#1 Way Families Hinder Their Loved One's Recovery

You hire professionals, you watch all of my YouTube videos and take down all my advice. You listen to the guidance from your sponsor, even heck, you listen to your best friend and your mama and your neighbor's advice on how to help your addicted loved one. And even though you're trying to do everything right, you are very probably still making this one crucial mistake, which is very likely sabotaging your loved ones chances at recovery. I know you're trying to do everything right. You are trying to educate yourself, you've read books, you've done everything. But you still could be doing more harm than good if you're not considering this one factor. And that factor is, are you considering the uniqueness of your family and your addicted loved ones individual situation? And you know what the truth of it is, most trained addiction professionals make this mistake too. You know why? Because everybody has these sort of like patent answers for how addiction should be treated, right? They have this sort of singular mindset about this is what has to happen in this order and this way. And if it doesn't happen this way, it's not going to work. And everybody may have their own pathway. And those of you that watch my videos, you know, I say there are many pathways to recovery. I like them. All right? But the thing of it is, no one pathway is going to perfectly fit any situation. And so what happens usually is it's like you're trying to take a puzzle piece. You know, when you're almost done with the big puzzle and it kind of like almost fits and you're trying to like cram it down in this little spot and it doesn't want to fit, but fit because you're not taking in to considerations like all the special circumstances of your situation. Now this piece of advice can be dangerous. The idea of considering special circumstances can be a little bit dangerous. So let me just go ahead and give you that disclaimer. The reason why a lot of sponsors, addiction counselors, treatment programs, the reason why they're so sort of rigid about the process and you have to do it this way is because everybody thinks their situation is special. And one of the things that people in sort of like the early stages of recovery, one of the big mess ups that they do is they think, oh, that doesn't apply to me because I'm special. And so they try to sort of this like I don't have to do this one thing or I don't need this one thing because it doesn't apply to me. That is pretty symptomatic of addiction itself is to Try to come up with why you don't need to do something or why your counselor's piece of advice isn't the best for you. So it's kind of one of those rock and hard way places. I don't want to enable people by saying, oh, you're so special and you're different, you don't need to do this. But I also want to take into consideration what is special and different about people. So there's a way of doing this that's enabling and there's a way of doing this that's really helpful. So let's try to like pull apart the pieces. Now I already told you, the person themselves will typically try to use something about their situation or whatever to, to say why they should or shouldn't do something that's, that's recommended, right? But family members do this too, right? They say, oh, well, my person this or my person that. And they have this special exercise and that special exercise. You've got to be careful about that. But you, you do want to think about a few factors when deciding how to approach someone. When deciding what kind of support or treatment options are going to be best for someone, there's some factors I want you to consider. And one of those big factors is personality. You've got to consider the person's personality. You got to stop and think, okay, Amber always says, do this and this and this, but what do I know about my loved one, right? The sponsor, my sponsor's telling me to do this, but what do I know about my loved one? Like for example, if you know that your loved one is ridiculously stubborn headed to the point that they will just like shoot their own selves in the foot just to go against you, like, or not even just you, but like anybody, you need to take that in consideration when deciding how you're going to approach them. Because if, if I'm dealing with someone like that or a family member tells me their loved ones like that, then I'm going to change my piece of advice to fit with that personality characteristic. If your loved one is extremely people pleasing, right? Like the opposite of the stubborn headed, like they kind of go along just to go along and they don't want to upset anybody, that's going to change my advice to the person and to the family on how to address the issue with the person on what kind of treatment is going to help that person. So there are personality differences that really are going to make a huge difference in what's going to be effective and what's going to be not effective. Or at least if you take these into consideration, you can get your best chance at hitting the right mark, the right time, instead of wasting a lot of time and money doing all the wrong things and damaging your relationship with this person and ultimately like prolonging the addiction process. So personality, I want you to hold on to that for just a second. We're going to come back to that. Another factor that you need to consider before deciding how to approach someone and what kind of options might be helpful is you've got to take into consideration their stage of change. Now of all the different factors that