Family in the Healing Process
Family is heavily intertwined in the fight with addiction, which means it is extremely important for them to be engaged in the recovery from it. It’s not just about advocating for your loved one to get better, rather it’s about developing a healthy place for everyone affected by the disease to live and communicate well.
Addiction Effects on Family
Like a tornado through the family, addiction leaves a wake of wreckage and causes family members to endure frustrating hopelessness, resentment, anger, and a host of other painful emotions. Dysfunctional thoughts and behavior patterns evolve out of the disease caused chaos. Figuring out how to help the whole family heal as an addict progresses from early to long term recovery can be scary – ‘What do we say? What do we do? When do we do it?’’ However with guidance and willingness, the entire family can better position themselves to successfully promote their loved one’s recovery as well as their own healing.
Tough Love vs Support vs Enablement
Another example of an often found point of confusion for families is knowing ‘how to differentiate between recovery oriented tough love, support, and addiction perpetuating enablement’. Working with a professional who has successfully achieved long term sobriety and helped other recoverees and their families do the same can help you figure out the answer to questions like these. Family therapy benefits everyone by enabling them to better understand each other. It can help members learn the skills, actions, and thought processes needed to better cope with and accelerate recovery, both personally and collectively.
Doubling the Probability of Success with Family Participation
It’s true there are addicts who manage to recover without family support, but they are in the drastic minority and not the rule. Allowing your loved one to tow the road alone puts them at massive odds with actually making it in recovery. Research shows the lack of family participation drops a loved one’s chances of success by half. The disease of addiction is cunning, baffling, and powerful and the fight for recovery is an all-hands-on-deck man-the-battle-stations call to the whole family. It is literally a matter of life and death as addiction played out to its end leads only to misery, institutions, and death. The recovery journey is almost uniformly never smooth but the benefits far outweigh the effort required as they exponentially magnify each other over time.
Benefits of Family Involvement
In Lifeway, family involvement is heavily promoted as it dramatically increases a client’s chances of winning their fight for sobriety. Lifeway has found that focusing on working with family members complements a client’s recovery, helps create healthy boundaries, repairs relationships, exerts increased positive recovery pressure, and trains family members to utilize recovery resources as well as educates them on how to manage addiction crises including setting up families to successfully be the intervention of last resort.
Contact us for a Strategy Appointment and to learn how to best support your loved one’s journey to long term recovery.
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