Welcome to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today, I am thrilled to continue conversing with Geoffrey Golia, the former Clinical Director of the New York Center for Living. Geoffrey has recently joined the New York City Criminal Justice Agency as Director of Clinical Services for the Queens Supervised Release Program.
In this second episode, we discuss parenting styles, communication, and the vital need for consistency in decision-making and establishing and maintaining boundaries. We talk about necessary steps that parents might find beneficial to assisting them on this challenging journey to recovery for their loved ones and their entire family.
Let’s get back to Geoffrey.
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See full transcript below.
00:01
You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast, a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now, here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Margaret 00:26
Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today, I am thrilled to be continuing my conversation with Geoffrey Golia, the former clinical director at New York Center for Living. In this second episode, we discuss parenting styles, communication, and the vital need for consistency in decision making, and establishing and maintaining boundaries. We talk about important steps that parents might find beneficial to assisting them on this challenging journey to recovery for their loved ones and their entire family.
Let’s get back to Geoffrey.
01:10
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast
Margaret 01:28
One of the things that I really appreciated about you is you’re very relatable parenting styles and explanations around parenting. So, I think that that would be an amazing thing to give to the audience listening if you’d be willing to, I love how you relate it to yourself to your family, but also to the people that you serve in the different types of parenting approaches when it comes to loving a young person through this challenging world.
Geoffrey Golia 01:53
Yeah, well, thank you for that. I mean, one thing I love to talk about is the continuum of parenting from authoritarian through to permissive parenting, and then authoritative parenting, which I do think of is that sweet spot.
And so, you know, permissive parenting right when we do not challenge, when we do not in any way try to shape or scaffold what’s going on, where we give the kid what they want. That is reactive parenting that really fears confrontation. And it starts early. Right.
And so one thing you know, I guess yes, just some of my folksy anecdotes from my own parenting journey’s right is pick up my daughter and she immediately wants to go to CVS, which he refers to as the stuffy store because they have this little beanie babies and she loves stuffies because she has 100 in her room. But I want to set a boundary to you know, not just for the purposes of budgeting, but also for the purposes of helping her develop distress tolerance, helping her to understand that sometimes she’s not gonna be able to get everything that she wants. And I don’t know that it’s great that she would get a stuffy every day anyway.
So, I say to her, if I was permissive, I’d be like, yes, we’re going because if you come out and you start crying, the last thing I want us to deal with that, and so I’m just gonna give you what you want. So that you don’t cry, and to some extent, so that you love me. Right? Authoritarian might be like, no, that’s final, daddy said so and we’re going home. And in fact, because you asked, you’re punished. And maybe one day I punish him and maybe one day I don’t.
Margaret: Right,
Geoffrey Golia: Right. That authoritative sweet spot is for me to look at her and say I love you. I know you want a stuffy. And I know hearing me say no makes you feel really sad. And I’m gonna let you know. That’s okay. I get it. You’re a three-year-old. The stuffy means everything to you right now. And Daddy is saying no. And that’s tough. And so, I want to validate. I don’t know, I’d say all of this. But this is my impression, right? As I’m validating how you feel. But at the same time, I’m saying no. And the reason is, is because it’s not your turn, right? We wait till we get stuffies. Right. That’s the thing that we have a whole process for how to earn the stuffy, right? And so, the authoritative piece acknowledges that I love her and that I understand that she’s upset about this and that that feeling is valid. But the validity of the feeling doesn’t mean I cosign the behavior, right? And so, if we extend this out to the older person,
Margaret 04:00
Got to stop there. Sorry, that is brilliant. Say that again. The ability to validate doesn’t cosign.
Geoffrey Golia 04:08
The behavior. Validating the feeling, does not cosign the behavior, right? I can say, yeah, you’re mad, I’m telling you, you can’t smoke weed anymore. Or I’m saying that’s not allowed in this house, that’s a boundary, I’m setting, you’re upset about that. I get it. Weed has been a coping skill for you. And I’m saying no, and you’re upset about that. That’s real. That feeling is real. But here’s the thing I can’t then say because you feel upset about it. I’m now just gonna give you, right that is not that one does not follow from the other. Right?
Margaret: Correct.
Geoffrey Golia: And there’s a lot of things that don’t follow. We love people. We love them passionately. Nothing follows from that if they’re a toxic person, they can’t be in our lives right now. We have to set that boundary. We can acknowledge the love, but we can accept that they can’t be in our life.
