I am incredibly grateful that my family found recovery, but like many of you, I sought to break the generational cycle of alcoholism in my family. Many children of alcoholics and high stress families, say, “It will never happen to me.
I even got a degree in substance abuse counseling in an effort to facilitate that for myself and others, but the disease of alcoholism is cunning, baffling and powerful, if not insidious. I am also a recovering alcoholic with nearly 22 years of sobriety now. I am grateful to report that the disease, trauma and subsequent recovery became the pathway to freedom.
Recovery freed me and my family, both my family of origin and my family with my daughters.
The pioneering expert in adult children of alcoholics work, Janet Woititz, states that every practicing alcoholic home has three rules: Don’t talk, don’t trust and don’t feel.
In recovery as in the conscious parenting movement, we talk, we trust, we feel.
In the conscious parenting movement, many of us are re-parenting ourselves as we raise our children. We identify our triggers, often leading to inner child work, we identify enmeshments and codependent tendencies within our nuclear families, where we were previously unconscious of them. We become capable of taking personal responsibility for our own thoughts, actions and feelings. We practice boundaries which in turn helps our children take full responsibility for their thoughts, actions and feelings. That’s the path to freedom…
But we don’t travel it alone. The very process of recovery requires trust building and the awakenings of conscious parenting requires truth-telling.
I’m on a mission to help parents in recovery transmit recovery principles by relating heart to heart in their families. Since my family of origin came to recovery later in life, I didn’t have a model of how to share or speak consciously. I set out on a course of study and growth that led me to develop a type of roadmap through conscious communication skills. These skills helped me speak openly about recovery concepts with my children. Communicating from the heart laid the foundation to break the generational cycle of alcoholism in our roots.
My work in the conscious parenting movement and in recovery finds alignment by offering an adaptation of the Twelve Steps of Conscious Parenting and the 12 Steps for Recovering Parents.
Today, I invite you to download the 12 Steps to Parenting Teens to support your journey to reparent yourself, heal and become a truthteller in your family.
