It is an incredible sacrifice to send you daughter to a residential treatment center and it is understandable to sometimes wonder if this sacrifice will be worth it. To help calm these fears, the therapists at Sunrise have shared 15 secrets to help you be an effective parent while your daughter is in Residential Therapy.

10. See the Program Levels for what they are


As your daughter is going through her therapy at Sunrise, she will work through 5 levels. Each level represents a value that your daughter is working towards in her treatment. It’s important to remember that these levels are tools that help your daughter find her value, recognize her potential, and help her heal. They’re not measuring sticks to see how she’s progressing. Some girls go straight through these levels and smoothly transfer through. Other girls though, it’s much more fluid as they work through their treatment, moving back and forth as they continue through treatment. This doesn’t mean that she’s less successful in her treatment as the girl who just moves through one level after another. Treatment is a completely individualized experience. The girls aren’t measured as being successful in treatment depending on what level they are on. These levels are designed to meet certain needs and some girls need to work through these levels in different ways to meet their own emotional needs. So always remember that these levels are tools, not measurements.

11. Expect things to be hard


Try and place yourself in your daughter’s shoes and imagine what it’s like going through treatment. You are frequently going to be asked to go through and experience emotions that you think you can’t. It’s so hard to push past that boundary, but as your daughter does she’ll begin to realize her successes and her ability to grow. This is an incredibly hard road to travel down. So just remember, this will be a hard experience for your family. So help her and your family prepare for this difficult journey. Validate and lift her as she works at pushing past her boundaries and her issues. This will make a hard journey just a little bit easier.

12. You Need to Work


An old saying is “Monkey see, Monkey Do”. Now here at sunrise we would never compare your daughter to a monkey, but this saying holds a lot of weight when it comes to family based therapy. Your daughter will only work as hard as she perceives you working. As we talked about in an earlier post, this will be a parallel process. There may be times that your daughter will become stuck in her treatment, unable to move on. In these times, she’ll look to you and she can be influenced in a great way based on what steps you are making in your life. So if you are working as hard as you can in your therapy, or reading books to help you improve, or are becoming more validating to her; she’ll notice these things and it will be a huge motivation for her to push past her boundaries and to work on herself. So always keep in mind the parallel process that goes along with familial change.