Mother Teresa said, “In the West there is loneliness, which I call the leprosy of the West. In many ways it is worse than our poor in Calcutta.”
In my experience, loneliness is best predictor of relapse. If a young woman finishes treatment successfully but returns home to no friends, even if her parents are “there” for her consistently, she will relapse within a very short amount of time. Teens need a support system outside of their immediate families.
Think about it: if someone loves you and wants to be around you, and they are not required or expected to do so, doesn’t that make you feel good? Parents and siblings are supposed to love us. But friends are not. Once we experience love and validation from others outside of our immediate families, something within us changes. We begin to believe that we DO have value and that the nice things our parents have been telling us about ourselves could possibly be true.
Mother Teresa went on to say, “There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience this in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family.”
Residential treatment centers have fallen short. We have not incorporated teens’ friends into treatment and transition as well as we should. Well before they transition – even from as early on as admission – we need to provide teens with ways of connecting with good friends. We can provide them with easy ways of keeping in touch with the friends they make in treatment through creative use of social media, such as Facebook and Ning, cell phones and instant messaging. We can help them determine more effectively – on their own – which friends at home are supportive and helpful. And then we should get them to connect with those friends in creative, non-electronic ways.
One young woman went home during treatment and invited her friends to a “non-alcoholic party”. She was nervous that they would think it was dumb. She was even more nervous that no one would show up, because she planned it for a Friday night – a night when “everybody goes out to party”. Well, she had a great turnout and she led them in a game of “supermarket relay”. She formed teams of two, each team filled a cart in the supermarket with goods, they all switched carts, and the first team to put the goods back on the shelves in the correct places won. Her friends had a blast and many commented that they didn’t know they “could have fun without getting drunk”.
Many teens think that being “clean” means being lonely. This young woman returned to finish treatment with a new confidence that she could be successful without having to be lonely.