Cognitive behavioral models predicate mitigation on the notion that familial relationships reinforce destructive habits, including drug and alcohol abuse. Treatments under this model focus on altering the interactions and behavior that fuel substance abuse, and also on improving coping and problem solving skills. The family systems model is based on the idea that families organize and adjust their relationships around the problem of substance abuse in order to achieve balance, or homeostasis. Smithtown addiction professionals who rely on this model seek to identify and alter harmful patterns of generating familial balance. This model can help, for instance, families with husbands who only express their feelings when they are inebriated.
The family disease approach views substance abuse as a familial rather than an individual disorder, and particularly seeks to mitigate codependency. The multidimensional family therapy model, on the other hand, fuses a variety of techniques in order to understand the intersection of emotions, cognition, behavior, the environment and substance abuse. Other family addiction treatment models that utilize similar integrated approaches include the brief strategic family therapy, multisystemic therapy and functional family therapy.
Despite the varying approaches, family addiction treatment models have similar aims. They seek to improve communication, provide lasting healing, correct harmful relational patterns such as role reversals, help families understand their needs and prevent substance abuse problems spilling over into subsequent generations. Therapists focus on catalyzing the development of familial environments suited to sustaining abstinence and help family members positively adapt to the altered realities wrought by substance abuse disorders. Because of the long term nature of certain types of addiction treatments, marriage and family therapy may span considerable periods of time.
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