Family may also provide economic support critical to recovery. Nargiso, Kuo, Zlotnick, and Johnson ( 2014 ) found that family financial support was related to lower rates of substance use in a sample of incarcerated women receiving drug treatment. Moreover, England Kennedy and Horton ( 2011 ) reported that clients in treatment for co‐occurring mental health and substance use viewed economic support as evidence of a restored status as a family member, which suggests economic support may also meet more emotional and identity‐based needs. Women in that study viewed restored relationships with their children as a critical motivation in their recovery. In another study of women engaged in trauma‐informed substance use treatment by Covington, Burke, Keaton, and Norcott ( 2008 ), 79% were mothers. Findings from this study reveal that mothers who were seeking to reunify with children in the early stages of treatment showed improvements in their depressive symptoms, supporting the importance of strengthening familial bonds. Clearly, diverse forms of family support can promote recovery. However, families are complex networks that can also impede recovery. Some studies suggest that family members can serve as a barrier to recovery by holding stigmatizing views and unrealistic expectations (Sanders, 2014 ; Tracy et al., 2009 ). Moreover, Tracy et al.'s ( 2009 ) study of 86 women in treatment, 78 of whom were mothers, reported that anxiety and worry over their children served as a major hindrance to focus on their recovery. We present findings that extend previous scholarship on family support by exploring how women perceive family as both a source of support and risk to affirming their identity work as mothers in recovery.

Research indicates that families offer emotional and tangible supports that aid relatives healing from their experiences of substance use (Falkin & Strauss, 2003 ; Tracy, Munson, Peterson, & Floersch, 2009 ). Such family supports have been positively associated with abstinence as well as improved psychological and social health outcomes (Lin, Wu, & Detels, 2011 ). Studies of women in residential treatment have also found family support and encouragement to be associated with sustained abstinence posttreatment (Ellis, Bernichon, Yu, Roberts, & Herrel, 2004 ; Kelly, Blacksin, & Mason, 2001 ). In one such study, women who completed treatment were more likely than noncompleters (53% compared with 29%) to identify a family member who provided support and discouraged use (Kelly et al., 2001 ).

Clearly, a multidisciplinary body of literature is providing increasing evidence that identity reconstruction can be critical to recovery and maintenance of wellness. Yet studies have not fully considered the relational elements of identity development. Few studies explore how other identities, such as mother, may offer pathways for affirming or discrediting one's recovery identity. Still fewer have focused on family systems as central to these processes. How does one minimize exposure to identity invalidation, when the source of harm is one's own family? As individuals disentangle from their addiction behaviors and old relationships, how does ongoing caregiving support from family shape the identity work so critical to mothers’ well‐being and health? Our paper begins to seek answers to these questions.

Interest in the role of identity is growing among addiction researchers, including understanding how individuals validate the self as indeed recovered. For example, the Positive Identity Model of Change emphasizes the centrality of “self‐verification” (Johansen, Brendryen, Darnell, & Wennesland, 2013 , p. 9) as the final task before moving fully into recovery. The work of Reith and Dobbie ( 2012 ) is distinct in its direct use of narrative method and theory to understand what they call “biographical reconstruction.” As in Goffman's ( 1963 ) notion of the spoiled identity and early scholarship by Denzin ( 1987 ) on the alcoholic self , a person learns to reorient a new self to access social and cultural affirmation. By engaging socially, and holding positive beliefs about self, the person is able to form experience‐based confidence and self‐esteem as a nonuser. Scholarship both in substance addiction and gambling addiction also reinforce the critical nature of re‐narrating and experientially grounding the self as recovered (Meijer, Gebhardt, Dijkstra, Willemsen, & Van Laar, 2015 ). In studies by Brown and Bloom ( 2009 ) and Opsal ( 2011 ), mothers on parole refused to internalize social stigmas attached to negative histories. The identity of mother is likely a core feature of positive identity work for women, especially those reclaiming maternal roles through reunification with children after recovery or incarceration (Brown & Bloom, 2009 ; Radcliffe, 2011 ; Richie, 2001 ).

