Are you really ready to get sober? (Here's how to know)
In this live YouTube session Amber Hollingsworth explains that readiness for sobriety is often misunderstood. She argues that readiness is not a feeling of certainty or a promise to never use again, but can manifest as fear, exhaustion, or a growing curiosity about a different life. Amber outlines three overlapping levels of readiness: (1) wanting the consequences to stop, (2) wanting to try a different behavior, and (3) committing to keep choosing a different path even when uncomfortable. She lists concrete signs that someone may be ready: repeated failed attempts to control use, mental fatigue from constant negotiation, diminishing relief and increasing cost, emerging curiosity about sobriety, growing honesty with oneself, and willingness to accept help. She stresses that fear does not mean unreadiness and that people do not need 100% certainty—average 51% readiness is enough to start. Amber then shifts to families, warning them not to mistake emotional outbursts, apologies, or short‑term “good weeks” for true readiness. She advises families to look for honest self‑reflection, acceptance of help, and consistent actions, and to avoid “pouncing” or demanding certainty. Medical safety is highlighted: heavy alcohol, benzodiazepine, or severe withdrawal should never be attempted cold‑turkey without professional supervision. Amber offers practical next steps—telling a trusted person the truth, scheduling an assessment, removing access, planning for cravings, and seeking medical guidance. She promotes her Denial Breakthrough Intensive, recovery coaching, and other resources, while encouraging viewers to engage (like, subscribe, comment). Throughout the live, Amber answers audience questions about long‑term weed use, the role of consequences, supporting a partner, convincing adults about weed, and handling denial, illustrating her framework with real‑world examples.
Chapters
Most people think that being ready to get sober means you feel sure, like one day you wake up and you're completely done. You never want to drink or use again, and you're ready to promise forever. Well, that's not usually what readiness looks like. Readiness can look like fear. It can look like exhaustion. It can feel like being sick of the cycle while not wanting to give up the thing that gives you relief. You can want your life to change and still feel scared of sobriety. So today I want to help you figure out whether you may be more ready than you think. And if you're watching because you love someone with an addiction, stay with me because towards the end, I'm going to explain what readiness looks like from the outside as well. And families often mistake things like emotional speeches, apologies, shame, or one Really good week for readiness. And yes, those things can matter, but they're not the same as willingness. Now, there are really 3 different levels that people confuse with each other. The first one is being ready for the consequences to stop. Like you're tired of the arguments, the anxiety, the money problems, the health scares, the hangovers. The hiding or the guilt even. The second level is being ready to do something differently. And the third is being ready to keep choosing something different, even when it gets uncomfortable. A lot of people are level 1, like they desperately want the pain to stop, but they still want to keep the same relationship with the drugs, alcohol, porn, gambling, whatever it is. Now that doesn't make them fake. It just makes them ambivalent. It's like part of them, yes, it wants relief from the consequences, but part still wants the relief also that the substance or behavior gives them. Some people think they have to be all the way at level 3 before they're allowed to begin. They think, I can't promise I'll do this forever, then I'm not ready. And that's not really true either. You do not have to know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, but you do have to become willing to stop pretending the current pattern is working. Now, one of the clearest signs that you may be ready is that you've already tried to control it. Like you've cut back, you've taken breaks, you've switched from liquor to beer or from drinking every day to only drinking on the weekends. Or you've told yourself you won't use alone, or you won't drink before a certain time, or you'll only have 2, and that you'll definitely not use during the week. You'll be careful this time, right? All these promises. And yes, maybe those rules work for a little while, and then the amount creeps back up. The exceptions start, the stressful week happens, the vacation happens, the rules get adjusted, and eventually everything goes right back to ship. If every new rule eventually falls apart, the problem may not be that you haven't found the right rule yet, right? It's not a matter of finding the right loophole. Readiness starts when you stop asking, how do I control this better? And you start asking, what if all these attempts to control it have already given me my answer? Now, another sign is that you're tired of negotiating with yourself. A normal decision should not require this much mental energy. You shouldn't have to spend half the day deciding whether you're going to drink or how much you're going to drink or how you're going to hide it or how you're going to explain it or when you're going to stop or how to make up for it tomorrow. When the substance or behavior, whatever it is, starts taking up that much space in your head, it's not just about the hours that you're drinking or using or gambling or