Drug and Alcohol Rehab for Couples

For anyone living with a substance use problem, achieving abstinence can be a difficult task (SUD). However, when intimate partners share a SUD, establishing and sustaining sobriety can be considerably more difficult.

Addiction has a ripple effect that extends beyond the addict; it impacts their family, friends, coworkers, and, perhaps most significantly, their spouses. Whether couples are married, cohabiting, or simply in a relationship, having a substance use disorder (SUD) can be detrimental to both parties and make it extremely difficult to maintain a healthy and supportive partnership. Even if the spouse with the SUD seeks treatment and maintains their sobriety, this does not eliminate the relationship’s maladaptive communication patterns, damaged trust, and emotional distress. Trust must be rebuilt, and both parties in the relationship must own their shortcomings and work together to overcome them. Without professional advice, this might be challenging. Couples counseling can provide a safe space for both partners to express their experiences with one another and their thoughts about those experiences in order to work toward restoring a loving and healthy relationship.

Couples or married partners who abuse drugs or alcohol have frequent disputes and face an ever-widening emotional chasm. This can result in a cycle of increased substance use if one or both partners continue to use drugs or alcohol to cope with stress or as a way of escaping their troubles. Fortunately, there are treatment institutions that specialize in treating couples, whether cohabiting or married.

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If you’re looking for a couples rehabilitation near you, there are several possibilities. Throughout the United States, treatment facilities can provide specialized care for couples suffering from SUDs.

Relationships Affected by Drug and Alcohol Addiction

In 2019, SUDs affected 20.4 million people in the United States. Drug and alcohol abuse in couples can be a substantial source of stress, affecting both the individual’s mental and physical health, as well as the relationship’s overall health. Addiction can create a dangerous environment, resulting in impaired functioning both in and out of the relationship, additional stress, and a variety of other problems that can have a detrimental impact on all aspects of life.

Couples may encounter the following challenges as a result of SUDs:

• Arguments regarding substance abuse or items associated with substance abuse, such as evading obligations, saving money, or staying out late.
• Participating in codependent actions such as covering for a spouse, finding excuses for them, or reporting to work “sick” on their behalf.
• Domestic violence incidents.
• Feeling compelled to drink or take drugs by yourself or your partner in order to cope with the stress caused by your disagreements regarding substance usage.
• Suggest that you or your partner require drugs or alcohol in order to be affectionate or intimate.
• Increased isolation from friends and family, which is frequently used to conceal the problem.

What Effects Does Addiction Have on Intimate Relationships?

When one or both partners abuse alcohol or drugs in a relationship, it can result in a number of major problems and negative repercussions. Couples may face financial difficulties, housing challenges, loss of employment, medical issues, poor communications, a loss of trust, and emotional neediness behaviors. Additionally, there is an increased danger of verbal and mental abuse, as well as physical assault. Substance misuse is a factor in 45 to 60 percent of intimate partner abuse. A parent who struggles with drugs or alcohol is three times more likely to abuse their children. Additionally, addiction can impair sexual performance, causing one or both partners to feel unwanted, dissatisfied, or hated.

Substance Abuse And Sex Life

Alcohol and drug misuse have a detrimental influence on mental and physical health, as well as on sex life, job performance, and bonding. Men who abuse alcohol have a 65 to 70 percent probability of developing sexual issues, including lack of libido, premature ejaculation, and other types of sexual dysfunction. Even brief periods of excessive alcohol consumption can result in transient erectile dysfunction. Researchers discovered that strong alcohol usage can have a long-lasting influence on a man’s sexual health, even after extended periods of abstinence. Although some cocaine users experience an increase in sex drive while using the substance, long-term cocaine usage has been shown to diminish sexual satisfaction. According to a study conducted at the University of Granada in Spain, all substances decrease the sexual functioning of men who abuse heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and cannabis. Orgasm and p leisure were the two areas most dramatically reduced.

Not only does substance addiction impair sexual function, but it also impairs the emotional tie between couples, which results in feelings of intimacy and desire. Discontent can sabotage the love one partner previously had for the other. Couples counseling may assist couples in resolving these negative sentiments and reclaiming the warmth that their relationship once possessed.

Can Couples Attend Rehab Together?

Certain rehab institutions permit couples to receive treatment for SUDs concurrently. Seeking therapy at a couples rehabilitation can be useful for a variety of reasons. If both partners are willing to begin the process of recovery, a couples rehabilitation center can assist in breaking the cycle of addiction and strengthening the relationship by assisting the couple in identifying the issues that contributed to the addiction in the first place.

