Four Things a Loved One Does That Sabotages Your Sobriety

Cali Estes
on June 22, 2019

Learn the skills needed to help support the FAMILY of the addict as they go off to treatment! The family needs a specialized recovery coach to help them navigate the rough waters of their loved one’s addiction and not sabotage their sobriety! This is a great service to add to your coaching practice.

During our recovery, our loved ones will try to help us get clean and sober. Many times the things they say and do can set us back in our recovery without our loved ones meaning to hurt us. Most of the time our loved ones have our best interest at heart and want nothing more than to see us beat our addiction. But time and time again the things our loved ones say and do can cause the opposite of our desired results. So let’s take a few minutes and take a look at four main things that loved ones do to sabotage our recovery.

1. THEY ENABLE US – This is a big one! A lot of the time our loved ones completely enable us by giving in to our every want and need and they think that they are helping us and making us better. In reality, this enabling can cause us to relapse or continue to use drugs and alcohol and our loved ones don’t even realize that they are hurting us. Tough love is needed when we are fighting our addiction and we definitely don’t need to be enabled.

2. THEY BECOME CODEPENDENT – after fighting our addiction with us to a certain extent, our loved ones can become completely codependent. They actually become as addicted to fixing us as we are addicted to our drugs of choice. Codependent loved ones can contribute to our sickness if they bring their codependent mentality into our daily lives. It’s hard enough during recovery to fix ourselves and even harder to try to fix our codependent partner.

3. THEY TALK DOWN TO US CONTINUOUSLY – most addicts already feel extremely guilty about the things they have done destructively during their active addiction. Sometimes all the addict needs is a little emotional encouragement to help put their addiction in the rear view mirror. So continually bashing your addicted loved one with hateful and demeaning words can often cause an addict to continue to use. We need to encourage our addicted loved ones with kindness during their quest for sobriety.

4. THEY ABANDON US – if an addict is making a commitment to get clean and sober, the last thing a loved one wants to do is leave them. Feeling alone and abandoned in this very fragile time period is detrimental to an addict’s recovery. Addicts need their partner and loved ones more than ever while fighting the deadly cycle of addiction. We need to be there for them.

So as you can see, loved ones can trigger an addicts relapse and addiction by the things they say and do so it is extremely important to be extra sensitive to this while their loved one fights for recovery. We here at The Addictions Coach are highly skilled in teaching families and loved ones how to best be there for their loved one during the recovery process without enabling or causing the addict to relapse by their actions. You can get information on our Family Coaching program as well as all of our recovery based programs by heading to our website at Top Recovery Coaches and Life Coaching for Drug and Alcohol Addiction or by calling 1-800-706-0318.

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