A Questionnaire For Parents, Spouse, Relatives And Friends.
Ask yourself the following 20 questions and answer them as honestly as you can:
- Do you find yourself making excuses, lying or covering up for your child/spouse/friend?
- Do you have reason not to trust your child/spouse/friend?
- Is it becoming difficult to believe his/her explanations?
- Do you lie awake worrying about him/her?
- Is he/she missing school/work often, without your knowledge?
- Is your spouse missing work and the bills piling up?
- Are the savings mysteriously disappearing’?
- Are the unanswered questions causing hostility and undermining your marriage’?
- Are you asking yourself, “What’s wrong?” and “Is it my fault?”
- Are your suspicions turning you into a detective, and are you afraid of what you may find?
- Are normal family disagreements becoming hostile and violent?
- Are you cancelling your social functions with vague excuses’?
- Are you becoming increasingly reluctant to invite friends to your home?
- Is concern for your spouse, child or friend causing you headaches, a knotty stomach, anxiety?
- Is concern for your spouse, child or friend easily irritated by minute matters? Does your life seem a nightmare’?
- Are you unable to discuss the situation with friends or relatives because of embarrassment?
- Are your attempts at control frustrating?
- Do you over compensate and try not to make waves?
- Do you keep trying to make things better and nothing helps?
- Are the life style and friends of the loved one changing? Do you ever think that they may be using drugs?
If you have answered “YES” to four or more of these questions, NAR-ANON may be able to assist you with the answers that you are looking for.
Your Role as Helper:
- not to DO things for the person you are helping, but to BE things,
- not to try to train and change the addict’s actions, but to train and change your reactions,
- to change your negatives to positives,
- to change fear to faith,
- to change contempt for what the addict does to respect for the potential within the addict,
- to change rejection to release with love,
- to try not to make the addict fit a standard or image or expect him/her to measure up to or down from that standard, but to give the addict an opportunity to become themselves,
- to develop the best within the addict, regardless of what that best may be,
- to change dominance to encouragement,
- to change panic to serenity,
- to change false-hope, self-centred to real hope, Higher Power-centred,
- to change the rebellion of despair to the energy of personal revolution,
- to change driving to guidance,
- to change self-justification to self-understanding.
Through working the Nar-Anon program we change in ways such as these, allowing us to change the world about us and all the people in our world for the better.
“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.”