Do’s and Don’ts to help a person with an addiction

Every fight drives a person with an addiction farther from the support they need, namely you. Prior to changing careers into the counseling field, Thérèse worked in the investment and securities field for over 20 years in sales, management and compliance, and supervisory roles. As a driver, she enjoyed talking with the students one on one and decided to go back to school to finish her BA in Sociology and her LCADC. After leaving Haley House for two years, she started working on her Masters in Pastoral Counseling.

It can damage the family structure and relationships, leaving behind guilt, anger, fear, and despair. Realizing that addiction is not just an individual issue but a family crisis is essential in providing effective treatment. Coping strategies and promoting healthy, supportive family dynamics are crucial in the fight against addiction. However, it’s important to remember that addiction is a disease, and like any other chronic illness, it requires professional treatment and support to overcome. Family support and involvement in recovery can help someone overcome addiction and achieve lasting recovery. This article will explore how family can play an important role in health care matters and your addiction recovery.

The Four Major Dimensions of Recovery

They also found that family-involved treatment showed consistent impacts across client age, other characteristics, and treatment models. Moreover, both family and couple therapy produce benefits for SUD whether they are delivered as the exclusive treatment or as part of a multicomponent SUD treatment program (Hogue et al., in press). As of 2017, there has been more research and greater advocacy by scholars to resume and strengthen family treatment within SUD programs. Different treatment agencies have done well to develop a full continuum of services that includes, detox, residential, outpatient, recovery coaching, and community support services, to help individual clients achieve the goal of long-term recovery.

A research-supported approach to boost engagement in this scenario is Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT; Smith & Meyers, 2007). There are several emotions that develop at this time, many of which can be complicated to manage in a healthy manner. While everyone exhibits different reactions to having a family member with a substance use disorder, it is common for members of a family unit to fall into a role that either allows them to feel in control or helps them cope with the chaos surrounding them. We know people with any chronic illness—medical, mental health, and substance use disorder—do better when they have the help of others, including family and peer support. Ask how the drug is helping because people use psychoactive substances for a reason, like physical or mental pain, or trauma too. It’s not the best of solutions, but likely is the best solution they have found so far.

Family involvement can be calibrated to meet the unique developmental needs of transition-age youth.

A family therapy program can provide the resources you need to build up family support. Multiple studies show that family involvement in recovery efforts leads to longer stretches of abstinence, fewer instances of return to drug use and better psychosocial and treatment outcomes. The benefits of family involvement during recovery can extend far past the immediate episode of addiction treatment. Challenging the usual maladaptive modes of communication and helping the family replace them with healthier alternatives is a focus of much of the effort in family programs.

• Many of the groups mentioned above, especially Codependents Anonymous, can help you learn the difference between helping and enabling and provide tips on creating healthy boundaries.
• Family members may attend support groups with their loved one or attend their own support groups for families of addicts.
• Mountainside Treatment Center is a nationally acclaimed behavioral health network specializing in individualized alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs and services.
• Remember that The Recovery Village can discuss any concerns about treatment with you, and we can work together to find solutions and incorporate them into your treatment plan.
• Many find it helpful to join a self-help or support group for friends, families, and loved ones of individuals struggling with an addiction or in recovery.
• Addiction often strains family relationships, leading to communication breakdowns and conflicts.

You may also have developed some unhealthy ways of adjusting to the changes addiction has created in your life. He has been actively involved in the field of substance abuse and recovery since 2016. Most recently, prior to joining Alina Lodge, Jim was a Business Development Representative for an outpatient facility that offered partial care, intensive outpatient and regular outpatient programs. Family counseling for addiction can also help teach a family how to navigate changing family dynamics as a person moves through recovery. Family members learn how to change unhealthy behaviors and patterns developed during the addiction, like enabling or co-dependent type behaviors.

Finding Family Support with Little Creek Recovery

Yet, in conventional practice little support outside of formal treatment settings is provided to families affected by SUD, which contributes to high rates of treatment failure and relapse (Quanbeck et al., 2014). In the past decade several literature reviews and meta-analytic studies have emphasized the top-shelf effectiveness of family-based treatment for SUD across the lifespan. Family-based treatment addresses family skills (e.g., communication, coping, problem-solving), family relationships and processes, and family member relations with key extrafamilial persons and systems (Hogue et al., in press). Hogue and colleagues (2018) concluded in a systematic literature review that family therapy is a well-established outpatient approach for adolescent SU that has accumulated the largest evidence base compared to all other approaches. Ariss and Fairbairn (2020) completed a meta-analysis of family-involved treatments that condensed data from 2,115 adolescents and adults across 16 independent trials. They calculated a small effect size that endured up to 12–18 months post-treatment and translated to a 5.7% reduction in SU frequency—the equivalent of approximately three fewer weeks per year of SU.

• Since adolescents are still developing social and behavioral patterns, early substance abuse can complicate future events.
• However, currently there are no empirically supported RSS approaches or programs in which families are systematically recruited to serve as instrumental supports for ongoing youth-focused recovery activities.
• Perhaps you didn’t do what you promised to do, or they couldn’t handle the stress of watching you use drugs or alcohol.
• The overall results of addiction rehabilitation can be significantly improved by involving families in the treatment process.

The focus lies in the area of staying sober and committing to recovery and building up the structure of the family after it’s been torn down in the earlier stages. According to Brown, the main difference between the transition stage and the early recovery stage is a general lessening of the physical cravings and psychological impulses for alcohol. Marital stress, employment strain, and children acting out are just a few examples that Brown gives of how sobriety-related stress can emerge within a family unit. She highlights how an end to substance use behaviors is just the beginning, and many other challenges can be experienced by family members during the first years of sobriety. In her book “The Alcoholic Family in Recovery,” Stephanie Brown takes a close, research-based look at the journey from alcohol use to recovery within the family dynamic. In this sense, when one person in a family has an addiction, it isn’t their health problem alone.

How Are Family Members Impacted by a Loved One’s Addiction?

Third, the youth SUD service system needs to become rigorously relationship-oriented. The most recent annual survey of SUD provider practices (SAMHSA, 2019) does not list any clinical or therapeutic approach that is fundamentally family-based. This omission acknowledges that although most providers purport to involve families in routine programming, evidence-based family approaches are not widely practiced.

You can also learn about our extensive treatment options if you are seeking substance use disorder treatment. Addiction is a family disease, and healthy family relationships help create a sustainable recovery. The Recovery Village encourages clients to involve families actively and thoroughly through the addiction treatment process. We help clients and their families become more effective communicators with each other. It is critically important for family members to learn to engage in healthy self-care. Family members who can do so are far better able to support their loved ones in recovery.

Despite seeing a loved one struggle, family members can and ideally do play a major role in the treatment process. CRAFT (discussed above; Smith & Meyers, 2007) is a provider-delivered intervention sometimes advertised as effective for improving the personal well-being of parents of youth, or spouses of adults, with SUD. However, few studies have rigorously examined CRAFT impacts on the wellness of significant others (Archer et al., 2020), and findings to date are mixed (e.g., Bischof et al., 2016; Kirby et al., 2017).

Recovery is characterized by continual growth and improvement in one’s health and wellness and managing setbacks. Because setbacks are a natural part of life, https://ecosoberhouse.com/ resilience becomes a key component of recovery. When an issue fails to infiltrate our personal lives, it’s easy to dismiss the need to learn about it.