Are you concerned about your son or daughter’s drinking?
Would you like some tips on how to better understand drinking behaviors?
Lisa Frederiksen is here to discuss how to help yourself when your child is drinking too much.
Lisa is an author and an advocate who helps educate concerned families when a loved one drinks too much.
I have some takeaways from my interview below, but first, watch my interview with Lisa!
Here are some key takeaways from the interview with Lisa:
• Second-hand drinking a term used to describe the negative impact family members feel because of a loved one’s excessive drinking.
• The negative impact leaves a family coping with something that they generally don’t understand, which causes stress and anxiety.
• It helps to be clear about what is happening from about age 12 through puberty with a brain under rapid change. Adolescent brain development makes it difficult for our kids to refrain from risk-taking behaviors and to think beyond an immediate reward.
• lt also helps to understand the changes in your child’s brain. Genetics, anxiety, depression, ADHD, and experiencing traumatic events can be contributing factors to the use of alcohol or other substances.
• Therapy, going to meetings, mindfulness practices, eating nutrient-rich foods, exercise, getting adequate sleep, and simplifying her life helped Lisa with her recovery.
• Realize the importance of treatment specifically for an adolescent brain as opposed to the treatment plan for an adult.
Three things for family members to remember are:
- The brain changes to protect itself when your child is using. Your real child is in there.
- Get really solid on what alcohol behaviors are.
- The importance of getting help for yourself.
You can learn more about Lisa at her website, Breaking the Cycles, and through her books. Her latest is the 10th-Anniversary Edition: If You Loved Me, You’d Stop.
Lisa Frederiksen founded Breaking The Cycles.com to provide education, prevention, and intervention services on a range of addiction*-related topics anchored in the 21st-century brain and scientific research. This research was guided by her 40+ years of personal experience with secondhand drinking, a concept she first introduced in 2009. Working to overcome its impact, she’s spent the last 16 years studying and simplifying this research on topics related to her experiences. These topics include alcoholism, drug addiction, alcohol, other drug use disorders, mental illness, co-occurring disorders, the family member’s experience, toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, codependency, brain development, and childhood trauma.