whatever. It's about the hours that you spend planning, managing, recovering, And trying to prove that you're still in control. Now, yet another sign of readiness is that the relief is getting smaller and the cost is getting bigger. Maybe it still works for a little while. You still get that moment where your brain settles down, you feel more confident, you stop caring, you can finally sleep or get some distance from whatever the heck it is that you're feeling or that's stressing you out. But that relief, it just doesn't last as long as it used to. And afterward, the anxiety is worse. The shame is worse. Your body feels worse. Your relationships are a mess. You need more to get the same effect, and it takes longer to recover. That's a sign of readiness. You do not have to hate every second of whatever your addiction is, the drinking, the using, any of that before you're ready. A lot of people wait for that moment. They think, as long as I'm still enjoying it sometimes, I must not really have a problem. But the right question isn't, do I ever enjoy this? The better question is, is this still giving me more than it's taking from me? Now, another sign of readiness is that you're starting to get curious about another way of living. You may not be excited about sobriety. You may not even like the word sobriety, but maybe you've started wondering what it would feel like to wake up without checking your phone, To remember what you said last night, or to be able to trust your memory, or to stop having the same fight and stop being disappointed in yourself and maybe even actually have energy again. That curiosity of what that might feel like, it's a signal. Now, it doesn't mean that you're fearless. It means that part of you can finally imagine that change might give you something, not just take something away. Because that's what most people focus on when they think about sobriety or recovery. They're focused on what they're going to lose when actually it's really about what you gain. You gain so much back. Now, another sign is that you're becoming more honest with yourself. Maybe you still minimize it out loud, or you still get defensive when other people bring it up, or you still compare yourself to people who are worse. But inside, deep down, you know, you know you're making more rules than you used to. You know the consequences are getting harder to explain away. You know you're not keeping the promises you make to yourself. You know the vision, the version of the story that you tell other people is not the whole story. Readiness usually begins privately before it becomes visible to anyone else. And one of the most important signs that you're willing is that you're willing to accept some form of help. Not every form, not every meeting, not every program, not a lifetime identity. One honest conversation, one appointment, one assessment, one plan you can follow through with. You don't have to be ready for everything, but some form of willingness has to show up. Maybe it's a book you're going to read, right? You got to have some willingness to do something different. This is where people get stuck. They keep waiting for the feeling that may never come. They wait until they just no longer want to drink or use, or they wait until they feel certain sobriety will make them happier. They wait until they're confident that they'll never relapse again. They wait until life calms down, but those ideal conditions just won't arrive. Fear does not automatically mean you're not ready. Sometimes fear means understanding That this is real change. And you may be afraid you'll lose your social life. You may think every conversation is going to have to be about recovery, or you may picture meetings every day and people monitoring you and your whole identity becoming the person that has the problem. Those fears are not ridiculous, but they're probably based on a narrow and miserable picture of recovery. Because recovery really isn't supposed to shrink your life down until all you're doing is avoiding a behavior or substance. The goal is to build a life where you have more choice, more stability, more trust in yourself. You don't need to commit to recovery identity forever. You don't need to commit. You just need, or you don't need to commit to going to meetings forever or getting a sponsor even, right? You just need to commit to an honest next step. And here's a few questions, speaking of honesty, that I want you to answer to yourself honestly. What are you hoping will change if you keep doing exactly what you're doing? What is this pattern costing you that you're no longer willing to keep paying? What are you willing to try? Not forever, but try honestly. What kind of help do you automatically reject before you even really consider whether it could work? And when discomfort shows up, what is your plan besides going back to the same old solution? Those questions are going to tell you more about your readiness and whether or not you feel inspired today. Now, for the families that are watching, I want to talk to you for a minute, right? Because I don't want you to confuse an emotional moment with readiness. Crying is not readiness. Shame is not readiness. Promises is not readiness. Saying, I know I have a problem, is not the same as changing the pattern. Look for movement. Are they becoming more honest? Are they accepting help? Are they following through? Are they willing to tolerate discomfort without immediately escaping it? Are their actions becoming more consistent? Now, Don't demand certainty from this person. Just pay attention to their willingness and