In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast host Lianne Castelino interviews Sarah Allen Benton, a licensed addiction and mental health counsellor, and author of ‘Parents in Recovery: Navigating a Sober Family Lifestyle.’
Allen Benton shares her personal journey of overcoming alcoholism, the multifaceted nature of recovery, and the unique challenges of being a parent in recovery.
She also discusses the misconceptions around long-term sobriety and effective strategies for preventing alcohol misuse in children. Allen Benton also provides advice on maintaining balance and wellness in recovery, emphasizing the significance of delayed alcohol use among teens and the impact of modern technology on addiction.
SARAH ALLEN BENTON
Licensed Advanced Alcohol and Drug Counsellor
Addiction Counsellor
Mental Health Counsellor
Author
Mother of one
“Removing a substance or an addictive behaviour out of your life and not changing anything in your life does not put you into a place of recovery. Recovery is multidimensional. It involves shifts and changes in various domains of your life to essentially change your lifestyle. So recovery is a lifestyle evolution.”
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Welcome to where parents talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a licensed advanced alcohol and drug counsellor, an addiction counsellor, and a mental health counsellor. Sarah Allen Benton is also a mother in recovery from alcoholism for almost 20 years. She’s also an author. Her latest book is called Parents in Recovery, Navigating a Sober Family Lifestyle.
Thanks Sarah has one child, and she joins us today from Connecticut. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. I thought that a starting or a fitting starting point would be to have you describe how you define the word recovery as it relates specifically to alcohol or drug misuse.
Well, it’s actually a wonderful question because there are different terms that people use When somebody has stopped using their addictive substance of choice, they’re sober, abstinent, and recovery, and there is a difference between being abstinent and being in recovery. And for those that have experienced both, they would understand that.
I think it’s really important that the general public understands it too. So just. Removing a substance or an addictive behavior out of your life and not changing anything in your life does not put you into a place of recovery. Recovery is multidimensional. It involves shifts and changes in various domains of your life to essentially change your lifestyle. So recovery is a lifestyle evolution. It’s not just, Oh, I don’t drink now. I’m slightly miserable. I don’t do anything differently in my life. I still go to happy hour. I just sit there and drool over people’s drinks. It’s about making shifts and changes in every area to a place where you find a sense of balance and wellness that you can come back to.
So along those same lines then, what are some current misconceptions around recovery and specifically parents in recovery? I think that there can be a misconception that once you have a certain amount of years that you have been sober from a substance, or when you are in a position of responsibility like a parent, that automatically you’re sort of snapped into this.
you know, position of maturity or that you, um, phase out. And I actually, I could speak for myself when I, you know, turned 23, I thought I was just going to phase out of my problematic drinking. And it took me until I was 27 to actually get there. But just because you hit certain milestones doesn’t mean that addictions just go to sleep.
And in fact, I think that parents Have greater stress factors and risk for having addictive behaviors, um, because of the, the sense of responsibilities that they have in their lives and just all the complications that come with being a parent and, you know, working and being married or in a partnership or single.
I mean, there’s just a million different variables. So Sarah, take us through a little bit more of your personal story, um, of your journey through this to the point where you are now in recovery. Help us understand sort of what you went through and sort of the mindset that you were in while you were going through it.
It’s interesting to go back in time. Uh, I was a high functioning alcoholic and I think a lot of people can relate to that. I actually had written my first book on high functioning alcoholics because I was so fascinated And confused and baffled by that profile. So when I started drinking at the age of 14, I began with problematic drinking in the sense that I blacked out.
I did not have control over how much I drank from a young age. I was binge drinking. It was something that other people were doing around me. So I think I was like a chameleon and I fit in in that sense. It was like, not that I stood out. As a sore thumb, I also got really good grades. I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, captain of field hockey, things like that.
Um, and I was relatively happy. I was a happy kid and I’m always, you know, I’m a therapist. So I’m always looking for, like, what was the deep, dark secret and why are you an alcoholic? You know, and sometimes the answer is. Because your brain is wired that way, you know, I continued on into my life. I went to college.
I went to college in Colorado and it was quite a party school. Um, but again, I chose that. It didn’t make me into, you know, into the drinker. I was, I was going in there fully loaded. So. I’ve had a lot of rules. I think that’s one of the pieces of compartmentalization that goes on for higher functioning individuals is that there’s rules we set for ourselves.
