Addiction touches the lives of millions of people, and you may find that you need to jump into a supportive role for someone in your life who is battling addiction. If that is the place that you find yourself in, then you need to know what you can do to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment. There are specific steps that you can take, and there are things that you ought to focus on doing to make sure you are doing everything that you can to support your loved one.
Listen to what the Treatment Center Says
The alcohol treatment center will provide you with plenty of information about what you need to know to best support the people in your life who are going through something like this. They will gladly make it clear what steps you need to take to get those people the support that they require. You should take note of what they have to say to you. The reason being because they are the experts on how to take care of situations like this. They can help you as the supporter of someone who has gone through treatment to provide the kind of assistance that someone needs when they are emerging from the treatment center.
Stay in Constant Communication with Your Loved One
You should focus on the telecommunications that are used to stay in touch with the loved one that you care about. If you want to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment, you should try to keep them in constant communication with you so that they know that they have a supporter in their corner who will always offer them support when they need it. It might seem like a lot of work on the front end, but just staying in touch with someone going through recovery is a very important factor.
There are a lot of people going through recovery who express the idea that they feel very alone when they are going through this process. They do their best to try to make it through their addiction, but they still struggle with many aspects of their recovery, and they might not do well if someone isn’t there for them. This is why you should try to stay in constant communication so they know that you are there for them.
Legal Assistance Might be Necessary
It is a scary world in the world of an addict at times. This means that you might need to look at getting them an accident lawyer to help with some legal matters that they are going through. Believe it or not, to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment, you might first need to be sure that they have their legal matters put behind them.
You can help them find an accident attorney that is able to work on their case for them.
Be very clear with your loved one that you are not helping them get this legal assistance so they can avoid the consequences of their actions. Rather, you are getting them legal help so that they must face the consequences of those actions. This is to say that you need them to get a lawyer so they can accept responsibility for their actions. That is what can happen when you help them get the assistance that they need, but that you will only do so if they are ready to accept their responsibility for their actions.
Visit With a Difficult Past
Sometimes, one of the ways that you can help a loved one returning from addiction treatment is to help them face difficult parts of their life. This might mean revisiting things that are very challenging for them to deal with. It might also means that you take them to do something like looking at the headstones of people who have passed away. Visiting those areas might be a way for someone who is trying to recover from their addiction to face the realities that might have had them driven to addiction in the first place.
You need to be extremely careful when doing this because you don’t want to set the addict back at all. It is likely to be psychologically difficult for them to face some of those old memories, so you should only do so if you have gotten the okay from experts who know about how to best help addicts.
Understand How They Got Where They Did
There are reasons why someone ends up caught up in an addiction. Some people have chronic pain that they are dealing with that put them in a place where they begin to take pain-killing drugs that they ultimately become addicted to. When you are working to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment, you need to try to understand that they got to where they got to for a reason.
The best thing to do is to try to drop your judgmental attitude about things like this. You are now in the business of helping someone with an addiction break through that and start to overcome the hold that it has on them. Keep in mind the fact that this individual is not going to simply ‘get over’ their addiction. That is not how these things work. Instead, people with addictions just learn how to manage them to the best way that they can. They remain in a period of recovery for the rest of their life, and you need to try to help them recover.
Show Them How They can Help Others
Something that can sincerely assist people who have addictions is to work on helping others. Addictions are often isolating and cause many people to feel like they do not have the time or ability to help others as much as they would like. This is to say that many addicts feel like they simply don’t have the time or ability to help others because they are doing everything that they can just to keep their own head above water.
What you can do to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment is work with them to show how they can do acts of service for others. Something as simple as flower delivery to people who might need a bit of an uplifting in their day might be able to help someone suffering from addiction to see how they can do some good for someone else in the world.
Someone who has been in the middle of addiction for so long may begin to lose a sense of their own worth in this world. They might begin to think that they are a burden to others and that it is impossible for them to do anything that is good or helpful to anyone. That isn’t true, but that is how things can feel for people who have gone through things like this. Thus, it is time to change the way that this works in the mind of people suffering from addiction. Help them to make that change by showing them that they can truly help others.
Help Them Receive Medical Care
Addiction can cause personal injury to the person suffering from it. They might face injuries because of the actions that they took, or they might face injuries because of situations that they put themselves in. It doesn’t matter. When you are trying to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment, the only thing that you need to think about is how you can provide that help to them. You don’t need to judge why or how a person ended up in a situation that they did. Instead, you just need to provide them with the help that they require.
You should take them to doctor’s visit and anything else that might help them get the care that they need for taking care of the personal injuries that they go through.
Help Them Engage with Interests
You can help someone going through an addiction to get engaged with life again by helping them take an active interest in making sure that they pursue their hobbies. This might include doing something like taking a helicopter ride or learning about how they could fly one of those things. If they begin to express an interest in something, you should make sure to encourage this.
It is so important for people to be engaged with interests that they have. This will keep them from falling back into addiction when times get hard. You are always going to want to do what you can to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment by keeping them as focused on things that are of interest to them. Thus, you can help them remain focused on the things that bring them joy and are productive for the world.
Assist Them With Getting Government Services
You might find that a great way to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment is to help them get government services and assistance that they are qualified for. One of the things that people might qualify for is social security disability. This is important for you to look at and see if you can help them get assistance for something like this.
You can help a loved one returning from addiction treatment by showing them what they need to do in order to get the assistance that is due to come their way. It is important that you don’t file all of this paperwork for them. Instead, you need to ensure that you are showing them how they can help themselves. Not only is this helpful for the person suffering from addiction, but it is also the case that by showing the person who suffering from addiction that they can do things for themselves that you provide them with additional support and help.
Become a Great Listener
You might need to practice your listening skills and make sure that you can be there to help a loved one returning from addiction treatment. They need an ear that will listen to what they have to say. They also need to be sure that they can trust you to take care to hear what they have to say.
It is likely that you will have some realizations about the person that you are listening to and this may even come as a surprise to you. There are still things out there that you can learn about someone that you love and care about. You may find that simply by listening to what your loved one has to say that you find new information about what is going on inside of that person. It is incredibly important to understand this, and to realize that there is more and more to learn from people like this.
Try to Avoid Risky Situations
Keeping people with addictions away from situations where they could potentially fall back into addiction again is critically important. For example, taking someone who is trying to stop drinking alcohol near a bar would be a very bad idea. It would also be a bad idea to take someone who is trying to get off drugs around the people who used to sell them drugs.
Those are more extreme examples and may seem obvious to most. However, there are other risky situations that you do not want to allow them to get anywhere close to any situation that is difficult for them. Anything that they express to you as being too high of a risk to them is something to keep them away from. On top of that, you should try to think about the situations that are potentially risky for them no matter what.
The person who suffers from addiction might not know all that is risky for them, and you should try to jump in and protect them as much as possible. Keep this in mind while you work on helping someone with an addiction to try to stay away from falling back into their addiction.
