Healing Relationships Amidst Addiction with Janice Johnson Dowd

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Is restoring and rebuilding family relationships influenced by addiction or mental health possible? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino.

Our guest today is a licensed master social worker specializing in family therapy and addictions. Janice Johnson Dowd is also a recovering alcoholic, a mother of four, and an author. Her first book is called Rebuilding Relationships in Recovery.

Janice joins us today from Daphne, Alabama. Thank you so much for making the time.

Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Always happy to share the message and give other people hope.

Your first book, which is coming out soon, the subtitle of which reads how to Connect with Family and Close Friends After Active Alcoholism and Addiction. For those who may not be aware, what is active alcoholism?

Well, I would say it's when you're in your active disease, when you have lost control of your drinking or your addictive behavior, and it controls your life more than you know, you can no longer moderate it.

And in your case, you know, you grew up in an alcoholic household, what would you say was your first memory of having grown up in that environment?

Oh, that's a great question.

I would say my first painful memories that we moved around a lot, which I've come to realize was one of the, you know, subtle factors of my dad's drinking. But, you know, my dad was much more a social drinker, drank at home. He was a fun drinker. He wasn't really sloppy, mean or violent.

So as a young kid, I didn't really realize how it impacted our family. Instead, my mother, if anything, was the codependent, the enabler.

And she was the, I mean, God bless her soul, she was the angry, hostile, trying to control him, resentful. So more of my frustration or confusion came from my mom.

However, I will say, all the mixed messages I got about what a healthy relationship is, communication, parenting, comes from both of them and from, you know, their patterns that they acquired from their families.

So then what age were you, Janice, when. When you started to really be impacted by what you were seeing in your household, would you say?

I would say about nine, when we, we moved again to Texas from Ohio. And at that point in my life, I just kind of shut down. I said, I'm not going to get used to this place.

I'm not going to like it because we'll probably move again. I had learned in those previous moves how to become likable, how to people please, how to adapt to other people and to the situation.

And I was the youngest child of three with two older brothers. So my role in the family was to be cute and distract. And I would say those characteristics because I didn't want anyone to know how miserable I was.

I continued to fake it. So I would say that's when I started, like, losing.

I mean, if you can lose yourself at 8 years old, but when I actually built myself on what other people's expectations were of me.

Is there an overarching, enduring memory of your childhood as it relates to the environment that you grew up in, of alcoholism that remains with you till today?

That's another great question. And I have to say, okay, so my parents are good people. They had good intentions. They always provided for us. We had food, clothing, shelter. We were.

Went to church on Sundays. They emphasized some really conservative values, but values nonetheless. So here was.

So like, initially I would look back, like when I went off to college, I'd be like, well, my family was just a little bit funny. I wouldn't have said my family was totally screwed up because at that point, you know, you're still immeshed in it.

You can't see the dysfunctional part of it. Yeah. But as. And thankfully I moved far away for college and that was kind of the beginning of the change in me and that I was no longer.

I couldn't come home because I was so far away from home. I was on a college scholarship. My parents were not in the financial position to bring me home.

And so I became more and more independent and, and actually. And that's how I ended up growing towards psychology and social work. So it was in college where I really began.

I was interested in psychology, took a lot of classes, got involved in internships with the PhD students did and took that even into graduate school. And, you know, it evolved over the course of time. So now when I look back at my family, I, it's. It was just confusing.

It was like we are putting on this Persona. It was fake. We put on this Persona for the rest of our neighbors.

We were in a very middle class neighborhood and on from anyone looking in at us, we looked like, you know, every other house on the neighborhood. You know, my parents also were really into living the American dream. They were children of immigrants.

So they put a tremendous amount of pressure on us to be successful in one format or the other. And each of us were. My oldest brother Was super intelligent, my middle brother, bright, creative, musical. And I was the athlete of the family.

So again, from the outside, we looked like, oh, you know, the Johnsons have three successful kids, but each of us had our weird idiosyncrasies, you know, and so it was just like that whole confusion, like something's not right. Must be me. I must be the problem. Why can I not be content in this family of plenty? You know, so it's.

There's so many interesting aspects to your story, and one of them you kind of highlighted there. You know, you were very determined and very proactive, I might add, for to not have history repeat itself.

In other words, you took proactive steps, steps in your 20s to ensure that you would not become an alcoholic yourself. Take us through why you did that and what the impact of that was.

