Loving Someone in Recovery

Loving Someone in Recovery

A relationship conflict is a common thing with addicts. Hate rate, loss of trust, blame, emotional blackmailing, manipulative behaviour, aggression, and verbal abuse can be clearly seen in the family members & addicts. Even though the addict comes in to recovery, most of the families find it difficult to love someone in recovery. 

It’s difficult to forget the hurts given by the addict.

I would like to share my view on the same as family member of a recovering addict. I hope these suggestions will help everyone to make this journey easy.

1.     Living in Today:  Being anxious about relapse & slips doesn’t allow us to appreciate the recovering person’s today’s efforts to be clean. Many times sticking to the past memories of addiction life; make us biased & close minded. Thinking about today makes the life easy & focused.  

 

2.     Being clear about our stand: As addiction is known as relapse prone disease. It’s always better to have a backup plan for handling slip & relapse. Conditioning is the key of preserving the changes.

3.     Looking at a whole picture: Sometimes we just magnify current use & damages. It’s important to be solution orientated. It’s unfair to be selective focus on relapse or recovery. Think about the whole picture even in the good days.

4.     Understanding the disease: we can’t deny the fact that disease in nature is relapse prone. Remember your patient is not unique, he has a equal chance of being clean & the same time facing relapse. You can help the patient by providing motivating him, reminding him for follow ups or giving him feedbacks about his mood swings, reactions & emotions.  

5.     Enabling vs. Helping: If you want to help your loved once who are suffering with addiction then you should decide the right mode of help. Sometimes we become emotional & we try and hide the slip or relapse. Denying the fact just aggravates the disease. We need to think logically & should focus on long term benefit of client. Any action of yours should not directly or indirectly help the client to continue the substance use. Sometimes being hard or not listing to addict will help them to come in to recovery.

6.     We are also recovering: Going in to self pity, giving up hopes will not solve the problem. Despite of the failure or success of the recovering addict we should access & think about our own recovery also. Trying to control the addict, blaming the destiny, neglecting own health, neglecting children’s need & being preoccupied about relapse will adversely affect your mental health. Take help & attend al-non meeting for yourself. Take therapeutic help & learn positive coping mechanisms.