be careful about forcing someone to promise forever in the middle of a crisis. That promise, yeah, it may make you feel safer in the moment, but it doesn't really create a plan. The better question is, what is this person willing to do next? And if you're considering getting sober, your next step may be telling one person the full truth. It may be scheduling an assessment. It may be talking to a doctor. It might just be getting rid of the stash and removing your access or figuring out what you're going to do for cravings or how you're going to sleep while you're kind of going through withdrawal. Now, if you sometimes, you are like the most likely to take, to talk to yourself, you talk yourself back into it. You need to make a plan for that. Like, you know your patterns, you know how you rationalize and how you minimize and how you're going to like convince yourself of it. You gotta be really aware and alert of those things because you gotta outsmart addiction, right? You gotta get ahead of it. You gotta know what it's gonna try to tell you before it tries to tell you that and have a plan for it. Now, I do wanna be really clear about one thing. If you drink heavily or you use benzodiazepines, which are things like Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, things like that, Or you've had really serious withdrawal symptoms before, I don't want you to suddenly just cold turkey it on your own because withdrawal for those things can be medically dangerous. A lot of people are surprised to learn and understand that alcohol withdrawal can be more physically dangerous than heroin withdrawal. Right? I'm not saying it's harder or anything like that. I'm just saying it's physically dangerous because you can have a seizure, you can have Psychosis, like it's life-threatening. So definitely get medical guidance about the safest way to stop, but don't let the fact that you need to get some kind of support become another reason to do nothing. Because maybe you just need to have a conversation with your doctor about it, right? There's a lot of ways to do this. Readiness isn't certainty. It's not excitement. It doesn't mean that you're Totally 100% there, or that you're not scared about it. It just begins with when protecting the current pattern becomes more exhausting than exploring change, and you become willing to do something honest about it. I want to tell you this story that all this reminds me of. I was working with this young guy off and on, and I hadn't seen him in a while, but he came back into my office. This— he's Was like a college-age kid. And he comes into my office and he was sort of in that moment of readiness. He was like, I've got a real problem. I'm flunking all of my classes. Things are out of control. And I had been trying to talk this young guy into doing intensive outpatient for a while, but I couldn't get anywhere with him because— He has a lot of social anxiety and the idea of being in a group really freaked him out. But on this day, I mean, he came in, I mean, he was in tears and he was like, okay, I know I got to stop this completely. This is not working. I'm a mess. And so he was ready to do it. Well, he's a college kid, so who's going to pay for it? Right? His parents. Right? So his dad comes down there or whatever. We have to talk to dad about it, even though he's, he was officially, you know, old enough to be an adult. You know, your parents still have to be involved in some of that. So we had his dad in the office with us and we're explaining, um, what's going on, um, and what we're recommending and all that kind of stuff. And the, the dad, bless his little heart, as I like to say in the South, he looks over at his son, this college kid, and says, Are you sure you're ready to do this? Are you sure you want to do this? And I swear, I wish there would've been a table between us because I could have kicked him under the table. Right? I really just wanted to say, can I talk to you in the hallway right now? But I had to play it cool. I think I almost just sort of interrupted and just kept talking and didn't even let that go down. Because if you don't want to ask somebody, are you 100% sure? Are you really ready? Because of course they're not 100% sure. Right. Don't ask this question. Are you doing this for yourself? There's no bad reason to do it. If your spouse says, okay, I'm ready to do it, but I don't really want to do it, but I'm going to do it for you. I'm going to do it for our kids. I'm going to do it for our marriage. You say, thank you. I love you so much. It means the world to me. That's what you say. You don't say, well, it's not going to work if you don't do it for yourself. A lot of times people have to get sober So that they can see how much they feel better and their brain can start checking back in and working the way it's supposed to for them to decide to stay sober for themselves. So if somebody is saying they're ready and they're saying, okay, I'm willing to do this thing, don't press them into a corner because I promise you there's no such thing as I don't want to drink anymore. I don't want to ever use again. Or yeah, I'm done with this forever. That's a myth. That moment May come eventually, but it is not there in the beginning. And if somebody's being leveraged into it by some external force, that's okay too. If they have to get sober because they're in drug court or whatever, totally cool. Don't talk someone out of it when they're ready and they're willing because they don't have to promise forever. That's too scary. It's too big. But they do need to have some kind of commitment to at