Individuals overcoming substance use disorders and mental health challenges often benefit from restructuring their lives or working to build a scaffold of support. This support system is necessary even as they continue to maintain their progress post-treatment and transition into the life they want to lead. Family support in recovery is an essential element of this process, and healthy family involvement has been shown to impact long-term recovery outcomes. Family does not need to be related by blood; those with supportive individuals in their lives, whether friends, family members, or community, can find more sustained wellness over time.
Family and other support members are not passive observers in a person’s recovery. They can promote accountability, emotional stability, treatment engagement, relapse prevention, and more. As you consider your own recovery journey, be sure not to neglect how supportive relationships can strengthen your recovery efforts, improve communication, and rebuild trust that sets you up for success.
Key Takeaways
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What Mental Healthcare Treatment Can Look Like
If you are seeking treatment for your own mental wellness, such as to combat substance use challenges, your healthcare strategy should be personalized to you and your specific situation. For many people, this involves a combination of group therapy and personal work through options such as cognitive behavioral therapy. However, numerous therapy modalities may be useful. These include the following:
CBT
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is the most common first step in family therapy and recovery from mental health symptoms and substance use disorders. It focuses on challenging existing thought patterns. For instance, stress can be a common trigger for a person who has struggled with alcohol use in the past. Suppose that they have a stressful day at work and are scolded by their boss.
This experience prompts a negative thought: “I can’t do anything right.” Because this thought creates feelings of anxiety and worthlessness, they may go to a bar or drink at home to ease the feelings.
Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches you how to restructure these thoughts. Instead of “I can’t do anything right,” you might try “I made a mistake, but I’ve learned something from it.” This is not lying to yourself; it is viewing the same situation from a different angle.
Dialectical behavior therapy
Participants in a recovery program may participate in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), either on its own or as part of a broader spectrum of treatment approaches. DBT targets emotional dysregulation and identifies the traumas that may be driving your addictive behaviors.
Patients who participate in DBT learn that their substance use is not a personal failing. Rather, it is a challenge that can be overcome through both in-the-moment decisions and a more proactive approach to one’s foundational beliefs and behaviors. DBT teaches distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotional regulation, and more.
EMDR
Those who have experienced trauma can benefit from EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. By talking while following the therapist’s eye movement tasks, you can help your brain process traumatic memories that could be pushing you toward the desire to use substances.
Long-Term Recovery Outcomes for Individuals Seeking Treatment
Studies have repeatedly indicated that when families are actively involved in a person’s addiction recovery process, the individual sees a more consistent level of success that extends further into the future. Family involvement in addiction recovery improves a person’s likelihood of continuing to attend care, decreases the risk of relapse, and reduces the frequency of cravings, including over longer periods such as one year and 18 months.
How Family Support Influences Outcomes
No matter which approach (or combination of approaches) your therapy professional recommends for your treatment, your support network is an integral element of your future. Your family’s role in your treatment success includes everything from providing you with a place to speak when you do not want to be alone to offering early intervention when you may be at risk of a relapse.
Some of the many ways your family can assist you as you work through your mental health treatment include:
Accountability
For many, recovery support systems include numerous resources for learning new skills or reframing their thought processes, but they lack accountability. Having someone to whom you are accountable offers motivation for success and helps to minimize the risk of relapse. Accountability systems have been shown to decrease the risk of relapse by as much as 40% to 60%.
Emotional stability
Emotional support during recovery is one of the most irreplaceable benefits of a strong communal system. Recovery can bring fluctuations in mood, resilience, stress, and more. By maintaining a scaffold of emotional behaviors that can serve as a metric for stabilization and consistency, you have a yardstick for regulating your own responses. Additionally, communicating with others and preventing isolation can keep your moods more predictable and help you move toward joy and purpose rather than feeling stalled.
Treatment engagement
Those with a strong support system are more likely to continue participating in their treatments, including group therapy and regular meetings with their individual therapists for CBT and other recommended approaches. They are also more likely to follow through on work outside those scenarios, such as journaling and active coping skills, when in the presence of their support system.
Relapse prevention support
As mentioned previously, those who have family members or friends behind them during treatment are less likely to relapse, and this benefit continues long after the initial treatment frequency decreases. If relapses occur, they are typically brief, and the individual can rebound more quickly and with longer-lasting success because of the family support. Substance abuse recovery support can mean different things to different patients, but many forms of help result in positive outcomes.
Early intervention
Should you struggle to manage your cravings, your support network can be an invaluable resource for early intervention. Whether they notice a change in your behavior or habits and take action, or they make themselves available to you for a conversation if you notice that you are relapsing, they can prompt a fast response that gets you back on track sooner.
Connections
Just as maintaining family and community support is a predictor of greater success in recovery on average, those who are isolated tend to have a more inconsistent experience. They may struggle with relapse or miss their mental health treatments more often, not just because they do not have people to help keep them accountable and excited about progress, but because isolation can lead to depression or antisocial personality that makes getting out of bed difficult.
What Family Can Do to Help
If you are a family member or friend of someone currently pursuing recovery through substance use treatment and mental healthcare, you can play an essential role in providing the support they need. Some of the ways you can help include:
- Being available to talk, especially about non-addiction topics
- Offering to drive the person to their treatments
- Creating a recurring commitment, such as lunch on a specific day of the week, to encourage socializing and emotional connection
- Being honest when you think something might be wrong (e.g., signs pointing toward relapse)
- Modeling healthy habits, such as removing substances (e.g., alcohol) from the home
While you are a valuable part of a person’s recovery journey, you must take care of yourself as well. Family members can sometimes devote themselves so intently to their loved one’s success that they compromise their own wellness. Aim for support, not enabling; do not take on tasks that they should handle on their own or lie on their behalf. Set healthy boundaries so that you are not solely responsible for them. For example, it is wonderful for them to have someone to call. But if they are calling at all hours of the day and night consistently, setting boundaries can be healthy while allowing them to find multi-modal support to fill these needs.
Family therapy is another option, both with and without the recovering individual. Attending together can help keep everyone on the same page about the relationship and boundaries (and assist with setting them if necessary). Scheduling appointments alone allows you to discuss the effects on your own life and helps you make sure you are being a supporter without sacrificing your own wellness.
Seek Addiction Recovery Services to Take the First Step
As you consider your path forward through addiction, understand that you do not have to approach this task alone. Friends, family, and community support can make a difference, and if you do not yet have a supportive scaffold to hold you during treatment, it is not too late to build one. Contact Aquila Recovery Clinic to learn more about substance use recovery and to schedule an appointment. We want to help you achieve long-term success!