Like, I’m not going to go out before I have a test or I’m not going to miss classes. I’m certainly not going to not show up for things because that would mean I have some kind of a problem. And so, because my grades were good, I had a lot of freedom. I would apologize and take responsibility for my mishaps of the night before.
I felt that I had a clear slate and that I was okay. I also thought it was a phase. I truly believed that I was having fun. I was young and I was enjoying my life. But what happened is when I turned 23, I was living in Los Angeles doing television production. So it’s always fun to be on, um, in media, but I I thought that I was going to wake up at the age of 23 and be cured.
I really believed that I was going to phase out. And I think that’s also kind of tying into that idea of, well, I’m a parent and I’m mature now. Um, you know, there’s many things that go with us from face to face. So. I tried for four years to control my drinking and it was baffling for me. I am goal oriented.
I’m very organized. When I put my mind to something, I do it. And I just couldn’t get a handle on how much I drank. So I could control the, um, I could take three months off or six months off, but when I did reintroduce alcohol into my life, I couldn’t control my intake. And that was very perplexing to myself and to people that were around me as well.
Oftentimes people think an alcoholic or drug addict is a homeless person on the street. And I really didn’t look like that act like that, but I could have been that if I didn’t have certain supports in place, I just happened to have certain things in my corner. But the point is that. It societally, it’s confusing and that’s part of why my 1st work was around uncovering that subtype of alcoholic.
So, I moved on in my life and I got sober at 27 and I knew in my, I knew that in order to have the life I wanted, I was going to need to take alcohol out of my life. Even though I didn’t want to, I really wanted to keep it in my life and tried for 4 years To do anything moderation management, I tried everything you can think of exercise, deep breathing meditation before I went out, like, you name it.
I did it. But if you have to control something, it’s out of control. So fast forward, I ended up getting into, um, uh. I was sober and then I got into recovery. Um, it took time. I was not feeling well for, you know, mentally my mind and body were out of alignment. It took me time to get everything sort of synced up and I ended up meeting somebody else in recovery.
We got married and I had my daughter when I was 35. So. I had years of recovery under my belt by the time I had a child and I have to say part of what went into my writing this book was that I found that having a child was one of the greatest challenges for me in recovery because for so many years I was able to rotate my life around, you know, um, Self care recovery meetings, things like that.
And I didn’t have this other entity in my life and other being that was so dependent on me. And once that happened. It really threw a loop into my rhythm of my recovery and of my sleep and my nervous system and mental health and all of that. So I found the interviews. I. You know, had with other parents and my own story that for some people it had, you know, different effects.
But for me, it was a very huge shift and a lifestyle change again in my recovery. Um, it’s a huge blessing in my life and I’m so grateful that I am a parent, but I have to say, I cannot, I’m very honest about The challenges that I’ve had with my own mental health and addiction recovery, along with being a parent.
Um, and so what I’m hoping for this book is that it’s a field guide and it short circuits the process for people. And it was very therapeutic to write it and to hear the voices, the interviews, put my own journal writings in there. It was, it was amazing. I, I feel a sense of healing just from completing this project.
It certainly is a brave task to undertake when you’ve lived through it and now having to relive it. I did want to ask you a couple of questions about your journey though. The period between the age of 14 and the age of 23, that’s a nine year period. Presumably you were able to keep this from your family, your close friends, or what did that look like?
And how did you get introduced to alcohol to that degree in the first place? Um, well, first question, I Believe because of my external, my ability to compartmentalize. And I think Caroline Knapp in her book, drinking a love story, she really captures that idea of compartmentalization that higher functioning individuals have an ability to kind of keep their drinking in the right pockets.
So for me, I really was drawn to people that drank like me and I spent time with them. So that wasn’t a secret. My family, you know, by the time I, well, when I was in high school, I. I would sleep out. I would just do different things to conceal. I wasn’t allowed to drink. Um, so it wasn’t something that was permitted.
My parents are actually on the stricter end. And so I found ways around that. Remember this was back in the 90s when you weren’t tracked on GPS devices and there wasn’t, it wasn’t all this like find my daughter. Um, so, so I did, um, have, but again, my, my, My grades, the way I, you know, I was, I think that I’m sure I’m a confusing, I think it was confusing because at the time this was when they would say, well, the sign of a drug and alcohol problem is your grades are sliding.
You’re isolating. You don’t have friends. You’re not engaged in activities. Quite the contrary for myself and other high functioning alcoholics and people with substance use disorders. I interviewed, there were many people that were overachievers that did really well. And that the yin to their yang was the fact that they had.