least some sort of next step. Now, if you're watching this video on either side of the issue and this is resonating with you, like you're connecting with this idea about readiness, not needing to be the 100%, but ready to do something different, ready for the consequences to go away. Willing to take some sort of step in the right direction, put a hands up emoji in the comments or in the chat. It's kind of like, it's kind of like a little amen or something. That way I just know you guys are tracking with me. I'm talking to the right people. So let me know that. And if you're not subscribed to this channel already, what the heck are you doing? You just spent, you know, a good while with me, even on a live video. So subscribe because I will make sure that you stay 5 steps ahead of addiction. And not only that, when you subscribe, it helps to get these videos in front of other people. And that's huge because the most common thing that I hear all the time is, I wish I knew this years ago. I've been doing everything wrong. And so your subscribe, your like, your comment, all of those things that you do, the interactions, it's just a totally free way. That you're not just helping me and helping yourself, but you're helping spread recovery. And it's our goal to see if we can spread recovery faster than addiction is spreading. And as you know, that's a big task though. I appreciate you guys' help. You don't need to wait for rock bottom. You don't have to pretend that change is going to be simple or that you're 100% fine with it. Sometimes you just know something needs to change. But maybe you're struggling to figure out what kind of support you need or how to build recovery into your real life without making it your entire identity. That reminds me of something else. If you're the family member and somebody's willing to do something, I call it pouncing. I know you've been wanting to hear this and you're excited, but do not pounce. And that means don't be overly eager and say, okay, let me do all these things. Let me set up all these appointments. And I know this great guy and he could be your sponsor and I'm going to go to meetings with you. Oh my gosh, you're going to scare someone off. You're going to freak them out. So no pouncing. This is definitely the moment to play it cool, right? If you are ready to take a step and you want to get some help, but you're a little bit nervous about it, you can always look into podcasts, reading a book, watching a video just like this, right? That's not even telling anyone else. You can totally do it in secret, right? If you're ready to take an even bigger step, Then I put the link in the description below for recovery coaching. There are all kinds of options that are not going to require you to do anything that you don't want to do. So the question is whether you're ready to stop repeating the same experiment, like all those loopholes and rules and all that stuff you've been trying. Are you ready to stop trying that and finally do something different and take Like a real honest step forward. If you've got that, you're ready. I used to tell people all the time about this issue. I would say, you really just got to be 51% most of the time, right? Because you're going to fluctuate. There are days when you're 80 or 90%. There'll be days when you're less than 50%, right? But if you can sort of average 51%, at least on most of the days, then you're ready. That's good enough. You don't need 100%. No one is 100%. And if you meet people in recovery and they tell you their story backwards and they tell you they were, they just miss remembering it. Okay? Because I've been on the front lines of this for a long time, and that's just not the way that it really looks. There is ambivalence to start with. Sometimes there's ambivalence for quite a while, and that's normal. And if you're trying to support someone who's having that, Don't freak out when you hear that ambivalence, right? Because that's only going to make things worse for them. That's a lot of the reasons why they won't even admit to you out loud that they are thinking about changing, they want to change, because they feel like if they admit it to you, then you're going to pounce and you're going to expect this huge commitment that they're not ready to give. And so if you can respect and understand and even have Empathy for someone's ambivalence, just really validate that it's a big step and you can see why they still want to keep it in their life. It does do something for them. That creates a lot of safety for someone to get more honest with you. And talking about these things out loud really helps to move people in action because it moves out of just a, I'm thinking about it. Talking about it is actually, I consider that an action step. Admitting it out loud is a big action step. Right. So try to create that kind of environment where someone can do that. Don't make them promise forever. Don't make them say they have to do it for themselves. Don't be looking for, I'm 100% and I never want to drink or use or gamble again. You're not going to find it. If they do say that to you, they're probably lying. That's normal, right? If they never wanted to do it again and they're 100%, they're probably not addicted. Okay. So I just don't want you to fall for some of those myths out there. Don't be like, well, have you hit bottom? I see people talk people that are in recovery out of recovery by saying, well, you didn't hit a bottom, or you're not really an addict. You never did this and this and this. Almost like it's this exclusive club that you— that's this competition