Addiction is a chronic disorder that affects the entire family. To manage symptoms together, the whole family must better understand the disorder. Chateau Recovery uses a family systems approach to establish each family member's role in combating the challenges of addiction.
Many people do not realize how family affects your mental health, well-being, and addiction recovery. Family systems theory helps you understand how you function and interact with your family.
Understanding your family dynamics is essential to healing from the disease of addiction. At Chateau Recovery, we can help you learn how your family can support your recovery while also helping family members better understand their roles.
Six Dimensions of Wellness
One of our focuses as Chateau Recovery is offering clients a holistic approach to treatment. A holistic approach treats the whole person. We treat holistically through our six dimensions of wellness. These dimensions look at complicated underlying issues that fuel problematic behaviors, so we can help you identify goals, skills, and motivators and overcome personal challenges.
Our Six Dimensions of Wellness include the following:
Daily Wellness: This type of wellness is about practicing healthy habits every day to improve your physical and mental health. You will practice daily wellness by maintaining jobs, furthering your education, creating daily routines, being financially responsible, prioritizing health and self-care, creating a healthy living environment, and finding ways to stay motivated.
Relationship Wellness: This type of wellness requires you to build healthy, nurturing, and supportive relationships. Fostering genuine connections with others is essential for optimal mental health and well-being. Relationship wellness offers you positive relationships, improves your social intelligence, and impacts how you see others. This focus carries into your relationships with sponsors, mentors, and connections you make in peer support groups.
Family Systems Wellness: Family systems theory assumes that a family is understood best by examining the family as one complete system. This system is a complex, deeply-connected changing collection of parts, subsystems, and family members, where each member has a known purpose or function. A healthy family system will include healthy relationships, communication, accountability, and boundaries. Healthy family systems can be pillars of support when it comes to mental health and addiction recovery.
Mental and Emotional Wellness: When you are emotionally healthy, you can effectively control your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and are equipped with the tools to cope with life’s challenges in an emotionally healthy way. This means that you are also resilient, able to feel comfortable with yourself, and have solid relationships with others.
Physical Wellness: This type of wellness involves doing what you can to help strengthen and care for your body. Improving physical wellness benefits all areas of your life and is less about being physically fit and more about feeling good about yourself and your body. Ultimately, the healthier your body is, the healthier your mind and spirit will be.
Spiritual Wellness: This last dimension of wellness involves achieving harmony with your surroundings and finding balance. Achieving spiritual wellness requires you to find a balance between taking care of yourself and your needs and being able to care for others. You can achieve spiritual wellness by practicing mindfulness and gratitude, finding purpose, accepting challenges, showing empathy to those in need, and maintaining a sense of hope throughout your life despite any challenging circumstances.
Understanding these dimensions is invaluable to healing from substance use disorder (SUD), and all six dimensions are crucial to achieving a life of recovery.
The Third Dimension of Wellness: Family Systems Wellness
As mentioned, family systems theory assumes a family is understood best by examining the family as a whole system. Family systems include immediate and extended family members; the “wellness” relates to how you deal with those relationships. Focusing on family systems wellness requires you to focus on your ability to communicate with your family, create healthy boundaries, and create independent bonds. This third dimension of wellness is somewhat similar to relationship wellness; however, relationships within families are quite different than other relationships.
Family systems wellness focuses on the relationships with your spouse, parents, extended family members, and children. If you have a child, addiction will affect your ability to parent. If you are a spouse, your marriage will be affected. It can be easy to fail to see how the family suffers from one person’s struggle with addiction.
Healthy family relationships can make or break recovery. By improving your family relationships, you can strengthen your support network and build stronger connections and communication within the family system. Access to proper resources for families dealing with a loved one's mental health issues or SUD is also crucial.
Understanding the Benefits of Family Involvement in Addiction Recovery
In addition to our belief in these Six Dimensions of Wellness, which include family systems wellness, research also indicates the benefits of family involvement in addiction treatment. According to the 2018 article “Family-Focused Practices in Addictions: A Scoping Review Protocol,” published in BMJ Open, “Family involvement in treatment” reduces harm and can also “Improve treatment entry, treatment completion, and treatment outcomes for the individual coping with an addiction.” The article also examines various family interventions and states that family members can be involved in your recovery by:
Learning more about addiction, treatment, and recovery
Participating in the recovery process
Attending family therapy sessions or support groups with you
Supporting family members in a loving, compassionate, and non-judgmental way
If done in such a manner, family support can offer you the strength needed to obtain and maintain sobriety.
Offering our clients a holistic approach to treatment means focusing on improving their well-being. Chateau Recovery does this through our Six Dimensions of Wellness. These dimensions include daily, relationship, family systems, mental and emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness.
Addiction is a chronic disorder that affects the entire family, and to handle symptoms successfully, the whole family must better understand addiction. The Family systems wellness approach helps families manage addiction as a unit. Focusing on family systems wellness will help your family recover from a family member's substance use disorder. Research strongly indicates the benefits of healthy family involvement in addiction treatment.
By improving your family dynamics, relationships, and communication, an individual can successfully embark on a path to a healthy recovery – with the support of their family. Reach out to Chateau Recovery to learn more about addiction recovery and family systems wellness. Call us today at (435) 222-5225.
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