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Couples that struggle with SUDs frequently struggle with decision-making, emotion expression, budgeting, parenting, and setting boundaries. Couples’ addiction treatment may give the counseling, information, and skills necessary to assist partners in developing more effective strategies for coping with these challenges.

Even if only one partner is addicted, the other partner can benefit from couples’ drug treatment by learning to manage specific triggers and assisting their partner in being sober. Couples who start treatment concurrently report significantly higher reductions in drug use than people who undergo individual therapy.

Couples’ rehabilitation can provide the tools necessary to attain and maintain recovery, whether one or both partners require treatment.

What to Expect in Couples Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation

Every couple seeking treatment is unique, and so requires an individualized treatment strategy. As is the case with other types of treatment, a couples rehabilitation program will often follow a four-step process:

Patient Evaluation: Admissions navigators will conduct a comprehensive medical and mental evaluation of incoming couples. This will assist in determining the appropriate degree of care and treatment course.

Detoxification: For certain patients, the continuum of therapy will involve detoxification, albeit this is not always essential.

Addiction treatment: Couples will often get a combination of behavioral, group, and individual counseling, as well as couples-based therapy. This procedure may be performed in an inpatient or outpatient setup.

Aftercare: Following completion of the steps outlined above, couples will continue to work with a therapist to build an aftercare plan. The objectives of aftercare are to maintain recovery, establish strategies for avoiding relapse, and develop a life filled with meaning and meaningful relationships.

Additionally to the foregoing, couples treatment participants should anticipate an emphasis on the strength of their relationship. Combining elements of relationship counselling and addiction-focused couples therapy allows for a holistic approach to difficulties, which may provide the best chance for recovery and relationship rehabilitation.

What treatment approaches are employed in couples rehabilitation?

There are numerous treatment options for distinct types of addiction. Generally, most treatment centers approach addiction through some form of behavioral therapy. Couples can learn new ways to interact through behavioral therapy, which promotes clear, supportive communication. This may assist couples in achieving and maintaining sobriety, as well as cultivating better and healthier relationships.

There are numerous sectors of mental health, addiction therapy, couples counseling, and merging contemporary research discoveries with drug abuse counselor experience. Numerous therapy has been shown to be beneficial and are accessible to couples and their families struggling with addiction.

They can be divided into the following categories:

1. Individualized psychotherapy

2. Psychotherapy for families

3. Couples therapy with an emphasis on addiction

Therapy on an individual basis. Individual therapy is frequently necessary for individuals with unique needs and is especially beneficial if there is a co-occurring addiction, depression, social anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance use, and mental health problems. Working long-term with an individual therapist will benefit individuals with co-occurring addiction, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance use, and mental health problems.

Individual treatment comes in a variety of forms:

1. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: This type of therapy teaches an individual to recognize the actions associated with their addiction and demonstrates how negative thoughts can cause dependence. This therapy may contribute to the destabilization of loving relationships and decision-making. By recognizing these concerns, the sufferer can also know how to prevent them or to avoid harmful thoughts from ever becoming permanent behavioral practices.
2. Motivational Interviewing: This technique entails the client and therapist engage in a structured dialogue. It is an empathic, realistic, and time-limited method that recognizes how difficult it is for someone to modify their habit. This treatment is designed to help the victim understand how their addiction and behaviors affect their current way of life; then, the therapist asks the patient to choose how they want to live in the future and, through self-awareness, expresses a responsibility aloud, which has been shown to help build a patient’s capacity to actually fix those things.
3. Psychodynamic therapy: The strategies and speculations that differentiate psychodynamic therapy from other forms of therapies include an emphasis on recognizing life experiences, unconscious feelings and thoughts, conceptual understanding, personal and social interaction styles that shape behaviors, and trying to overcome deleterious and suppressed emotions in terms of improving the client’s communication between relationships.

Psychotherapy for the family of addict couples. Family therapy is a sort of psychotherapy in which all family members’ behaviors are discussed, as well as how these behaviors affect not only individual family members but also the relationships between family members and the entire family. This treatment can assist family members in learning how to interact with one another and overcome issues.

Family therapy comes in a variety of forms:

1. Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT): BSFT is a family-based approach designed to prevent and manage child and adolescent substance usage linked with other behavioral issues by altering family members’ behavior in accordance with both risk and preventive characteristics for substance misuse.
   • Assembling—Assembles a psychological and emotional healing process including all family members

The therapeutic method makes use of the following techniques:

• Restructuring—This is the process of altering the intercommunications within the household that are directly related to harmful behaviors.
• Diagnosis—It uncovers the patterns of interaction that permit or enable harmful teenage behavior.

2. Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT): The CRAFT program’s objective is to educate you on how to assist your substance abuse patient to stop using and enter therapy. Additionally, helps them in developing methods for their interactions with that individual, such as assisting them in communicating or setting up rewards for positive behavior. Couples are benefiting from these tactics.
3. Matrix Model: Developed in the 1980s, this technique has seen great success. It is intended to aid in the process of recovery from drug addictions such as methamphetamine and cocaine. Because the Matrix Model’s therapeutic procedures are integrative, they incorporate specific viewpoints from a variety of helpful therapy strategies, including:

• Improvement of Motivation
• Couples, family, and personal counseling are available.
• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) 
• 12 step program 
• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) 
• Outpatient intensive care
• Preventing relapse

These are interventions that educate patients about how the brain responds to drugs and withdrawal, provide support in community-based collaborative aid groups, and help patients develop their coping abilities.

Addiction-Focused Couples Therapy. Substance abuse has a detrimental effect on family interactions and marital functioning. Addiction-related issues might be exacerbated by other troubles in a couple’s relationship. This tools therapy helps to combine an attachment-based approach to drug rehabilitation at all phases, from pre-contemplation, when sufferers and their families frequently live off the addiction, to contemplation, where unhealthy defense mechanisms such as refusal and blame become visible, and finally to action, where victims and their families mop up or reduce use while reconciling with family members.

There are several types of Couples Therapy with an Addiction Focus:

1. Alcohol Behavioral Couples Therapy (ABCT): Outpatient treatment for individuals struggling with substance use disorders and their supportive partners. ABCT is a technique comprised of three components:

• Conversations between couples might serve as triggers for alcohol consumption.
• Reduced relationship anxiety decreases the likelihood of recurrence.
• Positive interpersonal relationships are critical for increasing motivation to abstain from substance misuse.

2. Behavioral Couples Therapy (BCT) for Substance Abuse: BCT fosters the development of interpersonal factors that support abstinence. According to a behavioral approach, members of the family can praise abstinence, and alcohol- and drug-abusing patients can be happier and minimize their chance of relapse with improved engagement. BCT is predicated on the following assumptions:

• When both spouses utilize the same strategy, the method becomes more effective.
• Reduced relationship strain reduces the likelihood of relapse.
• Including practice of parent skills in BCT
• Investigating dissemination techniques

Medication-assisted treatment (MAT): MAT is a comprehensive approach to substance abuse treatment. MAT makes use of pharmaceuticals (such as naltrexone, methadone or buprenorphine) to alleviate withdrawal symptoms, aid in detoxification, and offer maintenance following the detox stage.

12-Step meetings: Couples rehabilitation centers frequently provide 12-Step meetings, such as Recovering Couples Anonymous (RCA), as an extra source of support during the recovery process from drug and alcohol addiction. Many couples opt to continue attending RCA sessions after treatment is completed.

Treatments such as BCT and ABCT have been shown to be successful at changing substance-use behavior and promoting abstinence in couples.

Additionally, studies indicate that MAT should be the initial line of treatment for opiate abuse. MAT is frequently used in conjunction with other forms of therapy to enhance outcomes for patients.

Determine whether you or your spouse requires dual diagnosis treatment, which includes treatment for a co-existing mental health disorder (such as depression or anxiety) in addition to drug rehabilitation. Treatment of both the mental health issue and the addiction is important to maximize recovery chances.

In conclusion, these therapies are meant to address the unique challenges that the addicted person’s family and loved ones encounter, and they provide clients with programs that expedite the rehab process and manage behavioral issues caused by the addiction. You might employ these tactics or even seek treatment at one of the drug rehab institutions to overcome addiction. Additionally, a couple’s joint commitment to therapy assists in initiating the necessary healing process while coping with alcoholism or other substance misuse disorders.

Couples Alcohol Addiction Rehabilitation Centers

Partners alcohol rehabilitation might be an advantageous option for couples to tackle their drinking and recover their relationship. Couples counseling for alcoholism, irrespective of the level of alcohol use, can provide various benefits for you and your spouse and can assist you in achieving and maintaining abstinence. Among the therapies available at a couples alcohol rehabilitation are behavioral couples therapy (BCT), which focuses on helping you stop drinking and work on your relationship.

Couples Drug Rehab Centers

Couples’ drug rehabilitation programs, irrespective of the substance being used, can assist suffering partners in breaking the harmful cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and trying to take control of their relationship and lifestyle. Couples drug treatment programs address a variety of substances, including the following:

• Heroin.
• Cocaine.
• Marijuana.
• Methamphetamine.
• Crack.
• Prescription medications.

