Healing Together: Family-Focused Addiction Treatment Services

The complexity of addiction requires many seeking recovery to leave their comfort zone. Overcoming addiction requires many pieces to be put in place and carefully arranged in order for the process to begin to work and one of the pieces that often gets overlooked is the role our family, friends and community play in our recovery from alcohol and drugs.

When someone seeks help for addiction, a sign of early success will be that they have family or some type of close social support. Families that support their loved one’s rehab, aftercare and long-term recovery goals with healthy boundaries see massive impacts on the outcome of treatment.

A supporter is someone who is involved in someone’s recovery from drugs or alcohol, and they often come in different forms and play different but important roles. Close family, extended family, friends, colleagues, managers, employers, community and religious leaders to name only a few.

How do Family and Friends Support Someone in Recovery?

The most important way is supporting the change. A lot of changes will be happening as someone begins the recovery process, they will need an incredible amount of support to truly succeed. Change is hard, especially when rebuilding relationships, careers and health. The role of the family or friend support is twofold, relationship and practical.

The relationship role is to maintain a healthy relationship with appropriate boundaries that works for both the recovering person and their supporter.

The practical role is focused more on helping out with specific recovery related tasks. Examples would be taking a loved one to their recovery meetings, appointments, financial support or offering them housing in some form while they recover safely.

The relationship and practical roles of family and support come into every step of a recovering person's journey to change from identifying a problem to treatment and beyond.

Free resource Change: Recovery From Addiction to Alcohol or Drugs:

How Does Sobriety Foundation Help Families, Friends and Supporters?

We offer family counselling, family group sessions that are small in size deliberately as well as spousal counselling, but our main focus no matter the "tool" we use is to mend damaged relationships. This crucial part of recovery can often not be given the appropriate care and attention, which puts families and recovering individuals at risk of more hurt and pain in the future as well as putting someone in recovery at risk of relapse.

Trust, trauma, pain, enormous emotions, anger, resentment. These are just some of the factors that will affect how someone in recovery and their supporters interact. It's complex, difficult to navigate and requires everyone to get a voice and the opportunity to set their boundaries. Recovery isn't just hard on the individual, it affects absolutely everyone who is very close to them. This cannot be stressed enough, and that's why we integrate family, friends and support directly into our programs at Sobriety Foundation. Healing is not only for people in recovery, but for those who love them and suffer too.

Mending damaged relationships takes time and often professional care which we provide as part of our extended aftercare program that keeps us, our patient and their support network in close contact for over a year. There could be difficult times, good times and a mix between the two. The past will resurface, roadblocks will pop up and those in recovery have a good chance to falter here and there. With family, friends and supporters on board these become manageable, and at Sobriety we have the program, counselors and experience to bring everyone together and begin the healing process.