Don’t wait

Families find themselves in the terrible position of believing they need to wait for the person struggling with addiction to find recovery before they can heal. That leads to exhaustion, frustration, and resentment and can negatively impact your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. The reality is, a family can choose to recover as soon as they are willing.

Watching someone you love disappear into the disease of addiction is exhausting, terrifying, and traumatic. Families make desperate attempts to get their loved ones sober, which is not effective - and not because they’re not trying hard enough, not doing the ‘right’ things, or don’t love them desperately. It is not effective because we can all only do our own work. Your loved one with substance use disorder will either make the decision to change or not - but YOU can.

Choosing to educate yourself, identify, set, and honor appropriate boundaries, practice intentional self-care, and seek community and support can allow your family to function in a more healthy way and preserve relationships so that if an when your loved one becomes willing to do the work to recover, there is a family to come back to.