This, you know, productive life in the reward was their substance use. So that started for me at a younger age. Um, and then onto college, I was 17. I was young for my class. I left home. I was never home again, you know, except in summer. So I was able to, again, my grades were good. I was organized. I had a very, you know, robust social circle and I found people to drink like me.
I always took things to the next level in certain ways. You probably, if you ask my friends, but at the same time, I think that I was I was able to kind of, um, to hide in some ways. And I, I do believe that the lack of knowledge around substance use disorders really confused those in my life. They felt like, well, you would be feeling out of school or you would be, you know, sitting at home crying and drinking and using drugs or something.
And they have, people had an image. I defied that image and a lot of people that are higher functioning do. And it really confuses your loved ones because they can’t quite, like I had friends actually say, like, we know you have some kind of an issue with drinking, but you’re not like those people. And so when people would say things like that to me, it was very confusing because I started to see that I was an alcoholic, but yet other people around me, which I call secondary denial, we’re starting to be confused as to what.
Was wrong with me or how to label it. Um, and to this day, when I think about the first times I drink, which most alcoholics can actually very clearly remember the first time they drink, that’s just. One of the, it’s a sign of the mental obsession and fascination that we have with our own drinking. Um, but I do remember that I walked into a party.
I took, you know, again, there was a lot of, you know, unsupervised parties and things like that. I grew up in a kind of a ruckus city and, um, I walked in, took nine shots, and that was just my instinct. Like, I don’t know where it came from. My parents didn’t drink that way. My instinct was to drink as much as I could, as quickly as I could, that nothing was ever strong enough.
I would pour vodka into wine coolers. It was just this, it was where they say things are either genetic or just wired into you. That’s how I feel. Um, and I didn’t learn my lesson. It wasn’t one of those like, wow, I really overdid it. And then I never did that again. It was, that was essentially it didn’t change from the age of 14 to 27, nothing changed.
So there’s obviously something positive about it for me. Yeah, absolutely. But so, you know, what kind of intervention could you have benefited from at the age of 14 when it just started and how Would the people around you, your family, your friends, have even known that that was something you would have needed because it sounded like you had it well disguised?
I’ve thought about that. You know, I’ve thought about what could have changed my trajectory. Um, if, if anything, I do think my parents had a lot of leverage that they would have used if they knew. Um, I know that for a fact. Um, I do think that. And I always say this, you know, I am an addiction counselor. I do think that money is, uh, is quite a huge source of leverage for parents.
And when you’re paying for your child’s cell phone bills and housing and cars and schooling and different things, um, unfortunately, a lot of young adults and teenagers are very, they’re dependent on. their parents for certain things and some parents are afraid to use that leverage for fear something worse could happen.
Um, so I do think that my parents I don’t think it could be done differently because they, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. But if they did know, I do think they would have probably leveraged in certain ways. I probably wouldn’t have been at the college I was at. I would have had a lot of losses that would have been significant to me, but I really struggled to see myself at that time as having an addiction because I was just a social partier in my eyes.
Um, I really, I couldn’t at all. I mean, I spent time with people that were acting just the same way as me. Particularly the boys and the men now men. And you know, I’ve been really grateful because I’ve had a lot of people from my past come forward and ask for help and reach out for support. And it’s been really, really powerful to know that I’m, I’m not alone on my recovery journey.
And some of us that, you know, maybe overdid it when we were younger are now in a different place in our lives. You talked about, um, eight shots on that first day, uh, curious as to what intake look like for you on, on an average, you know, outing or an average day and how many times a day, just to kind of paint a picture of what that looked like at that time.
It never really changed. I can honestly say my drinking never really changed. So when I did, I never, I didn’t drink to, you know, how a lot of people will say I started off like this, but when I stopped at 27, my drinking looked the same as it did at 14. So it was essentially hard alcohol. I never drank beer.
Um, it, I didn’t count and I had, I was a blackout drinker. So I wouldn’t know the number of drinks. It was all an estimate. Like in my estimation, I would probably average 15 or so drinks. But in a short, pretty short amount of time, and then I’d continue drinking when I wasn’t aware of it. Um, there’s a really good book on the topic of blackouts by Sarah Hapola called Blackout.
Um, it’s very confusing to people that haven’t had a blackout, but it’s something that is both sounds scary, but for those that experience it. Or it’s all I knew when I drank. I thought everybody, I thought if like you drank too much, I thought that that’s what would happen to you. There was some part of it that I like enjoyed because there’s an anesthetized part of it.
