Our Family Programming includes individual and group counseling, family therapy, and educational seminars designed to help you and your family heal together. Our curriculum incorporates the 4 pillars for both families and our patients:
CONNECTION: Addiction is a disease that wants you and your family to isolate from one another. Addiction causes the person to pull away from everyone, while families push their loved one away.
What can you do? Set up safe boundaries to keep your family close while everyone works through the recovery process. Ask yourself, either as a family member or person struggling with addiction:
- How can I stay connected even when I need to create my own safe space?
- How can I stay connected but also say, this is what I need from you?
We help you figure out these answers through connection. When you’re connected to someone, you end up seeing their side. We identify the support needed, while recognizing that both the family and the patient need their own kind of support.
HEALING: Families often blame themselves for their loved one’s disease, while the person struggling with addiction blames themselves. As a response, everyone is angry with everyone. Parents have shame from not saying something sooner or raising their son/daughter a different way. The loved one feels shame for not being able to beat this disease.
Part of healing is recognizing the humility behind the disease of addiction. If you can understand this is a disease, it takes away the stigma, the guilt, and the shame, and replaces it with empathy. Once you do this, your loved one will know you’re there for them and how much you love them. Patients need their families to understand the disease because they’ve carried so much shame for having it.
KNOWLEDGE: Understanding the behaviors of addiction and the impact they have is key, because education is everything. When you know better, you do better. Education gets rid of anger. We’re trying to teach this, because often, even if the person has some buy-in, they don’t fully accept, understand, or acknowledge that addiction is a disease.
When families and support systems are involved and understand addiction being a disease, it allows the patients to stop focusing on blaming themselves and instead focus on reaching long-term recovery.
HOPE: You can be angry and still have hope that things will change or get better, hope is the beginning of recovery. The disease wants you to let go of hope, but we can’t let that happen. A patient has to have hope to get to recovery.
It’s the most important piece of having families together – none of us can get through life alone. As a family member or patient, you can be scared but still believe there’s hope. Families try to find hope by disconnecting from their loved one, while the loved one tries to isolate himself to find hope, but you can find hope here together.