So, the authoritative parent, the authoritative person says, I hear that I hear how frustrated you are in hearing your voice. I love you. I don’t love to see you frustrated, but I get that you are. But I’m saying no and we’re going home and slowly that authoritative parenting shapes the capacity for a young person to tolerate distress, to regulate their emotions, and to realize, you know, the truth of the society we live in. Because all of this is contingent on this society we live in, we live in a different kind of society that was structured different, maybe we’d have different ways of dealing with this. But for now, resources are finite, and they’re scarce sometimes. And then we have to say no.
And so the authoritative parent acknowledges the feeling, and holds the boundary. And that’s a really important piece here, right? And so that’s just one way in which I like to talk about the continuum of parenting, and to say, listen, if you didn’t start when they were young, yes, it’s gonna be hard to kind of re implement that. But every crisis is an opportunity.
Margaret: Right?
Geoffrey Golia: So, every crisis is an inflection point by which I can say the way that we were doing things, I got it. And listen, we can start today, we can change it anytime. But if we need to weigh in, right, if we’re playing double dutch, we need to find that way to get into the double dutch, which I’m terrible at. That’s one way to say a crisis emerged, you started using, you were in the ER, because of alcohol poisoning, right? You came home having a bad reaction to being high, I am now saying that this is a moment in which things change, don’t need it. But it’s always possible to utilize that and then from there, we can start to engage in authoritative parenting.
Margaret 06:14
And consistency, I’m sure is key in that piece, once you start making that shift, if you don’t consistently utilize those tools, it’s going to go back to the way it was because that’s familiar.
Geoffrey Golia 06:25
Well, that and co-parenting.
Margaret: Yeah.
Geoffrey Golia: Because consistency for me, is nothing if my partner is not consistent as well. And whether you’re together, whether you’re separated, whether you’re divorced, parents have to co-parent and have to co-parent in an authoritative way where everyone’s on the same page.
I talk to parents all the time, “well, we’re divorced, we don’t talk, we have separate lives” doesn’t matter. If you are going to rally for your kid, and thus rally for your family, you need to come together and you need to be able to co-parent effectively can’t have a good cop, bad cop. You can’t have a permissive parent and authoritative or authoritarian parent; you have to come together. Because it’s not gonna work. If I’m setting the boundary to a kid that they can’t utilize substances in my house, but you know, I have a divorced partner, and they’re okay with it, right? That’s going to create a mixed signal, a mixed message that is going to be really, really challenging in order to support recovery. So that’s the other piece.
And so, you do sometimes, you have to have a hard conversation with parents who’ve been even divorced for a long time, and say, know you don’t love spending time with each other. There’s a reason you’re not together anymore. But part of it is also understanding the impact that divorce has on kids. Right,
Margaret: Right.
Geoffrey Golia: I think about this metaphor of an atom, we can all visualize an atom with a nucleus, and the electrons you know, going around it, right. And I like to think about children as the nucleus and parents’ kind of stabilizing that little atom, that little system by buzzing around it, right. And that’s a stable system.
When a divorce happens that that splits and obviously, we know when atoms split, atomic bomb. But beyond that metaphor, is the idea that the kids are no longer that nucleus, the two parents are the nucleus and the kid’s kind of buzz between the two. And so, the only way to maintain that stability, right is for those parents to be in some kind of homeostasis together, some kind of capacity to work together adaptively for those kids, because it’s a trauma. And so, you know, to mitigate that trauma means that you have to do a lot of work as parents around that. And that’s a big part of it, too. And that’s one of the tougher conversations to have.
Margaret 08:31
And I would think that the other piece that you experience with that is the splitting of parents, the attempt to manipulate one against the other, the need for unification, or a united front on that is so vital, because in my world, the disease will also split the people, the disease manipulates the person who has it, that then manipulates everybody around it.
And so having the resources for families to get an understanding of the work they may need to do to be consistent, to be united, to be together to understand the magnitude equally, because some parents will see it as no big deal, whereas other parent will see it as a crisis.
Geoffrey Golia: Yeah,
Margaret: based on the way we were raised and what we came from. So, I’m sure a lot of encouragement of seeking services for everyone. It’s the mission, I believe I will die on it, I guess. And I don’t mean that dramatically. I mean, just my mission, my belief system is we subserve the rest of the family when we have an identified patient and probably in all models. I don’t spend a lot of time in cancer or any other model but probably an all models. And I think that that’s just something we can do better at, so I love hearing the work and education and counseling and therapy that’s provided for your families. If they embrace it and do it.
Geoffrey Golia 09:54
Yeah. Well, you mentioned I mean, the word splitting comes to mind in two ways right one because also you know substance use disorders often don’t exist in a vacuum. In fact, I don’t think they ever do. And when we think about co-occurring issues, and those can be things like depression and anxiety, a lot of trauma. In fact, some people say that the origin of substance use, to some extent, exists in traumatic experience and trying to manage those. I think there’s also an epigenetic and a genetic and a biological basis as well, there’s a whole host of factors there.
