Family Motivation to Change

Abstract

SUMMARY Family Motivation to Change can best be understood as the combined forces operating within a family guiding it towards maintaining survival in the face of serious threat, and towards healing when threat is removed. Exploring what happens to families during major disaster allowed the authors to step back into the grief that initiates the problem. The authors discovered that the force driving a family towards health is the same force that drove them to the initial adaptive behavior where a family member becomes addicted in an attempt to keep the family close, preventing them from feeling the pain of intense loss and sorrow. Once this has happened, the driving force of health and healing, “Family Motivation to Change,” pushes, frees, or allows a member of the family, a natural change agent or Family Link to lead the family out of grief and addiction into health and recovery.