Relationship Issues
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Relationships play an important role in addiction, both as contributing factors and as a part of the recovery process. Our interactions and bonds with one another are crucial for understanding and managing substance use problems.
The parent-child bond and other family dynamics can contribute to or play a protective role against substance use problems. Peer influence can affect drug-related decision making but is equally important when examining the way our friends and closest loved ones offer support during recovery. The intricacies of intimate and romantic relationships can contribute to addiction through codependence, emotional distress, and even violence, but can also play a vital role during recovery as emotional anchors and sources of comfort during treatment.
Examining and improving relationships during recovery can help forge crucial support systems, fix broken bonds, and address personal communication or trust issues that may stem from childhood trauma and other past experiences.
Relationship Issues and Addiction
No one exists within a vacuum. Every person is shaped through their experiences with others and the world around them, and while individual responsibility is crucial in all parts of life, it’s just as important to recognize and acknowledge how behaviors, thoughts, and actions are influenced by the intentional and unintentional actions of others.
Recognizing how our relationships with others can affect who we are is important. As is taking control where you can, ending relationships that are mutually harmful or destructive, and nurturing those that bring peace and wellbeing into your life.
Here at Coastwise, we spend time examining how a client’s past relationships might affect them today, and how they can improve their communication and relationship skills to forge healthier bonds in the present.
The relationships we have with our families are often the first meaningful relationships we form in life. Family dynamics can shape a person’s thoughts and behaviors, without them realizing it. Dysfunctional family dynamics can cause communication issues, trust issues, and create negative expectations for future relationships.
Addressing your family relationships during addiction recovery is often an important step towards improved social and mental wellbeing. Incorporating modalities such as Family Systems Therapy into the treatment process helps clients recognize and address communication problems, generational differences, and negative influences.
Our peers and friends may also play a role in substance abuse. The research on peer influence shows that social norms within cliques or groups, as well as direct and indirect pressure can affect a person’s attitudes towards drug use over time. There are limits to how indirect pressure and social norms affect a person’s pre-existing attitude towards drug use, but personal boundaries can be eroded by stress and time. This is especially true for teens and young adults, who are more likely than adults to take risks for the sake of popularity or their peers’ opinions.
How Addiction Strains Relationships
While relationships can affect addiction, addiction itself also affects our relationships with others. Over time, substance use encourages increasingly risky behavior to satisfy an addictive compulsion. This can erode people’s trust, and deeply affect relationships.
Drug use can also contribute to social isolation, further pushing people away. As friendships dwindle, feelings of loneliness and abandonment can set it, which makes it harder to get out from under the weight of an addiction.
Even among close friends, loved ones, and family members, relationships can become strained under the stresses of addiction, which can include financial and legal consequences, loss of employment, and the responsibility of assuming a caretaker role for someone with an addiction.
Incorporating Relationship Recovery into Addiction Recovery
The relationships we have with one another can affect addiction and are affected by addiction. But they also play a role in treatment and recovery.
Fostering positive relationships can improve a person’s self-esteem. Doing things for others can be a source of altruistic joy, and a positive force during treatment and recovery. Seeking and receiving forgiveness can help deal with deep-seated feelings of shame or resentment, which can help clients achieve an emotional clean slate.
Addressing and resolving negative family dynamics – and the underlying issues that fuel or perpetuate them – can break generational cycles of resentment and establish healthier rules of engagement and communication between family members, while emphasizing individual boundaries. It can also help people who have willingly distanced themselves from their families come to terms with the resentment they might still feel for their relatives and avoid carrying those negative feelings into present or future relationships, and potential new family bonds.
Addressing codependence during recovery helps those who might have a fragile self-esteem come into their own, focus on their personal development, and foster a healthier sense of self-respect as part of their recovery journey, improving their mental resilience.
Relationships can also be shaped by trauma. Lifelong expectations can be shaped by extreme circumstances or negative experiences, which can contribute to addiction. Addressing and resolving trauma during treatment and recovery is important to help realize healthier relationships with others.
Finally, while self-reliance is important, it’s just as crucial to recognize the role others play in our well-being, and the role we play in theirs. Recovery emphasizes helping one another and relying on others to help keep us accountable in times of distress.
Get Started with Us at Coastwise
Relationships play a pivotal role in addiction, both as contributing factors and integral components of the recovery journey. Addressing relationship issues during addiction recovery is crucial for fostering healthier bonds, fixing broken connections, and resolving past trauma that may influence present behaviors.
At Coastwise, we help our clients improve their relationships by incorporating modalities like Family Systems Therapy in our outpatient treatment plans.
By fostering positive relationships, seeking forgiveness, and resolving negative dynamics, individuals can break generational cycles of resentment and establish healthier connections, promoting mental resilience and well-being in the recovery process. Get in touch with us to find out more about our addiction treatment programs here at Coastwise.