Troubles within the family are always sensitive to deal with, and they should be approached with the utmost care, as there’s a lot on the line. If someone in your family is struggling with something like addiction, you should make sure it’s approached appropriately and tactfully. There’s a wrong and a right way to go about it, and simply talking to them about it without consideration could lower your chances of being able to help them.
It’s often hard for the person who is struggling with addiction to identify when there is a problem with what they’re doing. It’s not easy to get out of an addiction, especially when the person in question feels as if it’s good for them, so don’t go about it unprepared.
Your relationship with them
If the family member in question isn’t someone that you’re very close to, you should maybe consider getting to know them better. It could help to really connect with people to learn a bit more about better ways to approach them or improve how they see and feel about your feelings. They have no reason to consider how you feel if you’re not that close, to begin with.
Alternatively, if you’re the only person in the family who knows about it, you should consider talking to someone closer to them that you can trust. You don’t want to tell someone who is going to spread the news around; it should be dealt with carefully.
Learn about the addiction
It can help to learn all about what they’re struggling with. Addictions aren’t always a bad thing, as a person can get addicted to nearly anything. Sometimes the problem is with how far the addiction goes or how it’s affecting the individual.
There’s no need to approach someone over something that’s actually doing them no harm and, in fact, could be good for them. On the other hand, if it is an addiction that’s not good for them, then it would help to know more about it before you talk to them about it if you want to make an educated point.
Approaching the matter
Your approach is one of the more important steps in this and requires a lot of planning and time to think about. How the person is going to react—whether or not they’re going to take it seriously or shut you out—you need to get through to them. They need to understand that you have their best interests in mind and that you care for them. It could take more than one person to speak up; it could take many people from the family.
The experts providing residential treatment for teens at The Arrow House can understand the difficulties and confusion that often come with having a family member struggling with addiction.
If you go at it the wrong way and bring up something like drug rehab centers early, you’re only going to push them away from the idea. Once they understand how serious of a problem what they’re doing is, the solution can be introduced, but before that, it can be intimidating, daunting, or something that sounds completely unreasonable, making it even harder to get through to them.