Identity reconstruction is significant for managing various health conditions, as it requires one to reconstruct the meaning of health to accommodate illnesses (Wilson, 2007 ; Yanos, Roe, & Lysaker, 2010 ). It is also required for someone who is transitioning to a more productive lifestyle such as those reintegrating postincarceration (LeBel et al., 2015 ). Early criminology research highlights how developmental turning points, such as marriage or aging out of crime, serve as mechanisms of change for those seeking to reestablish themselves. Recent scholarship has extended these theories to explore how cognitive identity transformation processes must accompany turning points such as reintegration into society (LeBel et al., 2015 ).

We also define recovery as an interactive and context‐tied process. Our conception of recovery departs from traditional recovery models as a fixed state or outcome of abstinence driven solely by self‐motivation (Haslam, Ellemers, Reicher, Reynolds, & Schmitt, 2010 ; Reith & Dobbie, 2012 ). Moreover, our narrowed focus on relationships specifically within women's families of origin is deliberate. Other research efforts have explored types of supports and identity work in the context of peer and romantic partnerships (Gunn & Canada, 2015 ; Leverentz, 2006 ). We focus on familial relationships because their role was notably distinct and critical to women's recovery.

Here, we present findings that explore the question: What conditions shaped how and when mothers engaged family relationships that offered both threat and support to their emerging recovery identity? We highlight the challenges participants faced as they pursued what Draus and coauthors refer to as a “deliberate alteration of the self” ( 2015 , p. 229). We refer to this process of change as “identity work” and “identity reconstruction.” This process is not an isolated, linear one. Identity work, including a recovery identity, is dynamically shaped by other identities (e.g., mother, woman) and embedded in a web of relationships. Reconstructing an identity is a lifelong process that is always unfolding and shifting based on context.

Over 60% of women in prison have minor children (Carson, 2015 ) and an estimated 20–30% of foster children have an incarcerated parent (Hayward & DePanfilis, 2007 ). Testa and Smith ( 2009 ) report 50–79% of children in foster care enter for reasons related to parental addiction. Drug and alcohol addiction treatment completion rates (a criterion for reunification) are notoriously low; only 25% of mothers whose children are in foster care fully complete treatment (Grant & Graham, 2015 ). Consequently, drug addiction is consistently listed as a significant barrier preventing reunification with biological parents (Choi, Huan, & Ryan, 2012 ; Lloyd & Akin, 2014 ). One study found only 14% of drug exposed infants are reunified with their biological mothers within seven years, in contrast to an estimated 33% of all foster children being reunified within 2 years of removal from home (Huang & Ryan, 2010). Moreover, children whose relatives provide caregiving support while mothers are incarcerated are less likely to be reunified than children placed with nonrelative foster parents (Hayward & DePanfilis, 2007 ). Children with incarcerated parents often navigate stigma, economic vulnerably, housing instability, and family disruption (Hayward & DePanfilis, 2007 ). Taken together, parental addiction and incarceration clearly affect entire family systems and as such, needs for support during recovery and transitions home likely implicate both individual and familial processes.

Identity reconstruction is central to myriad life transitions, including transitions from addiction to recovery (Draus, Roddy, & Asabigi, 2015 ; McKeganey, 2001 ) and during reintegration postincarceration (Baldwin, 2018 ; LeBel, Richie, & Maruna, 2015 ). Such personal work is challenging and typically involves parallel changes in one's key relationships. Formerly incarcerated mothers with substance use problems, our focus here, face significant challenges to identity reconstruction as they navigate recovery processes and seek support for their new lives (Gueta & Addad, 2014 ). Whereas researchers have explored identity reconstruction among people with addictions, few have sought to understand how women restore identities as mothers in recovery during reentry processes (Hughes, 2007 ). Even fewer studies explore how these mothers navigate family relationships that both support and risk that identity work.

