Boundaries and Relationships

Learning to cultivate healthy boundaries and relationships is a strong component of our Arizona Addiction Treatment Program for Women. This is because establishing healthy boundaries are of the utmost importance to the success of an individual’s recovery. Boundaries are limits that the client establishes in relationships between themselves and others that allow the relationship to remain healthy. Maintaining healthy relationships in one’s life helps maintain a healthy quality of life and a healthy recovery.

Those suffering from addiction often have many negative relationships when they enter our program. Many times these unhealthy or negative relationships spawn from unhealthy boundaries. These unhealthy boundaries that were present in addiction include either giving too much, or taking too much from another person. The individual may have put other’s needs before their own needs, or put their needs above others in their lives.

Learning when to say no, and establishing boundaries, helps our clients eliminate relationship issues that could potentially manifest into an excuse to use or relapse into old behaviors. Most of our clients had dramatic relationships and circumstances in their past lives, and eliminating this helps them focus solely on their recovery.

Just as the client will need to establish boundaries with others in their lives, family and friends will need to establish boundaries with client. The family will need set healthy boundaries to allow the client to grow in their recovery in a healthy manner. The family will need to eliminate any unhealthy boundaries that were present before, such as enabling or being unfairly strict with the individual. Our Family Program will address these boundaries, among many other topics, and will allow the family to heal as a whole.

Our therapeutic environment begins with having women establish a healthy relationship and boundaries with themselves. We teach women to love themselves and respect themselves enough to be able to set boundaries with others in their lives. This is an essential component of relapse prevention, as many women fall back into addiction after seeing that their relationships – both friendships and intimate relationships – are still filled with drama.

Helping women establish a relationship with themselves, a higher power, women in the program, their family, loved ones, employers and even strangers is one of the most transformative and evident processes clients at our Arizona addiction treatment center for women go through.