How Does The Family Influence When Supporting The Addicted Person?
Addictions are disorders that globally affect a person’s life, undermining their physical and emotional well-being and progressively destroying their relationships in both the social and family spheres. But the reality of addictive disorders goes beyond the individual people who suffer from them, and often involves the family, for better and worse.
Research in psychology and medicine has shown that The action of the family towards the person who has any type of addiction can have a very significant therapeutic value ; However, in other cases the family can have a negative effect on the person, even encouraging the person’s addictive behavior.
Possible negative effects of family influence on the person with addiction
There are a series of possible negative effects that the family can have on the person suffering from addiction if these people do not adequately adapt to the needs of their family member in a vulnerable state. Let’s look at the most important ones.
1. Stigmatization
A common phenomenon in cases of addiction is stigmatization by the family towards the person who presents the addictive behavior, something that It has a truly harmful effect on your mental health and contributes to maintaining your harmful habit.
Mainly, because it leads the sick person to feel worse and feel greater impulses to escape from reality through the action of satisfying “the mono” of addiction. Furthermore, it predisposes her to adopt a defensive attitude and to reaffirm her habits that are harmful to her health, as if they were a sign of her identity in front of others.
On the other hand, with the stigmatization of their addiction, the affected person feels alienated and will assume in the long run that they do not have sufficient control of the situation necessary to be able to stop their consumption, something that contributes to their demotivation and to the point of abandoning the drug. therapy.
2. Denial
The denial of the addictive disorder, keeping it as a taboo subject is a common phenomenon in both the addict and his family and generally occurs in family environments in which people do not want to talk about their family member’s problems in a natural way and in the long run it becomes a “forbidden” topic.
These types of denialist dynamics are put into practice in families that want to keep up appearances on the outside, pretending that everything is fine and that there is no such problem.
3. Concealment
The concealment of criminal actions linked to the maintenance of addiction (for example, stealing) on the part of family members is also produced by the desire to deny that an addictive disorder exists, although in the long run it is also a dynamic that appears after a long period of struggle to help the family member who has this problem.
Concealing the problem does not help the addicted person at all, since it aggravates their behavior over time, turns the family members who practice it into accomplices and makes them feel very guilty in the long run.
4. Overprotection
The excessive overprotection and complacency exercised by the family of a person with an addictive disorder also contributes to the maintenance of their addiction and makes it more difficult to start the path to recovery, since there is no incentive to do so.
In addition to that, this complacency with the addicted person allows them to remain in the sick role and not progress, since they are in a comfortable situation in which they have the connivance of their family members.
5. Emotional closure
Emotional blockage and closure is the phenomenon by which the family members of the addicted person refuse to express any of the emotions caused by the situation they are experiencing.
This absence in the expression of negative emotions is often related to a posture of covering up and denying the problem, and ends up generating emotional problems in the family members themselves, since They repress everything they feel.
Possible positive effects of family influence on the person with addiction
As mentioned at the beginning, the family of a person with addiction can provide positive support of great therapeutic value; The most common cases are the following.
1. Show support to motivate and encourage
Having your family close, in constant support, as a motivating element, is of great help for people who have cases of addiction, since this helps to mitigate stress and anxiety and serves to better cope with withdrawal syndrome, disorders that greatly predispose them to relapse into drug use.
Having a clear goal allows you to focus on it and not let the discomfort invade the mind of the person who has the disorder. Furthermore, this decreases the chances of the patient abandoning treatment, so it is important that family members take an interest in their progress and show their satisfaction and appreciation for the small victories of the person with addiction.
The family can also help by motivating the person, thus increasing their self-esteem, by periodically taking an interest in their progress and encouraging them at all times not to give up in their attempt to heal.
You may be interested: “Types of motivation: the 8 motivational sources”
Addictive disorders have both an emotional and physical impact on people who suffer from it, which is why having a family that offers listening and empathy, these people they will be more capable when it comes to rehabilitating. In this sense, the fact that the person with addiction has people who listen to him and with whom he can “vent” helps a lot to overcome crises, since it serves to relieve internal tensions and to organize ideas and stop avoiding thinking about what worries you.
It is important that the family openly show their support for a family member who presents these types of problems and that they offer their understanding and relief at all times in times of crisis.
3. Promote healthy social relationships to avoid relapses
In cases of addiction, the family can also introduce new friends to the person who is going through a rehabilitation process, thus promoting a new social fabric of healthy relationships away from the contexts of drug consumption bets, etc.
This is of great support, since, as has been mentioned, addictive disorders tend to be tremendously destructive with the healthy social relationships that the person has when starting their addiction.
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