Helping someone in recovery can be a challenging process, especially when that person is your loved one. You may truly want to help your loved one navigate their addiction recovery, but you don’t know how. Or worse, you may fear getting in the way—even enabling their addiction—so you hold back. However, family members like you can play a pivotal role in their loved one’s successful long-term recovery. In fact, there are a number of ways you can support your loved one’s recovery from addiction while respecting the process they’re going through on their own.
The Impact of Addiction on Family
As we explore how to help someone with addiction in your family recover, it’s important to understand the context of addiction’s impact on the family. While addiction is very much a disease that your loved one goes through, its consequences very much involve the family, too. Growing up with an addicted family member in the house, for example, can create adverse childhood experiences that lead to emotional trauma. At the same time, adult family members can deal with a variety of issues as their loved one struggles with addiction symptoms, self-sabotage, and more.
Over time, a loved one’s addiction leads other family members to experience emotional difficulties, from anger and frustration to fear and hopelessness. It’s likely that a loved one’s lies about their substance abuse have caused tension and feelings of betrayal. On the other hand, the loved one’s addiction may have exposed family members to financial insecurity, abuse, physical danger, or violence, and even legal issues.
As the family tries to make sense of the fallout, each family member can take on different roles in response. Enabling an addict in the family can become center stage as someone may try to protect their loved one from addiction’s consequences. Other family members may choose to act out negatively to reclaim attention from the addicted family member. And still others may get left behind emotionally while the family spends most of their energy on the addicted loved one.
The Importance of Family in Addiction Recovery
We’re well aware at Defining Wellness that your loved one’s addiction may have resulted in some of the above consequences in the family. On the other hand, your experience could have looked entirely different. No matter what occurred prior to your loved one’s decision to enroll in a residential substance abuse treatment center, they’re now in recovery and making intentional efforts to maintain their sobriety. While a treatment center can certainly help them in this process, having family support in addiction recovery can pay substantial dividends, too.
When your loved one is in recovery and trying to re-enter the real world, they face a myriad of hurdles to maintaining their sobriety. In fact, relapse is a normal occurrence for many in recovery within that first year. However, your family can provide a natural, built-in support system that your loved one needs to stay the course. You know your loved one better than most, so you can help them find substance use recovery resources that fit their unique needs. And because you’re likely around them regularly, you can provide consistent accountability in helping them follow their aftercare and relapse prevention plan. With your support, your loved one is less likely to encounter relapse along their addiction recovery journey.
9 Family Strategies to Help Your Loved One in Substance Abuse Recovery
So as a family, how do you help someone with an addiction when they’re in recovery from it? While your loved one may have their own goals and plans to follow based on their outpatient substance abuse treatment and aftercare, you can still make a difference. After all, addiction recovery is a lifelong process, even after going through a residential treatment center. You don’t maintain sobriety without continued commitment, work, support, and goals. With that said, here some actionable strategies you can use as a family to provide emotional, practical, and moral support to your loved one in addiction recovery:
1. Help Set the Boundaries They Need (and You Need)
Setting boundaries is a really important aspect of your loved one’s long-term recovery. These boundaries protect them from compromising situations that could expose them to addiction triggers that lead to relapse. Because you know your loved one well, you can take part in helping them establish healthy boundaries in their daily life, as well as help other family members respect these boundaries, too. At the same time, it may be important for you to set boundaries for yourself, especially if you played the enabler role during your loved one’s addiction.
2. Prioritize Self-Care
Maintaining healthy recovery from addiction means that you’re making time for self-care in your daily life. Self-care activities like getting enough sleep, eating healthy, exercising, and taking time for rest can be critical to helping your loved one maintain the physical and mental health they need to stay sober. You can hold them accountable in maintaining their self-care practices, while also following their example and pursuing them for yourself.
3. Support Their Relapse Prevention Plan
Your loved one will likely create a relapse prevention plan during outpatient substance abuse treatment or aftercare. You can support your loved one by familiarizing yourself with this plan and helping them stick to it. Make it a point to learn their addiction triggers, healthy coping mechanisms they want to utilize, their long-term lifestyle goals, and other elements of the plan. And if they don’t have a plan in place, help them create it yourself.
4. Educate Yourself With Addiction Resources
When you see things from someone else’s point of view, you’re better able to understand and empathize with them. This is no different in addiction recovery. Make a commitment to educate yourself with addiction resources on the challenges of addiction, the stages of treatment, and the recovery process. Your education will better equip you to support your loved one during their recovery.
5. Be Encouraging and Non-Judgmental
Your loved one is in a vulnerable place during addiction recovery. They’ve already dealt with discouragement, shame, anxiety, and heartache during their addiction, and they’re trying to climb out of these prevailing feelings in recovery. That’s why it’s important for you to have a non-judgmental attitude towards them, as well as to provide constant encouragement. Recovery is already challenging, but your words of affirmation can keep them going in the right direction.
6. Help Out With Their Daily Needs
Your loved one has a lot on their plate in early recovery as they apply what they’ve learned in treatment while also adjusting back to their regular lives (or even making substantial changes). Because of this, consider lending them a helping hand from time to time with their daily responsibilities, whether it’s taking their kids to school, helping pick up groceries, cooking a meal or two, or giving them a ride somewhere. Your extra support can help ease their transition and keep anxiety or stress at bay.
7. Pursue Support Groups
While your family can provide invaluable support to your loved one during recovery, they also need support from their peers. Peer support can be especially helpful from those who’ve navigated addiction previously, which is why an addiction recovery group is so important to your loved one’s sobriety journey. As a family, you can be proactive in helping your loved one find and stay in an addiction support group. During this time, it’s also a good idea for you to join a family support group of your own so you can have space to process this journey, yourself.
8. Participate in a Family Addiction Recovery Program
Because family plays such an important role in recovery, many outpatient substance abuse programs offer additional programs for families to join. These family addiction recovery programs allow you both understand your loved one’s addiction better and equip you to bring about hope and change. Many of these groups also give you the opportunity to participate alongside your loved one in recovery. Together, you’re able to learn better communication skills, as well as participate in various therapies that promote healing within the family. Family programs may also provide family-specific support groups, workshops, and individual counseling.
9. Celebrate Small Wins and Milestones
While challenges can occur in addiction recovery, as your loved one progresses through their goals, they’ll also make progress in their sobriety. When this happens, be intentional about celebrating the small victories along their journey—and especially major recovery milestones. This not only encourages your loved one, it brings your family closer together.
Get the Support Your Family Needs at Defining Wellness
Addiction can be a trying time for your family and your loved one, but with the right professional support, you both can navigate the recovery journey well together. At Defining Wellness Centers in Mississippi, our family program empowers your family to heal and grow together through the addiction recovery process. If you’re ready to learn how to better support one another and create a healthier long-term family dynamic, contact our team today.