In conducting this analysis, we focused specifically on exploring how women managed their family relationships and what shaped differences. To facilitate this phase of the CGTM analyses, we employed some of the heuristic “six Cs”: Causes, Contexts, Consequences, Conditions, Covariances, and/or Contingencies (Charmaz, 2006 ; Glaser, 1992 ). This analytic step challenges researchers to ask questions of the data, selectively using any or all of the six Cs, to establish the conceptual relationships between themes or concepts. Here, we asked questions such as what are the consequences of a shared past? Under what conditions do women cut family ties? What conditions shape their levels of engagement? Exploring the data in this way helped move the analysis beyond descriptive findings (e.g., listing themes). The process of identifying the connections or independence between concepts or themes is a “dimensional analysis.” In this way, a theory grounded in one's data—a grounded theory—is developed. Here we present findings from a subset of the Six Cs: (1) the Consequences of a shared past ; and (2) the Conditions shaping family engagement . Central to most Grounded Theory studies is visually mapping the dimensional analysis—a figure that illustrates the key processes and concepts within one's grounded theory. In the following section, we introduce readers to the core concepts of our analysis and provide the illustration of their relationships to one another in Figure 1 .

Our analysis used a systematic process guided by Constructivist Grounded Theory Method (CGTM), which included open coding, constant comparison, and axial coding (Charmaz, 2006 ). After interview transcripts were read thoroughly, open line‐by‐line coding was used to reduce the data into codes. Next, constant comparison methods involved evaluating earlier codes against new emerging themes, refining and collapsing redundant codes, and eliminating those that failed to be substantiated by the data (Glaser, 1992 ). Finding exceptions or counter evidence for early conceptual claims resulted in codes being discarded or reworked to better align with the data. Finally, we used axial coding to illuminate conceptual explanations for relationships between codes (Charmaz, 2006 ; Glaser, 1992 ).

From the questions we ask to the analysis and presentation of findings, all research is shaped by those engaged in the work. No study, regardless of method or methodology, should privilege researchers (ourselves) as neutral objective observers and only participants as subjective objects of study and critique (Iphofen & Tolich, 2018 ). In the case of this paper, both authors are Black women, from modest economic backgrounds. We have experienced the majority of our academic training and careers in wealthy, predominantly white institutions. We collectively have decades of professional experiences that span teaching, direct practice, community advocacy, and research in the fields of social work, child welfare, criminal justice, racial‐ethnic identity, and substance use that we bring to bear on the research inquiry process. Our interests and choice to focus on family relationships, as well as on navigating stigmatized identities, are undoubtedly informed by our own social identities and experiences both professional and personal. We used the methods described above to maximize the potential for our subjectivities to serve as strengths and insights, and to ensure our analyses were self‐critical and maximally centered the diversity of experiences and insights of the women in this study.

To further analytic rigor and credibility, we engaged in ongoing self‐reflexivity, sought critical feedback, and memoed throughout the analytic process (Charmaz, 2006 ; Schuermans, 2013 ). The auditing process also structured reflecting on how our own social locations informed how we heard and interpreted participants’ experiences (Cloke et al., 2000 ). These reflexive processes led the first author to develop a paper examining researcher positionality and its role in the analysis and interpretation of data (Hardesty & Gunn, 2017 ).

While our paper draws upon data from semi‐structured interviews with women in recovery, the first author also engaged in participant observation in the field for approximately 8 months. Extended immersion and member checking facilitated rapport with both program participants and staff and enriched and expanded interpretations of the data as the study progressed. The first author also conducted semi‐structured interviews with staff members to explore how they assisted the women through their recovery and reentry processes. Using these three strategies to collect and triangulate the data were a counterweight to researcher bias throughout the analysis (Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ; Padgett, 2016 ).

This study made use of diverse strategies to promote rigor and trustworthiness, which included pilot‐testing the interviews, prolonged engagement in the field, data triangulation, peer debriefing, audit trails, and member‐checking interview data (Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ; Padgett, 2016 ). The first author pilot tested the interview guide to gain feedback from the population of interest, resulting in the development of more culturally valid and nuanced understandings of the community being studied.

Approximately 65% of the residents identified as Black, 25% as White, and the remaining 10% as Latina. The sample in the original study was racially representative of the clientele at Renewal House (Table 1 ). Most residents identified their primary drug of choice as crack cocaine or heroin; about 30% reported primarily marijuana or alcohol use. All 30 participants were mothers, and 26 of the participants had children currently under the age of 18.

