What are the important steps loved ones can take to support someone’s recovery?
In a recent Ask Candace Live!, someone asked this question. I think it’s so important to help people who are in active addiction, who are wanting help and are ready for help. I think it’s also really important to support those of us who are in recovery. Even though recovery can be quite difficult because we’re no longer stoned and drunk and we have to actually face life, it’s still a much better option than being in active addiction. I know that for sure.
There are a lot of people in recovery now and they make the choice to stay there one day at a time. For families to support somebody to go into recovery, whether they’re your child, your partner, your sister, or your brother, if you’re doing anything to enable them to continue to stay in addiction, you have to stop doing that. If you’re not sure how to stop doing that or why you’re doing that or what else you can do instead, you need to reach out, and maybe do some inner work of your own to find out why you’re enabling. Often family members enable because they don’t like conflict and they don’t like what happens when they bring something up to an addict and the addict gets angry.
The addict knows that if they get angry, their loved one, or their family member will just go away. They get mileage from being angry. Family members have to learn how to deal with an addict’s anger. How do you deal with that? We teach that at Love with Boundaries. Think of it this way, if you want your addict to go to treatment, to learn about themselves and why they’re using addiction, and to do their inner work, it’s not fair to them to expect them to do it when you’re not willing to do it yourself.
If you’re enabling, why are you enabling? What’s that about for you? Why is it so hard for you not to do that? If there is addiction in the family, everybody is affected by that—not only the addict. Everybody needs to heal. What usually happens is that the family members need to make some changes themselves first before the addict is going to be willing to make healthier choices. Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. That’s one of my favourite quotes. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. Almost always, the family members need to change what they’re doing first for the addict to be willing to change.
If you have an addict in your life who isn’t ready to stop, isn’t ready for recovery, but you’re ready to see some change, you’re at your wit’s end, then reach out to learn how to change what you need to change so that the addict sits up and takes notice and says, Uh-oh, maybe this isn’t working for me anymore. That’s where we want to get to with an addict. If you keep enabling them, that won’t happen. If you get some help for yourself and start understanding what you’ve been doing and what you can do differently, that will help them.
Please don’t give up. If your addict is still here with us, please reach out for help because we can stop this. We really can. We’re doing it at Love With Boundaries.