I'm going to tell you, this is probably the easiest one to identify and probably the most crucial difference that you've got to take into consideration. You got to put these variables in the formula if you want the formula to work. The stage of change. Now a lot of you are probably familiar with that if you've watched my videos about, I've got videos about stages of change. In fact, I will link those videos up for you at the end because you need to understand and identify where your loved one or your client or whoever this is that's trying to help is in those stages of change. Like, are they in complete denial? Do they think, well, I kind of have a problem, but it's not that bad. Are they completely ready to do whatever it takes to address it, you know, or have they been sober for three weeks? You've got to decide where someone's at in the stages of change. Because so many families overlook this. They. I've seen families make mistake. Maybe they like hire huge interventionists to come in, pay thousands and thousands of dollars for an interventionist to come in to address their 16 or 17 year old son or whatever who's doing drugs, who probably maybe does need treatment, but isn't even ready for treatment. And by ready for treatment, I don't mean like they have to want it. I know a lot of people say that, I don't agree with that, but probably not ready for treatment if they're not even close to thinking that they have a problem, right? They have to at least think they got like a problem of some sort. Or they have to at least be like, well, I'm not a drug addict, but it is causing me these problems over here. There's got to be something there for treatment to be effective. Otherwise you're going to Pay, you know, $5,000 for an interventionist, $30,000 for a treatment program. You're going to put a 16 year old in it and then that 16 year old is going to come back to your house and guess what's going to happen? Same thing that was happening before you sent them to treatment. So you really got to take into consideration these factors, the stages of change. Where are they? Because a lot of treatment about timing, if you have the right thing at the right time, now you have the combination. Now there are things you can do to help, like a 16 year old that's maybe in that situation. There are counseling interventions that are specifically designed to help someone become more motivated for change and to help someone see the problem and come out of denial and all that kind of stuff. So I'm not saying there's nothing that can be done. I'm just saying you got to pick the right intervention for the right person at the right time. Now another thing that you really need to consider and think about. Hold on one second. My dog is busting and I barely let him out because I know y' all can hear. There we go. Now I can concentrate better and you can too. All right, so the, the next factor that you really got to consider, we talked about personality. We talked about stages of change. Another thing that you need to take into consideration is whether or not this person has been to treatment a bunch of times before. Because if I'm dealing with someone, maybe they are in a relapse and it's pretty bad. That's been going on for a long time. But they've literally been to inpatient treatment six times. They've been in eight Iops. You know, they have three sponsors and six counselors. That's gonna change my recommendation as far as what they need. Because a lot of times treatment is kind of like, kind of like taking an antibiotic. Timing is important. Like, antibiotic, like, you don't want to use it just for everything. You need to save it and use it at the right time. But also, if you use it too much, the person becomes like, tolerant to it. So if a person's been in treatment a bunch of times before, they probably have like this tolerance to it because they've heard it up before and they're going to be saying things to you like, dude, I can teach those classes. I don't need to go to that. Like, I know everything they're gonna say. And you know what? They're probably telling you the truth. So at bare minimum, you need to acknowledge that fact. Like, even if you're gonna send them back to treatment, you need to acknowledge like, you know what? You probably have heard all this work. In fact, you. You probably could be Running these groups, you can say that to them, but these things matter. And most often, the advice that you're going to get from interventionists, addiction counselors, treatment programs, they're not going to ask any of these questions, and they're certainly not going to consider it. They're going to ask you, like, questions about how bad the addiction is, and that's about it. They're going to make their recommendation based on how bad the addiction is, but neglect to take in any of these individual factors. And because of that, a lot of times it doesn't work. Once you start to really customize your approach and your recommendations to these factors, you're going to hit the mark much, much better. Now it's pretty easy to see, you know, to know whether or not someone has a long history with treatment. Another question you may want to ask them about that, though, is like, what is their experience? One of the first questions I ask people when they come to my office is, have you ever been to counseling before or treatment or anything like that? So I try to get a. A bearing on what their history is with this. Sometimes they never even talked to a counselor before. I'm the first one. Sometimes they have, like, been to treatment. They had 20 years