Addictions
When talking about addictions, from drug or alcohol addiction to the different types of addictions, the discovery that a loved one is abusing drugs is usually slow and excruciating. There are small signs at the beginning. The person does not show up for some appointments, and a little money is missing, but it is not a big deal. Some of the person’s actions do not make much sense, but he explains them one way or another. However, the explanations fail to make complete sense. However, they can still be minimized.
Stranger things can happen. A car accident. A lost job. A lost weekend. Appointments with the children that he does not attend. Perhaps an angry tirade that has nothing to do with his character.
Perhaps the consumption of drugs or alcohol is noticed and talked about, the subject of addictions. The person agrees to stop using, says it was only a couple of times, and he (or she) did not like it anyway.
Family Intervention In Addictions
Among psychotherapists, there is often a difference in criteria about whether or not it is advisable to include the family in the treatment of problems. However, when we talk about addiction, there is unanimity in considering that the family of the addict is key when it comes to understanding and treating the addiction problem, which is why family intervention in the treatment of addiction is a fundamental piece in our center.
Nevertheless, although most specific addiction treatments include family assistance, the addict’s family has not always been understood, cared for, or used as a therapeutic resource, over time, addiction has been considered in different ways, and this has determined, at least in part, the way to involve the family.
At first, there was a tendency to think that addiction was a misfortune that fell on an innocent family, so family care was limited to offering them a space where they could be listened to and cared for in their suffering. Afterward, 
emphasis was placed on family relationships as the origin of the problem, thus offering a space for counseling and reducing their role to that of a watchdog of rules imposed by the program or treatment itself or by the therapist himself. This type of involvement, on many occasions, harmed the family by producing a feeling of guilt, which made them consider the addiction as a consequence of a lousy upbringing or a lack of affection.
Systemic family therapy has been one of the most effective when it comes to involving the family since it considers it a system in which each member influences and is affected by the behavior of the other.
In the same way that the addicted person needs to learn a series of strategies that treatment provides to change their relationship with the world and with themselves, the rest of the family needs a type of intervention not normally provided by specific addiction treatments.
Family Intervention helps to retain patients in treatment programs more than common types of interventions: This is so because family approaches manage to increase the commitment of patients and their families to treatment programs. The low drop-out rate in interventions based on family work is especially important in addictions since treatment adherence, that is, remaining in it until its completion is one of the greatest difficulties encountered in the intervention with these patients.…