Important Ways Families Play a Role in Addiction Recovery
Recovery is a hard road when you have an addiction, and because of this, you have to realize that what you do affects everyone in the family, not just you. But what you also probably don’t realize is that family plays an important road in a successful recovery as well, because they need to do their part in being completely supportive. In this post, we’re going to discuss some of those roles that family can play to help you succeed in recovery.
The Intervention
Family plays an important role from start to finish, and a lot of times, a person may need some sort of intervention. When it comes to someone who needs to recover from their addiction, the family needs to be supportive and understanding.
A lot of times we hear of “intervention” as a pretty much pity party for the person having the problem and a sort of family meeting. This doesn’t have to happen the cliché way at all. As a matter of fact, an intervention can be as simple as just talking and figuring out what to do.
Going to Rehab Doesn’t Cure Everything
If you go to a treatment facility, you’re not going to come out cured if you don’t have a solid backbone of support. That being said, you need someone who can understand just what you’re going through (even if they’re not going through it themselves). Your family needs to understand that you’re going to need a lot more help than just staying away from your addiction.
You’ll need help regaining trust in people, take care of your health problems, get or resume employment, as well as get you help to reduce your financial stress as much as possible, which are often triggers for relapse. At the same time, you need to do your part and let them help you, and stay away from the “bad seeds” that you may have been used to hanging around, and your family can help you with that too.
How to Help Your Family Member Cope
Your family member is going through a large amount of emotional stress when you’re in recovery too, so you can’t forget that. A lot of times, when you have risks for relapse, they’re going to stress and worry that you’re going to slip up constantly.
You aren’t the only one that’s going to have trust issues, and if you broke their trust in any way, shape, or form, you’re not going to get instant results overnight, just like you won’t trust people overnight as well. Try to not argue as much as possible, and if you need help communicating, be sure to seek out support groups, as well as maybe seeing a counselor that can help you mitigate conversations and proper communication with your family.
Conclusion
Recovery doesn’t have to necessarily mean a 12 step program and rehab is all you need. In this guide, we covered how your family and friends have to do their part too. You may have friends who aren’t in your previous circle of bad influences that can also help you stay away from the things you’ve been addicted to.
You need to surround yourself with those people and work together, because just like what you do affects them, everything they do can affect you as well.
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About Christian Reynolds
Christian is the chief reporter, editor, and webmaster at Cleveland Leader. An aspiring news anchor, his hobbies outside of investigative reporting are golf, martinis, and adventure travel. If you have a scoop on any developing story, please contact him on this page.
