Introduction
You've explained it. More than once. You've used the words about disease and brain chemistry, or you've tried to describe what a craving actually feels like from inside, and you've watched something not land.
They nod. They say they're trying. And you can see, plainly, that they are translating what you said into something they already understand, which is not what you said.
They Probably Won't Understand, and That's Not a Moral Failing
Start with the honest version, because the alternative is years of a doomed project.
Some experiences don't transmit. A person who has never had a craving cannot reconstruct one from a description, in the way that a description of grief doesn't produce grief and an account of chronic pain doesn't produce pain. The information arrives. The experience doesn't.
This isn't because they don't care. It's a structural limit. And the belief that sufficiently good explanation would close the gap keeps people explaining, endlessly, into a space where explanation was never going to work.
The Public Story Is Working Against You
Part of what you're up against isn't personal.
Survey research finds Americans hold significantly more negative views about people with drug addiction than about people with mental illness — with the study's authors noting that the public is more likely to think of addiction as a moral failing than a medical condition.1 That belief is ambient. Your family didn't invent it, and they absorbed it long before you needed them to think otherwise.
You are not only explaining your experience. You are arguing against a cultural default, from a position of low credibility, to people who are frightened. Those are difficult conditions for persuasion.
Understanding Was Never the Requirement
Here's the reframe that actually helps.
You do not need them to understand. You need them to behave decently — to not use it against you, to not withdraw, to keep showing up. Those things are entirely possible without comprehension, and they're what actually affects your life.
Plenty of good marriages contain a person who has never understood their spouse's depression and has nonetheless sat with them through it for thirty years. Plenty of families support a member through something they find incomprehensible. Understanding is a bonus. Reliability is the requirement.
Aim at the achievable one.
Ask for Behavior, Not Belief
Which converts an impossible request into a possible one.
Please understand what this is like cannot be complied with. Please don't bring it up in front of the kids can. Please don't offer me a drink can. Please call me on Sundays can. Please stop asking me if I've relapsed every time I'm quiet can.
Specific behavioral requests are gettable. They can be agreed to, remembered, and kept, by someone who continues to privately believe that you could have stopped whenever you wanted.
Give Them Something That Isn't You
A practical move that works better than another conversation.
You are a poor messenger for this material. You're the interested party, your credibility is damaged, and everything you say about addiction sounds — to a frightened family member — like a person explaining why what they did wasn't that bad.
The same information from a third party lands differently. A book. An article. A family support group where other people's relatives say the same things you've been saying, and are believed because they have nothing to gain.
Handing someone a resource is not giving up on the conversation. It's recognizing that the message may be fine and the messenger compromised.
Where the Real Understanding Comes From
Not from them. This is the hard part of this article, and it's the reason fellowship exists at all.
The specific relief of being understood — of saying something half-formed and having someone nod because they have been in that exact room, at that exact hour, thinking that exact thing — is available. It is available almost exclusively from other people who have been through it.
That relief is not a substitute for family, and family is not a substitute for it. They are different goods. Expecting your family to provide the first one sets up an inevitable failure, which then gets read as evidence that they don't love you.
They may love you enormously and be entirely unable to give you this. Get it where it exists, and stop demanding it from where it doesn't.
Some of Them Are Trying Harder Than You Can See
Worth considering, in the interest of accuracy.
A person who reads an article about addiction, who asks a clumsy question, who says the wrong thing while visibly straining to say the right thing, is not failing to care. They are working at the edge of their capacity with poor tools.
The clumsiness is easy to mistake for indifference. It's usually the opposite — indifference is smooth, because it requires no effort.
And Some of Them Understand Better Than You'd Like
The other possibility, less comfortable.
Occasionally the person who "doesn't understand" understands precisely. They've watched, over years, and formed an accurate view — including of things you were doing that you'd rather not be seen. Their wariness isn't ignorance. It's an assessment.
Being understood is not always pleasant. It's worth checking whether what you're calling incomprehension is actually comprehension arriving at a conclusion you don't like.
The Bottom Line
They may never understand, and the campaign to make them understand is unwinnable and exhausting for everyone involved. Ask for specific behavior instead of belief — behavior can be given by people who don't comprehend, and behavior is what actually affects your life. Get the experience of being understood from the people who share it, because that's the only place it reliably exists. And notice that clumsy effort looks a great deal like indifference, and that some of what feels like incomprehension is comprehension arriving somewhere you'd rather it didn't.
Sources
- More negative attitudes toward addiction than mental illness — Barry CL, McGinty EE, Pescosolido BA, Goldman HH (2014). Stigma, discrimination, treatment effectiveness, and policy: public views about drug addiction and mental illness. Psychiatric Services, 65(10):1269-1272. View source ↗