of horrible bad things that have ever happened. And then it's this weird social pressure that you're not bad enough. That is ridiculous. Like, don't, don't do that. Like, the goal of this channel is to help people put the shovel down before they hit the bottom, because you don't have to burn every bridge. You don't have to lose every relationship. You don't, you don't, you don't have to suffer longer, right? You can decide, I think I've suffered enough, or Yes, I still like this thing, but it's just costing me too much. It's just not working for me anymore the way that it used to. I'm ready to do something different. That's it. That's the only requirement. All right, in just a second, Bree is going to, um, she's back there moderating. Everybody say hello to Bree. She's not feeling well. Y'all give her little well wishes up there. She's reading through your comments and your questions. She's going to pop some of them up here. So that you can join the chat and we can have a conversation about it. If you're watching this on the replay, not during the live, then we're live every Thursday at 1:00 and we'd love to have you here. Oh yeah. Before I forget, next week we start our Denial Breakthrough Intensive again. So if you're watching this as a family member and you're like, my person is not ready and you're trying to figure out how to get them ready, that is the program for you. It's like a live coaching event. We only do it about every 8 or 9 weeks or so. So if you don't have your seat or ticket, get it. I've put the link in the description because we don't do it that often. And it's like me live, right? And we walk through things. We— I teach you step by step by step how to get someone from denial into this willingness state that we're talking about today. All right, Bri, what we got back there? All right. Mom23Trader says, I've been smoking pot for 50 years. Today is day 10 without weed. Nice. All right, congrats. You guys give her some props. That's impressive. This might not seem like a big thing to some people, but it's huge for me. It seems like a big thing to me. I don't, I don't know how long you've been around this channel, but I say all the time, weed is the bane of my existence. It is the hardest addiction that I treat. And people are like, what, really? And I'm like, oh yeah, because it's the hardest one to really make yourself understand that it is causing the problems because it causes problems in your life so slowly. Like this person's saying, 50 years, right? It negatively affects you, but it does it slowly so you don't connect the dots between the shitty things that are happening in your life and the weed. You really are just like, well, the weed is the only time I feel good. So it takes a long time to connect the dots, right? Yeah. Whereas if you're doing cocaine or something and you're spending thousands of dollars a month, you can connect that dot of like, holy crap, I can't keep doing this. It's costing me too much money. Right? It's like the weed affects you slowly over a course of time. It's really hard to see it. So the fact that you are brave enough to say, yeah, I've been doing this for 50 years, but I'm ready to be done, is super impressive. And you're on day 10. 10. Squeeze in there, get to day 14. Once you get to 2 weeks, you might think that maybe eventually you'll feel like a human being again. Once you get to 30 days, you feel a little better. Once you get 3 months out, you're gonna be like, holy crap, I don't know how I stayed in that misery all the time. Like, I feel like a different person. So hang in there. You're about to get through the roughest days. We're proud of you. All right. Mike says, If experiencing the consequences is the solution and addiction is using despite the consequences, how does the addict get out of the circle? I like your question because people say that thing, like the whole hitting bottom thing, right, Mike? I don't agree with that. People say if someone's not getting sober, it's because they haven't had enough consequences. I don't agree with that. I do think that the scale has to tip a little bit. Like the consequences have to start outweighing the pros to some degree. Right. But I don't think that it's a matter of experiencing more consequences. It's more a matter of envisioning that your life might actually be better without it. Right. You do need to experience some discomfort to decide life might be better without it. Right. But it's really something else. And what's so important about you asking this question is that so many family members get the impression that If their person isn't stopping or they don't seem ready yet, that they haven't suffered enough. And so the family almost feels like they need to manufacture more consequences, which really doesn't work because the person knows that that's coming from the family and they just perceive it as punishment. They just get mad at you and it just doesn't work. So it is these little moments of clarity that people have and people with addictions, they have a lot of them. They, you have a bunch of them moments where you're just like, Maybe you wake up one day and you're just mad at yourself or something happens. And it's usually after some crappy something, right? And you're like, I'm just so done with that. I'm done. I'm done. When that moment of clarity meets, okay, I'm going to take this action, right? I'm going to call up my one friend I know that got sober and ask them about it. That's an action. Maybe that's all. When that feeling meets an action, we got momentum here and now we're moving in the right direction. That's