Share this page?
To support a loved one towards a positive lifestyle, restore some balance to your own life, or both, this topic will help you to understand how we change and why.
About SMART Family & Friends Programme
The SMART Family & Friends Programme (F & F) has used the four key points of SMART Recovery and adapted these to suit the needs of family & friends of people with a drug and/or alcohol addiction.
Rather than focusing on the loved one, the F & F Programme invites participants to spend time concentrating on themselves and their goals, an area they may have been neglecting for some time.
The F & F programme explores ways participants can look after themselves better; even in difficult and stressful circumstances, and establish healthier relationships with their Loved One.
Taking steps to make changes in life requires considerable courage. Participating in a supportive environment, comprised of people sharing similar experiences, will hopefully lessen feelings of isolation and instil a sense of hope.
Example Topics Covered
Change and Motivation
Self-care and Self-rewards
This topic provides tools for assessing your current levels of emotional distress and helps you restore balance to your life in order to calmly and effectively manage the challenges you face.
Positive Communication
Learning to communicate in a positive way and listen to your loved one effectively are skills that can lead to an improved relationship and the possibility of collaboration vs confrontation.
Healthy Boundaries
Addictive behaviours are often in direct conflict with health boundaries. Restoring these is key to re-establishing mutual respect in your interactions with your loved one.
Safety and Support
It is common for substance abuse and violence to go hand-in-hand. Violence includes verbal, psychological and physical abuse. Isolation can lead to increased stress, depression, anxiety and loss of perspective on what is normal or acceptable.
Disable the Enabling
It can be helpful to gain awareness and insight about how certain strategies which you intended as helpful are actually counter-productive and begin to change these to more helpful ones.
Trust & Forgiveness
This topic explores ways that family & friends can deal with broken trust, rebuilding trust, and letting go of past hurts.
Accessing SMART Family & Friends
Attend a SMART Family & Friends Meeting in your area or online
You can search to see if there is a Family & Friends meeting near you, when searching select ‘Family & Friends’ within ‘meeting type and features’.
We also run weekly Online Family & Friends meetings on Mondays at 7:30 pm and Thursdays at 7.00 pm.
Complete our Training
The online training is designed with two specific but differing learning streams in mind; (1) it provides participants with a deeper understanding of the programme, for personal development and (2), it provides the basic information and knowledge for those participants who may wish to qualify as registered SMART facilitators in the future.
Purchase a SMART Family & Friends Handbook
The SMART Family and Friends Handbook is useful to meeting participants who want a stronger understanding of the topics and tools that are used in the Family and Friends programme. It includes most of the hand-outs and written exercises used in meetings.
Most people will not read this Handbook from cover to cover, but rather use it as a topic-by-topic reference to answer questions.