The primary data collection methods included 1 year of participant observations and interviews with clients and staff at an urban Midwestern residential treatment facility we will call “Renewal House.” The researcher chose this site because of its mission to provide gender‐responsive services to women seeking abstinence and healthier lifestyles. For example, Renewal House allows mothers to reside in the facility with their children as well as engage in activities such as obtaining employment, returning to school and visiting family in efforts to facilitate their community reintegration. At any given time, Renewal House serves about 30 women for as long as 2 years. The program is also unique because 65% of the residents are finishing sentences with the Department of Corrections. Thus, these women are still under correctional supervision but are not physically detained in a correctional facility. Instead, they are living in a community‐based treatment center.

The original study, from which this analysis emerges, was designed by the first author to explore how women navigated stigma across a range of social contexts as they progressed through recovery postincarceration. However, an unexpected and unexplored theme centered on tensions between their own identities as recovered and family members who still perceived them as “addicts.” In some cases women withdrew from family, including their children. In other cases, they continued to engage family despite feeling invalidated or deeply hurt. Here we explore how and why participants navigated dynamics of family engagement that both risked and supported their identity work during recovery.

Like Nicky, Sheryl also reports decisions to fully engage with her adult child, albeit defensively. She remains committed to strengthening their connection, despite the threat it poses to her recovery identity. Relationships with older children may present a unique challenge where withdrawal is not so easily chosen. Even in the face of relational shaming and stigma, participants expressed a greater desire for reconnection and restoration of their parental status even at the stage of their child's emerging adulthood. They often sought this in ways that prioritized their need to validate their recovery identities and parental status, rendering them defensive in their styles of engagement.

I was able to send him a little something but when he felt that he couldn't get any more it was like, “Okay, what do I need her for?” And he started to criticize and parade on my past and talk about how I abandoned him and his brother too. I love him and I want to have a better relationship, but I'm not going to let my kids hurt me, down me.

Nicky acknowledges a tumultuous history in which she abandoned and mistreated her children. But she firmly positions this behavior in the past, believing she is no longer that person. She fully engages, with an active insistence that her child also respects and validates her recovered identity. This engagement approach even causes her to assert that she doesn't “owe” her children anything, and thus will not allow them to impose shame or stigma. While Nicky reports that she wants to repair a relationship, she self‐protects her recovery identity. She seeks to exert control over this parent‐adult child dynamic that she views as disrespectful.

Currently drug abstinent for 19 months, Nicky had attempted recovery numerous times over her 23 years of addiction. At the time of this study, seven of her nine children were in foster care. The two youngest were with her at Renewal House. Nicky desired a relationship with her children, but they harbored enduring resentment over the past. Previously, she had withdrawn from their anger and from relationships with them. But now she reports being fully engaged as she challenges their continued negative judgments:

I kind of had to tell the older one, “I don't owe you anything from the past, I can't buy your love, but I will be here for you now. I'm not that woman anymore.” I am there for my kids. There was a time I ran away when I felt ashamed that I wasn't there. Not anymore. But they can't talk to me any kind of way. I can't let shame and guilt take hold.

The second identified pattern of full engagement was a more defensive relational pattern where women guarded, and confronted family members’ attempts to stigmatize or discredit them. Using what we label “defensive engagement,” participants did not convey empathy. Instead, the findings indicate that they asserted their recovery identities with a defense of its legitimacy and validity. Based on our data, this strategy was exclusively used with adult children, as was the case with Nicky.

Lisa believes that her parents’ mistrust is a natural consequence of their shared past in struggling with her addiction. But she remains hopeful in proving that she has changed. Thus, she conveys empathy for their need for time and works to repair the bond of trust that was broken.

Lisa, a 25‐year‐old Latina in treatment for the second time, uses empathetic engagement. She now has all three of her children with her at Renewal House. But in the past, her parents often stepped in to provide caregiving. During the interview, she expressed hope in demonstrating to them that her recovery identity was trustworthy:

If we go out to eat my mom won't leave her wallet by me or anything. And sometimes my mom and dad will question me, like, “Well, why do you need us to take the kids, what are you doing? Who's going with you?” I know my parents don't really trust me. I know I wasn't a good mother, having my kids out there seeing some of the things I was doing, but I am working on proving I am a better mother.

