.
To summarise and ramble a long long story, she is my half sister (technically but that doesn’t matter) however her mum was quite mentally and sometimes physically abusive person who tried to be the disciplinary but just failed so much in how she went about it (also a damaged person as we all are in a way). Dad was the stark opposite and never set boundaries, and did his own thing, so undermined her mum constantly. This all created a pretty terrible place to live, not the worst, but far from what could be if people just had a bit of sense.
Long story short the environment she/we grew up in drove her to at some point in her teens trying smoking H and got on and off active addiction. She had a daughter at 19 (the dad is not around) which I think saved her a bit but obviously it wasn’t enough to get her fully off it. Some might disagrees because of the elephant in the room but in all manners she is a great mum and hasn’t repeat the way she was treated by her own and my niece is a happy, beautiful kid.
I’m about 10 years older and I guess I didn’t know the full extent of it all but recently she had a OD and was found by my niece. Services are invoiced and has tried to take her daughter away from her but thankfully she is now with our Dad, her grandfather, while she works on the addiction.
I guess now I am learning a lot more than I knew before, but now is the time for her to fight hard otherwise she’s going to lose her daughter and potentially lose herself if she does. She’s got her weekly meetings but I want to find as many other useful things she/we can do for her as there seems to be very little support from the system.
We are messaging, I am checking in every few days and also have an open invitation for calls or for her to come over. We are connecting her to a therapists to start addressing this past trauma which she wants to do. EMDR or ERGT, anyone got info or recommendations of this as an alternative option?
We’ve asked her to start really thinking about whats happening, looking at herself and finding triggers (again we don’t know, it’s just ideas).Maybe spend 1 day volunteering at some sort of animal place shelter as she said this might be something she wanted to look into in the future.
We’ve had a bit of fun in our lives but H is a different thing that I cant comprehend how much pull the addition has so any advice or knowledge I can pass on would be really appreciated.
Welcome to Talking Sober. I have no direct experience with these resources, but maybe you haven’t heard of them yet. Nar-Anon is for family and friends of drug addicts. It grew from a similar program for families and friends of alcoholics, Al-Anon. Al-Anon in turn, was developed by the friends and families of the original Alcoholics Anonymous groups.
I wish you success in helping your sister. Blessings on your house .
Sounds like you love and support her and that’s definitely going to help her along her journey.
Have you looked into Nar-Anon? It’s a free support group for family members. It’s a sister group of narcotics anonymous.
Addiction recovery is mostly a mental and emotional project. Part of it is physical in the beginning but once that is done, the work is lifelong, and it is in the head and the heart, one day at a time.
Whether she’s in Narcotics Anonymous or SMART Recovery or another system of regular meetings - or a combination of systems - she can get meetings every day of the week if she wants, even multiple times a day.
There is lots of support to recover, and any of those recovery systems works if you work it. The effort to recover has to come first, from the addict, and it has to come daily, for the recovery to happen. There is lots of free support for people recovering from addiction, but the initiative has to come from and be sustained by the heart of the person in recovery. You can’t push a rope; the recovery has to start with wanting to recover and putting in the effort, every day. If she works it, it works.
It is possible. It starts with her opening her eyes. Ultimately, that’s something only she can do; no one else can open her eyes for her.
OK great thanks, I’ll look into nar-anon, kinda what I was thinking might be out there.
I hear you about its up to her, I think there is a layer of her wanted it but I hear you can never be sure with these kinds of things.
If there is anyone out there that went thought this and doesnt mind sharing what she might be feeling, thinking, facing be interesting to her people perspectives that have lived it.
Yeah. It’s wonderful you want to be supportive, and it can be hard to know what that looks like.
If you can be there for her without judgment, listen when she wants to talk, respect her path, that already goes a long way.
Being on the other side of it though, it really is something we can only do for ourselves. And when it comes to family, as a rule I was taught we cannot be “sponsors” for our own family. It just doesn’t really work.
We can support each other’s programs and sobriety and trust we find our own paths in time. Maybe she needs a little help watching the kids so she has time to get the support she needs. Maybe she needs a moment to collect herself. Maybe she just needs her sister to talk to.
If you can let her find her way, support her while still taking care of yourself first, just your love and faith in her can go a long way if and when she is ready to heal. Even when there may be some initial stumbles.
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