Addiction takes a toll on the entire family, creating pain, sadness, and isolation. Maintaining relationships in the midst of addiction can be difficult, frustrating, and even scary. We understand where you are and we want to help you change the situation and begin the healing process while your loved one is completing his or her drug and alcohol rehab program.

At Nova, we believe in offering an experience with the work we do. We dedicate ourselves to powerful, life-changing work and have thoughtfully created an Intensive Family Program with healing at its core. Our Family Program is designed to promote healing in a way that acknowledges all family members and allows everyone to be heard. We have carefully selected a team of experienced, skilled, and caring Nova staff members to assist you in learning about yourself, your family, and the role everyone plays in recovering while a loved one is in rehab.

The primary objectives of our Family Program are as follows:

• To provide more information about the disease of addiction
• To explore family roles and address family conflict
• To develop healthy communication skills and boundary setting
• To begin the healing process

Family Program Outline

Our Intensive Family Program is a three-day experience that involves the whole family. It is co-facilitated by counselors and recovery specialists and is held in a discreet location that is separate from the main campus at our drug and alcohol rehab center. This allows for a private, intimate setting with small groups, minimal distractions, and promotes relationship-building with other families.

The program schedule consists of several different methods and models that allow you to leave your pain here with us and move on toward healing. These methods include:

Group therapy sessions – Therapy groups incorporate cognitive behavioral and interpersonal therapy models designed to help families discover root issues within the family system. These sessions also provide a safe place where all family members can be heard and can talk about their experience with addiction. These sessions are held with and without the client present.

Educational lectures – Lecture series topics include addiction’s effect on the brain, communication skills training, and understanding codependency and boundary setting. 

Homework assignments – Families will receive homework assignments each night. We use the Johari Window model to identify family issues and writing assignments to address the pain, love, and healthy boundaries needed to move forward.

Experiential work – Throughout our Family Program we use the psychodrama techniques of role reversal, mirroring, and modeling to engage the entire family in exercises and reveal individual perspectives that will break down denial and barriers.

These methods and models produce deeply moving family encounters that aid in the resolution of family conflict and encourage clients and their families to heal together. In addition to the program components listed above, we also encourage interaction with anonymous community groups, such as AA or NA, and families are asked to travel off campus with a Nova representative to a meeting to begin finding support.

Benefits of Our Family Program

• Encourages healing and understanding among family members
• Provides a safe space for everyone to be heard and to listen
• Helps clients and their families develop self-awareness of negative behaviors and learn how to modify them
• Encourages healthy communication practices
• Helps rebuild trust within the family unit

Read more about the benefits of family therapy in addiction treatment.

3 Additional Ways to Get Involved in a Loved One’s Treatment

Because addiction is a family disease, the whole family is in recovery when a loved one seeks help for an addiction. Family involvement in the recovery process is crucial for the best possible chance of successful long-term sobriety, because dysfunction in the household is a major relapse trigger. The more the family can do to restore function to the family system and heal individually, the better the chances of beating the addiction.

1. Family Therapy

Family therapy is a fundamental part of a high-quality treatment program. Family therapy addresses dysfunction in the family system and helps family members understand the interdependent nature of that system and work to replace unhealthy thoughts, attitudes and behaviors with healthier ones. Productive change comes about through improving communication skills, exploring relationship patterns among family members and working to restore trust and rebuild damaged relationships.

Family behavior therapy is an outpatient treatment that’s been shown to reduce drug and alcohol use in both adults and adolescents, and it improves family functioning by addressing a variety of issues. Co-occurring problems like depression, unemployment, conduct disorders and child mistreatment must be managed in order to restore optimal family functioning.

2. Individual Therapy

Although individual therapy for family members is not generally part of a treatment program, each family member—and the family system—will benefit from individual therapy, which helps members identify unhealthy patterns of thought and behavior and replace them with healthier ways of thinking and behaving.

As family members address their own complex issues related and unrelated to the addiction, they develop skills and strategies aimed at restoring good mental health and an improved sense of well-being. Family members improve their self-esteem and communication skills and develop skills and strategies for improving the functioning of the family system. For children and adolescents, individual therapy reduces the risk of developing a substance use disorder down the road.

3. Support Groups

Support groups are important for family members, especially during the early period of addiction recovery. Support groups prevent feelings of isolation and offer the opportunity for family members to tell their story, vent their feelings and receive support from people who have gone through a similar situation. They offer a safe place to voice fears, work through setbacks and celebrate milestones, and they provide the therapeutic benefit of being able to help someone else through a rough patch.