For Parents, Spouses, and Families of Addicted Loved Ones
An on-demand video course by licensed therapist Karen Perlmutter, built from 20 years of sitting across from families just like yours.
You know that voice in your head that never fully goes quiet?
Did my addicted loved one get out of bed today? Did they make it to work? Were their eyes a little off last night, or am I overanalyzing it? Should I check their phone location? Should I call? Should I not call?
Inside the course we call it “the chatter.” And since you’ve made it here, you probably know exactly what that means–even if you’ve never given it a name.
You likely feel like so many other families that are navigating a loved one’s addiction– you’re functioning—surviving, but not thriving. You go to work, get the kids where they need to go, wave to the neighbors and say everything’s fine. But you’re doing all of it with one foot in your own life and the other foot planted in your loved one’s world. Monitoring. Worrying. Waiting. Walking on eggshells.
And underneath the chatter, there’s usually a cycle that goes something like this: Guilt leads you to soften a boundary you said you’d hold. Resentment follows when you then feel that they didn’t even consider how their actions affect others. Then fear takes over — what if they spiral? What if it’s my fault? — and you’re back where you started.
Here’s what most people don’t tell families: addiction doesn’t just affect the person using. It trickles down both sides of the mountain. The obsession, the chaos, the loss of identity, the poor decisions made in moments of fear or grief or exhaustion — those happen on your side too. In different ways, but just as powerfully.
You've probably been doing everything a loving family member is supposed to do. The problem is, addiction doesn't follow the same logic — and there is no "right way" when addiction is running the show. Nobody gave you the playbook for that.
Not a guarantee. Not a formula to "fix" your loved one, or a map with only one destination. But an actual field guide — one that explains where you are, how you got here, and opens up the full range of what's possible when you learn to harness what is within your control..
Because one of the cruelest things addiction does is convince the family facing addiction that everything has to be black and white. Either you let them come on vacation and absorb the chaos, or you let them die alone in the street. Either you enable or abandon. Two bad choices leave us feeling paralyzed.
Those are not your only two choices. There is an entire field between those two extremes — and empowering you with options is exactly what this course is built to do.
Living with the chatter on a loop — monitoring, worrying, waiting for the next crisis
Cycling through guilt, resentment, and fear, and making decisions from whichever of those has the wheel
Getting a brief hit of relief when things look better for a moment — then crashing when reality returns
Setting a boundary and not being able to hold it, then feeling ashamed
Losing track of who you were before this became your whole life
Understanding why you’ve responded the way you have — without shame
Having language for what you’ve been carrying, so it no longer runs silently in the background
Knowing the full spectrum of choices available to you — and how to figure out which ones you can actually live with
Being able to protect what matters most — your values, your wellbeing, your other relationships — without abandoning your loved one
Navigating the recovery journey with a toolbox
A six-session online course for the people who love someone struggling with addiction — built around your healing, your clarity, and your power to show up differently.
Created by Karen Perlmutter, licensed therapist (LISW-CP) and founder of Collaborative Counseling LLC, this course is built from a decade of leading hundreds of families through her in-person group program — distilled into a self-paced format you can work through on your own terms, on your own timeline.
This isn't a course about how to fix your loved one or how to simply survive the chaos of addiction. It's about understanding what the disease has done on your side of the mountain — the chatter, the cycle of guilt and fear and resentment, the identity you've slowly lost — and finding your way back to solid ground.
$297 $159 launch price
full access to all sessions for 1 year
Each session is under an hour and can be paused and resumed on your own time.
Session 1: The Mountain — Understanding Addiction in the Family
The storm isn’t the person. It’s the disease — and it’s raining on both sides of the mountain. Session 1 builds the shared language and big-picture understanding that makes everything else in the course click into place. You’ll finally understand not just what addiction is, but what it has been doing to you — and why that’s not a reflection of your character.
Session 2: The Field — Navigating from Enabling to Loving Detachment
Enabling isn’t a dirty word. But in the context of addiction, it can quietly work against the very outcome you’re hoping for. Session 2 introduces the Field — a continuum between full enmeshment and full detachment with love — and gives you a practical tool to stop thinking in black and white and start finding the response to their behavior you can actually live with.
Session 3: The Tree — Protecting Family Values from the Disease
Addiction is a threat to family values — not just for the person using, but for everyone around them. Session 3 introduces the Value Tree, a framework for getting clear on what matters most to your family and how to use that clarity as an anchor when emotions are running the show.
Session 4: The Island — Maintaining Healthy Boundaries
Boundaries aren’t about controlling your loved one. They’re about protecting your Island of Sanity — your rights, (which we call “the Sacred 6”) and your non-negotiables, which every person deserves to maintain. Session 4 reframes boundary-setting entirely and gives you a vetting process so that the boundaries you set are ones you’ll actually be able to hold.
Session 5: The Other Side of the Mountain — Exploring Your Loved One’s Experience
Understanding why your loved one does what they do won’t fix the addiction. But it can lift some of the weight you’ve been carrying. Session 5 takes you to the other side of the mountain — into the neuroscience, the trauma, the hijacked brain — so you can separate the person from the disease, and find a more sustainable place to stand.
Session 6: The Wave — Empowering Ourselves for the Journey
Recovery isn’t a cliff you have to live in fear of falling off.. It’s a wave — with quieter valleys and more turbulent peaks, and the real goal is building a toolbox strong enough to navigate both. Session 6 closes the course with an honest, compassionate look at what the long road actually looks like, and what it means to become what Karen calls “the messy, imperfect, but beautiful recovering family.”
Six video sessions with Karen — warm, direct, and built from 20+ years of clinical work with real families
Downloadable session guides and reflection handouts to help you apply the frameworks to your specific situation
365 days of access from the date of download — work through it at your own pace, return to it when you need a booster.
