Forgiveness can help you find peace with your past. But facing painful truths can be hard, especially as a family. It can be a complicated process, and it’s often easier to avoid or ignore these issues. When you can come together and support each other as a family, everyone can heal. Addiction treatment can help as you start this journey together.

Facing and Forgiving Your Past Self

To move forward in your recovery, you’ll need to face some painful truths. Part of forgiving yourself is confronting who you were in the past. While you were using substances, some of your actions were harmful. You hurt yourself and the relationships you care about. Looking honestly at your past self isn’t easy, but it’s an essential first step. 

When you feel ashamed or embarrassed, it’s natural to feel like hiding from it. But looking away could allow you to fall back into old habits. Forgiveness can take time, so it’s OK if you feel uncomfortable at first. Over time, you and your family can learn forgiveness together.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting what happened. It is about seeing the truth and making a genuine effort to change. Letting go of pain and resentment helps you find peace in the end. 

Address Enabling Behaviors as a Family

Another part of healing is addressing enabling behaviors as a family, which means that you must look at any habits or patterns that allow the addiction to continue. Many times family members believe they are helping. But instead, they allow problems to continue.

For example, a parent may pay their adult child’s rent when they fall behind. An addiction keeps this adult child from holding a job. They’re not able to pay rent without help from their parent. 

Losing their home could be motivation to face their addiction. Instead, their parent pays the rent and saves the adult child. When the parent allows the adult child to fail, they can learn to make different choices. 

Keeping your family involved in addiction treatment makes it more effective. You may have two or three more sober days a month than if you didn’t include your family. That may not seem like a lot at first. But this can add up to a few extra weeks of sobriety in a year. 

The changes you make in treatment will stick around better with family support. It may hurt sometimes, but you’ll learn new ways of coping with difficulty. Learning together as a family can take some time. But you won’t be the only one to gain from this. Everyone can find healing and peace when you come together.

Understand the Role of Trauma

Substance use disorders often grow from pain within the family. Some of these issues are traumatic, like sexual abuse or family violence. Part of substance abuse treatment is looking at how these traumas affected you. 

You may have turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with pain. Self-medicating like this can seem helpful at first. But without getting help for past trauma, substance use can become a long-term problem.

Facing this trauma may stir up uncomfortable feelings. But understanding how your trauma and substance use fit together can help. Many families choose to bury or ignore trauma. When no one wants to talk about it, it’s harder to move away from substance use. 

Family programs in treatment can open the door to these topics. Treatment is a safe environment to talk about painful trauma. It can take time to forgive, and forgiveness doesn’t make harmful actions OK. It does help you decide how you live with the pain. 

You can face your pain, honor it and let it go. Together you and your family can work through these difficult issues. 

Conclusion

At Lucida, we understand how to help you heal, even when it can be challenging to work through old family scars. Your journey to hope and healing starts here. Our recovery specialists are here to help you and your family better understand treatment options, discuss insurance benefits and answer any questions you may have. Call us today at 866.947.7299