what gets— People out of the cycle. Fun Mom Time says, my partner has been out of the house for almost a month, left because of a bender. I told him my boundary for willingness is to continue— like to continue in the relationship, I'm assuming— is for him to go to rehab. He hasn't gone, just says he's sober. Do I Take him to his stuff. Do I take him to his stuff? He's text baiting me with rage, pity, and all the other tactics, and then asking for rides. Oh, like, do you— when you take him to his stuff, you mean like drive him to places? Okay. How do I support without picking up the shovel? I like it. Don't pick that shovel up. Okay. Um, here's, here's the thing. When you, when someone, I don't want to use the word kick them out, but when you say, hey, you can't be here for a while or whatever, that's an okay thing to do because sometimes it's a boundary that you need to do for your own sanity. 100%. But don't expect that kicking someone out is going to make them get sober because it usually makes it worse, not better, as far as like on the using end. Now, The other thing that I want to comment on here is saying, I promise to get treatment. Here's the thing. Treatment's not the goal. Okay? The goal is get your butt sober, get your life right, get your life together. That's what I tell my son, get your life together. Right? That's the goal. And then let them figure out how to do it. Right? It's not like, okay, you can come back if you go to meetings, because they can go to treatment. They can be in an IOP program. You can let them back home and That doesn't mean nothing. They could still be using, right? They could be going to meetings every single day and be using, right? Sometimes they just go drive to the parking lot and use in the parking lot and don't even go into the meeting. So it's not about— don't make it about jumping through a hoop, right? Make it about fix this issue, right? And sometimes it's trial and error, but they know what they need to do. They'll figure that out. Now, As far as whether or not you should pick him up for rides, I would base that decision on how he's treating you. Like, don't try to figure out, is he sober? Is he not sober? If he's text baiting you with rage and pity, or when you pick him up, he's acting like a jerk, sober or not, whatever, then don't pick him up because that doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't do someone a favor that's treating you Crappy. Like, just put it in the common sense barrel, right? If they're, um, pleasant and if it works out that you can do that and you're not like putting your job in jeopardy or missing things that are important to your life to do it, then I'm fine with doing it. But just don't do it if someone's treating you crappy, because you're going to feel resentful about that. They're going to feel resentful about it. It's not going to get you or them anywhere. Hopefully that helps answer. My husband has been struggling to commit to get sober. He's tried for a few months for a few years now. Last night he made a choice to stop drinking. I worry that when he feels bad, he'll give up. I just feel so exhausted and tired of it. I feel like I'm not far from giving up hope myself. We hear you, Emily, and it is exhausting. And sometimes they figure it out, but they figure it out too late, you know? And that is heartbreaking, but it does happen. When I say too late, it's like once you've had your fill and you're just done and you just can't take it anymore, right? Like there is an end of your rope. That's the thing. As far as him for a couple of years, like having months of sober, like on and off, that's totally normal. And when someone says, okay, I'm ready, I'm going to get sober, my advice to you, Emily, is don't say things like, what makes this time different? Right? Or, you said that before. Don't talk them out of it. Encourage them. I can't tell you if he's ready to get through uncomfortableness without drinking or using, and he may not even know for sure himself. Right? But you never want to talk someone out of it. What you want to say is, I hear something different in your voice. And in fact, you've had several long stints of sobriety, so I know you already know how to do this. You got this. That's what you say as far as if you want to do something that's helpful. I know there's this part of you that doesn't want to believe it, and that's normal because you've had your hopes crushed before. So if you're not ready to 100% believe it in your heart, that's cool. But I want you to say, yeah. Yeah. I feel a different conviction. And if you can even put your finger on and say specifically what you hear in his voice and what he's saying that's different, that hits it home even that much further. All right. Melanie says, how can you convince an adult that weed is bad? I told you, Melanie, this is like the hardest of all the addictions, right? Let me tell you a few techniques that have been helpful for me in the past. Okay? One of the things is they'll say, well, it's the only thing that helps me with my anxiety. And so I might ask a question like, okay, well, is your anxiety better or worse overall than it was when you started smoking? It's worse. Okay. But you don't answer that, but just ask the question. They might lie to you. They may not answer you, but if you ask them the question, their brain will think the answer. Okay. And that's a step in the right direction. If they're saying something to you, like I used to hear this a lot more, which is like, you can't be addicted to weed or it's no big deal or everyone does it. Then one thing I've