Completely private — no group setting, no sharing required, no timeline to keep
Not just your understanding of addiction — though that shifts too. What changes is how you move through the hard moments. How you respond when the chatter starts. What you do when guilt pulls one direction and resentment pulls another. Whether fear gets to make the decision, or you do.
The families Karen works with don’t just learn to cope. They learn to understand why they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing — and from that understanding, they find a steadiness that didn’t feel possible before. Whether or not their loved one got better, they did.
— Karen Perlmutter
“My loved one isn’t in treatment. Is this still for me?”
Yes — and maybe especially for you. This course doesn’t require your loved one to be in treatment, in recovery, or even willing to admit there’s a problem. Your healing doesn’t have to wait for theirs. And in many ways, doing this work now is the most important thing you can do — for them and for yourself.
“I already go to Al-Anon. Do I need this too?”
Al-Anon offers something genuinely valuable — community, shared experience, the relief of not being alone in this. This course offers something different: a structured, private process with specific frameworks for understanding your own patterns. Many families find they complement each other beautifully.
“We already did family weekend at my loved one’s treatment center.”
Family weekends are built around your loved one’s treatment — their timeline, their program, their next step. This course is built around you. It a deeper dive into the guilt, the resentment, the fear, the identity loss that doesn’t just resolve because your loved one is in a good place. And unlike a weekend, it’s here whenever you need to come back to it.
“I should be focused on helping them, not on myself.”
Here’s what Karen has found in over 20 years working with families: the way you show up matters. The patterns you’re operating from matter. Doing this work doesn’t take you away from your loved one — it makes you more effective, more grounded, and frankly a healthier person for your loved one to partner with in recovery when they decide they’re ready.
“I don’t have a lot of time.”
There’s no schedule to keep, no live sessions to attend, no falling behind. While we recommend you take your time to absorb the concepts, the entire course can be completed in 6-8 hours and you have 365 days of access from the moment you purchase. Work through a session when you have an hour. Come back to a framework the next time a hard situation comes up. This is built for real life, not ideal conditions.
“I’m worried this will tell me I’ve been doing everything wrong.”
Quite simply: It won’t. Karen’s approach starts from a clear premise: you have been playing by the rules. You’ve been a loving family member doing what any person would do when someone they love is struggling. The disease is the problem — not you. This course isn’t about blame. It’s about finally having the understanding and tools to respond differently if and when you want to.
You love someone struggling with addiction — whether they’re in treatment, in recovery, still using, or somewhere in between
You’ve been living with the chatter — that constant background hum of worry, monitoring, and second-guessing
You’ve tried setting limits and couldn’t hold them, and you want to understand why — without shame
You’re exhausted from cycling through guilt, resentment, and fear, and you’re ready for something to actually shift
You want to do this privately, on your own timeline, without having to share before you’re ready
You’ve read books, attended support groups, and still feel like something is missing
You’re a parent, partner, sibling, or adult child who is ready to stop white-knuckling it and start navigating with a real toolbox
Karen Perlmutter is a licensed therapist (LISW-CP) and the founder of Collaborative Counseling LLC, where she has spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of addiction and family healing.
Karen began her career in hospital-based addiction treatment before expanding her practice to include the families who are so often left out of the conversation. What she found, again and again, was that families weren’t just affected by their loved one’s addiction — they were caught in their own version of it. Doing things that didn’t match their values. Making decisions driven by fear and guilt rather than clarity. Losing themselves in the process of trying to save someone else.
She built Empowering Families That Face Addiction because she believes families deserve more than generic advice and borrowed frameworks. The Mountain, The Field, The Tree, The Island, The Wave — these aren’t textbook concepts. They’re the tools Karen developed and refined in real rooms with real families navigating real crises.
Her approach has always started from the same place: you are not the problem. You are not to blame. And you are not without options.
This isn't about telling you exactly what to do. It's about empowering you with a broader understanding of the behaviors and reactions to addiction within the family system — and a new way of imagining your journey of recovery, not just for them, but for you.
— Karen Perlmutter
Feedback from the 10-week course
"My husband and I cannot thank Karen enough for all she has taught us. The 10 week course on Empowering Families Who Face Addiction was just that, empowering! If you have a loved one facing this horrific disease arm yourself with Karen's course!"
“I speak for my whole family in thanking you for the gift that was your course. A year after taking your course, I still find myself relying on the skills I learned when interacting with my [addicted loved one] when I'm uncertain how to respond. The content of your course was such a guidepost that I actually printed out a page from your workbook and taped it to my fridge as a reminder when I'm feeling lost in what to do."
"We feel so very grateful for your guidance and knowledge the course has given us. It helped us in so many ways during [our daughter’s] visit. Words seem so inadequate here to let you know how much the course has helped and how grateful we are."
Managing the chatter. Absorbing the consequences. Holding hope on behalf of everyone else. Trying to find the right response in the middle of impossible situations — with no map, no framework, and no one really asking how you’re doing in any meaningful way.
That changes here.
Not to tell you what to do. Not to judge the choices you’ve made. But to give you what Karen has spent 20 years building — the understanding, the frameworks, and the tools to navigate this with more clarity, more steadiness, and a lot less shame.
The storm has been on both sides of the mountain. It’s time someone brought yours into focus.
That makes sense. You’ve probably invested a lot already — in your loved one, in trying to find answers, in just surviving. The idea of one more thing can feel like a lot.
But here’s what’s different: this course isn’t asking more of you. It’s offering you something you probably haven’t had yet — a real framework for your side of this experience that also leaves room for the nuance of your own journey.
You can keep navigating this without a guide. Or you can use the one that’s already empowered hundreds of families just like yours. Ready when you are.