Additionally, rehabilitation can assist you or your spouse in addressing and treating any dual diagnosis or co-existing concerns, such as anxiety or depression.

How Do I Deal With My Partner’s Addiction?

It can be challenging to strike a balance between being supportive for your spouse when they are actively abusing alcohol and/or drugs and being an accomplice. Even if your purpose is to assist, sheltering someone from the implications of their drug misuse is considered facilitating. This includes taking over their duties, finding excuses for them, and avoiding legal implications. It might be challenging to establish boundaries and limits. Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Recovering Couples Anonymous are all non-judgmental self-help groups for the companion who is not addicted to a drug but is frequently affected by their loved one’s habits. They provide support and recommendations from others who have faced similar challenges. Couples therapy can assist individuals in reestablishing a healthy state of cooperation, compassion, tolerance, and confidence throughout and after treatment.

Find a Couples Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Facility in your area

You have various alternatives when it comes to selecting a couples rehabilitation center for you and a loved one. Before deciding where to get therapy, you should carefully explore the programs offered to ensure that you receive treatment that is suited to your unique requirements and those of your partner.

If there is no suitable rehabilitation center in your area, you may wish to consider out-of-state treatment. Our database can help you locate inpatient and outpatient couples rehabilitation centers that offer expert addiction therapy. Our inpatient programs are customized to meet the particular needs of each couple. Our facilities are staffed with professionals who can assist you and your spouse in getting back on track.

What information should you gather prior to contacting a rehabilitation center’s hotline?

Before you contact a helpline or a couples therapy facility, you should gather some details about yourself or your partner, if you are speaking on their account. Confirm that you have the insurance policy and policy number for yourself or a close one on hand. Additionally, it will be beneficial to create a list with as much information on alcohol or drug use as possible. This comprises the substances utilized, their concentrations, their length of usage, and their route of administration.

Attempt to disclose any co-existing or dual diagnosis mental wellbeing or medical disorders if possible. These are critical considerations for addiction treatment, as it is critical to locate a couples rehabilitation that has expertise meeting the individual needs of you or your loved one.

Are couples counseling the best course of action for us?

For couples who are battling with addictive behavior and alcohol and drug abuse, usage might become the couple’s only shared activity. If you’ve seen that your drinking or drug usage is having an adverse effect on your relationship, now is an ideal moment to seek couples rehab. Delaying treatment may result in further harm to your relationship.

You and your companion may gain from a couples rehabilitation treatment program if you find yourself experiencing intimacy only when you are using, arguing about drug use, covering up for your partner, experiencing domestic violence, or experiencing isolation from mates, relatives, and other support networks.

Your addiction does not have to take over your life or your couple’s connection. Do not wait until irreversible damage has occurred.

Which Couples Treatment Program Is the Best?

The appropriate treatment for you and your loved one is determined by a number of criteria, including your specific requirements, your combined needs, and any other particular conditions pertaining to your relationship.

Couples’ rehabilitation can be inpatient or outpatient, or a combination of the two, with one partner receiving inpatient care and the other receiving outpatient care. The structure you choose is highly dependent on your couple’s needs and if one or both spouses are suffering from SUD.

Inpatient couples rehabilitation treatment requires the addict to reside at the facility, while outpatient rehabilitation enables the addict to continue staying at home while undergoing treatment at the facility during the week.

Irrespective of the nature of the treatment program, research indicates that couples who join couples drug treatment centers concurrently report a higher rate of sobriety, a better level of relationship quality, and improved family dynamics than couples who only seek personal addiction treatment.

Addressing addiction using the tools and approaches unique to couples recovery enables you and your partner to concentrate on obtaining and keeping sober while also enhancing your relationship. As a result, long-term recovery is possible, as is a healthier, happier relationship free of drug use.

When selecting a couples treatment facility and program, various criteria should be considered, including the following:

• Expense
• Duration of treatment.
• Geography
• Whether or if the program includes ancillary services, such as childcare
• Whether you or your companion require medical attention for a dual diagnosis
• Whichever program you choose, inpatient or outpatient.
• Your insurance policy’s coverage.

Is Couples Rehabilitation Covered by Insurance?

Insurance frequently covers at least a portion of the cost of therapy, if not all of it. If your insurer does not fully cover the cost, some institutions offer payment arrangements or flexible scales that take your salary and other financial commitments into account. If you’d like to know whether your insurance would cover the expense of rehab at a particular rehabilitation facility, you may check your eligibility online or by contacting the helpdesk/hotline.