sober. They sponsored 100 people. But they're in a relapse and they're sitting from office. I'm going to treat that person different than I'm going to treat someone else, right? Because there's going to be annoyed. I'm gonna have to put somebody on the advanced track, and I have to start at the beginning for somebody else. Because if I come at everybody the same way, that's just gonna, this is not gonna work, and it's gonna feel just sort of undermining, I guess I would say, to the person, especially if they've had a lot of experience. So once you gather the information, how they. What have they done in the past? And then I ask the question after I ask, what kind of things have you done in the past? I say, what's been helpful and what hasn't been helpful? And then I usually say, because if you tell me what's not helpful, I'll totally skip it and we won't have to do that. And they. And people like that because they want to know that I value their opinion about what they need. Because so often when it comes to addiction, the person that has the addiction, no one values their opinion at all, right? It's because they have no credibility. They've lied a million times, They've tried their own way and it hasn't worked. There's some reasons why they have, like no one listens their opinion. There are some reasons. But even if you don't agree with their opinion, that's okay. You still need to listen to their opinion. You need to know that that's their opinion. Because even if you don't agree, you've got to think about how that impacts how you approach this person. Because just because you don't agree with it, you still got to know it's there. Maybe it's a roadblock, maybe it's a positive thing, a strength that you can use. And you've got to consider that. So once you figure those things out, you figured out what their past history is, what they think is helpful, what they think is not helpful. And the next easiest thing to figure out is that stage of change we talked about. Then the personality characteristics come in. And that one can be a little bit more difficult. I mean, you can kind of consider some basic things that are pretty easy to figure out, like stubborn headed or people pleaser. You can probably figure out like introverted or extroverted. You can probably figure out like does the person do better in big groups or one to one. Those are pretty easy things. If you just spend any time with someone at all, you'll know if they're your loved one. You probably already know those things if you just stop to consider it. But you can get even more in depth to understanding someone's personality, to look at what their motivators are, what their strengths are, what their trigger buttons are. One way that we do this in our office is we use a system called the Enneagram, which is a personality typing system. I personally think it's kind of fun anyways, but like we know all the people that work for us and work with us. We know all the personality types we talk about and also all the time. But we figure out each of our clients. What personality type are they, what personality types are their family members, and how is this personality type interacting with this personality type? Right. Because if you can really understand the core motivators, someone has the core fears, that someone has their strengths or challenges. Now you are really rocking and rolling. Now you can really, really figure out how to get through to this person and what resources are helpful and what resources are not are not helpful. Now we use the Enneagram, which you can look up online. We also have, I have a little mini course called recoveryou which helps you figure out your Enneagram type. And it what's really cool about it is it's kind of divided into the family member. So has the family identify their, their own personality type and then the person struggling with addiction, their own personality type. In fact, you can have them do it, you can do it too, or you can do it by yourself or together or whatever. And if there are more people in the picture, everybody can do it. And the course is designed so that each, that it kind of looks at it from all the angles and everybody can figure out personality types. And then you can take all that information, look at how the, the dynamics are working between the personality types and why, what might be roadblocking someone. Like, for example, I'm an enneagram personality type 7. There's good and bad for every personality type. There's no like good type and bad type. Every type has good and bad. In fact, they call it like the virtues and the vices. One of the good things about type sevens is we are typically fairly positive people. We are glass half full kind of people. We love anything new, novel, interesting, exciting, ability to put ideas together in a way that are maybe different than the way other people do it. So that's a good thing. One of the trigger buttons of my personality type is fear of missing out. Fomo. Have you heard of FOMO before? Like type sevens don't want to miss out on things. They, they don't want to be put in a box. They don't want to be limited. Maybe that's even a better word. They don't want to be limited. They want all their options. Okay. And so that's important when considering the type of treatment and the type of approach that you use with someone because the more you try to put limits on them and contain them, the more they're going to resist that. But they might respond to out of the box ideas. They might be really good at creatively coming up with ideas that will help them. You see what I mean? There