Um, and also an excitement to kind of not knowing where the night will take you. So there was a little bit of, um, adventure and rebellion to it. But at the same time, when I tried to stop blacking out, I couldn’t, I couldn’t control my intake. And so. My consumption was always hard alcohol and it was always, I’m a binge drinker, so I didn’t drink during the day ever.
Um, I didn’t enjoy it. It made me feel weird. I really only drank towards the evening and it was very social. I never, um, I never ever drank alone. I always found somebody, somebody that wanted to go out and I didn’t usually stay at home. I was usually out and about, um, which made it more dangerous to be honest.
I think I would have been safer I had been home. So, what happened then in your early to mid twenties, like what was the tipping point that led you to say, look, I have to address this and I have to be active about how I’m addressing it. It definitely was a data collection process for me. It started at the age of 23 and I would say it went four years.
So it started with my 23rd birthday. I included some of my journal entries actually into my first and second book, uh, which I, I think is helpful to personalize the topic a little bit. And I had written a letter to myself on my 23rd birthday that my gift to myself was six months that I wasn’t going to drink.
And I was going to try to reset myself so that I could fix myself and become a normal drinker. And. After that, when I, I didn’t feel well, I honestly needed support during that time. I didn’t know it was because I had an alcohol problem. I just didn’t know why I thought my nervous system was off. My stomach hurt.
I had anxiety. I didn’t, I didn’t put it all together and no healthcare professional did either. So when I started resuming drinking, I was back to my old habits and I felt better. Um, again, I wasn’t a daily drinker. I probably drank twice a week maybe. Um, and when I did, it was. obviously problematic. So that was confusing.
I wasn’t a daily drinker. You hear about withdrawal, you hear about people feeling awful when they stop drinking, how dangerous it is. And then yet, I don’t drink daily and I still have issues when I stop. So I then moved to the East Coast. I was in Los Angeles when that happened. I moved To the east coast and I went and got my master’s degree because I thought, you know, you can help think addiction and I got my master’s in counseling and continue to drink the same way.
But I was I was having some mindfulness about it. I heard about moderation management. I decided to see a therapist practice that harm reduction technique and. I failed. I wasn’t able to stick to the menu of moderation management, but at the same time, it helped me write and track and get data. And I tried all these different techniques of exercising before I went out drinking water in between drinks, drinking things I didn’t like, like beer and nothing.
Would, once I had a drink, that’s when the problem happened. So, you know, there’s sayings like, if you, what is it? You won’t, if you don’t have the first drink, you won’t get drunk. And it’s kind of seemingly stupid and simple, but that the truth for me is I don’t have a problem when I don’t have one, right?
Like once I have one, it, all bets are off. And it took so long to figure that out. Cause I kept thinking. Yeah. I’ll just do all these tricks. But for four years I tried tricks and you know, for those people that are listening, anything that you have to put that much effort in and that occupies that much space in your mind, you have to look at that relationship and what that there is some addictive quality to that relationship if it, if it occupies that much space.
And that’s what it did for me. But what led me to my, you know, everyone’s so dramatic about the word bottom, but really was crossing a line for myself behaviorally. Um. At the age of 27, but also waking up and just feeling that I couldn’t put myself through, um, the shame, the upset, the knowing people were upset at me, I would disappear, my phone would be off, people wouldn’t know where I was, where I woke up, I would sort of disappear in the city, I lived in Boston, and, um, I just felt like a hole in my soul after years of this.
And I 12 years and I, I just felt like I don’t have it in me to do it again. I that makes sense, but I just, I was like, I don’t, I don’t have it in my spirit to put myself through this again. And 2 of my friends confronted me the day that I had that revelation in the morning, and it was. Divine intervention.
Um, because the timing I was so receptive and no one had intervened up until that point, which is also amazing. Um, called my mother. I confess. She already kind of knew at that point. She said, you’re an alcoholic and hearing it from my mom was really powerful. Um, I went and got help from a medical doctor and then I.
Went and got an evaluation and yeah, so that’s kind of how it happened, but it took years to conclude it. And that’s the part I think of this disease that’s so insidious is that very intelligent people can sit there and out dumb themselves because the overthinking process is actually indicative of addictive behaviors.
