What Does Family Therapy Achieve?
When someone in your family is addicted to a substance, suffers from a mental illness, or is otherwise unwell, it leaves marks on the whole family. Stress, trauma, changes in patterns, lapses in judgement, increases in negative emotions, and similar abound. When you go into recovery, those scars don’t just go away. They stay and they negatively impact the family, how the family interacts, and how the family support each other. This not only negatively affects the addicted person’s ability to recover but also puts everyone else at a greater risk of mental illness and developing a substance use disorder themselves. Timely family therapy can help to root out those issues, preventing significant and long-lasting damage.
Understanding – Family therapy, especially that delivered during treatment, helps families to understand addiction. That obviously results in a better understanding of what happened, a better ability to forgive, and a better way to move forward.
Improved Relationships – Family therapy works to help families recognize and move past barriers, to set boundaries, and to therefore improve the full family dynamic. That might be identifying enabling behaviors. It might also be identifying points of stress or tension, of identifying negative behavior patterns that lead to arguments, or to help each person understand the other’s communication methods. The idea is to ensure that everyone understands what the other has gone through and how they feel about it, how the other communicates and from what basis, and which behaviors of their own are contributing to hurt and unhappiness.
Parenting – Family therapy is especially important if you have young kids. That’s important even if you have a spouse who has had no issues. Having one member of the family addicted to a substance greatly increases levels of stress, which reduces quality of parenting from both parents. Family therapy can help kids to understand problems and to come to terms with them, can improve parenting, and can improve parental management – so that everyone involved is happier and less stressed. In one study, family therapy was also shown to catch co-occurring disorders and developing anxiety in children significantly earlier than in families that did not seek it – allowing those children to get treatment.
Most families are resistant to family therapy, especially parents. “It’s not me with the problem”. But, likely, it is. Substance use disorder builds stress, trauma, and maladaptive patterns. If your loved one stopped taking care of their responsibilities and you had to pick them up, you have behavioral problems to work through and recover from. If your spouse was violent or frequently blacked out, you have trauma to work through. If your parent suddenly became distant and more interested in drugs or alcohol, you have trauma to work through. And, many families respond to substance abuse by withdrawing, by becoming antagonistic, and by arguing with the person with a substance use disorder. That’s fair, even though you can’t argue with someone who is irrational, but those patterns extend well past when the addiction stops.
Rebuilding Family Ties
Organizations like SAMHSA list family therapy as one of the single most important steps you can take following an addiction. That recommendation is based on data that shows families that get therapy are more stable, less likely to develop their own disorders, and less likely to become addicted themselves. That’s especially true when children are involved, because children are extremely vulnerable to substance use disorders. Getting help can move a child out of the path of early substance abuse, emotional management problems, and self-esteem issues by resolving dysfunctional patterns.
While no family therapy can ever rebuild your family as it was, it will help you to recover. It will help your family to recover. And, that’s an essential part of recovery in the modern sense of “building a life where you can be happy without drugs or alcohol”.
Substance abuse is incredibly harmful to everyone around the abuser. Family therapy helps you to tackle that harm and to take steps to recover from it, so that you and your family can be happy.
