At some point in your life, you may have to help a family member through some sort of addiction recovery. This can be an extremely tense time in your life, especially if you have not familiarized yourself with addiction in the past. It’s a fairly complicated topic, and there are typically no simple or easy solutions to some of the situations that can occur.
That said, some of the best things that you can do in order to help family members through this process include doing your research about what addiction is, understanding habits in general, reading about success stories from other addicts, and making sure that you never give up. Moving through the recovery process can be put on a truly extended timeline, but that doesn’t mean you should lose patience.
Do Your Research
Learning about addiction is at the core of beating it. The more you do your research, and the more people you talk to, the better your chances are that you’ll come across the right type of treatment and recovery options for your specific family member. There are probably a lot of different ways and methods that won’t work, but it’s up to you to find the one that will finally get through in the appropriate manner.
Understand Habits
One thing that is very central to the life of an addict is habits. Which means you, as a loving family member, need to research what habits are. You’ll find that a lot of statistics point to the fact that you can’t just get rid of habits. You have to replace them. So that means you have to talk to your addicted family member about what potential solutions you can find for habits in terms of replacement rather than just getting rid of something completely.
Read About Success Stories
When you start reading success stories from addicts, you will notice a lot of very common themes. If you figure out how to relate those common themes to what your family members going through, that will lead to a very direct line of communication for positive results. You aren’t necessarily going to find something exactly like what you’re dealing with, but even finding something that’s close enough might give you that extra edge when it comes to conquering a potentially destructive addiction.
Don’t Give Up!
No matter what, especially as a family member, you can’t give up on your addicted brother, sister, parent, or relative. It may seem like a hopeless case, but if you communicate that in any way, the person that you are trying to help is going to pick up on it. You have to make this a long-term, forever-lasting goal, and that way nothing that you do will come across as judgmental or hopeless from the perspective of the addict in question.
