3 Ways Cycles of Change Can Help Your Family Recover from Addiction

When people enter residential treatment for drug or alcohol addiction, they’re submerged in a caring, supportive environment. During rehab, they can learn about their disease, how it impacts their brain and body and what they can do to protect themselves against the threat of relapse.

While these are all important components of recovery, it’s vital that the family is not overlooked during the healing process. Family members of people struggling with addiction also need help recovering from emotional stress, learning how to help their loved one deal with addiction and reopening the lines of communication.

Here are some of the ways Cycles of Change works to heal families in recovery:

1. Recovery from Emotional Distress

Anger, anxiety, fear, helplessness, stress. These are all valid feelings that can be experienced by family members of someone caught in the destructive cycle of addiction. Their households are often impacted with financial issues stemming from property damage, legal trouble and hospital bills.

However, hostility and repressed anger can continue to wreak havoc even after their loved one recovers. Cycles of Change’s compassionate counseling team can help you with processing and recovering from this emotional distress-promoting healing within the family and helping your loved one’s sobriety stay on track.

2. Education Around Your Loved One’s Addiction

Addiction is a chronic disease with many underlying causes. No one would willingly choose to suffer the devastating consequences of this disease, including your loved one.

Perhaps it started with seemingly harmless experimentation. Or maybe a friend offered your loved one some left over prescription medication to help with a nagging injury. This first time provided such a positive feeling that it turned into a second time, then a third.

Before your loved one knew it, their body had built a tolerance to their drug of choice and are now taking it in higher doses to get the same effects as the first time.

At Cycles of Change, we help you understand the slippery slope of addiction and what your loved one has gone through. This knowledge can help you also heal and learn ways to positively impact your loved one’s recovery.

3. Re-establish Healthy Communication in the Family

When your loved one is struggling with addiction, you have difficulty understanding one another. The blame game starts and supporting each other becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Cycles of Change teaches family members how to communicate in healthier ways. When you can share your needs, wants and appreciation with each other, your relationship has the opportunity to grow stronger. Empathy is vital. To keep growing in recovery, you need to stop providing evidence to show who is at fault and start offering solutions to problematic situations. Remember: how you talk to someone reflects how you feel about him or her, and it sets the tone for a response.

Recovering Through Family Therapy at Cycles of Change

At Cycles of Change, we have helped countless families overcome addiction and grow closer because of it. Our entire staff – from the CEO to our therapists and counselors – care deeply about healing families like yours struggling with addiction.

When you’re considering options for rehab from heroin, alcohol, opioids or other drugs, ask about the family therapy component of each program. If you have any questions about our programs or about staging an intervention for your loved one, contact us today for a confidential conversation.