Living with addiction is a challenge, but so is living with a close family member, especially a spouse who struggles with addiction. If you have a spouse who has recently gone to rehab or found professional treatment, you will play a key role in figuring out how to support a sober spouse long-term.
How to Support a Sober Spouse
During this time, it’s normal to worry about how life will change and what you can do to support them.
Patience
Learning how to support a sober spouse takes patience and it takes a lot of endurance. It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed by the amount of patience and support that is required when your loved one has an addiction.
The hard truth is that when someone moves into recovery, it’s never a linear process where they make gains or improvements day after day. There will be ups and downs, times when things move forward, and times when things seem to move back a little.
As a spouse, it’s up to you to understand this, to remain patient, and accept that while you might want things to immediately go back to how they were before addiction, it’s not your responsibility to hold your spouse accountable to the person you thought they would become or wished they were but rather to live with them and support them through the thousands of chapters that are ahead.
Keep Your Home Sober
One of the easiest ways to figure out how to support a sober spouse is to keep your home sober. In the early stages of recovery, people are more likely to remain sober if they have a sober living space.
Even though you might not think that you have a problem consuming a single glass of red wine on the weekends, if your spouse has just dealt with treatment for alcohol addiction, your living space will need to conform to their needs, and your life routine might have to exclude red wine to show that you are committed to the long-term success of your spouse and your life together.
Set Boundaries
A big part of your role in supporting a spouse who is in recovery is to establish healthy boundaries. This means understanding triggers and enabling behaviors, and figuring out what things you might have to change or give up as a result.
You might, for example, have to avoid participating in risky situations like hosting parties or going out to sports bars. You might have to be more honest about when your partner isn’t pulling their weight or when they are showing signs of relapse.
Sober Activities
A similar way to support your sober spouse is to make sure that you avoid any destructive behaviors, even if they are things that are not personally destructive for you.
This necessitates a deep understanding of the things that might be triggering for your spouse so that you can find activities that don’t accidentally trigger them during their recovery and that you can find enjoyable activities that are drug and alcohol-free.
One of the easiest ways to learn more about personal triggers for your spouse and how to incorporate new, sober activities is to participate in Virtual recovery coaching.
Getting Support for a Sober Spouse with Aligned Living
With Aligned Living, you can learn how to support a sober spouse with virtual recovery coaching. This type of coaching is something that your spouse can utilize while in recovery and something that you can utilize while you support them.
At Aligned Living, we provide virtual programs with flexible schedule options so you can choose to have a coach who checks in on yourself or your spouse at regular intervals, whether that is a few minutes every day, a big session once per week and a shorter session a few other times per week, or something in between.
We provide the safe space you need to focus on ways to keep your home sober and supportive, like establishing healthy boundaries but also making sure that you take time to ask about yourself, establish healthy communication, and take time to focus on the emotions that you might have temporarily pushed away when trying to deal with addiction in your spouse.
Overall, learning how to support a sober spouse takes time and effort. With the right type of virtual coaching programs, you and your spouse can set aside time to get the support and perspective you each need, to learn more about things like relapse and triggers, and to come up with plans of action to support long-term sobriety.
Contact us today to learn more about our virtual programs and family therapy.