Helping Your Teen Choose Healthy Friendships During Recovery

The relationships in an adolescent’s life play a significant role in teen recovery in Fort Lauderdale. In many addiction cases, it’s enabling and toxic relationships that can contribute to your child’s initial development of substance abuse problems. Teaching her how to choose healthy relationships will aid in her recovery.

Toxic Relationships

It’s common for teens struggling with alcoholism or addiction to reach the point that their relationship with their drug of choice is the most valuable one in their life. Behavioral changes and ambivalence to her social life may have cost her any positive friendships she once had. Teens with substance abuse issues commonly develop or maintain relationships only with the people who supply their drugs or alcohol, or with whom they abuse drugs.

Enabling Relationships

Friends that your teen abused drugs with pose one of the greatest risk factors she will face during her recovery. When an addict continues to spend time with their supplier or enabler, they are more likely to consider relapsing into drug or alcohol abuse. Any person who will make excuses for your teen and try to cover for her to prolong her substance abuse behavior poses a threat to her sobriety.

Identifying Relationships

Your child’s professional rehab program will help you and your adolescent identify unhealthy and damaging relationships in her life that promote her chances of relapse. Her counselor can aid in changing these relationships when possible, or explain the need to remove them if necessary. Additionally, your adolescent’s counselor can help her identify any healthy and positive relationships in her life and guide her to develop and strengthen them to support her recovery.

Developing New Friendships

If your child has no healthy social relationships, she will be strongly advised to create new friendships. These positive relationships often develop from participation in support groups and therapy programs with other youths who are facing similar challenges. Finding new friends and maintaining her healthy relationships is a vital step in your adolescent’s recovery and long-term abstinence.

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