Findings indicated that some women chose to fully engage with specific family members even in the face of enduring mistrust and stigma. Through these connections they sought meaning in their pasts and affirmation for their recovery identities. Our analysis suggests women even engaged skeptical relatives when they believed there was a possibility for that family member to someday see them differently (see Figure 1 ). Yet these engagement strategies took on different qualities. In some cases, participants demonstrated empathy through patience and understanding of a family member's need for healing and a rebuilding of trust. This engagement strategy, which we labeled “empathetic engagement,” appeared to be more frequent in relationships with one's parents.

It is possible that overcoming her own addiction without treatment or relapse makes Jamila's sister especially mistrustful of the sustainability of Jamila's recovery, which has involved many relapses, formal treatment, and incarcerations. Also, the sister's addiction, according to Jamila, never caused her to lose custody of her children. Jamila believes that fact, coupled with her shouldering the burden of parenting Jamila's children, makes her sister feel superior. Nevertheless, Jamila engages because she desires to get her children back.

Even though Jamila has been drug abstinent for over 3 years and is completing college, she perceives her sister to still doubt her recovery identity as valid. Moreover, Jamila perceived her sister to impose stigma due to the permanence she seems to attach to Jamila's identity as a “bad mother.” That identity invalidation may not be the only factor that threatens Jamila's focus on reunification or recovery. She goes on to discuss her sister's mistrust in her capacity to parent even during informal visits. The relationship is so strained that their brother serves as a go‐between to transport the children and supervise visitations:

Right now he (brother) brings them over cause my sister doesn't want me to see them alone. But I can't worry. I'm focused on my recovery and my kids. I'd never pick up that stuff again, but I'm still a junkie to her. My sister used drugs herself, but she thinks she better ‘cause she wasn't in and out of treatment. But she has my kids so I deal with her.

Latanya, age 37, is a Black woman who had cycled in and out of recovery programs for the past decade. At the time of the interview, her four children were placed with various family members while she stabilized her living situation and recovery. She acknowledges that her family plays an important role in providing caregiving support. She also believes they present serious challenges to her recovery identity work, publicly labeling her a “bad parent” in court. In pursuing legal custody, the cousin is also discrediting Latanya's potential for change. Latanya believes her cousin portrays the past addiction and parenting behaviors as permanent indicators of Latanya's untrustworthy parenting in the future. However, Latanya selectively engages in order to regain custody of her daughter, not to change her cousin's views or strengthen their relationship. Jamila, a 32‐year‐old White mother, shared a similar story of selectively engaging with her sister. During her 26 months at Renewal House, her sister had legal guardianship of Jamila's two children, and regularly told Jamila, “Your kids hate you,” or “You aren't a good mother.” She rejected this, “I tell my kids that I love them and 1 day they will be back with me.”

We use the term “selective engagement” to indicate a relational quality marked by a conditional and single purpose: to obtain reunification with children (see Figure 1 ). Some women chose to selectively engage in relationships with particular relatives, despite the presence of hurtful and stigmatizing relational dynamics. The primary condition shaping engagement was the need to regain custody of their children from this relative. Findings show women engaged selectively even when these relative caregivers were described as discrediting participants’ recovery identities by mistrusting the women's potential to become “good mothers.” Latanya highlighted the precarious nature of maintaining a familial connection for this greater purpose:

My cousin has my middle child. … She was supposed to have temporary custody … but now she is telling the courts that I'm a bad parent. I'm fighting it though. Bringing in papers showing I'm in school. She is still calling me all sorts of names, talking about my past. I have to tell my daughter I love her and that I will get her back. Every time I get to the point where I want to cuss her out I remember that I want to show the courts I am fit. The staff here tell me all the time to remember my goal of getting my child back.

To her sister, Sheryl's addictions likely violated social expectations of the “good mother,” an identity that should preclude an addiction identity. As the findings suggest, Sheryl views her identity as a mother as central to affirming her identity work. As long as she is viewed as a “bad mother,” she is also viewed as not recovered. Her decision to withdraw, despite her sister's efforts to connect, is nested within her belief that she cannot change her sister's judgment and the resulting stigma attached to being seen as an “unfit parent.” Sheryl is not dependent on her sister for child rearing support. This absence of support possibly makes it easier to disengage from family members who discredit a recovery identity.

