Put your shame aside. I called the number on our health plan card for chemical dependency. I felt no shame in this my child needed professional help.
Take care of yourself. In the first few weeks of her treatment I came close to a nervous breakdown. I pulled it together just to get to work and function. While it will be a difficult confession you must tell your boss what is going on with your family. I found not getting special treatment helped my morale. It made me feel strong and that my co-workers were unaware of my troubles. I felt I had privacy. My personal life was different. On my days off that happened to occur during the weekdays I cried uncontrollably alone. I just let my tears flow gradually with each passing day I stopped crying. I had no focus for this problem I could not even dial the necessary phone numbers to get the ball rolling for her once I made that first phone call. Thankfully I have a wonderful husband and father to our kids. He completely took over and followed up on her care. Now that I have explained my emotionally state and after my emotions settled down, we did take care of ourselves. We went out to eat, saw movies. Go out and enjoy your child is someplace safe. Her/his recovery will be another milestone for you achieve.
The counselors are your friends. I found that going to them for their thoughts and guidance to be very helpful. I often followed it when I was ready as I found it required a certain amount of detachment for your child to follow through on it. I felt I was never being mean to her. I was fulfilling my parental love for her and avoiding my greatest fear, which was burying her. As you are aware addicts are manipulative people. When our daughter realized we were going out and enjoying our family life without her. She did try to pull a stunt of threatening to leave her treatment center because we were just ?having a grand old time without her and it hurt her.? She felt calling us at 11:00 pm to tell us this would leave us vulnerable. We instead bought ourselves time. We told her to spend the night at the center. We lived one hour?s drive from the town she was in and I told her quite frankly that while our jobs were understanding of our situation we first had tasks to fulfill that morning and I did not wish to be sleep deprived. Please let us do our jobs and we would come and get her by noon. She agreed. This bought the counselors? time to figure out what was triggering her. She had just gotten her first ?little sister? (a new patient) and having the girl talk about using made her want to use as well. We stalled once we arrived and spoke with the counselors and her about how proud we were of her having a ?little sister? only three months into treatment. She did not care she wanted to go home. After stalling a bit more the center agreed they would give her a mini break she would go home with us for six hours. She came home with us. She took a bath. I gave her a back rub and massaged her feet. She hung out with her cats and went back to the center.