But with respect to the co-occurring stuff, you know, one thing we see also is around personality disorders and borderline personality disorder, as one example, and you know, one of the characteristics of borderline personality disorder or borderline traits is the capacity to split the object, right to idealize and devalue.
And we see that not necessarily function exactly the same, but in very similar ways with the manipulative behavior that can occur in active addiction, pitting parents against each other. In some ways that serves the substance use disorder, right, or the addiction, with Borderline states, right, that’s often about I think, managing the lack of what we call ego integrity. But the point is, is that it’s serving a function, right? Even if it’s detrimental. And yes, in large ways, you have to address that in two places. You have to address that externally, right, with the folks being split, or the folks in, you know, being manipulated, in this case, the parents, and then you also want to seek to address that and create integration with that person. And recovery is a good foundation to start to, to kind of get that person to integrate in terms of you know, who they are.
And you mentioned a really challenging piece, which is when parents don’t agree. The moment any kind of division is found, right? It’s something that can be sort of exploited or manipulated in the service of that substance use disorder,
Margaret: Right.
Geoffrey Golia: And so that’s why sometimes the work is family therapy. But the young person is not present in family therapy for a period of time because we still have to work on the fissures and challenges with the two parents, whether they’re together separated, divorced, or what have you. Sometimes two sets of parents, right if there’s a divorce and remarriage. But the idea is saying, we have a goal here, right. And the goal here is for us to come to some kind of consensus about how we’re going to be consistent and authoritative in ultimately supporting this person and supporting them in the way that they need to in order for them to really embrace and have an effective recovery.
12:13
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Margaret 12:17
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13:20
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Margaret 13:31
The goal is always for the best outcome. I mean, unless there’s a major issue within the system of the family, the goal is to have their loved one be well and healthy. That’s what they want. I think that the manipulation of the disease within the person, which is to use until they no longer exist, I mean, the goal of that, if you look at that in a family system, it’s going to do whatever is necessary to get the family to come along and enable and cater to. And so, part of it is really the education and the language of separating the person from the disease and doing the work to be consistent around those boundaries and that parenting style.
14:16
Geoffrey Golia: Yeah, let me just say the word manipulation can be one of those words that people feel is loaded, right? That’s the behavior. A person isn’t necessarily manipulative, but they engage in manipulation as a behavior. Right. And I think that, you know, when I was working in more residential style treatment, I ran a lot more groups and did a lot more therapy, you know. An administrator in large part now, although I do still engage in treatment, but, you know, we used to talk a lot about separating behaviors from people, right, which I think is what you’re talking about here, right? And in some ways, right, what I would say for instance, I used to run a group called in this is something I stole from Instagram. I saw some posts that said, ‘boundaries are the distance by which I can love you and me simultaneously’.
And so, I used to write that on the board, and I was working with young people and they all were on Instagram, so they all knew what I was talking about. But I would talk about boundaries. And we would talk about the ways in which inactive addiction or when their mental health issues were not being managed effectively, how they had difficulties with boundaries, and that included crossing their own boundaries, right?
Margaret: Absolutely
Geoffrey Golia: Engaging in behaviors that didn’t respect their own personhood, let alone ways in which their boundaries have been violated by others, and ways that they had violated other people’s boundaries. And what I sought to say is that this issue of active addiction, or untreated mental health symptoms is not a moral failing. It is an issue that needs to be addressed. It’s an issue that needs to be addressed with both compassion, and also with really strong expectations and boundaries.
And you know, I’m consistent in my language, I use the same phrases over and, over and, over again, right, it really helps. And so, you know, people listening to this podcast be like, here’s the same words over again, yes, that’s by design, right? We want to be very affirming and consistent in what we say. But the bottom line is, I was very clear that everyone in this room, everyone in this group has the capacity to radically reshape their lives, and radically reshape their behaviors.
Because fundamentally, what we’re dealing with is not that you’re a bad person, but that you’re struggling with an issue right now. And there’s different ways of conceptualizing it, do we surrender, do we give up, do we put an effort? Do we enhance motivation? I think at the end of the day, there’s a lot of ways to get to 59th Street, right, you can take first avenue, Second Avenue or Third Avenue, so any way you can get to that place to say, I’m not a bad person. And in fact, if I believe I’m a bad person, I’m actually not going to embrace recovery. And so that’s why de-stigmatization is so key here.