It’s actually really simple. If you can’t control it, and if you’re drinking and you’re doing things that are beyond your control when you’re drinking, you should stop drinking. But the problem is your addiction doesn’t want you to stop. So that’s the kind of, you know, angel and devil on your shoulder that go back and forth and it’s powerful.
So the other part. Of your story. That’s so interesting, but not unusual. I would say is that while all this was going on, you pursued a career in this field as a counselor in an addictions counselor, alcohol counselor, etc. Was that intentional? And was that helpful or a hindrance to you? Um, it was. somewhat subconsciously intentional in the sense that I did think that I could maybe fix myself.
Um, but I don’t think I exactly knew what was wrong. The suggestion of moderation management came up in one of my graduate school classes, and that’s how I got that referral to that therapist. So it was interesting. What I learned, you can’t educate yourself out of addiction. I mean, that would be wonderful if we could read books and stop.
Right. But, uh, but I think what happened for me is that I was working in television production and when I moved back to the East Coast, I. When I knew I wanted something I wanted to help people and so it’s interesting. I’m still in the field right today so even though I was in active addiction at that time, I knew myself pretty well in some ways and I Um, I needed to change into something that had more meaning to a field that had more meaning but I do think there was There was also an intention of trying to fix this restlessness and this confusion I had around my relationship with substances, mainly alcohol.
I mean, I meant alcohol, but yeah, so you are clearly a parent in recovery and has been for the last almost 20 years as we talked about what have been the keys. For you and just for others in terms of what you learned in the course of researching your book, et cetera, what are the keys to long term recovery, maintaining and sustaining it?
Well, I would say the best suggestion I ever got Was the key is recommitting, meaning that you never do your recovery perfectly. There’s always some area that you could beef up. There’s always, Oh, I could be, you know, pursuing spiritual practice more. I could be going to more meetings. I could be talking to more people, like more sober peers.
Like there’s always more you could be doing. I mean, that’s the case with kind of everything. Um, but it’s that you have the ability to examine the different. Areas of your recovery and take an honest look and say I really need to go and connect with some sober people or I really need some time alone or I really need to foster a deeper spiritual connection.
Like it’s the ability to step back and make a shift in a change, not to do it perfectly the whole time. That’s absolutely unrealistic has never been done. And it has led people to relapse because they’ve sat there They felt shame for whatever reason that they just let go of, you know, themselves, their recovery, their sense of balance.
And then they just get a case of the efforts and they’re just, it’s, you know, off to the races. And that’s really the key is the recommitting, um, not the perfection. So, to me, that’s the best, the best advice that I’ve been able to share with anybody, um, and that I received. Sarah, take us through, if you could, your goal in writing Parents in Recovery.
My goal is to have organized, essentially, a guide for parents who are in recovery, either After they became parents before they became parents, they got sober a combination of both. Maybe they relapsed as a parent. It really doesn’t matter. This book is for everybody, but I really wanted to consolidate all of the wisdom.
I could there’s over 400 years of recovery represented through the interviews that I did and I wanted to consolidate this information into it. A guide essentially for parents that they could use and normalize some of their own struggles challenges, but also find solution at the end of each chapter. So that for me was, you know, we had all everyone I interviewed, we’d all kind of muddled our way through and figured it out.
And there were different recovery paths, but why not have something that helps people to synthesize the process or to know what to expect, or, um, To forgive themselves that they’re struggling with certain things that a million parents before them have struggled with as well. I also thought it was interesting to do some points of comparison 1 around research, but also I did kind of a control group where I interviewed parents who are not in recovery and it was very interesting for me and I do quote them not quote direct, but I also had sort of percentages and.
I noticed some differences, actually, between parents in recovery and parents not in recovery, just in terms of different concerns, worries, priorities around self care, relationships to substances, stress management. So, that was very interesting, too. It was talking to parents in general that was quite interesting.
Educational for me. Yeah. Now you’ve got a 12 year old daughter. You mentioned that your husband is somebody that you met in recovery. What is your level of concern around your daughter being exposed to alcohol, given that background and context, and also how has your journey and everything you’ve been through impacted the way that you parent?
It actually hugely impacts and this is back to that concept of recovery as a lifestyle. Uh, my daughter’s entire life is affected by my husband and my recovery because we live our lives in a certain way because of our past addictions. And so the antithesis of that has been being proactive about self care, about downtime, about overscheduling, about, you know, going to see a therapist ahead of time, about talking about our feelings, about, um, about coping skills, things that are not learned in school, about, you know, emotion regulation, about all of these things that we realized that we learned.
