Advice for parents on how to forgive your addicted child

Karen Khaleghi, PhD, suggests ways for parent to get over the resentment and hurt when a child has been addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Advice for Parenting Teens | Forgiveness and acceptance of an addicted child
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Advice for parents on how to forgive your addicted child

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One of the things that happens within a famly is members become identified and slotted in a space. It can be very difficult for a family to change that up, in particular if you have someone who has abused drugs and alcohol. They become the identified patient within that family and to move out of that space within the family, takes a great deal of family work. Patients have put their families through an enormous amount. They've put them through angst and expense and more expense and more angst, and frustration and pain and tears, and it's a very, very difficult place for parents to be. They can't vote their child off the island. Their child is their child forever more. So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with what you see that you don't like and can't cope with? How do you deal with the anger and the resentment and the frustration and the recurring hope that gets dashed? That's the most frequent state that we see families in when they have someone in our facility. They want to know how they're going to be able to deal with their anger and resentment towards their child for what they've put them through. That requires family work. That requires the family stepping forward and working this out. Now sometimes it can't be worked out, sometimes it becomes a sitiuation where you begin to identify your boundaries. You understand that your family going forward needs to be structured differently. The relationships need to switch up a little bit, and there needs to be work on all family members so that dynamic can change and that identified patient doesn't have to be the identified patient any longer.

Karen Khaleghi, PhD, suggests ways for parent to get over the resentment and hurt when a child has been addicted to drugs or alcohol.

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Karen Khaleghi, PhD

Co-founder of Creative Care Malibu

Dr. Karen Khaleghi is a pioneer in the field of dual diagnosis, or co-occurring drug and alcohol addiction along with mental health disorders. As one of the co-founders of Creative Care in Malibu and co-author of The Anatomy of Addiction, Dr. Karen speaks to parents and organizations about the formation of addiction, the critical aspects of nature and nurture and the resulting disconnection between emotions and behavior as well as the genesis of addiction and the path to recovery, a process she calls "connecting the dots." 

There are many things that set Dr. Karen Khaleghi apart from others including her individualized treatment approaches and excellent treatment facility Creative Care which is filled with clinical staff comprised of professionals that offer the highest standard of care in the industry. Karen graduated from California Graduate Institute with her Ph.D in 1989 and lives in Los Angeles, CA with her loving husband and children. Dr. Karen Khaleghi has been featured on The Today Show, KCAL 9, Dr. Phil and many others!

 

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