Abstract
Previous research has focused on the impact of substance use on the whole family system, and whether certain family dynamics are common in families with substance use in them. This research, conducted in the UK, explores the specific experience of being a mother of a substance user and their phenomenological experience from the perspective of mothering metanarratives in western cultures today. The findings were complex due to the amount of data, but the theme of loss ran through all of the impacts, as well as being a major part of how the participants made sense of their experience. Loss was therefore the focus for studying the impact on the participants. The findings showed the complexity of mothering for this group of women and how their experience is largely misunderstood and unsupported in our society, where mother blaming is culturally acceptable.
Highlights
Until recently UK governmental policies have been unsupportive of a family’s caring role for the user, and not until the Coalition Government’s 2010 Drug Strategy were the specific needs of family members quoted within a national policy document in England
Research into families with substance users has focused on the family system as a predictor of substance use (Hopper et al [5]; Spooner & Hill [6]; Myles & Willner [7])
There were several superordinate themes around which the narratives clustered. These are set out in figure 1 under the metanarratives, which frame the sense making of the participants, showing how their sense making in turn informs their behaviour
Summary
Until recently UK governmental policies have been unsupportive of a family’s caring role for the user, and not until the Coalition Government’s 2010 Drug Strategy were the specific needs of family members quoted within a national policy document in England. Despite the huge impact on the lives of relatives their needs have historically been largely ignored, and there is an unspoken assumption in Treatment Services that families are ‘part of the problem’ Orford [1]. These families live with the daily trauma of seeing someone they love slowly kill him or herself and experience domestic violence, verbal and emotional abuse, constant worry, shame, fear of police and social exclusion, isolation, anger, helplessness, powerlessness (Orford et al, [2]); the list goes on and has many parallels with the experience of users. More recently has research begun to focus on the support families need in their caring role (Toumbourou & Bamberg, [12]; Yuen & Toumbourou, [13])
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