In recovery, but that maybe should have been taught prior to that. Right? So there’s a lot of things that my daughter could probably talk to you about actually that she’s learned from us. She didn’t always know why we didn’t drink. She didn’t know the reason she’s always known we didn’t, and it wasn’t in our lives or our home.
But as of. About a year ago, um, when I started writing this book, I did have a conversation with her about the reason that I don’t drink and it was a really powerful conversation. It was something I’d put off until I felt that she was Emotionally ready to understand what addiction is and I felt that she was at that time ready, uh, to understand it um from Other her own experience around using a phone too much.
She was able to liken that to an addictive behavior um, and I realized she kind of gets this concept and I think that she’s ready because Different parents tell their children at different times. So It impacts my parenting also in a way that my daughter understands without question when I’ve had, um, I, when I’m saying no to plans, when I’m saying I just need, um, I’m, when I just need downtime, it’s just baked into the way that I live.
Like, I don’t, I don’t give of myself to such a point. as a parent where I collapse. I, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury. The risks are too great for me. And so I try to head things off. Of course, everybody has crazy weeks, but it needs to be countered at some point with With, um, recovery, self care, coping, talking to somebody, like I, it has to be countered.
It can’t just go on and on and on. So Sarah, along those lines then, I mean, obviously binge drinking is still an issue in society today, uh, depending on the statistics you look at, look at, you know, it’s increasing in some age groups, et cetera. Alcoholism continues to be an issue, you know, addictive personalities and, and, and, uh, diseases are, are also an issue.
What can you say to a parent, whether they have a child who is exposed to alcohol or not about being proactive so that potentially they never have to deal with, you know, some of the things that you had to endure? Well, there’s a couple of statistics that for me have been. Life changing and something I try to share with parents as often as I can.
So the surgeon general report indicates that alcoholism in particular is accounted for 50 percent by genetics. That doesn’t mean that if you and your spouse both have it, that it equals 100. Because I know plenty of people that are in recovery that have had kids and not everybody’s got an addiction. Um, but what was the most interesting part was the NIAAA and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that if teenagers could delay their use of alcohol to the age of 15.
That they would decrease their chances by 40 percent of developing an alcohol use disorder, regardless of their family history, and that each year following that, that you delayed it, you could decrease the risk by 7%. To me, that is so powerful and so important to have a dialogue with our children, because when people have cancer in their family and diabetes in their family, they talk about blood sugar.
They talk about. Carcinogen prevention. They talk about things that you can do, you know, to decrease your risk. So I have to have that same discussion from a almost medical perspective with my daughter around it. And I think that it’s really important that the delayed onset of the drinking is so influential.
And if I go back in time and think about all the meetings I’ve sat in for self help groups, the clients that I’ve done assessments on. Most people who have an alcohol use disorder or substance use disorder started use at the age of 13 or 14. Most of my friends that started in college around 18 phased out.
That statistic is real. I’ve seen it in my life. Um, and I’ve seen it, uh, personally, I did start when I was 14. So again, does that solve everything? No, but what are the incentives that we can give to our children to delay use? If genetically your child is loaded, The only chance that they have to be a possibly normal drinker in their lives is possibly through delayed onset of use.
And so I think that there’s a context to speak to our children about it from, you know, from the facts of it and not from a never drink the rest of your life, because I don’t think that’s realistic. And I wouldn’t expect that of my child, even if that’s her personal choice, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t expect that.
But at least to have that awareness around how you could give yourself a better shot. At not developing an addiction. I think the other component of it is that we underestimate the powers of cell phones of, you know, the work of and lumpy dopamine nation, the work of the movie, the social dilemma, the fact that.
Our cell phones are dopamine producing agents and they prime. There’s a lot of things in our society that prime for addiction. And so there is a connection between cell phone usage, not just calling on the phone and FaceTime and texting, but more of the very high stimulation apps that our children are using and video games.
Those things can really prime. Um, children that have addiction in their family or addictive, possibly impulsive personalities. And it’s really important to catch those children and to try to work with them and talk with them about the connection between all of those pieces. So I don’t think just talking about substances is the full solution.
I also think Talking about how to manage your mood and emotions and teaching and coping skills. It’s all part of it. So much important information that you’ve shared for parents, children, and families to consider. Sarah Allen Benton, author of Parents in Recovery, really appreciate your time and your insight today.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your very thoughtful questions.
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