My daughter is an alcoholic in the recovery process after inpatient rehab and intensive outpatient treatment.

Hello, I am Rafael. Thanks for asking your question - I'm here to support you. (Information posted here is not private or confidential but public).

I am very sorry to know about your daughter's situation.

Answering your question I have to say that your plan "to make any help we give her contingent upon further treatment." is the right way to go.

When we talk about people with addictions we find that the very worst factor enabling their ego and fueling their illness is providing the wrong support. Many times loving parents and families do literally worsen their loved ones addiction by unhealthy ways of support they provide.

If you and her father, and every other important person involved in her life do exclusively offer healthy support, her chances for real rehabilitation become real and significantly increase. A key word here would be "consistency". You and her father would need to comply %100 with such agreement if you truly want to play the best possible role in her rehabilitation process.

I can tell you from experience that a person with an addiction could go multiple times through inpatient treatment and do it just fine, but as soon as they leave the program and get back their freedom, without the systematic restrictions of inpatient facility and 24 hrs. staff monitoring them, they just get back into the same active addictive cycle.

Because of such reality, I do support intensive outpatient treatment as long as necessary, including both, individual and group psychotherapy, plus all the necessary activities to support her rehabilitation process. I want to mkae it clear that IOP success rate would also depend mainly on how well her "support system" works, not enabling her addiction and dysfunctional life, but setting limits and eradicating any form of codependent support.

Most women in her shoes would truly care and many times use children as the best justification to avoid inpatient treatment, but if you come to terms with the fact that without codependent support enabling her and affording the consequences of her actions-addiction, she would undermine her own parental rights herself and end having her children removed if she does not truly commit to her rehabilitation process.

Legal and substance abuse-dependence issues are the most common case for parents to stop having custodial rights of minor children because of the neglect and abuse involved. Then if she truly cares and wants to protect and raise her children she would have to take full responsibility of her rehabilitation process, and afford the consequences in case she does not comply.

Please get all family support to help you promoting her father's awarenes of how unhealthy and literally destructive him actions have been undermining his daughter's rehabilitation chances. It is only through concrete consequences,and most times pain that people in her shoes get a chance to change. I hope you well.

It is very sad but I have to say that in this scenario your daughter becomes a victim of her father's codependent enabling, what worsens her addiction taking away her chances for rehabilitation and a healthy life as individual, mother and whole person. It is very sad, but you cannot do more than what you are already doing and planing. You are showing wise and consistent love having eliminated any codependent enabling from your relationship. Thank you for your trust.