Margaret 16:30
Yes, and for the families around it, too. What did I do wrong? How did I go so bad? How is this happened on my watch, I failed my, I am a failure, you know. Like you, language is vital to me. And I love interviewing people who have different language than me, because it gives me some new tools for my toolbox. But I think the piece that I say is take out failure and success. Those are not words to use with mental illness, substance use disorder, illnesses. Working one day at a time finding a wellness and recovery and a quality of life you want is very different than succeeding or failing. What does failure look like, if you embrace this is in fact, an illness?
Geoffrey Golia 17:11
You know, and I think a lot about that, because one phrase I think I get from a lot of parents is I think, I feel like I’m a failure. I feel like I failed as a parent.
And I think the way that I seek to address that, which I always need to be clear and honest. Right. But I think this is sort of an honest framing of it, which is that no one can do this alone, right? If a young person is struggling with substance use disorder, the way we conceptualize that is that they can’t do it alone. And therefore, as a parent, you know, there’s plenty of parenting manuals and parenting classes out there. But no one really hands you a book and says, this is how you parent and by the way, and this is how you parent a kid who also has these other issues.
Margaret: Right?
Geoffrey Golia: And so, what I would say is that let’s just dispense with the idea that you are to blame for it. Let’s accept that. This is my child; these are the issues they’re facing. And what do I do now? It’s not a matter of failure on your part, rather, you know, you are seeking help, that is the right move here.
Margaret: Exactly.
Geoffrey Golia: If we want to say success, that’s the only way that we would get to whatever this thing called success is right? Your kid needs more help.
Margaret: Right.
Geoffrey Golia: And it’s beyond you. And that’s okay. Because that’s not a failure of your part. That is just listen, I can’t heal a broken arm, I need to go to a doctor for that. Right? No one says I’m a failure, because my kid has a broken arm.
Margaret: Exactly.
Geoffrey Golia: And sometimes that metaphor is helpful, but really, to see a parent’s face, but then to be able to say to them, because we’ve seen this before, that it’s not your fault. And to mean that.
Margaret 18:39
Yeah, and believe that to our toes, and hope that they can internalize that for themselves. Because the other reality that I witness is if they stay in that place of it’s my fault, they’re much more easily manipulated, they’re much less able to set healthy boundaries, they’re less able to step away from the enabling behavior, the desire to please and feel loved and feel important and feel like they have the ability to do something, makes it a lot harder to step into the tools of recovery as a family.
Geoffrey Golia 19:08
Yeah. You know, one thing you said that I associated to just now was, you know, when we think about the permissive parent, that is somebody by and large, who has unmet needs with respect to how they feel loved by themselves. And they seek that external validation. And part of it is just the impossibility of having a child be angry at you, because the association or the interpretation of that is that then they don’t love me, right. And that’s born of their own experience. Right.
And so, a couple other things, right. Parents need to deal with their stuff.
Margaret: Yes.
Geoffrey Golia: So that means they need to get into therapy, they need to get into coaching, they need to work on their stuff, right? And that’s a big part of it right? So much about our capacity to parent. And this isn’t my idea. This comes through a lot of different parenting literature, is our capacity to cope and manage our own stuff.
Margaret: You bet.
Geoffrey Golia: And so, if I’m able to, as best I can with as much love and patience, deal with a tantrum, or deal with a kid who is highly escalated and be able to manage my own stuff. I am most of the way there, in being able to give them what they need in that moment. And so, if I were to experience every time my daughter, for instance, wants the stuffy and I say no, and she has a lot, he does have a lot of tantrums. But occasionally it happens, right? And I can just breathe and say, all right Geoffrey, you’re doing the best you can here, use your coping skills, stay with it, stay with it, right, you know, pat on the back, tell her you love her. Ride this out, and not react. I’m most of the way there. And so, I think with a lot of parents, it’s that way and when it comes to that longer work of not just blaming yourself, but actually loving yourself, right? And now we’re getting into like, the stuff I love about therapy, right, which is building up people’s capacity to love themselves and have self-esteem because that as a parent pays dividends with your kids, right?
Margaret: Yes.
Geoffrey Golia: They see you loving yourself. They see you as a loving person helps them in that moment. But knowing too, that you’re able to set those expectations set those boundaries say no. As Dr. Collins, my medical director is writing. There’s a blog on our website right now ‘Saying No Early and Often.’ It’s good for your kids.
Outro 21:27
Come back next week. For the final part of this instructive and interesting conversation with Geoffrey Golia. We will be looking at the various substances and issues that are facing our young people today.
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability and sharing parts of their story. Please find resources on my website.
This is Margaret Swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you!