Another respondent who utilized withdrawal strategies was Sheryl, a 43‐year‐old Black woman who had been at Renewal House for 3 months and drug‐free for 11 months. Like Leah, she too had sought treatment for substance use problems several times before. All six of Sheryl's children had been involved with the child welfare system as a result of her 25 years of heroin addiction. Sheryl recalled her sister's attempts to judge her as reasons why she withdrew:

My sister, she always calling me an unfit parent. Because I never raised any of my kids. … I didn't understand, how can you be judgmental when you drink alcohol every day? But by me doing heroin they think mine was the worst. … I'm not letting them criticize me, call me a bad mother. I just don't deal with them. … I gotta focus on myself, my recovery. … They say my sister called, but I don't call her back.

Withdrawal was another important strategy reported by study participants, particularly for women who were not relying on their family members for raising their children. Leah only has one child, and she is currently taking care of him with the support of the substance use treatment community. That support may make it easier to fully withdraw from relationships with relatives who discredit her recovery journey and burgeoning new identity. Her ability to already perform motherhood allows her to externally validate that she is indeed trustworthy in her recovery (see Figure 1 ).

At the time of the interview, Leah, a Black mother, age 31, had lived for 4 months with her only child at Renewal House. She conveyed a strong desire to reconstruct her identity “anew,” even though she had been struggling with addiction for 6 years and had been in treatment many times. Like the families of other participants, her family had witnessed and endured her substance use struggles. She believed these shared experiences impeded their ability to imagine her capable of change. When women believed that others viewed their past addictions as permanent identities, they typically reported withdrawing to protect their recovery identity.

My mother, she will always see me as an addict, but I am not, I am a new creature, old ways are gone, and I am anew … so my mother and I do not have a relationship right now. (Leah, 5 months in treatment)

Presented below, our analysis identified three levels of engagement with families: selective engagement, withdrawal, and full engagement. These levels were informed by two conditions: recovery identity (in)validation and a relative's current provision of caregiving support (i.e., held legal custody of their children). “Selective engagement” occurred when despite identity invalidation, women maintained limited connection with a family member because that family member continued to provide caregiving supports and retained custody of their child. However, when a family member was perceived to invalidate a recovery identity with no hope for change, and did not provide caregiving support, women reported decisions to withdraw from those relationships. This process of engagement is depicted within Figure 1 as our dimensional analysis and is described in detail with supporting data in the following section.

Our analysis suggests that a primary task during recovery is to access external affirmation of one's ability to change (see Figure 1 ). Family engagement and reclaiming family roles as a mother were critical pathways for our participants to perform a recovery identity—affirming they indeed had changed. Reclaiming their roles as mothers was so critical that some participants endured identity invalidation from family members who were still caring for their children.

Delila is a 28‐year‐old Latina with four children; two are in the custody of her mother. Delila discusses her past substance use and engagement in sex work. As a consequence of their linked lives and witnessing Delila's struggle through addiction, Delila believes her mom stigmatizes her as a forever “junkie,” untrusted with leaving “things around” that she might steal. Taken together, the study findings suggest that these consequences of shared pasts have created a level of mistrust that many women reported experiencing as invalidating and stigmatizing to their recovery identities. But not all women reported decisions to disengage from family when they perceived their recovery identities to be discredited. Below, we share findings that highlight the conditions that shaped the use of different strategies of engagement.

Women reported that one of the most pronounced consequences of their families having witnessed past cycles of addiction and incarceration was mistrust in their ability to change. Family members both directly and indirectly communicated stigma and mistrust in the women's recovery, ability to maintain their sobriety, and general trustworthiness. Delila is one woman whose story speaks to these consequences on one's current family dynamics:

When I was doing drugs I really didn't care about nothing, not my kids, no one. All I cared about was getting the next one or selling my body. That's all I thought about. Being in the streets, sleeping in people's houses. Since I've been clean from drugs I have a clear mind and I want to be a good mother … but my mom doesn't want to have a real relationship with me right now. She won't even leave her things around me. She thinks, “once a junkie always a junkie .”(Delila, 28, 15 months in treatment)

