When addiction runs in our families, or when we fear addiction might develop in our children, we instinctively want to protect them and safeguard them from harm. We want to do everything in our power to keep the addiction from developing, or if it has already appeared, worsening and further overtaking their lives. When we’re […]
Category: Family
Unconditional Love vs. Enabling
Confronting our children’s addiction is one of the hardest things we’ll ever have to do. We want what’s best for them. We want them to be happy, healthy and whole. Learning they are struggling with addiction can be shocking, troubling and heartbreaking. Our instinct is to want to protect them and to lessen their burdens. […]
Supporting Our Children’s Healing Without Enabling Them
When our loved ones are suffering, our instinct is to protect them and shield them from harm. We want to take away their pain and prevent them from experiencing yet more suffering. Our intentions are to support our children, but we can fall into patterns of enabling them instead. We enable other people’s addictions in […]
Mindful Listening to Support Our Children
Confronting addiction in our families can be a grueling and painful process, full of unforeseen mental and emotional challenges. We can feel as though we’ve let our children down and can therefore be filled with shame and regret. We can find ourselves analyzing all of the mistakes we might have made, all of the ways […]
Family Therapy in Recovery
Family therapy is one of the best tools we can use to help ourselves when a loved one is struggling with addiction. Working with a therapist as a family can help us at various stages in the addiction and recovery process: when we feel we need an intervention, planning and executing the intervention, supporting each […]
Planning an Intervention
When we have a loved one struggling with addiction, it can be extremely painful to watch them suffer. For many of us, we feel compelled to stage an intervention to try to convince them to get help. Confronting someone on such a sensitive issue as addiction can become contentious. Emotions are high, and a lot […]
How Can We Heal from Addiction as a Family?
When one of more of our family members is struggling with addiction, we are all affected and the negative impacts extend to all of us. We perpetuate toxic patterns of enabling, denying and exacerbating each other’s addictions. We are all hurt by the negative consequences, the arrests, accidents, abuse and self-harm. To feed our addiction, […]
How is Addiction a Family Disease?
Addiction is sometimes referred to as a family disease because it affects everyone in the addict’s life and also because underlying issues and contributing factors are often shared among family members. How does addiction function as a family disease? For some families, addiction is genetic, and we pass the traits onto our children. Families with […]
The Holiday Help Guide For Those Struggling & Their Loved Ones
The holidays are well-known in the recovery community as a challenging time of year for maintaining sobriety. Between the stresses of being busy and social, and the prevalence of mind-altering substances at big holiday gatherings, the temptation to turn to drugs or alcohol to is usually higher than it is at less hectic times of […]
How is Family Involvement Beneficial to our Recovery?
At Riverside Recovery, we know how important family involvement is to the success of your recovery. To this end, we offer weekly family therapy sessions as well as monthly family workshops. Our goal is to help educate families on the nature of addiction and on ways in which they can help their loved ones, as […]