Summary: Yes, in most cases, you should support your adult child after rehab in one important way: emotionally. Whether you offer other types of support – financial, for instance – depends on factors unique to your family situation.
Key Points:
- With very few exceptions, like irrevocably burned bridges, it’s essential to offer your adult child love, compassion, understanding, and encouragement after they complete rehab.
- Emotional support does not necessarily mean financial support: that’s a decision you need to make depending on your specific circumstances.
- The best way to make this decision is to involve the treatment team where your adult child went to rehab and collaborate with everyone involved to make a plan that best serves you, your adult child, and the rest of your family.
How to Help Rather Than Harm
As parents, most of us want our children to grow up to become independent and capable adults who stand on their own two feet, contribute positively to the world, and find happiness in their lives. When our young children get sick, we take care of everything for them. That’s our job. When our adult children get sick, we also do everything we can to help them heal and get better, because it’s still our job.
But when the illness is addiction, the best way to help your child can get complicated and is not as easy as chicken soup, cough syrup, a grape popsicle, and a day in bed watching cartoons.
The job is no longer as simple as it once was.
In this article, our focus is what happens after rehab, and finding your place and role as a parent in a difficult set of circumstances. We’ll assume everyone is on the same page and has one goal in mind: the long-term sobriety of your adult child. That’s also where we need to make a point many parents of adult children with addiction problems need to hear:
In addition to long-term sobriety for your adult child, we encourage you to make the health and wellbeing of the entire family a primary goal.
Sacrificing your wellbeing for your adult child can increase family dysfunction, degrade your mental health, and impair your adult child’s ability to achieve long-term sobriety. Yes, of course, we all make sacrifices for our children. However, exposing yourself to financial hardship, emotional heartbreak, and a tumultuous home environment may not the type of sacrifices that help your family in the long run.
So how do you handle the situation?
Options After Rehab: Plan Sooner Rather Than Later
There’s something to address we haven’t yet.
What you do for your adult child after rehab depends on myriad factors, but one of the most powerful factors is what’s happened before. If they’ve been in and out of rehab for years, and you’ve offered comprehensive support before, then that may dampen your inclination to support them this time. But if this is their first time finishing rehab, you may be more inclined to support them in any and every way you can.
The thing is, whether they’ve been in one rehab or a hundred rehabs, the most important thing you can offer them after rehab is your unconditional love and compassionate emotional support. But what many parents miss is that no matter how many times their child has been in rehab, they need the same thing every time:
A plan that holds them accountable for their own behavior and moves them toward independence while promoting sobriety and a recovery lifestyle.
Here’s another thing to know:
Living with you at home may not be the best thing for them. It may not be what moves them toward those core outcomes.
That’s one reason why what’s happened before matters now. If they’ve been in and out of rehab for years and you’ve given them a soft place to land every time, with no strings attached, then we encourage you to consider the possibility that your behavior – which may or may not be identified as enabling –could be part of the reason they’ve been in and out of rehab for years.
To learn about enabling in addiction, please read this article on our blog:
How Do I Know if I’m Enabling Addiction?
Working through these questions is challenging. There’s baggage, there are emotions, and there may be hard feelings, bitterness, and resentment on both sides. For those reasons, we encourage parents wondering whether they should support their adult child after rehab to start planning before the end of rehab, and consider the input of everyone involved: you, your adult child, their therapist, counselors, and psychiatrist, and any family member the decision directly affects.
Deciding What’s Best: Use Professional Resources
To make this decision, involve the treatment center if you trust them and believe they have the best interests of your adult child in mind.
They know, perhaps better than anyone else, what the next best step might be. They may know better than you, and they may know better than your adult child, although everyone’s input is necessary. If you and your adult child trust them, then the reason(s) they may know what’s best include:
- They don’t have the family baggage you and your child have.
- They’re trained in addiction treatment and likely have experience supporting families in your position.
- They’ve observed your child during treatment. And if you’ve participated in family therapy during treatment, they’ve observed how you interact.
- Their objectivity and experience mean they have perspective and insight beyond what you’re capable of having. They can see the forest, the trees, and a map of the entire surrounding area, while you and your child, in most cases, can only see the trees.
- They will consider your best interests, whereas you may not, and they will be able to see what’s best for your child, whereas you may not have the capacity to see or understand what’s best, given your emotional proximity, i.e. the trees.
When you enter a collaborative dialogue with your adult child and their professional support team, there are at least three things to consider that will inform your decision:
Where you and your child have been, i.e. the history.
Where you and your child are now, meaning their current state of physical and mental health, and your ability to offer support.
The place you and your child want to be in the future, i.e. their recovery goals, your family goals.
An addiction treatment professional, who may be a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, a counselor, or a therapist, will be in the best position to help you understand your history, clarify your collective goals for the future, and make a choice that’s healthy and moves you toward your goals.
Deciding What’s Best: Home, Supported Living, Other Healthy Places
In a family where one person has an addiction disorder, the rest of the family often adapts to the situation by taking roles that may not help the situation at all. One role parents unintentionally fall into is the role of the enabler. To learn about enabling in general, and the negative consequences of enabling, please refer to the article we mention above.
To learn about the other roles – sometimes helpful, sometimes unhelpful – family members may adopt, please read this article on our blog:
Is Addiction a Family Disease?
