For The Family and Loved Ones

It can be tormenting to live with or watch someone you care about suffer with addiction/alcoholism. Anger and sadness may have become a regular part of life. If you have been part of an intervention, or have simply wished or prayed that someone might find help, a New Life Launch Pad residence may be at least part of the answer.

Letting Your Loved One Go

Letting them go may be the most loving and helpful thing you can do, even if the troubled person is your child, parent or spouse. This does not mean just letting them go into a Launch Pad. It also means letting go of the helpful control you may have tried to exercise. You have probably supplied both rewards and punishments to get your loved one “back on track,” and it has been heartbreakingly ineffective.

Even if love and yearning are the main feelings, the sad truth is that for the afflicted person such feelings remain unsettled and unsettling. A stepping back, at least somewhat, on the part of loved ones, is very important for the recovering addict/alcoholic. You may not want to do that, and he, or she, may not want you to. Familiar pain sometimes seems better than risking change. But the mental and emotional clarity must develop for effective surrender of defenses. They cannot be successfully charmed or forced to change.

The unconscious urge toward another drink or drug is intensified when emotional connections are too strong or too weak, too distracting or too reserved. Though the addict/alcoholic may make perfect sense in verbal discussions, his behavior repeatedly shows something besides “perfect sense” is at work. It is the language of feelings, not words, which must change from a frozen mass or a raging torrent, to a negotiable stream.

Being Released from a Treatment Program

When a loved one is released from a treatment program or other institution, (or experiences a few days or weeks of abstinence) it is tempting for everyone to fall back into the same patterns as before. Welcomed home they shakily try to pick up where they left off, only to discover the fears and anxieties are still present. Old angers or disappointments have not been resolved by sobriety; and now there is no ‘medication’ to ease the pain.

Left unchecked, unresolved, such mental and emotional problems come to be a kind of madness. It is a madness that inexorably progresses toward institutions and death. Religions help some, and psychoanalysis helps some. But for addicts/alcoholics who cannot recover through religious or psychological help, the Twelve Step programs have offered the only hope.

AA and NA

Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous have provided a way by which millions upon millions of sorely afflicted people found hope, and recovery. These programs are free, and continue to exist through the tireless efforts of men and women who give back to others what was so freely given to them. It is that very act of giving back which keeps them sufficiently dedicated to their own abstinence.

As recovering people, with reverence beyond description for the Twelve Steps, we noticed, however, an ongoing tragedy. Many people spent long years, or died, without the solution of the Twelve Steps. They had not hit a “bottom” hard enough to have no further choices; or their usual daily interactions seemed to have more influence upon them than the brief times they spent with recovering peers.

Those of us who’d been successfully practicing 12-step programs for a while saw the comings and goings of the youngsters, or the too-stubborn, and told each other, “They’ll be back, if they live.” And it was true.

Nothing can replace the Twelve Step programs for those of us who need them. The missing piece of the puzzle was enough daily interaction with recovering peers. New Life Launch Pads and other “recovery houses” like them are a modern cultural response to a very real and growing need.

The Launch Pad to a New Life

The Launch Pad system offers much more than shelter. A regimen of 12-step participation, in-house sessions, monitored life skills practice and active principles such as honesty, empathetic respect and critique, dependability and sensible frugality make up the structured atmosphere in which we live. Positive goal making is our standard replacement for self-recrimination and the self-sabotage of excuses.

For more information about Launch Pad opportunities and requirements please see the Admissions page. To fill out an application, see the Contact Page or call (910) 632-2344.

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