Today, millions of people struggle with addiction and substance misuse. Is your family member one of these individuals? We know how troubling this could be. Because addiction doesn’t only affect the person struggling with it, it affects everyone in the family.
You might have gone great lengths to enrol your loved ones in a treatment program, but never think that is sufficient. Alongside this treatment program, you will need to understand addiction quite well so that you can give your loved ones tremendous support and care for your health.
Below are ten outstanding tips you can master so you can help your loved ones with, and ultimately help you provide support and love that the addicted person needs to heal.
10 Tips to Help Your Loved Ones With Addiction
1. Learn all You Can about Addiction: One of the great tools here is education. It can help you avert that blame game that most people are guilty of today. It guides you from thinking that the addiction stems from stubbornness, weakness, and willfulness. With excellent knowledge, you can understand that it all began within the brain. Knowing that the act isn’t a choice could relieve you from resentment and anger toward the addicted.
There are abundant online resources on the internet where you can help your loved one learn about addiction. In the bookstore, you can also lay your hands on a great selection of books that centers on the chemistry of addiction and the science that governs the addiction treatment.
The vast array of knowledge will boost your sense of hope, and as you notice tremendous advancement, you can be more convinced that you will eventually win over the addiction.
2. Get in Touch With Personal Joy: Each person in the family must be responsible for their moments of joy. This means that each member must get to do something that will be highly fulfilling and relaxing.
Some of these include: Crafting, taking nature photographs, gardening, and volunteering jobs. These and many of these activities will instill responsibility and happiness in the hearts of participants, and help boost mental health.
3. Build Connections With Reasonable Peers: Living with or supporting someone that has an addiction isn’t easy. Research has proven that it leads to a stressful life that wouldn’t last for a few months, but years. And this long-term dysfunction will, in turn, lead to poor communication within family members. There is more; there could also be the existence of mistrust between family members. As a result, connecting with reasonable peers will be a great approach.
When you use a trusted program, you would be helped as a family of the addicted. They additionally provide a nonjudgmental and safe space where learning can be done by family members and cope well with the addiction that exists within them.
4. Advocate and Educate: The world is filled with lots of misinformation about addiction. So, each time you hear a wrong conclusion about addiction, try all you could to educate and advocate the right thing. This will help them stay positive, even if it is a hard thing to do. Share all the knowledge you have acquired from various sessions you have attended with them.
5. Embrace Family Therapy Sessions: Families of addicted people often absorb the consequences of their loved one’s actions. For some, they have great difficulty talking openly regarding the addiction that’s negatively impacting their life. For those who are tired of fighting their loved ones, they tend to become distant. And in fact, they blame themselves when the addiction fails to halt or, in extreme cases, blame the addicted person.
By subscribing to a family therapy program, you will be able to break down guilt and distrust by allowing each one in the family to be heard.
It can also help family members to understand each other and healthily resolve conflict. It helps them to transition effectively from a tight-knit to honest communication and reasonable boundaries.
6. Regular Exercise is Paramount: Getting regular exercise is entirely personal. You could start the day with just a brisk walk, or if you have the time, you’ll end each day with a few laps in the swimming pool. These activities will deliver considerable exercise.
It has been proven that exercise does have the ability to limit depression and stress. Each time you stretch your muscle, it releases pleasure chemicals known as oxytocin and dopamine.
7. Prepare and Eat Meal Together as a Family: Understandably, the chaotic modern world that we live in has necessitated that many families eat separately. It’s quite easy for one of the family members to grab a burger while another one gleans on a salad at work, and for the kids, they just get their hands on ready-made foods they found in the freezer.
Incorporating family meals allows everyone to reconnect at the end of a stressful, boring, and perhaps, bitter day. Each meal eaten together is a help in building over the network that’s done in the family therapy and creates a sense of togetherness and common ground.
8. Organize Private Therapy Sessions: A safe place meant for the stressed family to work through issues and talk things out is a private therapy.
These sessions embrace a skills-based pattern. And this allows caregivers to learn the best ways to handle destructive habits and thoughts that have developed for long years. They will learn how best to carry out meditation and handle stress excellently. So, never hesitate to join in these sessions if you find one in your territory.
9. Manage Expectations Well: The moment an addicted person in the family enters into the recovery process, families are thrilled, and their sense of hope is ignited. And within a while, the addiction will be solved, and things return to their initial way.
But sadly, it could take a considerable amount of time for patterns and behaviors linked to the addiction to be solved. An addicted person could become frustrated leading to a relapse. In the event of a decline, it can be disturbing.
However, you should be reminded that a relapse doesn’t translate to failure for either you or your loved one. Since addiction is a chronic disease, the decline is quite a part of the recovery process.
As a result, it’s reasonable to understand that recovery is a lifelong event and never a single event. So, learn to manage expectations. Understand that even if things aren’t in its perfect shape, with more work together, they will be.
10. Stay Glue to Formal wake and Sleep Schedule: Some harmful, dangerous addictions could trigger in the middle of the night. Thus, it’s vital that those with addictions could get into some situations that family members would have to deal with.
That’s why many families struggle with sleep during the recovery process. There is a part of their brain that’s waiting for the next trigger at night. So, you need to let them sleep to feel their best, and you can assist them when they need to be mentally and physically refreshed. Thus, only a regular sleep schedule that’s fixed will assist the brain in obtaining quality sleep.
As a family member to an addicted person, it is no gainsaying that you can walk through this recovery process. There are great support systems you can use. Coupled with that support, you can enjoy being a great help. Remember, when you support your family, you are contributing to their recovery process.
