Life in Recovery: A Families’ Perspective

ABSTRACT

Although the Life in Recovery series has provided valuable insights into the transformation of the lives of people in recovery and has helped to frame that by recovery method and approach, by gender and by location, it has not assessed the impact of recovery on those immediately surrounding the person in recovery. The Families Living in Addiction and Recovery (FLAR) survey was an attempt to address this by inviting family members to report on their experiences, as witnesses and in their own right as people going through their own version of recovery. Based on two half-day workshops in London and Sheffield, a revised survey for family members was developed that assessed the family member’s observations of recovery and their own personal journey. In total, 1,565 surveys were completed and returned, reflecting much of the positive experience of the previous surveys. They also showed the extent of adverse effects of addiction and the subsequent benefits of recovery to family members. However, recovery is not a linear process, and much of the data in this article discusses the impact of user relapse on family member functioning. The implications for ongoing support for family members and further research around the recovery journeys of family members are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Life in recovery
• families
• relapse
• support
• needs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In LIR surveys, participants were asked about being either perpetrators or victims; for FLAR this was separated into two individual questions to ensure that victimization and perpetration were each accounted for independently.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alcohol Research UK (R 2016/05).