Picking Fruit Prematurely

Now that your young adult has been in treatment for more than thirty days, it can be deceiving to think that they are fixed and ready to come home.  They are a lot of things disturbing about that sentence.  First, if someone is going to treatment, returning home especially after a short residential stay is a very, very bad idea.  That could be a stand-alone article topic!  Secondly, treatment is not a quick fix.  It is a marathon.  We need to be thinking about long-term change because it takes a while to rewire the brain.

So I liken this exact scenario to picking fruit.

Having stepped away from the fruit for a bit (i.e. being removed while they are in residential) allows the fruit to ripen a little.  It is easy to look at the fruit and from the outside believe it is ripe and ready to be picked.  You can compare this to someone discharging prematurely or being taken out of treatment prematurely.  For fruit, we lose the nutrients.  It’s bitter or hard, and we feel duped.  How could that be?  It looked so perfect from the outside.  How do we compare this to effective change in our young adults?  Well, because they have been able to be sober for four weeks (because they’re in a program!) they must be ready to be out in the world again, totally tempted by drugs and alcohol and without the long-term skills to be able to seek out alternative coping skills when they struggle.  That was most-likely why they were using in the first place.

If you pluck the fruit too early, they have not had the chance to form new neuropathways.  They will return, most likely rather quickly, to old patterns and behaviors.  You will be pissed when your young adult relapses and in truth, you may need to look in the mirror and figure out why you were so insistent on picking that fruit so early.  Was it for personal gain?  Did you just assume they were already better?  Was it because treatment is expensive?  Whatever the reason, everyone needs to understand that treatment is a process, not a single event.  Residential treatment needs to ideally be 90 days.  From there, they need more than just sober living.  Seek out a professional who can help you navigate this for your loved one so that they do have time to heal, and so that you, as a parent, don’t get stuck picking the fruit prematurely.

For questions or comments contact Joanna.