Michael M. Miller will be speaking on the role of the physician when caring for a patient with addiction at the 2010 National Conference on Addiction Disorders Conference.

Miller, Medical Director of The Herrington Recovery Center at Rogers Memorial Hospital, will be giving a presentation at the National Conference on Addiction Disorders Conference. The 2010 conference is held September 8 through 11 in Washington, DC. Miller will be speaking on the critical roles physicians are now playing in diagnosis and treatment. Rogers Memorial Hospital will also be exhibiting throughout the conference.

If you would like to receive a copy of the presentation after the conference, please contact Jody Miller (800-767-4411), Outreach Representative.

“If I could impress upon my fellow professionals what I have learned through painful lessons and save them from the disaster that has been my life, I’d embrace the opportunity to do whatever I could. Maybe this will trigger something in someone. I have finally been humbled into submission. Being handcuffed in a squad car after a 0.22 Breathalyzer was the slap my head needed.”

These moments of clarity  are often when impaired people are jolted into an acute, painful awareness of the destructiveness of their alcohol or drug use. For the impaired professional, these moments can be especially disturbing.

Doctors, lawyers and other professionals are role models. They are highly trained, licensed and monitored. We rely on them to protect our health and well-being, our safety, our lives. We regard them as far removed from the stereotypical world of the skid row drunk, wino or crack addict. And still, these highly revered professionals are no less vulnerable to addictive illness than the general population.

“Drinking and driving is beneath a respected, highly educated leader in the medical community. Doctors don’t drive impaired. That’s the territory of other people, not intelligent enough to be in control.”

It is sometimes said in Alcoholics Anonymous that a person can be “too smart” to get recovery. Recovery from chemical dependency requires letting go of control, acceptance of limitations, and a willingness to ask for help.

Letting go can be extremely difficult for the professional who has been trained to rely on the intellect, who has achieved success in life by not giving up and not admitting defeat. A chemical dependency problem puts their reputation, license to practice and livelihood at stake. Professionals are “supposed to know better.” Secrecy and shame drive the addiction.

“Finally, I can look at myself, humbled, broken, and see what I am. I’m a drunk. No better than any other alcoholic. I’m better educated, sure. I’m more accomplished in the world’s eyes, sure. But different? Hardly. All that buys me is arrogance, an inability to ask for help, and a poor prognosis for my illness.”

While full recovery from chemical dependency requires major thinking, behavior and lifestyle changes, the “way in” to recovery is through surrender. The only way to get treatment is often to break the secrecy and asking for help.

“I was told many times that my greatest obstacle to recovery was my insistence on complicating it. I wanted so badly to out-think alcoholism. I thought I was much smarter than some stupid disease.”

Proper treatment ensures that the initial “slap on the head” that prompts a person to seek help will provide him with the necessary skills and resources to carry out a long term commitment to ongoing recovery.

There are many resources available to provide help and support options for impaired professionals who want to begin or resume their journey toward recovery.

We reviewed roles in the addictive family, skewed by addiction — the Hero, the Lost Child, the Scapegoat, and others. We defined codependency as “a way of thinking and a set of behaviors that are painful.”

In codependency, we “forget” who we are. We lose our authenticity, our spontaneity and joy of living. Recovery, we said, is allowing ourselves to adapt to new, healthy patterns of living, which gradually appear in our lives by practicing the 12 Steps and the spiritual principles contained in them.

We don’t do this alone. In that group of 40-50 people on Saturday, we experienced something, in miniature, of what can happen when we give ourselves to this program of recovery.

Boundaries become unhealthy in an addictive family. Sometimes we lose our boundaries altogether. Sometimes they get too weak or too rigid. Sometimes we put walls instead — walls of silence, walls of anger.

That Saturday we practiced how to set healthy boundaries in small family groups, consisting of patients and their families. There were some bumps, of course. When you set a boundary with someone, it’s not comfortable, especially when you don’t know what their reaction will be. But you set it to draw a line between what is acceptable and not acceptable.

In short, you stop hiding and enabling, and start being direct and honest. Your loving the other person doesn’t have to change.

Before we departed, each participant shared what they got out of the program in our Sharing Circle. Patients and family members offered their insights and the renewed hope they gathered from either the speakers, the lecture, or what came out of their own small group work.

For some, it was facing codependency. For others, it was facing pent-up anger. And for some, it was admitting if you love others, you try your best to be honest, open and willing. Then change will happen.

The articles published in “Thoughts from the Field” are part of a series of blog posts written by the experienced professionals at Rogers Memorial Hospital. This article was written by Ron Houssaye, MA, LMFT, SAC-IT, AODA Family Therapist at The Herrington Recovery Center.