A model for developing and testing Family Recovery Capital
Blog Post by: David Best, Shelley Duffy, Maria Power, Amy Beardmore, Shinasa Shahid, Annie Topping
August 2026
Rationale: Recovery capital is a term that has entered the lexicon of not only academics but also practitioners, the peer workforce and, in many cases, people in recovery themselves. It represents a way of tracking progress that is recognised as a scientifically acceptable metric for mapping strengths and growth across the recovery journey, and for empowering people to plan and shape their own personalised recovery pathways. In the process, it has helped to shape a new model of measurement, including for outcome monitoring and for the evaluation of new recovery interventions.
When Granfield and Cloud (1999) in “Coming Clean” talked about the internal and external resources accessible to support recovery, they paved the way for White and Cloud (2008) to develop a measurement system based on the division of strengths into personal, social and community capital to denote the domains where assessment and measurement can take place.
Why is this relevant to families? There is now increasing evidence that families go through similar recovery journeys to the individuals overcoming addiction, a process that has sometimes been paralleled to post-traumatic growth. For family members who seek help, often following years of despair, damage and shame that have resulted from familial addiction, there are typically three areas of work to be done:
Psychoeducation about addiction and guidance on how to respond to a family member’s addiction
Support (and often peer support) around self-preservation, protection and growth
Family interventions designed to embed the individual’s therapeutic response inside a family-driven approach
So why is the concept of recovery capital relevant here? As illustrated in the diagram below, there are at least four overlapping circles that can be used to represent recovery capital in the context of whole-family recovery:
The recovery capital of the individual experiencing the addiction
The recovery capital of the person seeking support as an affected other
The internal and external resources available to the whole family (including their inter-relationships) that can support or hinder the family’s journey to wellbeing
The recovery capital of the family as a unit, which holds the other three within it and contains those resources that no individual member owns
Figure 1: Characterising recovery capital at a family level
In Figure 1, the outer dotted circle shows the recovery capital that belongs to the family as a unit. This will include shared joys and despair, shared history and trauma, the quality of relationships between members, but above all the collective strengths and goals the family shares. This circle is defined by belonging to the family and what that entails, something that may shift over time and that does not have to involve the biological family of origin.
The traditional approach has been typically to think about the blue and pink circles overlapping and, as the journey of each progresses, to consider the impact on the rest of the family. However, the model we are trying to develop here is one in which the contents of each circle, and in particular the section of the Venn diagram where the three circles overlap, are treated as the key domains for understanding family recovery capital, and then conceptualised (and ultimately measured and operationalised) within the outer dotted circle as something that can be understood and measured as a fluid and dynamic but meaningful concept.
This is, of course, incredibly complex, as family dynamics (and indeed family membership) may shift permanently or temporarily over the course of the recovery journey. It also means that who counts as family has to be defined by the family rather than by the service, since the people doing the work will not always be the people a service would have listed. It is also important to note that all four circles exist within the socio-ecological system described by Witkiewitz and Tucker (2025), which includes broader social networks as well as contextual and environmental conditions in which the family’s journey takes place.
So why is this worth the effort? It has long been argued (e.g. Best, 2019) that recovery is an inherently social process in which individuals change their identities and their strengths through changes in social networks and the resulting sense of belonging. While there is no question that a family model of recovery will require a more sophisticated model of measurement, the attempt to capture not only the ‘internal’ strengths that characterise recovery capital but the ‘external’ resources including the nature of relationships within families and from families to the communities allow us to frame familial recovery in a way that avoids the traditional cleavage between ‘look after yourself’ and ‘care for the addict’ by attempting to capture and measure whole family resources. This re-framing should also help move the family support model away from a narrow focus on ‘anxious and grieving mothers’.
Families who do not come forward
Everything described so far begins with a family member who seeks support. It is worth being clear that this is a starting point and is based on our plans for conducting research with families engaged in help-seeking. However, there is a wider group of families to be considered. Even among families connected to services, most of the family is not visible and may not be heard. The person who comes forward is one member of a household in which several other people are living with the same problem and have not come forward at all. This matters beyond the individual family, because the barriers are not evenly distributed. In some minoritised ethnic communities, the threshold for asking for help is higher still. Hiding/concealment is a strategy for protecting the family’s reputation and standing because the family cannot afford to lose that (Sattar et al., 2026).
Faith
Faith belongs in this model as a domain (not only as a demographic characteristic). On one side, faith is the origin of the prohibition and therefore of shame. Where substance use is forbidden, it may be understood as a moral and spiritual failure, which leads to hiding/delays help-seeking. On the other side, affected family members describe religious practice as one of the few things that gives them solace (Church et al., 2018). Also, religious institutions are among the most trusted places in many of these communities and are frequently the first place families turn, yet faith leaders are rarely equipped to respond to addiction and often have nowhere to refer people. That is a gap, but it is also an opportunity, and it is the most plausible route to families who will never reach a support service.
Finally, what are we proposing to do? To develop this work, we have built an initial alliance between people who have lived experience of their own addictions, people with lived experience as family members, researchers and people who work in family recovery support services. Our aim is to build a partnership that is committed to testing the ideas presented in this model, to engaging with family services and Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (LEROs) to test and refine these ideas and to build a virtual recovery research network addressing strength-building for family recovery. To date, we have initial engagement with six family support services in the UK and Ireland whom we hope will be able to work with us and who see the merit in this approach.
There is almost no funding available either for research or for service delivery in this area, but there is a huge unmet and unmeasured need. We want to try to ensure that seeking help for families is not seen as an absolute last resort, nor an act of despair and defeat. What we can learn from the recovery movement is around the social contagion of hope and the transmission of hope and empowerment from family to family.
If you are interested in being a part of this group, please contact David Best at david@starrecovery.co.uk.
References
Best, D. (2019) Pathways to recovery and desistance: The role of the social contagion of hope. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
Church, S., Bhatia, U., Velleman, R., Velleman, G., Orford, J., Rane, A. and Nadkarni, A. (2018) Coping strategies and support structures of addiction affected families: a qualitative study from Goa, India. Families, Systems and Health, 36(2), 216–224.
Granfield, R. and Cloud, W. (1999) Coming clean: overcoming addiction without treatment. New York : New York University Press.
Sattar, Z., Shrimpton, L., Alderson, H., Sahito, A., McGovern, R. and McGovern, W. (2026) Navigating between spaces: faith-based stigma among South Asian and Muslim carers of individuals with problematic drug and alcohol use. Global Discourse, 16(2), 149–169.
White, W. and Cloud, W. (2008). Recovery capital: A primer for addictions professionals. Counselor, 9 (5), 22–27.
Witkiewitz, K., and Tucker, J. A. (2025). Whole person recovery from substance use disorder: a call for research examining a dynamic behavioral ecological model of contexts supportive of recovery. Addiction Research & Theory, 33(1), 1–12.
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