Absolutely. I. I started on a good path again. I was interested in psychology and social work and in graduate school, I.

I actually was a teaching assistant for one of the professors who was in recovery, and he taught classes on treatment of addiction. And so just naturally fell into place to move, go into that in my career.

And at the time, I mean, all growing up, I had drank socially, but not very much. I really, I was such a controlling kid and wanting to control my environment and make sense of it.

That alcohol and drugs didn't do it for me as a young person, made me feel out of control and paranoid. So I was okay. And the other thing is that I am a people pleaser and I have. That I've got to accomplish. I've got to do this right. I follow directions.

Again, all those traits from an alcoholic family, those carried me well into my career, into social work, because I believed a good therapist goes to therapy. If you work in the addiction field, you go to Al Anon or Codependence Anonymous or ACA and open a meetings.

And I was doing all of that in my 20s to be the best therapist that I could be. And it served me well. I really do think that I was on a good path and that I had a foundation.

I had decided really, I mean, my passion from undergraduate on my first, like, volunteer experiences was working with adolescents incarcerated and in treatment centers.

And my passion was, this is the crazy part, I wanted to help other kids like me, you know, not, you know, make sense of their dysfunctional childhood and not repeat those cycles. And I was committed early on to do that. And when I first started having kids, like in our home, we didn't have much alcohol, very rarely.

And the first two kids, I feel Pretty confident in saying this. We'll say know their early childhood was pretty normal.

It was fake, superficial because I still had all those traits of like trying to look like the perfect mom and balancing out. But you know, I did provide for them well.

I took parenting very seriously and being involved with my kids and work part time during that time and tried to juggle and I had four kids in eight years, which is not tough. My mother in law, my ex mother in law had four kids in four years. So what I experienced was not hard.

However, my husband at the time traveled and was gone three nights a week. So it was hard. It was hard being a parent and I started letting my self care skills go.

I stopped working out because fitness and running was a big part of my mental health. So I stopped doing those things.

And as long as I was pregnant, breastfeeding, you know, or driving the kids to school, but basically those years of my 30s, I was pregnant or breastfeeding. And so of course I didn't drink because that's part of being a perfect parent.

But once the youngest was nursed, I mean honestly, the story is this, like my husband had won a trip through his company to Hawaii, an all expense luxury trip. So I stopped breastfeeding before that trip so that I could drink on that trip, which is a little sign that that addiction was always there.

I had just been able to control or moderate it. So I, and, and for the next 10 years I went from social drinking to moderate drinking to full blown alcoholism. It graduated over a course of time.

It's sneaky. I believe alcoholism is a disease. It has a genetic component and a behavioral component.

And I just was in denial for those first like seven, eight years. Oh, I'm moderating, I'm drinking like everyone else. All the other moms are going to lunch and having glasses of wine.

You know, I justified and rationalized it until the drinking started creating its own problems. So the younger kids will say what would.

Well, their experiences, they, they grew up in a household where the parents drank from their probably earliest memories. I mean Matthew was probably 6 or so and, but that's still pretty young. I, you know what I'm saying?

So he'll always probably remember alcohol in the household. And both of us drank, we drank socially. I just would come home from an evening out and keep drinking and drink myself to sleep.

Most of my drinking was done at night, which fueled the denial because I was like, see, I'm not hurting anyone, I'm just hurting myself.

So looking back on that time, then in your 40s was there anything you could have done or should have done to stem the onset of that, you know, more active drinking that you were taking part in?

Absolutely. And I wish that I had.

I am really proud of the alcohol free movement that I see in social media where people are choosing to drink before they get to that point.

Because again, I think if I had stopped early on, gone back to counseling sooner, started taking care of self help skills, addressing some of those childhood needs that had never been addressed, that I might have avoided it, I probably would have come to the same conclusion that alcohol didn't serve me.

One thing that I want to say too, that I think is an important part of my story, is that, and I'm in my 60s now and I perceive myself as part of the post feminism, the first wave of daughters from the post feminism movement where like my mom grew up on a farm, they got her through high school and she was on her own. She married a man, put him through college, she valued an education, she wanted me to have all the things she didn't have.

And I think I internalized this pressure from that generation, from my mom, that I had to do it all, be it all. I had to be able to have a career, work full time and, and also be a great mom, which I could not do.

