As the family members, friends and loved ones of addicts, we know all too well how hard it is to watch them suffer after years of struggling with addiction and mental illness. We want nothing more than to help ease their pain and see them come out on the other side, renewed, healed and transformed. As our loved ones are working to recover, we’re also undergoing our own recovery process. We’re recovering from patterns and cycles that have harmed us, from enabling our loved ones’ addictions to developing dependence issues of our own to cope. We’re figuring out how to live again, after years of prioritizing our loved ones and their needs. We’re trying to learn how to love ourselves again, after giving most of our energy to helping them navigate the relentless cycles of their addictions and mental health issues. When our loved ones aren’t out of the dark yet, when they’re still grappling with addiction, many of us have a tendency to continue to prioritize them and the ways in which we’re trying to support them, and often to our own detriment. We realize over time that we too are in recovery, from our loved ones’ addictions and our own responses to them. How can we support our own recovery when our loved ones are still recovering?
One very helpful way of supporting ourselves and our recovery is by attending support group meetings designed for the loved ones of addicts. Many of us have become so consumed with helping the addict in our lives that we’ve totally neglected our own mental and emotional health. We suffer from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and other health issues. We feel burdened by deep sadness, confusion and overwhelm. We live in a constant state of fear that our loved ones will be hurt. The state of our loved ones and their addictions remains at the forefront of our minds, leaving little room, time and energy for ourselves. Attending group meetings gives us an opportunity to receive some much-needed support for ourselves. We learn more about addiction and the debilitating effects it can have on all of our lives. We learn ways in which to support our loved ones. We learn powerful ways of caring for ourselves, such as creating healthy distance for ourselves, working to understand how we’ve been enabling our loved ones and facilitating their addictions, shedding these toxic patterns, and creating healthier ones for everyone involved.
We support our loved ones’ recovery immeasurably when we give time and energy to our own recovery. When we work to heal ourselves, our loved ones benefit energetically from the transformation that we’re emitting outward, that is resonating from within and extending to them, whether they realize it at first or not. We also can better inspire them to take their health into their own hands when we are committed to doing the same.
The caring, compassionate staff of The Guest House is here to support you as you start your journey to recovery and healing. Call 855-483-7800 today for more information.