During your recovery journey, it’s important to build a strong support system and surround yourself with loved ones who are going to help you through any challenges you may face. Letting go of any toxic relationships you have, whether it’s a family member or a friend, will also help you stay on a sober path once you finish your rehab program.
However, it can be hard to let go of a toxic loved one when you are so close with them. Here’s how you can navigate harmful relationships and form healthy connections in recovery.
Understanding What a Toxic Relationship Is
The first step in letting go of a toxic loved one is understanding what an unhealthy relationship is and what it looks like. Knowing the features can help you identify who isn’t positively contributing to your life and recovery journey.
Instead of being enriching and building up your self-esteem, toxic relationships are draining and tear you down. A toxic relationship includes someone who:
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- Encourages drug and alcohol use
- Is not supportive of recovery
- Is verbally, emotionally or physically abusive
- Is controlling and manipulative
- Is unreliable and unstable
- Isn’t respectful of personal boundaries
- Doesn’t support your healthy relationships with others
- Is not based on trust or mutual respect
- Filled with never-ending drama
Other qualities of toxic relationships can include jealousy, shaming, betrayal, codependency, manipulation and physical or sexual abuse.
To help you know if you’re in a toxic relationship with a family member or friend, consider how they are making you feel. Here are some questions to help guide you:
- Do you feel like you can tell them anything? Are they trust-worthy?
- Do you feel better about yourself when you’re with them? Do you feel worse?
- Do you feel respected by them?
- Do you feel pressured to do anything with them? Are they controlling or manipulative?
- Do you feel supported by them, especially in recovery?
Work on Unhealthy Relationships or Let Them Go
After identifying what toxic relationships you may be in, you can choose to either work on them through setting safe and healthy boundaries, or letting go of them completely if you can’t work out a healthier connection.
Working on unhealthy relationships and letting go of toxicity can include these strategies:
- Use Your Honest Judgement: The only way to recognize who is negatively contributing to your life is by being honest with yourself. Take note of any unhealthy, toxic behaviors and don’t hesitate to let go of them if the relationship is beyond repair. Being honest with yourself can help you build awareness for any changes that need to be made in your relationships.
- Open Communication: When you want to fix unhealthy relationships, you need to communicate openly with them to express your concerns and the changes that need to be made. Being clear and concise like this ensures that the person understands what needs to change to establish a healthier relationship.
- Don’t Be Afraid to Say No: You may experience difficulty letting go of a toxic loved one, especially if they’re family. It’s important to remember that you can tell them no and deny them the power to inflict harm. Doing this will help you enforce the new healthy boundaries you’ve created.
- Respect Yourself: Recovery can be hard, especially if you’ve endured any challenges that have impacted your feeling of self-worth, like financial or career issues. It’s important to consider your well-being during recovery, so work on building up your self-confidence to help you enforce healthy boundaries in your relationships.
Substance Abuse and Relationships
Sometimes, it’s possible that a loved one you’re close with may also be dealing with substance abuse. A relationship like this can cause the person to try and prevent you from seeking recovery.
It’s also possible that a family member or friend could be enabling your addiction. They may have intended on helping you, but instead ended up assisting with your addictive behaviors. Enabling can look like financially supporting you, removing consequences, hiding your behaviors, or providing you with drugs or alcohol to feed your addiction.
There is opportunity to change enabling behaviors to foster healthier relationships. Here, it’s important to discuss the behaviors and how your relationship with them contributes to your addiction. Remember to be honest and tell the person what needs to change so that you can work on establishing healthy boundaries in your recovery journey.
Establishing Healthy Relationships in Recovery
Letting go of toxic relationships creates room for you to form new healthy connections with people as you continue on your recovery journey. It’s important to take this opportunity to make new positive friendships and welcome sobriety with supportive people around you.
Struggling with addiction or poor mental health may make it harder to build connections with others. You might not feel like you’re worthy, know what a healthy relationship is supposed to look or feel like, or really know where to look to make these new connections.
Establishing your sense of self-worth is the first step in building healthy relationships in recovery. You need to feel good about yourself and know that you’re worthy of having family and friends around you that support you.
To help you feel worthy of a sober life and healthy relationships, try:
- New hobbies or regain interest in old activities you used to enjoy, like reading or journaling
- Eliminate negative self-talk and focus on positive thoughts and feelings
- Set goals that can help you boost your confidence, like prioritizing doing the things that make you feel good about yourself, such as exercising
Knowing what a healthy relationship looks like will help you know what to look for and recognize the people who contribute positive attitudes and behaviors. A healthy relationship will:
- Support recovery, NOT addiction
- Be built upon mutual respect
- Center on the health and wellness of each individual
- Involve healthy communication
- Encourage you to achieve your highest good
- Respect personal boundaries
- Be trustworthy and reliable
- Be kind and caring
- Make you feel good about yourself
- Make you feel safe and supported
- Enrich your life
- Bring you a sense of peace and contentment
If you’re unsure where to look to make new healthy relationships with others, try connecting with your peers in recovery. Talking with people who are going through similar hardships and experiences, whether with substance abuse or different mental health disorders, can help you bond and keep each other accountable.
At The Recovery Village, whether you’re receiving addiction or mental health treatment, we offer different types of group therapy to help you form healthy connections, build your sense of community and increase your sense of self-worth.
In group therapy sessions, you:
- Get to know other group members
- Begin to understand yourself and what others are going through
- Build self-awareness
- Develop social skills
- Foster personal growth
- Support other members
Remember that healthy relationships take time and commitment to build. But once they’re established, they add significant value to your life.
Building Healthy Relationships With Yourself and Others at The Recovery Village
At The Recovery Village, we offer inpatient and outpatient addiction and mental health treatment programs. We’ll help you regain your sense of self worth so that you can repair broken relationships, let go of toxic ones and build new ones that are healthy and supportive of your journey toward a sober life.
Both inpatient and outpatient addiction rehab services offer similar therapies to treat alcohol and drug addiction, like individual and group therapies. Inpatient treatment is meant for those who need a higher level of care as patients live at the facility full-time and receive 24-hour medical supervision. Outpatient treatment is meant for individuals who don’t need intensive care and patients attend scheduled appointments with medical professionals to assess their physical health during recovery. Patients also have a combination of individual and group therapy sessions that they attend either onsite at the location or in online teletherapy sessions.
With experienced, licensed therapists at the top of their fields, our clinicians specialize in a variety of mental health conditions, including but not limited to depression, anxiety, PTSD and addiction treatment. Both inpatient and outpatient mental health rehab services offer similar therapies to treat mental health disorders, like CBT, DBT, individual and group therapy. However, inpatient rehab takes place in a residential setting where the patient lives at the facility full-time for several weeks. In outpatient rehab, patients attend scheduled appointments with their therapist weekly, either onsite at the location or in online teletherapy sessions.