Understanding the content in that article will help, but is not essential, to understanding this one. When we get clear perspective on our behavior, it helps us make difficult decisions based on logic rather than emotion.
Now let’s get down to brass tacks.
How Do You Decide How to Help Your Adult Child After Rehab?
When you’re making this decision, we encourage you to consider all of the following:
Treatment Should Continue.
- Understand that treatment does not end after rehab. After rehab, by which we mean residential addiction treatment, the treatment team may recommend:
- Partial hospitalization treatment (PHP). This is basically rehab. PHP programs typically involve a full day of treatment, five days a week, but patients don’t live at the facility. Often considered the first step towards returning to independent living.
- Intensive outpatient treatment (IOP). This is less immersive, and typically involves half a day of treatment, five days a week. This is often the second step toward independent living.
Home is Not the Only Option.
- And it may not be the best one. Coming home immediately after rehab may not help everyone. Many people in treatment need ongoing professional support and an environment curated to facilitate recovery. You may be tempted to turn your home into a curated assisted living environment, and we understand that. If you want to do that, please check with the treatment team first: a common outcome of taking that route is that whether or not your adult child stays sober, you’ll become emotionally drained and physically exhausted.
Other Living Options: Sober Housing, Recovery Friendly Spaces.
- There are purpose-designed living situations for people transitioning from addiction treatment to independent living. They’re run by experts. They do the curating you may be tempted to do. Most sober living facilities have strict, but compassionate rules for residency, and may offer a range of support options, including daily mutual/peer support meetings, help with rides to essential appointments, and help finding and maintaining gainful employment. These other living options immediately post-rehab may include:
- Sober living facilities operated by the rehab center where they went to treatment.
- Independent sober living facilities unaffiliated with the rehab center.
- The National Alliance for Recovery Residences (NARR) provides comprehensive resources on how sober living works, the norms and rules present in all accredited sober homes, and their official standards and policies for sober living homes. There are four levels of sober living, and the treatment team can help you decide which is best:
- Peer Run. Democratic governance (small “d,” no political affiliations), recovery friendly and recovery supportive. Peers help with life skills and other recovery necessities.
- Monitored. Managed by senior residents often called House Managers. May offer more practical support than peer-run homes. Peers and managers help with life skills, vocational pursuits, and other recovery necessities.
- Supervised. Includes trained staff, scheduled treatment and recovery activities, may be best for people who benefit from structure and strict accountability.
- Clinical. These facilities are often owned and operated by residential rehab centers and offer a way for patients to transition gradually through levels of care, from most to least immersive. Clinical sober living facilities include clinical support and a mixture of peer and professional staff. Best for people who need substantial ongoing monitoring and support.
If you’re looking for sober housing for your child or loved one, we encourage you to start your search with NARR.
- Recovery peers and other family members may offer living situations that can work and are healthy. However, if considering this option, please weigh the input of the treatment team: their perspective matters.
We’ll close with ideas about how to approach your adult child living at home after rehab.
Proactive and Goal Directed: Accountability and Respect
We’ll recap what we believe your core responsibilities are when your adult child leaves rehab:
Unconditional love, compassion, and encouragement.
We’ve heard someone put it this way:
Love unconditionally, support conditionally.
If you decide to welcome your adult child into your home after rehab, we encourage you to collaborate with their treatment team to create a plan that’s best for everyone. Here are things to think about:
1. How long can they stay without contributing financially?
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- The answer should not be indefinitely.
2. What kind of behavior will you accept?
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- The answer should include respectful behavior, first and foremost.
3. Will you require them to continue treatment?
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- We think this should be a yes, but every circumstance is different.
4. Will you require sobriety?
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- We think this should be a yes, however, you want to be loving parents, not the sobriety police.
5. How will you resolve conflict?
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- It helps to have a family therapist, of course, but they won’t be there all the time.
- Before allowing them back home, it’s important to ensure you have a way to resolve conflict that’s positive, nonviolent (as in nonviolent communication), and respectful.
Finally, we’ll say that in many cases, there is nothing wrong at all with supporting your adult child in practical and financial ways after rehab the first time. Things change when it becomes the second, third, fourth, or fifth time. To avoid those repeats, our experience tells us the best way to support your child after rehab – aside from the love we think is the most important thing you can offer – involves the following components.
How to Offer Support That Helps: What to Include
- A realistic timeline. Indefinite support can create apathy, and in some cases, delay real recovery.
- Expectations and outcomes. With your adult child, we’d avoid saying rules and consequences. With this vocabulary, everyone feels like an adult, accountability is encouraged, and you get to determine the kind of behavior you’ll accept and the outcome if those behavioral expectations are not met.
- Follow through. This is probably the hardest thing of all: following through on outcomes that aren’t the outcomes you want for your child.
That last point is a good place to finish this article. You cannot recover for your child, and the path your child takes through life might not be the path you want for them. But it’s their path to walk. To become whole and thrive in recovery, they need the chance to try, fail, try again, fail again, and keep trying until they can stand on their own two feet and live their own life on their own terms. To do that, they need you to perform a delicate balancing act: love them while empowering them to love themselves and live themselves.
The work is hard, but recovery is well worth the effort.
