Unfortunately, you may not have the support of your family of origin while you are getting sober. No matter the reason, such a lack of support can make your recovery more difficult. When you are alone in your desire to become healthy, it can be challenging to keep moving forward on the path of recovery.
Recovery support is a valuable resource that can make you feel loved and connected. You have people you can trust and lean on if something goes wrong. Not having family support might mean you’ll need to look for family and support in less conventional places.
Why Your Family Might Not Support You
You may not have a family standing behind you on your sobriety journey. Your family dynamics may be toxic. Your parents might be the source of underlying trauma or neglect, which affects how they handle your addiction.
They might respond in abusive, harmful, judgemental, or selfish ways. Your family might not understand addiction and blame you for what you’re going through. Some families might directly contribute to or enable your addiction, or they might use substances themselves.
It’s also possible for your family members to carry resentment and distrust because of how your addiction has impacted them. Addiction can cause trauma and pain to the entire family.
Family members might have been victims of disappointment, extreme stress, financial problems, or even violence. The impact of the addiction might cause you to lose their support.
This is especially true if you’ve been trying to get sober and stay sober for a while but keep relapsing. Even though your treatment may stick this time, it can be hard to convince your family that it’s the truth.
The Power of the Found Family
It can be devasting not to have the support of your family. It can make you feel more alone than ever. You might feel like others don’t care about you or that no one has your back.
While it’s painful when your blood relatives are not there for you when you need them the most, they are not your only options for support. Family doesn’t need to only mean blood relatives. Your family can be made up of anyone who cares about you, loves you, and supports you. If you don’t have the support of your family of origin, you can build your own family, called your found family.
Where to Find Your Found Family
Learning how to life live in early recovery can be difficult. It may seem that you are learning how to live again. This involves knowing how to have healthy relationships with others.
You now have a chance to rebuild your family. This may include relatives and new trusted friends who become part of your family. Your new family can be found in sober areas all around you.
Sober Community
Building your family through your sober community is the best and safest place to start. When you’re in early recovery, it’s essential to surround yourself with people who are trying to accomplish the same thing as you.
Having people around you who also want to stay sober can help you make good choices, manage stress, and focus on the important things. Places where you can connect with other sober people and build solid and meaningful relationships are 12-step meetings, sober living homes, and alumni programs at treatment centers.
Church or Spiritual Community
Reconnecting with your spirituality is an integral part of recovery. In recovery, you might consider attending a church service or finding a spiritual group. These communities often feel like family.
You and your religious or spiritual community can grow closer together as you answer life’s big questions and heal when things are difficult. It’s also common for local churches to host 12-step meetings or have substance use or mental health support groups where you can meet others who are experiencing the same struggles as you.
New Hobbies or Interests
Recovery is a time when you can try new things. Joining classes, clubs, or online communities can introduce you to new people with similar interests. You could also look for groups specifically for sober people who share the same interest, such as a sober sports group. After spending time together, you can grow close bonds that begin to feel like family.
Coworkers And Volunteer Work
The workplace or volunteer space can also be a great place to develop a found family. Since you probably spend forty hours a week with your coworkers, you may develop close and supportive relationships.
In volunteer spaces, you can meet others who share the same compassion as you, and often there are volunteer opportunities for people in the sober and recovery community. You can bond over making the world a better place.
Dealing With Toxic or Unsupportive Family
A broken family can heal eventually. However, relationships with some family members may not be healthy if they are not supportive of your sobriety. If you want to keep your family in your life while you are in recovery, it’s essential to lay out some ground rules and know your limits.
People who are struggling with addiction tend to have low self-esteem. This makes it hard to know how you should be treated. You might accept treatment that’s worse than you deserve, causing you unneeded stress and pain.
Take Note of Who Is on Your Side
It’s easy to feel like the whole family is against you, even if only some are unsupportive. Taking stock of who does or doesn’t support you during recovery can help you understand what support you do have.