Some people do, but I could not do that insecurity, those feelings from childhood that I've carried with me all my life of being less than insecure, trying so hard to people please fueled the drinking. So maybe if I had addressed some of those issues, I could have stopped before I went over the that line.

So as you recount your past and describe it, there are going to be many parents, moms and dads listening to or watching this interview, seeing themselves in that description. How can they go about taking tangible steps to prevent themselves from full blown addiction? And is that even possible?

I do think it's possible. I do. And maybe that's looking at it through rose colored glasses.

I think the first, easiest step to do is to educate yourself about alcohol or your drug of choice and really look at how it serves you. Does it serve you? Why are you drinking? Could you do something else in replace of that?

And also just to look at alcohol when you look at it now all these studies are coming out that associate cancer with alcohol.

So if you're health oriented like I was in my 20s and 30s, you have an opportunity to embrace giving up alcohol for purely health reasons, you know, before that addiction kicks in. So I would say the first thing is educate yourself, learn as much as you can take a hard look at when you drink.

I mean me being kind of a coach or a teacher, I always tell people to write, write it down because then it forces you to look at your behavior a little bit more. It's harder to deny if you're slowing down to look at it and then to ask for help. You know, it's.

There's nothing wrong with asking for help, whether it's mental health counseling, coaching, support groups, questioning information, listening, even just listening to YouTube or social media or podcasts like this where you can get more information.

Janice, take us through what was the turning point in terms of the point of impact, the point of no return, let's call it in your journey with addiction and then your relationship with your family. When did that start to go south?

That's a, another wonderful questions and I was asked something similar about that. Again, I need to go back to my kids. My one daughter has done a few podcasts with me and I'd be curious to see when, at what time she would say.

I would say the last three years of my drinking. So from like age 49 to 52 were the worst. Where I was unhappy, emotionally unhappy, depressed, anxious. I wasn't sleeping well because of the alcohol.

And before decided to really look at my drinking, I was like, let me fix myself in every other way possible. Counseling, antidepressants, anti anxiety meds. So I tried everything first.

But those last three years, I look back, there's no denying that I was in full blown alcoholism. I was trying desperately to moderate my drinking and I couldn't.

And then sadly, combining like sleeping medication with even less alcohol creates even more blackouts. Semi behavior was getting worse and worse. And then I had the ultimate bottom, which is not as bad of a bottom as some people.

Which my point with that is, is you don't have to hit a terrible rock bottom. You don't have to lose everything because I, my bottom was an emotional bottom. I embarrassed myself in front of my children.

I drove drunk, I took out my neighbor's mailbox. Yeah. Made a scene in my own house.

But in front of my 15 year old son and two of my friends who us after I sobered up, they put me to bed and after I sobered up they intervened on me because I at that, the last three months of my drinking, I had started going to aa. I admitted I had a problem. I was trying to work that program, but I was trying to do it my way, which doesn't work. I think AA definitely works.

It's not the only way to get sober. But it ultimately worked for me after I went to treatment to help maintain my sobriety. And so they all knew that I was trying not to drink.

And just incidentally, it was Mardi Gras. And I had decided during that week I had family in town. Well, I'm just going to drink this one last week, and I'll start again after Mardi Gras.

And I did the typical alcohol thing that, you know, when you stop drinking. If I were to start tomorrow, my disease would start at right at the same place. And that's what happened. So within four days of drinking, I was.

I hit that bottom of embarrassing myself in front of my family and friends, and I went to treatment and. Which was a huge turning point. I didn't want to go, didn't want to invest in myself, but it was just exactly the right thing for me.

While you were going through all of this, your kids were between 13 and 21 years old. I wonder, Janice, if you recall any tangible impact of your drinking through that you saw, you know, being acted upon by your children?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I. My daughter started taking over my role at home and taking care of her brothers.

The middle son started taking over, taking care of the younger boy, like, okay, mom's in a bad mood, so you might as well stay at your friend's house for a while. Don't come home yet. I saw them withdraw from me emotionally and physically. I once been that fun mom who had kids at the house, and they pulled back.

Probably the greatest example of how I impacted them came to me when I was in treatment at the facility I went to. Family members were invited to write a letter, an impact letter, where they tell you.

They tell you, and brutal for us, and you have to read it in front of a group of your peers, what you've done, what your disease has done to them.

