Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction Parallel Recovery: What If Helping Your Loved One With Addiction Begins With Healing You?
What if helping someone you love through addiction starts with healing yourself? That single shift reframes everything—your boundaries, your tone, your scripts, and the way your home holds stress. Dr. Casey Grover sits down with family coach and author Lisa Katona Smith to unpack Parallel Recovery, a values-driven approach that gives families actionable tools and a steady process for change without the burnout of fixing or the coldness of detachment.
Lisa shares how a personal crisis led her to blend educator skills, CRAFT principles, motivational interviewing, and trauma-informed strategies into a practical toolkit. We explore values and their shadow sides—how devotion without limits becomes resentment, and humor under pressure turns into sarcasm—and why clarity about who you want to be drives better boundaries. You’ll hear the “hamburger boundary” story, a low-stakes, high-impact example of retraining family dynamics; a phone-blocking repair script that turns punishment into invitation; and simple ways to separate the person from the behavior so conversations stay human.
We also look at the reality of nervous systems under stress and why sustainable change means concepts over checklists: consistent limits you can keep, language that calms, and agreements on how to raise concerns after treatment so families don’t slip back into super-sleuth mode. Lisa explains why families are the first and final connection in recovery and how parallel support—one guide for the family, one for the person—reduces conflict and opens the door to readiness. If you’ve felt stuck between carrot and stick, this conversation offers a third path: redesign the relationship so change has room to grow.
To learn more about Lisa and her work: https://lisakatonasmith.com/
To contact Dr. Grover: ammadeeasy@fastmail.com