You are in this too.
Someone you love is in recovery, or should be, and nobody handed you a map either. This page is for you. It says what actually helps, what makes it worse even when it comes from love, where your own support is, and how to keep naloxone in the house.
If they are unresponsive, breathing slowly or not at all, or their lips are blue: call 911, give naloxone if you have it, and stay. If you are afraid for their life or yours tonight, call or text 988. You do not have to be the person in crisis to call.
What helps
- Keep normal plans. Dinner on Thursday, the walk on Sunday. Recovery needs ordinary life to return to.
- Notice the small things out loud, without a prize attached. "You seem more here lately." That is enough.
- Learn the shape of a craving: it crests and passes inside half an hour. You can sit with someone through one without fixing it.
- Ask what they want from you on a hard night. Some people want company, some want a text, some want to be left alone and checked on after. Ask once, then believe the answer.
- Keep naloxone in the house if opioids were ever involved, and tell them where it is.
- Get your own support. This is not optional, and it is not a betrayal.
What makes it worse
- Counting their days for them. If they want to tell you, they will. A number said by someone else becomes a leash.
- Searching, testing, checking. It turns a home into a station, and it teaches them to hide.
- Treating a return as the end. It is one hard moment, not the whole person, and the fastest way to make it the whole person is to say so.
- Offering the substance "just this once" at a celebration. Ever.
- Making your own peace depend on their day. You will both drown.
documented · CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training) trials, SAMHSA family guidance
- I am not keeping score. I am just glad you are here.after a hard week
- Do you want company, a text, or to be left alone and checked on later?on a night that looks hard
- That was one night. It does not undo the rest.after a return, once, and then stop
- I am getting help with my side of this too.said plainly, once
- The naloxone is in the kitchen drawer, left side.every time you move it
The approach with the best evidence for a person who refuses treatment is not confrontation and not an intervention with the family in a circle. It is called CRAFT: you change what you reward and what you stop protecting, you keep your own life, and in the trials about two in three refusers entered treatment. It is teachable in a few sessions, and some of it is on this page already.
strong evidence · Miller, Meyers and Tonigan 1999; Roozen 2010 meta-analysis
Every one of these is free, and every one of them has heard your exact story.
What to do when someone is overdosing
Naloxone reverses an opioid overdose in minutes and does nothing harmful if opioids were not involved. It is over the counter in the United States. Keep it where you can reach it in the dark, tell everyone in the house where it is, and read the two steps on the box once, tonight, so you never read them for the first time in the moment. How it works, in plain words.
Marrow is the app the person you love may be using. It keeps no streak, it never shows you their record, and nothing they write in it leaves their phone. If they want you on their bank of people, they will add you, and you will find out because they reach for you. That is how it should be. More on helping someone in recovery.