The Crucial Role of Family Support in Addiction Recovery

Mutual help groups are also widely available to aid family members of persons with SUD (e.g., Al-Anon), and a few studies based on member surveys have reported gains in member self-care (e.g., Timko et al., 2016). This area of recovery practice appears poised to host rigorous studies of family member service access and outcomes among families of youth with SUD. In some cases, youth with SUD exhibit minimal or no readiness to enter treatment, whereas family members are motivated to assist them in doing so.

You can’t control your family member’s life, but you may have leverage to keep them in treatment. This may include financial or legal assistance, a place for them to reside, or other means of support. While your family member is in treatment, you can do some work on your own to gain support, improve your coping skills, learn how to avoid enabling, and be better prepared overall when your loved one comes home from rehab.

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

The transition stage can be a complex ebb and flow during which the person using alcohol adapts to not drinking, and the family adjusts to the transition of living through the end of the drinking into the beginning of abstinence. You might be the one living with alcohol use disorder, but your behaviors and lifestyle may have shaped, and continue to shape, the lives of those closest to you. When you live with alcohol use disorder, positive outcomes often involve the entire family. The rescuer role is thus a common trap that family members fall into, dragging their loved one with them. While it’s tempting to think that by helping a loved one avoid the negative consequences of their actions, they’re helping the situation, rescuers are in fact pushing their loved one further away from the motivation to seek treatment.

• With the right therapy, you can resolve that pain and have the support you need in recovery.
• You and your close family members work hand-in-hand with a therapist to overcome past challenges.
• 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.
• This may be due to financial constraints, personal obligations at home, or sickness.
• He is advanced certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and is an EMDR Consultant.
• Aaron is an energetic and results driven marketing professional with the experience and qualifications to lead sales, marketing and business development activities.

They may be in denial, overlooking major problems that require professional intervention. They are also compensating for feeling empty and helpless themselves due to the dysfunctional family dynamic. Families often give everything of themselves to help get a loved one into treatment. There can be, however, a mix of relief and fear when that loved one actually admits to treatment. In the first phone call from the therapist or doctor, families are anxiously waiting for an update on the well-being and progress of their family members.

Clinical Family Assessment

People in recovery often receive a large morale boost when their families and friends are involved in their treatment. Such support is invaluable, but it must also remain healthy in its approach; supporting a loved one in rehab involves recognizing when unhelpful patterns may develop. These roles are not always clearly divided between individual https://ecosoberhouse.com/ family members. Often, one person assumes multiple roles (e.g., hero and enabler), or multiple family members may play a single role (e.g., children become the collective “scapegoat” in a family with an alcohol-dependent parent). Addiction recovery is a long and challenging journey that requires physical, emotional, and mental strength.

When confronted with addiction, clients and their families often engage in reinforced patterns of behavior, usually without any conscious knowledge that they are doing so. This phenomenon in families was described in the 1960s and 1970s by psychotherapist Virginia Satir and others, then adapted specifically to by psychotherapists Claudia Black and Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse in the 1980s. It is therefore of critical importance that family members recognize which roles they may be assuming. It ruptures trust and communication and can contribute to emotional instability, financial difficulties and lack of safety.

Family Support Services

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provides much research and information on best evidenced-based practices for substance use disorder treatment and family therapy. A key point to understand is that families are both affected and are affected by loved ones who struggle with SUDs. The family and/or friend system has its own personality, just as much as the individual members who are a part of the family. Individuals in active addiction usually are not fully aware of the damage they created and do not seek treatment until the consequences are too dire or urgent to be ignored. Families may need to serve as catalysts for convincing their loved one to seek treatment but may encounter significant resistance from an addicted person. Sometimes the family ecosystem has adapted so strongly to the unhealthy environment that families may not be aware of the extent of the problem.

• Despite seeing a loved one struggle, family members can and ideally do play a major role in the treatment process.
• Routine SU screening is recommended as a part of routine healthcare for all youth (Levy & Williams, 2016), and evidence suggests that youth-facing healthcare providers are increasingly adopting this practice (Levy et al., 2017).
• While you may not know exactly how to help a family member with addiction, there are plenty of ways you can support them.
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Arguably, DTC telehealth represents the great frontier for research on supporting family member self-care. Despite this abundance, little is known about which DTC RSS tele-resources produce measurable recovery benefits among persons with SUD (Ashford et al., 2020; Nesvåg & McKay, 2018), and still less about possible benefits to family member well-being. Whereas proliferation of such resources (e.g., drugfree.org) can be deemed a benefit in itself, their value would multiply to the degree they are proven effective. Two related behavioral interventions are primed to enhance youth MOUD services are family psychoeducation and shared decision-making. Family OUD education can provide structured information about OUD symptoms, disease course, impacts on multiple domains of functioning, individual differences, and MOUD practices.