In any family system, there is a shared history that plays a critical role in shaping the context of one's contemporary family patterns of interaction and engagement. Although participants’ families sometimes lacked full awareness of women's pasts, participants felt that their families knew enough. Typically, this understanding was embedded in real and shared life experiences, as was the case for Jane's children. Part of these pasts included disruptions to the family system, altered family roles, and strains created by adult family members taking care of participants’ children. Grandparents became primary parents, and sisters became both aunt and mother to participants’ children. Some participants, like Jane, seemed highly attuned to the relational and emotional residue of their shared past, which also limited their agency and control over managing family members’ perceptions of them as “untrustworthy” or “permanent addicts.” It is not difficult to imagine that family members had memories of a not so distant past that challenged their trust in participants’ assertions of a new self. Whereas 26 women had at least one child younger than 21 of whom they were seeking custody, 14 of these women had children placed with family members (see Table 1 ). These caregiver roles shaped family engagement generally, and required continued, if sometimes selective, engagement with the caregivers from whom they might have otherwise withdrawn.

He was three. He remembers that. He remembers the night that I got incarcerated because my parents had to come pick the car up. I got pulled over and so the officer was nice enough because I admitted I had four warrants from 2006. I'm like, “Please don't take my son!” But he was like, “Call your father and tell him to pick up your kid and your car.” So when my parents came to pick me up, my oldest was in the car and he remembers that. Sometimes he'll be like, “Mom, you're not going to leave me again?” My youngest, when I take him to school, he thinks I'm not coming back.(Jane, Latina, 26 months in treatment)

We present findings that explore how participants managed family relationships while also safeguarding their recovery identities. Our findings suggest that all participants navigated highly complex family dynamics and desired connections with family. Yet these relationships were embedded in shared pasts of substance use, relapse, incarceration, and the relational consequences and losses tied to that history. Their past addictions and incarcerations frequently impaired their abilities to parent their children, a responsibility that often fell upon their family members. As a result, these family caregivers mistrusted women's claims of recovery, sometimes sending messages that felt stigmatizing to the women in our study. Consequently, participants noted the importance of having their recovery identities validated by family; affirmation of their recovery was core to their choices to engage with or disengage from family members. Our findings also illuminate complexity in participants’ decision‐making process. Below we first describe the consequences and conditions within participants’ families; it was the consequence of this past that shaped the contexts in which they were forging their current identity work. We then identify the condition of navigating mistrust and accessing identity validation that resulted in the family engagement strategies of withdrawal, selective engagement and full engagement.

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to illuminate how women transitioning back into the community manage their recovery. One significant finding was the degree to which women seemed to link their recovery identities to reclaiming their roles as mothers. Our analysis suggests that being stigmatized with labels like “bad mom” and viewed incapable of change rendered participants’ recovery identities invalid. This identity‐driven pattern of engagement compliments similar findings slowly emerging in recovery literature (Best et al., 2015; Reith & Dobbie, 2012).

It is not surprising that participants reported mothering as a critical pathway through which they could perform their recovery identities. Nor is it surprising that the failure to successfully retain this role because of their addictions was deeply stigmatizing. The gendered identity of woman is fully synonymous with its ultimate expression through the role of mother (Baldwin, 2018; Figueria‐McDonough & Sarri, 2002). It is an identity that depends on having a relationship with a child, rather than being simply self‐validated. Motherhood is also a role that is publicly and socially revered and judged (Baldwin, 2018; Radcliffe, 2011). Our findings suggest that all participants were (re)negotiating this identity, many through courts and child welfare systems. For some, this required selectively engaging with family members who were currently parenting their children. Women reported relatives who erected barriers to their resumption of this role. Other times, mothers seemed to assert a parental right to a higher level of respect from their adult children, demanding affirmation of their parental status as a pathway to affirming their recovery identity.

