Catholic therapists address preventing addiction, healing affected families

Catholic counselor Lorraine Saldivar grew up with an alcoholic father. But because she and her husband weren’t alcoholics, she felt her children would be safe. Then her daughter “went through almost every addiction you can imagine,” she said.

Salvidar shared her family’s story, as well as her clinical experience working with families of people with addictions, at the trauma and addiction-focused Catholic Psychotherapy Association Conference in Philadelphia May 1-3.

Between chemical dependencies on drugs and alcohol and behavioral compulsions such as pornography, addiction has become an ongoing conversation in our society, said Shannon Mullen, a psychologist and the association’s president.

“Our culture is conditioning us to be dopamine seekers,” she said. Around 180 members of the CPA met at the conference to discuss best approaches for treating addiction through the lens of the Catholic faith. “I love that there’s a really open and honest conversion here about how to make the whole church healthy,” said Mullen.

At one talk, therapist Crystal Collier spoke about prevention and the genetics of addiction — and from personal experience. Collier started drinking and using drugs as a young teen before ultimately going into rehab and getting sober at age 18. Years later, she learned that she has reward deficiency syndrome, a genetic condition that predisposes people to addiction because their bodies make less dopamine.

Despite that, Collier believes addiction can be prevented.

She works to educate children from a young age about the impact of drugs on their brains. The human brain is still developing executive functioning skills such as impulse control and emotional regulation during the teenage and young adult years, said Collier.

“By the time we get to about 12 years old, we’ve got about 10-15% of our adult frontal lobe,” she said. “By age 16, we’ve got 45% of our adult brain. We have a fifth of brain development between 20-25 years old.” If somebody starts using drugs and alcohol early, their frontal lobe will not fully develop, and it takes a long time to heal. She showed brain scans showing the differences between adolescents who drank heavily and those who were sober.

Collier tells parents and kids to avoid drinking as long as possible.

“A lot of times I hear parents say, ‘Well, I want to prepare my kids to drink, I don’t want them to go crazy when they go to college,'” she said. But that actually has the opposite effect. “The younger you are when you start engaging in substance use, the greater your struggle with it. If you actually delay until you’re 21, you almost completely eliminate your risk (of addiction),” she added. “This is why we call it a preventable pediatric illness.”

Another proven addiction-preventing activity that parents and their children can do is eat meals together multiple times a week, she said. Encourage children to feel negative feelings such as boredom or sadness instead of seeking to numb the pain. Parents should also talk to their kids regularly about alcohol, drugs, eating disorders, smoking and other possible problems.

“Six conversations per year, 10 minutes long starting at age 7 — that has huge preventative outcomes and effects,” she said. “(Say to kids), ‘In our family we talk, we deal, we trust and we feel.'”

In her talk, Saldivar, focused on healing family members of people suffering addiction. Families of persons with addiction deal with shock, shame and guilt, difficulties implementing boundaries with addicted loved ones, and managing their emotions. Parents can neglect the needs of their non-addicted children, and family members may blame one another for handling the situation in different ways. They can start to neglect their physical health, their emotional needs and other relationships, she said.

A relationship with God can be a critical resource, but Saldivar also has seen the many ways a misunderstanding of faith can cripple family members of people with addiction. Some believe they just aren’t praying enough for their addicted loved one, or that God wants them to suffer. Others think letting an addicted child suffer the consequences of their actions would be un-Christian, or that divorcing an addicted spouse is always a sin.

Saldivar advises clients to get a spiritual director, who can then collaborate with their therapist to optimize their treatment.

In the end, Saldivar’s daughter got sober and is now married with kids. Her father became a deacon. But not everyone survives addiction, said Saldivar, and she nearly lost her own daughter to a suicide attempt. Saldivar had to accept her lack of control and to trust that God desired the well-being of her daughter even more than she did.

“(I prayed) an altered version of the serenity prayer,” she said. “God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”

Father Bryan Duggan came all the way from Canada to attend the conference. Father Duggan, who works as the director of psychological services for priests and seminarians at the Archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia, appreciated the conference’s focus on “Freedom for Self Gift.”

“The experience of trauma and its impact and addiction are significant impairments to freedom in our relationships and spiritually, so I was really excited about the CPA tackling some of these topics,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing to be together and support one another and to be nourished in that way.”

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