Interaction Patterns and Couple Resilience for Drug-Abusing Couples: A Case Study

Background and Purpose: Drug abuse is always considered to bring illness, disorders, and deficits to individuals and families in a traditional deficit-based approach. Literature on identifying and applying the strengths and resources of drug abusers from the strengths-based perspective is very limited. With couple resilience, drug abusers and partners will be confident in overcoming dysfunction problems, managing negative emotions, embracing the difficulties, and flourishing the family together. While family interaction and relationships play key roles in developing strong and unique resilience during stressful situations, there is a lack of research on how drug abuse affects interaction patterns between couples and how they develop couple resilience to cope with stress brought by drug abuse. Descriptive studies can reveal the complex, rich, and diverse family lives with drug-abusing couples, which also contributes to our understanding of couple interaction and resilience for drug abusers. The purpose of this case study was to explore the interaction patterns and couple resilience of drug-abusing couples, particularly how couples develop resilience through dyadic interaction to cope with drug abuse.

Methods: The collective case study was adopted to explore the experiences of drug abuse, couple interaction, and resilience through selecting multiple cases from the population of drug abusers. In the study, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative data from eight participants, including three drug abusers with their partners and two drug abusers alone (37.5% males and 62.5% female). Participants were recruited via a local social service provider in Hong Kong. This sample included drug abusers with drug-abusing experience of more than 10 years. All couples had been together in an intimate relationship ranging from 10 to 20 years. The qualitative analysis was guided by an inductive approach. Using thematic analysis, interviews were transcribed and coded to identify main themes and illustrate the varieties of results.

Results: Participants generously shared their experiences of drug abuse, interaction patterns, strengths and resilience, stories about how drug abuse caused stress to a relationship, and how they protected against drug abuse and promoted drug abstinence. Data analysis revealed that drug abuse had negative influences on couples’ romantic relationships, emotional attachment, and communication. Compared to couples with marital conflicts, those couples who maintained good relationships under the stress of drug abuse showed positive interaction patterns in dimensions of communication, emotional attachment, and affectional responses and enhanced resilience in processes of constructing belief system, organizational patterns, and problem-solving skills. Findings also suggested that relationship and interaction contributed to developing and enhancing resilience of drug-abusing couples to adopt positive coping strategies and thrive under challenging stress.

Conclusion and Implications: Considering all individuals have resilience to cope and grow in facing with adversity, couple resilience contributes to providing emotional and behavioral supports to each other and coping with adverse consequences of drug abuse. The positive interaction patterns facilitate the development of couple resilience to overcome and rebound from stressful situations. Findings can guide assessment and enhancement of couple resilience and provide implications to design effective couple therapy for drug-abusing couples.