A second key finding was the presence of intrafamilial risk factors for recovery and, specifically, the prevalence of recovery identity invalidation. The family dynamics that we have explored raise questions about the unintended consequence of some types of family support. In our study, the findings suggest that caregiving support for children may be essential to keep extended family ties intact while women obtain treatment and complete their incarcerations. However, this structure of kinship care sometimes undermined the ability of mothers to reclaim roles and identities that they viewed as central to obtaining external affirmation of their recovery. Previous research suggests economic support from families can convey personal value and validate one's role and family identity during recovery (Ellis et al., 2004). However, our analysis suggests other types of support (e.g., caregiving) may undermine one's value, and role, and invalidate one's status in their own family system. Furthermore, this invalidation could exacerbate earlier damage caused by parental absence due to addiction and/or incarceration. Thus, we witnessed a paradox in family systems providing caregiving supports: The extended family system was kept intact by disrupting nuclear family systems and all family members’ roles and identities.

A third finding emphasizes the dire need reported among these mothers to access spaces that affirmed their emerging recovery identities. Identities are not just independent ideas we have about ourselves. They need spaces to be publicly expressed, shared, and socially affirmed. In fact, many of these women required what Case and Hunter (2012) describe as “counterspaces.” Counterspaces are contexts and relationships with similar others that can assist people in navigating the effects of stigma and discrimination. Counterspaces are places of respite, renewal, and belonging—but they are also places of resistance, validation, and collective transformation. These spaces offer new opportunities to receive validation and promote psychological health, wellness, and healing (Havilcek & Samuels, 2018). These women reported frequently lacking such spaces and relationships. Instead their existing family contexts created what Goffman (1963) would describe as a familial projection of spoiled identities (bad mothers, “junkie,” etc.). Unfortunately, their families may be uniquely disadvantaged in providing a counterspace that affirms their recovery identities. In part, this is because of the intimately shared experience and history of shouldering the burdens of their addictions, burdens that were ongoing for those who retained caregiving responsibilities for participants’ children.

Finally, our findings highlight both the need for and potential limitations of identity reference groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and similar treatment communities. Through ties to others with shared experience, identity‐based groups like AA provide essential recovery affirmation and counterspaces for those transitioning back into the community (Case & Hunter, 2012; Dingle, Cruwys, & Frings, 2015). However, our participants operated in more than one social context, navigated more than one identity, and coped with tensions between those identities and spaces that were both chosen and ascribed. Women reported that they faced the daunting task of providing their own recovery identity support in the context of family stigma, judgment, and legitimate worry that their recovery identities were fragile and temporary.

Limitations Our study used interview data originally collected to explore experiences of recovery and stigma faced by women with intersecting marginalized statuses. Therefore, we do not have data on family members’ experiences or perspectives on participants’ past relapses, their caregiving roles, or their own views on women's current transitions out of treatment and incarceration. We also do not have data on family members’ (including children's) feelings or insights about participants’ incarcerations or recovery. This limited our analyses to participants’ perceptions of their family's beliefs and behaviors. Caring for one's own young family member, especially in the context of a crisis, can indeed foster a special bond. Relinquishing this parental role clearly represents a pronounced loss for that caregiver as well as for the child. How one copes with that loss could shape the family dynamics around the reunification process above and beyond holding mistrust and stigma toward the biological mothers. More fully understanding all the complexities that affect this family dynamic requires the inclusion of more than one voice and perspective within a family. Studies must involve family members including minor and adult children and allow them to discuss their patterns of coping with, and making meaning of, a shared past of addiction and incarceration. Interviewing family members could also provide a fuller understanding of the supports necessary to promote a family's health and well‐being. Our study focused on heterosexual mothers who grew up in highly stressed neighborhoods struggling with multigenerational poverty. However, navigating other stigmatized or privileged identities or statuses arguably shape variance in how families and individuals cope with the stigma tied to addiction and incarceration. Future studies should consider collecting data using more diverse samples, including diversity in sexual identity and class status. Persistent inequalities or privileges tied to these and other identities and statuses likely facilitate unique pathways for identity (in)validations, and shape family processes in accessing critical supports. Finally, relationships are dynamic, and we were only able explore how one's recovery identity is linked to their management of familial relationship at a single point in time. Our study design limits what we are able to say about the long‐term processes of engaging family or possible cycles of engagement over the course of a women's recovery process. Most participants were at later stages of their attempts at recovery. However, we cannot speak to their sustained abstinence or the durability of their recovery identities as related to any of their engagement strategies. Longitudinal and comparative study designs would be essential to understand how engagement strategies both threaten and protect recovery processes over time.