So…I found my old home contract from treatment 🏠
This is the final installment in our series outlining what we - as former troubled teens turned young adult coaches - have found to be the pillars of a successful transition into young adulthood. For the last three weeks, we’ve talked about:
Today, we are talking about the final piece in the successful transition puzzle, which, for the majority of our audience, is probably the most relevant…
So…I found my old home contract from treatment 🏠
“YOU HAVE A GRAD DATE!!” 🎓🥳
“Now, it’s time to start working on your home contract.”
This was simultaneously the most exciting and most annoying phrase a girl could hear from her therapist when I was in my residential treatment program - at least it was for me. I mean, your girl doesn’t like to be pushed into signing anything, even if it’s not legally enforceable.
At my treatment center, the “home contract” I had to do was actually called a relapse prevention plan since I had struggled with substance abuse and was committed to staying sober.
A month or two ago, when I was in the depths of an unrelated internet rabbit hole, I actually found the exact relapse prevention plan contract that my program had me fill out. Some excerpts:
Both my parents and I had to agree to and sign every page.
My family had just moved us to California right before I was sent away, so I legitimately had no friends in my “day-to-day environment.”
This shows how important it is for programs to help their upcoming graduates find and build community in their home environments before they leave. But that’s the topic of a different rant.
While parts of my relapse prevention plan were helpful in that it required reflection and insight into what patterns of thinking and behavior I should look out for that might indicate backsliding, the entire document is ALL PREVENTATIVE.
It’s six pages of what I need to do and not do, who I can spend time with and who I can’t, in order to not go back to how I was before treatment. It’s only focused on looking backward and not falling back into past behaviors.
For someone leaving treatment, it makes us feel as if we’re still completely defined by our past, even after, in some cases, years of working on ourselves to have the freedom to build a life that we actually want to live when we get out.
This specific home contract did not capitalize on my momentum and help me identify any goals that I actually want for my life, let alone the steps I need to take to get there. The topic of yet another rant.
The other issue is that my parents signed every page and yet there was nothing in there about what they were committed to doing to help support me when I came home, besides approving what I could and couldn’t do.
To be fair, I know there are many programs at this point with home contracts that are more progressive and forward-thinking and that represent more of an agreement between parents and their child of what both parties are committed to doing to work together to support each other.
💡 But the important thing for parents to understand is this:
After working on ourselves for months, if not years, in treatment, and especially if we’ve openly committed to wanting to live our lives differently than before we went to treatment, we former troubled teens feel like we’ve earned some trust from our parents.
I get that this is hard for parents. Everyone is nervous. Parents have often spent a lot of money getting us to this point, and no one wants to “fail.”
It took me a few years to understand why my parents were hesitant to give me free rein when I was home for the two months between treatment and college. They hadn’t witnessed the work I was putting in day-to-day at my program just to get through the experience, let alone improve myself. They had only seen me a few times back at home, and those home visits were not nearly enough time to be confident that I wasn’t going to go off the rails again.
At the time, this was very frustrating for me because I was fully confident in maintaining my sobriety and all my progress.
Luckily, my parents had done a lot of their own work. Looking back, they did an excellent job managing their emotions and fears around me “failing” after treatment.
This brings us to the last pillar of a successful transition into young adulthood. Here’s what Colin’s parents and my own parents did right:
🔑 Our parents gave us a baseline of trust when we left our programs.
Did this approach go perfectly for my parents? Absolutely not. But they had to deal with their own emotions, and I had to deal with the consequences.
For example, part of my relapse prevention plan was that I wasn’t supposed to get a boyfriend when I got home. Little did they know, I had already picked out the guy I was going to make be my boyfriend in an AA meeting a month before I was set to come home. The guy didn’t even know he was going to be my boyfriend. But at least he was sober, and he was my age, so in my mind, that was progress.
I wasn’t supposed to stay out past 10 p.m. all summer. But I turned 18 about a month after I came home, and curfew went completely out the window. Most of the time, I was hanging out with people after an AA meeting, so again, there’s progress.
I wasn’t supposed to smoke. My friend, who had graduated from our program a few months earlier, and I regularly went to hookah bars with our boyfriends because we thought it made us look badass. I mean, there are much worse things we could have been doing that would have actually made us look badass. I obviously didn’t tell my parents.
We would drive like complete idiots around the hills above our houses while blasting dubstep music (I know…) Was it stupid and dangerous? Yes. We did get multiple tickets, but at least we weren’t drunk! There was just no way around 18-year-old me doing stupid things, so my parents decided to pick and choose their battles.
However, because of the baseline of trust my parents gave me, I was empowered to follow through on going to AA meetings and finding a sponsor. I followed through on working a summer job as a camp counselor. I bought myself a car so that I could get to meetings once I went to college. I spent the majority of my “planned leisure time” with my girlfriend who had graduated from our program a few months before I did.
Did Colin and I sometimes abuse this trust and backslide into some “non-working” behaviors? Yes. Did we get up to some generally stupid shenanigans? Also, yes.
But because our parents built the foundation of our new parent ↔️ adult-child relationship on a baseline of trust, we also started to trust ourselves to figure out how to deal with the consequences of our actions. We started to rebuild that relationship with our parents from a place of mutual respect rather than stewing in resentment.
Most importantly, our parents acknowledged that they were proud of us for the hard work we had just done in treatment, and they would never understand what it was like to have to be in that environment during the most formative years of our adolescence.
They acknowledged that things wouldn’t be perfect afterward, and they didn’t expect us to be perfect. They also made it clear that we could always go to them for support, but they weren’t going to bail us out anymore because we were adults. And they trusted us to figure it out.
Colin and I work with our clients to help them see their parents’ point of view. We spend a lot of time helping them figure out how to integrate their parents’ goals into their own vision for their lives.
We also spend a lot of energy helping them process what was behind their parents’ decision to send them away. As a result, our clients start understanding and forgiving their parents a lot more quickly than we did ourselves. We shorten this process to a few months, instead of a few years.
On the flip side, if parents look through their child's phone expecting to find something, they’re going to find something. If parents track their child's location 24/7, they’re setting their child up to lie to them.
Instead, having a baseline of parent trust empowers our clients to trust themselves. It also makes it much more likely that children are honest with their parents when they inevitably “mess up” because they know they have that unconditional support. By giving them this trust, parents give their children the space to solve their problems for themselves first and then come to their parents when they need help figuring out a solution rather than having their problem solved for them.
Obviously, we get that this is scary for parents. That’s why we’ve made it our job to give parents peace of mind. Peace of mind that their child has a positive influence they can talk to at all hours of the day, who’s not going to let a slip-up become a downward spiral, and who can show them how to set and achieve their goals as they enter the most exciting phase of their lives.
And now….our vibes this week 🔮
📚 What we’re reading
47th Semi-Annual Taking Stock With Teens® Survey - Spring 2024, Piper Sandler
Girl in Red Is Ready for Her Superstar Era, Rolling Stone
🎶 What we’re listening to
I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! Girl in Red
💡 One last thought
THANKS FOR READING!
If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎
We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:
If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!
If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.