While drug and alcohol abusers are tearing their lives apart with drugs or alcohol, there are usually others who are getting hurt. We call that the collateral damage that comes from substance abuse. Unfortunately, the ones who tend to get hurt the most are the addiction sufferer’s family and friends. Addiction is like a tornado. It simply tears down anything in its path.
Have you gotten yourself caught up in the cycle of addiction? If so, you might want to take a minute and look around you. Can you see the devastation your substance abuse has caused to the lives of people around you? Have your family and friends been adversely affected by your addictive behavior? There will come a time when you have to make a decision about your substance abuse. Your decision will involve two choices.
You will have to decide between continuing on the path of destruction until you hit rock bottom, or you might want to consider admitting you have a serious problem and then reaching out for help. If you make the decision to seek help, that’s very good news. While you are in the process of looking for a drug rehab that can help you, a rehab like ours, you might want to contemplate using your time in rehab to deal with your collateral damage. In a lot of addiction treatment facilities, there are therapy programs for family and friends.
About Family Therapy
While most of the work you would do in rehab would focus on you as an individual, family therapy could certainly be included in the treatment mix. You might consider it mandatory if you believe you have done significant damage to your relationships with important family members. If you are not sure about how your family has been affected by your substance abuse, here are a few ways you might have affected them:
- Stole money from them to support your addiction
- Turned them into codependent family members trying to appease you by supporting your addiction
- Forced them to turn away from you
- Embarrassed them in public with illicit or troubled behavior
If any of this seems familiar, you have likely done significant harm to the family unit. That’s your cue that it might be a good idea to try to make amends wherever possible. A local rehab like ours can help you make those amends through family therapy. Sometimes, all it takes to fix things is the addiction sufferer taking the time to sit down face to face to talk things out. This opportunity would be of real importance if family relationships are one of the root causes of your addiction. At some point, you would have to deal with an issue like that if you had any desire for a full recovery. Here are two things a family therapy program at a local rehab can do for your family relationships.
Teach Your Family the Truh About Your Addiction
It’s reasonable to believe that many of your key family members simply don’t understand your addiction and how it has been affecting you. They can gain that knowledge by sitting down with you and your therapist to have an open and honest discussion about your addiction and how it has changed you. This would be of particular importance to family members who have become codependent. It would help them better understand why supporting your addictive behavior does more harm than good.
Chance to Make Amends
Family therapy would be your best chance to make amends to family members you have harmed. By seeing the effort you are making to turn things around, they might be motivated to listen and perhaps forgive you for your transgressions. For you, that would be the best result. Why? You will need the support of your family throughout and after the treatment process. With them standing by your side as a support resource, it increases the chances you will be able to avoid relapses in the future. We hope this information helps you see the value of family therapy.
We also hope it motivates you to come in for treatment to fix your personal problems and family relationships. You can get yourself going down the road to recovery by calling one of our staff members at 833-497-3808. Our staff members are available 24/7, and they would be more than happy to give you information about our facility and addiction treatment options.