So I don't think I really understood how badly I had been impacting them prior to getting that letter, because in my mind, I had said, well, I've never physically abused my kids. I never drove and drank. This is what I was telling myself. I did drive with alcohol in the car. And.

And, like, yeah, I did drink and drive with my kids. But at the time, I was telling myself I didn't. You know, I hadn't. I hadn't got a dui. I didn't have any terrible health issues.

So in my mind, I was like, I only hurt myself. I didn't hurt my kids. But when I read that letter where he talked about.

And I know he won't mind me saying this because my kids and I have great relationships now and we talk openly about everything that happened and where we're at now. But he wrote about how afraid he was, how he laid in bed at night crying, how he was at a point, you know, he's 15, and the younger child was 13.

Very much transitional periods in their life where their parents weren't there, their dad attempted to be there, but he still traveled a lot, you know, and I was pushing him away, too. So, you know, they were kind of left alone. They had to be overly responsible, take care of themselves.

One of the crazy things that, you know, I didn't drink and drive with them that much because I had a designated driver for years with the age range that the kids were.

So when the oldest kids started driving, they could carpool the younger kids around, and I could start drinking at four in the afternoon or two in the afternoon because I didn't have to drive them. So I. It was gradual. It was gradual. Took me time, and I was full of denial and so afraid of fear and rejection that at first I didn't want to know.

But that's an important part of healing.

That is one of the first steps as a parent that we have to take in order to heal those relationships is to be able to honestly look at it, address it, affirm our kids. I hurt you. I am sorry. Tell me how you feel about it, and I will work on a plan for not doing that to you again. I jumped ahead, but.

Well, when we unpack what you just said, Janice, there's obviously so much going on. On the one hand, you're trying to heal yourself. You're trying to get onto the road of recovery and sobriety.

And at the same time, you're looking or, you know, maybe parts of you are thinking about the damage being done to these relationships and how are you going to repair them? So they're really parallel tracks, you know, happening and unfolding at the same time.

How does one go about navigating that if they find themselves battling with addiction?

Yeah, I think, again, the first thing is to ask for help, because you can't do it on your own. I mean, which is how the book evolved, because I went to treatment, and after treatment, went to a halfway house and then sober living house.

I stayed away from my family during that time.

I built a really good foundation of sobriety skills, but I didn't work on my family relationships, which I learned later was continuing to put them in a situation where they felt abandoned by me. There's lots of reasons.

I mean, yeah, we won't go into that because I don't think we have the time, but I made a lot of mistakes during that time period. I did not balance my sobriety needs with my family's needs. That's another key element to repairing those relationships.

So after everything you've lived through, that you've witnessed, you know what motivated you to want to write this book?

And again, that evolved naturally, too, because at six months sober, my world came crashing in and I saw I was living away from home. I finally woke up and saw that I had lost my family, that I had lost my family, and my identity had been based on being a mom.

And so I lost my identity, which sent me into a desperate depression and spiral, but thankfully had great sponsors and good peers in my support group and a great therapist who were like, okay, this is an opportunity for growth. You know, I know it hurts. It's terrible. And so I strategically went like the social worker research part or me strategically was like, all right.

And my sponsors and therapists were great. My therapist is like, okay, we're going to deal with those childhood issues now that have impacted these relationships.

And my sponsor was like, okay, we're going to talk with the other parents in the group and in our support group, our network, and hear what they did. And then I would reach out to, like, the woman I went to treatment with, the woman at the halfway houses. I would talk to their kids.

What worked, what didn't work? What would you like to know? I mean, I actively started gathering, researching it naturally, because I wanted to fix me and my relationships.

A lot of it was trial and error. And then when I started to see success, every time I did a presentation, told my story, it was all about. Or volunteered at treatment centers.

It was all about the family, how to not reabandoned your family in sobriety like you did in active addiction. And. And people were like, you should turn this into a book. And I love writing, always dreamt of writing a book. So that came naturally.

And yeah, I'm real proud of this book because it's got a mixture of my professional experience and my personal experience. And again, this is an example. I forgot to mention this point.

So it's really hard for us to treat ourselves, you know, like, I had that experience as a social worker, but I still couldn't see it in my behavior, you know, in early recovery, that I was not doing anything to help my family. So I wrote the book that I wish had been available for me.

