For every person who has dealt with addiction and addiction recovery on a personal level, there’s the family of that person that is affected as well. So it makes sense that many of the activities meant to help the addict can also be adjust to be family activities. In fact, sometimes it’s the family aspect of these events that make the difference between success and failure.
Consider specifically structured activities that you might find at a rehab clinic, collective research done by addicts and their families, using planned meals as a communication device, volunteering at different events together, and even taking on the idea of journaling as a family unit.
Structured Activities
For structured activities that can be done as a healthy family concept, you can look to see what’s offered at rehab clinics. Those kinds of lists will be particularly helpful because they are already professionally vetted, which means that their success rate when it comes to treating signs and symptoms of addiction are going to be above average. As a starting point, this is one of the best ways to begin to choose motion and emotion-based ways for the family to connect back with the addict in question.
Collective Research
Another family activity, though not necessarily as motion-based as the others, is to do family research about addiction, addictive personalities, and addiction recovery. Having everyone type in search words and sift through information is actually a very powerful way to support the addict and also self-inform, as many types the only thing stalling the recovery process is an overall lack of information. Granted, a lot of the information on the internet is incorrect or false, but at least with a family research project, everyone will begin with the same base of knowledge.
Planned Meals
Sitting down to eat together is very important for family units, and if the idea is used in conjunction with the idea of helping an addict recover from their personal situation, it can be very powerful indeed. People need to coordinate things like time, amount of food, expectations of topic, even dress code.
Volunteering
And what about volunteering as a family? Sometimes all an addict needs is to move the attention away from himself or herself, and helping other people is a fantastic way to do this. The more members of the family are involved, the greater the sense of group effort as well.
Journaling
And a final way to use a family activity to learn and recovery from addiction together is the idea of group journaling. If a family agrees to work with the same set of topics and goals in a set of writing, everyone will get a chance to see personal thoughts presented in a narrative, which can be immensely helpful.