Stories, Trauma, and Family Recovery: A Technology-Enabled Narrative Program for Families Living with Addiction, Mental Health, and Co-Occurring Disorders

Session Description: Families affected by addiction, mental illness, trauma, and co-occurring disorders often enter different treatment systems and receive different forms of family education. Addiction programs may emphasize enabling, relapse, boundaries, and recovery, while mental health programs may emphasize diagnosis, medication, crisis planning, symptoms management, and psychoeducation. Yet families in both worlds describe remarkably similar experiences: fear, stigma, secrecy, hypervigilance, caregiver exhaustion, grief, sorrow, ambiguous loss, relational rupture, and the painful search for a new normal. This session presents a technology-enabled narrative family recovery model designed to bridge the traditional divide between addiction family programming and mental health family psychoeducation. The model integrates trauma-integrated education, app-based reflection, structured storytelling, peer support, and facilitated multi-family group process to help families understand how chronic behavioral health conditions reorganize family life over time. The session will focus on family secondary trauma as a central barrier to change. While family programs focus on the practice of new boundaries, tolerating uncertainty, reduce rescuing, improving communication, and acceptance of social support, when families are traumatized, these new actions can feel threatening rather than healing. Participants will learn how structured narrative work can help families name what happened, understand what it meant, identify what it did to the family systems, and develop a more recovery supportive story for what happens next. The presentation will describe a replicable hybrid model using brief app-based lessons, guided family story prompts, peer story response, facilitator feedback, and weekly multi-family groups.