Family

Family is one of the most important things. Most of the time they are there when we need them. Yet, in our days of using it seems that sometimes they get the brunt of our manipulation, anger, resentment, fear, etc. A lot of times we don’t even realize that our disease affects them but it does.

When we finally decide to get sober and change our lives we see our family as a gift. Most of them support us and our decision to get sober. Sometimes we expect everything to go back to normal with our family. We want our relationships with them to go back to the way they used to be before our lives got out of control. We even expect them to trust again wholeheartedly. We get angry when they are apprehensive about trusting us. We don’t understand why they can’t see that we are sober and have changed.

What we don’t realize is that after all the years of hurt and pain and worry that we have put them through, it is going to take quite a bit of time for them to trust us again. We must realize that we have to build those relationships back up since we destroyed them when we were using.

The beauty of recovery is that after a while, they do start to trust us again if we are doing the right thing. Things can get better if we just work for it and unconditionally love our family especially since in the midst of our addiction they unconditionally loved us.