Your priorities now are keeping your teen substance-free and holding your family together. Your teen tells you that recovery is all-important to them, too, and says that attending school, working or taking responsibility for their life will have to come later. Not wanting to be an obstacle to your teen's recovery, you continue to drop them off at meetings and watch for telltale signs of relapse. Without realizing it, you are hindering, not helping the recovery process. In my 15 years of working with families in recovery, I have found that many people believe recovery, from various forms of addiction, is the process of just giving up what that person is addicted to.
Recovery is about dealing with life on life's terms.
That would include your family, your teen's personal recovery, self-esteem issues, school, work, relationships, and other behaviors that contribute to substance abuse and chemical dependency. Addiction is a family disease. Success is built on total family recovery. Unfortunately, if the parents don't realize the dynamics of what's really going on, their teen may use the recovery process to gain more freedoms and start entirely different addictions within the family. Confused and reluctant to shake up the family structure more than necessary, parents readily buy into these veiled manipulations that their teen doesn't need to attend school, get a job or listen to their parents.