Your parents might not support you, but maybe a sibling does. Your aunts and uncles might not want to talk to perhaps you, but your cousins have your back. Knowing this information lets, you know who you can reach out to and who is off limits. The amount of family supporting you might be more significant than you initially thought.
Only Deal With Family if You Feel Well Enough
In early recovery, you’re at your most fragile. It’s easy to become triggered by stress. Family can be a massive trigger for people and may be a significant source of trauma. Family is often the biggest reason why people choose to enter sober living when they leave treatment.
A toxic environment does not help you stay sober and may lead to relapse. It is worse when the family doesn’t understand how they contribute to your difficulties. Eventually, this may be remedied, but becoming stable in early recovery is more critical. Take time to deal with your family, especially toxic family members, until you are in a better place spiritually and emotionally.
Set Boundaries That Aren’t Debatable
In the past, you might not have set boundaries. It’s common for people who don’t have healthy relationships with their families not to know how to set boundaries. Setting boundaries is how you keep yourself and your relationships safe.
The boundaries that you set can focus on the time you’re willing to spend with them, the treatment you’re ready to tolerate, and what decisions are yours alone to make. Your family might be upset about your new boundaries, especially if they aren’t used to you setting limitations on the relationship.
While your family might be upset with you, staying firm and respectful when enforcing your boundaries is vital. Standing up for yourself might feel weird or scary if you aren’t used to setting boundaries. It can take practice. However, setting boundaries can help you reclaim your sense of identity and agency and raise your self-esteem.
Fix Relationships That Deserve Fixing
Some of your family might not support you during your recovery because of arguments or pain before you entered treatment. They even might have wanted you to get better but became fed up with waiting. It’ll take time for these relationships to heal.
There might need to be multiple discussions about treatment, recovery, and the mistakes you may have made before entering treatment. If you’ve made any mistakes or caused pain, you’ll need to acknowledge it and hold yourself accountable.
Education may be beneficial if one of the problems in your relationship is that a family member does not understand addiction. Some people don’t know that addiction is a chronic disease and substance use has changed your brain, making quitting harder. What’s needed is support, as well as conditions that help your mental and physical health.
Know When It’s Time to Cut Them Off
Sometimes, toxic relationships are unsalvagable. This can be especially painful if it’s family. There are some cases where your family’s treatment of you is incompatible with your sobriety. You might find that it’s better off if you don’t stay in contact with some family members.
It can be hard to come to terms with this loss, but you’ll find that cutting these people off leaves room for you to flourish and grow. They’ve been holding you back from staying sober and living a fulfilling life. This can be complicated if the person is a part of the immediate family or if they are a spouse. The process of separating from this relationship might require more significant life changes than losing extended family. However, the effort is worth your ability to live a healthy life.
Grieve Your Losses
Allow yourself to process your emotions while you heal from losing family. Cutting family off, or having your family cut off relations can sometimes feel as if they’ve died. You’ve lost them, and you’ll need to accept that loss.
Talk to a therapist or trusted friends about family members that you’ve lost. Through talking about it, you can process losing that family and potentially think about what you’ve gained from ending those ties.
Eventually, you’ll be able to accept it and move forward. Grieving these losses might take time. Taking care of yourself is essential, and not blaming yourself for these losses. You took the steps you needed to take to get better and recover from substance use. You can grow from your past and live a fulfilling future.
It can be devastating to not have family support your addiction recovery and sobriety. Those who are healing from addiction rely on their support system to help them. Your family not having your back can make things much more difficult and stressful. You might feel lost as to what to do, and you might feel lonely without the support of your family. Thankfully, you can meet others who can feel like family. You can develop close relationships during your recovery journey. Family doesn’t only have to be blood relatives. Ultimately, you need a support system that is there for you, and it might be something you’ll need to create yourself. In the meantime, you’ll need to figure out which relationships are worth saving, and who you might need to let go of. To learn more, call us at (727) 290-9156.