done is I, and this works well with young people and adults is I'll say, have you ever known anybody that did have a problem with weed? They'll be like, oh yeah. I'll be like, well, how did you know they have a problem? And then they'll explain to me, well, he's 45. He lives in his mom's basement or whatever. I'm like, okay. Okay. So that's a sign. And then I would say, if you don't have a problem with weed now, what would be a sign to look out for that might mean you should pay more closer attention to it? What you're doing when you ask that question is you're asking them to sort of Put some standards for themselves in place, draw some lines in the sand. And if and when they cross those lines, then they'll have to notice. If they say, if I just start smoking during the day, or they say, if I start missing a lot of work, or if they say, if I start missing my kids' events because of it, whatever, it doesn't matter what they say. It just needs to be their lines in the sand, not yours. It's important that it be theirs. Because when they cross their own lines that they've said out loud, they are going to notice, they are going to pay attention. And so the thing of it isn't that you have to convince them that it's bad, it's they have to convince themselves that it's not serving them anymore. And this is how you plant the little seeds that get them to start noticing that, hey, this maybe isn't working for me as well as I thought it was. Hopefully that's helpful for you. Let's see. Norma says, my ex-husband was an alcoholic. I was exhausted and I left him. Now I'm dealing with my kids, but I'm exhausted and can't do it anymore. Oh, you mean like your kid, like your kids have a problem? I have 2 younger kids and they are watching this. Is there more to that one, Bree? No, you're just saying. I— having to go through this with one person is unfair. Having to go through this multiple times is really unfair. I don't know, um, if you've been around the channel that long. Your name looks new to me. If you, if you're new here, welcome. We're glad you're here in our— welcome to our little community. But one of the, um, one of our team is Campbell, and she talks a lot because she had 2 sons Like, didn't know either one of them had a problem. And then it all came out back to back and it was rough. Um, because it's like you, you get through hell with one and you're finally breathing. And then next thing you know, here it is back at your doorstep again. And it's, it's awful. So I feel for you. Um, is there something that you're hoping that your kids get from this or hear from this? I'm just wondering. All right. NJR says, what if my loved one who was previously in complete denial started therapy, admitted alcohol addiction is a problem, but nothing is actually changing and they're even making future drinking plans? Okay. This is just a stage, right? Like of Denial happens in layers. It's not like, I don't have a problem. You're crazy. Oh my gosh, I'm an alcoholic. I need to go to AA. It is not a clear black and white thing. It's like an onion, like they say on Shrek. It's got layers. So there's a, it's not a problem, layer number 1. And it's okay, it's a problem, but I'm not really hurting anybody else. I'm just hurting myself. Layer number 2. Then there's the, It's a problem, but I can handle it on my own. Then there's the, it's a problem, but I'm not alcoholic. I don't need to quit completely. I just need to cut it back, maybe only on special occasions and that kind of thing. So I call it bargaining. That's my word for it. And when you're dealing with someone that's bargaining, there's only one way to get past bargaining is to let them run these bargains really quick. Because sometimes when someone says they have a problem, maybe they're like, okay, I'm going to take a break from it for a while, like Dry January or Sober October or whatever. And they don't plan to stay sober forever. Don't freak out about that. Don't say that's not going to do you any good or whatever. Because the goal here, especially if they'll do 30 days, I think 30 days is important, at least 30 days, because that's when you start to feel better. Then if they take some sober time and they feel better and then they go back to it, which they will, And then they're going to realize that their life falls back to shit really quickly. Then the picture becomes even more clear about what the grass is like on both sides. So there's a process. You're going to have some of these, like, I'm going to cut back. I'm going to quit temporarily. People think it's sort of like a reset is what they're telling themselves. So don't discourage that. Encourage that. You can't skip this stage, but you can speed it up by saying, yeah, let's try that. I'll say, yeah, let's put that on your treatment plan. That does sound good. Only never drinking more than 2. I like it. Let's put it down. If that doesn't work, don't worry. We got 100 other things we can try. That helps you actually speed the process up. So hopefully that helps you. All right. Bree says we're out of time for today. You guys are awesome. You ask great questions. Thanks for showing up live. I've got links to resources in the description, whether You need to get your person ready to change, Denial Breakthrough. If you're watching for yourself and you're ready to make a change, you can look at coaching, all kinds of stuff on our website. There's all kinds of free downloadable resources. Obviously there's thousands of videos on this channel, and I will see you guys next week. Bye everybody.
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