are nine personality types. I'm just giving you that example for type 7. And there's a lot more to learn about each of the personality types. I just want to give you kind of an example of how that information is useful. Now another factor that you want to consider when making these kinds of decisions is are there other mental health problems going on? Like is there a past history of trauma? Does this person have severe social anxiety? Are they massively depressed? Do they tend to over exaggerate mental health problems? Are they hiding behind their mental health problems? You gotta look at all of these factors because if someone does seriously have like some, what we call like co occurring disorder or underlying disorder or something like that. You gotta take that into account because if you don't is going to block you from the recovery process. So looking at everything from all the different angles is the best way to go about it. Now on this channel I try to tell you the pieces of advice that are most likely to work with the most people. So it's kind of like this technique is the most sort of statistically researched. This is your best avenue. But even everything that I say on this channel really should be sort of tailored, tailored to the person specifically. So if you want to figure out personality type, you can look at our course called Recovery U. I think I put the link in the description. You can set up consultations or assessment with us or anybody else. Doesn't have to be us to figure these things out. Because once you have all the factors now you can make an informed decision. Is it time to push? Is it not time to push? How am I going to motivate this person? All these things are very, very important. Now if you're watching live and you have a question, I'm about to get ready to take those questions. So make sure that you are putting that in the chat and if you're watching on the replay, I always go back and read all of your comments too. And if there are questions that I can answer, I definitely try to answer answer. Now I will tell you this. Sometimes when people leave me questions like in the comments, some, some of you guys will ask me something that's like so big that I have hard time answering. It's like you're asking like in one sentence you're asking a massive question like how do I get my brother off drugs? Or something like that. I'm like, well that's complicated for all these reasons. I just told you so. The more specific your question is, the more likely I can be to guide in the right direction. Donnie, which is my husband by the way, he says wrong. Type 9 is all good. There is no bad fact type. Not because He's a type 9. Type nines are called mediators are or peacemakers. And so he's, he's advocating, he's saying type nine is the best one. We'll see about that. Gigi says, I love your channel, but please do not promote the enneagram is incompatible some of our religious belief. There are other tools to use that is right. If you don't like the enneagram, there are tons of personality assessments you can use. You can use Myers Briggs, you can use Disc. There are Many other things. The important point here is to look at who someone is and what their core motivations, strengths and fears are. This is the key information that you need to have. Okay, so like for example a core fear of a type 7 is type sevens don't want to experience uncomfortable emotions or pain. We're magnificently good at reframing, finding the silver lining. So good in fact that we completely ignore things that we don't want to deal with. We're really good at that. And our denial can be really big because we're too good at that. So it's about understanding those things. And so if you don't want to use Enneagram, there are many other ways to go about doing that. But I do think you need to consider those factors. You know, just this week I worked with one guy who's so dang stubborn headed you do not ever want to go at him directly with anything because he will just go the opposite just to show you any super competitive. So that's important factor to know. I talked to somebody else who, whose family thinks that they need to go to treatment. Probably does need to go to treatment but has some severe social issues. And I'm thinking this, this isn't going to be a good fit for group kind of treatment because you're going to put this person in a group setting and they're going to get rejected and they're going to get criticized and they're going to feel even more alienated which probably going to make their situation even worse. That's what I mean by looking at the uniqueness. It's kind of like addiction is kind of like always the same. That's why I don't spend a lot of time on this channel talking about the different types of addictions because really don't matter. Addiction process is the same. What is different is the people that it affects. So I can tell you, if you could tell me what's going on with someone, I can be like here's what's going to happen next. That's how predictable addiction is. It's very predictable. But recovery is not. And that's where the personal parts come in. The personality factors, the stages change. I'm going to link up this change video. I want you to watch it next because it is one of the easiest, fastest factors that you can figure out about the person you're trying to help. That's going to help you make strategic decisions. And you guys know I am all about strategic decision making. Beating addiction is a chess game them and in order to do that. You got to be five steps ahead. Thank you, everybody. I'll see you next time.