And my goal is that people would get the book or this type of information earlier in treatment. Because most of us, when we go to treatment, at least this is true in my facility.

And it's true the facilities I worked at 30 years ago, 95% of the emphasis on giving the addict or alcohol the tools to stay sober. And if you have time, if you can bring the family members in, that's great too. But the family can be such an excellent tool or it can sabotage you.

So let's my. That's my thing. In fact, I'm giving a presentation on this at University of Alabama next month and I'm super excited about it.

So digging into that point a little bit more, you believe that relationships impacted by addiction require a different kind of approach than let's say a relationship that goes sour because of financial issues like infidelity, communication, etc. What necessitates that different approach in your view, when we're talking about addiction or mental illness?

Yes.

And obviously the core structure of family therapy or marital therapy is the same and it has to go on a case by case basis because again, my last few years of drinking, I drank a lot of alcohol. I believe that there and my children will tell you this, that the brain takes time to heal. And I had a lot of brain fog at first.

We the frontal lobe blanking on names. You know, it's our decision making portion of our brain.

And I know early on I made a lot of poor decisions based on good intentions, but just because I couldn't think clearly. So when that is one of the important aspects of working with families, got to meet the addict or alcoholic where they are.

I do believe you have to have a little more tough love approach with an addict or alcoholic than you would like, say with someone who was recovering from PTSD or another mental health diagnosis to be a little kinder to them. Us, we need that black and white. Do this, don't do that. I'm very. I like structure steps, not like steps in the aa, but kind of tools to move along.

More of an emphasis early on on communication. Definitely an emphasis on taking responsibility for your behavior and your actions. I mean it's a whole lot of little subtle things.

And again, that's what I was writing about earlier today and my brain is blank because it's just little things. It's emphasis on communication less. Okay.

Probably the big thing is a lot of times in family therapy we look at the patterns of how people relate to each other. We often look at the family history, the stories behind it.

But an early Recovery with families, you're going to focus more on the present and less on the past. And part of it is, too, you have to educate the family members because they have. We've got to ensure the family members get their own care, too.

That's crucial. But you've got to educate them on the limitations of the addict or the alcoholic in terms of that brain fog of their ability.

For instance, a lot of family members are like, please, please promise me you'll never drink again. And to this day, I will never make that promise to my kids because I broke so many promises before. You know, and.

We should mention, Janice, that you've been sober for about a dozen years now. You talked about, you know, the first six months and. And how trying that was.

What's been the key to rebuilding and restoring the relationship with your kids.

Well, definitely maintaining my sobriety.

Which doesn't mean if you relapse, that doesn't mean you have to start all over, because we believe in the recovery community that a relapse, you don't start from scratch. You start from experience. You take what you've learned. Or as my friend RJ would say, it's a data point. It's information that you use. So, oh, my God.

I just totally. Can you ask the question again?

Sure. What has been the key to rebuilding the relationship with your kids?

Yeah. Okay. So it is.

It is maintaining my sobriety, being honest, opening the door to communication, and I would say, validating their feelings and experience because. And this probably varies from person to person.

For me, the guilt and shame that I carried from the damage I did to my kids initially prevented me from seeing it. I didn't want to look at it, but in order to repair the relationships with them, I had to say, yes, it was that bad. What I did to you was that bad.

It's a lot of listening and less talking. It's a lot of behavioral changes, compromise on our part.

And from the parents point of view, I mean, that the family members point of view, it is a lot of communication about the time period.

Because I do think it's realistic that in early recovery you have to invest a lot of time and energy into your recovery, which takes away from the family. But you have to reassure the family it's not going to go on forever.

I'm gonna get back to a normal balance, and I will make as many soccer games as possible. I will be at crazy Aunt Judy's Thanksgiving dinner and not embarrass you this year. Things like that. It's consistent behavior over time.

Is probably greatest tool. And, and for me, too, from our point of view, is not having really high expectations about what, how quickly they're going to love me back.

Because and I, I've said this a million times, I didn't see any progress in my relationships with any of my children until I was about a year, year and a half sober. And it took me to four years before I saw real progress with the youngest child. And still there's opportunities for growth. You know, embrace.

That's another thing is embrace the opportunity.

Lots of excellent food for thought. Janice, we're out of time.

Janice Johnson Dowd, author of Rebuilding Relationships in Recovery, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your lived experience with us today.

Thank you. Enjoyed being here.

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