Dealing with Someone in Denial (7 week turn around)

So I am super excited to tell you about some fantastic results that some of our clients have been getting. And I'm going to explain to you the step by step process that they have used to take their family from the brink of destruction to an all the way like 180 turnaround. And so I feel like the best way to do this is to basically tell you a story or tell you the story about how that happened. Now, I'm going to change names and some of that kind of details just to protect people's confidentiality. But the thing I want you guys to get out of this is I want you to see the process that people are taking, specifically people that are in a situation where they have a loved one who's either in denial or extremely reluctant to getting help and how they sort of influence that person to move along the stages of change and then to get them to engage in some sort of treatment process. And we've actually made some notes about several of the cases that we've worked with lately to tell you exactly how many weeks it took, how many sessions it took, and what they actually had to do to make that happen. So. So if you are watching us live, feel free to put in the chat questions or comments you have along the way. And if you're watching on replay, you can put that in the comment section and we will come back to it. Like, if you have a question or there's something you wanted to ask about one of these cases, I'm happy to answer it for you. All right, so ultimately I'm going to start by telling you the story. I'm going to call this the Smith family. Not the Smith family, but we're going to call it the Smith family. And so I got a call from Mr. Smith. I think they live somewhere like out in Arizona or something, I think. And he was telling me he had had it, he was done with it, and like, he was over it, he was leaving, he was going to leave the wife. In fact, actually, I think he had already like, actually left the house. Not like fully moved out though, but just had gotten like upset and left. And I think while he was gone, he started Googling or something. That's how they came across this. And he was basically saying, okay, I don't even know if I'm in it enough to do this, but I figure I'll give it one last shot. And so I started talking with him and he was calling because he's concerned about his wife who had a substance abuse problem. And essentially I talk to Mr. Smith about shifting his dynamic because he had been doing, like, the. The tough love thing, the I'm not going to enable you thing. And we shifted it into this situation where I wanted him to really align with his wife, to really sort of help her to understand that he's on her side, which is a lot of what we do when we work with loved ones is we. If. If the goal is to get the person to get from denial or from being reluctant to being in treatment, the first thing you got to do is build that. So that's really step number one. And many of you know that I always say you need that relationship to be there because you need the credibility. But once that positive team relationship is established, then you. You've just got all this leverage to use in all these different ways. Number one, the person's gonna, like, open up to you so much more. They're gonna talk to you because they're not gonna feel like it's this cat and mouse game going on anymore. And so there's trust established. And once they're talking to you, then you can use those conversations to pull out their motivation and move them forward using some. Basically some counseling techniques that we use. Because a lot of times when we talk to families who can't get their loved one to go to treatment or to come see us or whatever it is that they're trying to get them to do, then we don't really have a lot of choice but to teach them what we would do. So we teach you how to align with your loved one, whether that's your spouse, your child, your sister, whoever that is, and then use the counseling, the specific techniques, to sort of pull motivation forward. And what we did in the Smith family was I knew that Mr. Smith's wife would be sort of in this stage where she was bargaining with her substance use. And so I just sort of walked alongside him to help him understand exactly what to expect and not to freak out when he saw those bargains, but to understand that actually that's good news because it means we're crossing them off the list. Because I always say, like, your loved one is going to try to manage it in all these ways. They're going to try the trial and error, the bargaining process, and there's not really a way to not do that, but you can speed it up. And the way you can speed it up is by systematically watching them go through those. And so if you've got an open dialogue with them and they're communicating with you about that process, when you can sort of Speed it up, because there's an open dialogue about it. It's kind of like their trial and error process that people kind of have to go through until they're ready to either stop using or get help or whatever that is. Give me one second, let me do our comments. I'm worried our comments aren't shaving. And so once you build this relationship, you start pulling out this motivation, then you've set the groundwork for change. So let me tell you about not just Mr. Smith, but several of the other cases. I'm going to tell you exactly how long it took and what the result of that was. So in the Smith case, that was the one actually, of the case I'm going to tell you about, took the longest. And so that's why I said seven weeks, because his situation actually took seven weeks from the time I. Or actually seven, seven sessions. I don't even know if it was that many weeks between the time I first talked to him, between when his wife was completely ready to do something different. So I started talking to him in May. And over the course between May and about the middle of July, there were seven sessions. And after that point, his wife made the big step of like, okay, I'm really ready to do this, done with it. I'm ready to like, you know, totally change it and shift around. And that was the Smith story. And like I said, that's the longest one of the situations I'm going to tell you about. I dealt with, or we dealt with not just me, but my family counselors as well, dealt with another situation in Ohio where someone was concerned about their daughter and the daughter was away at college. And they're just concerned that the daughter had had substance abuse problems in the past like she'd been to treatment before and she was back in college. Hey, hey, Melissa. And they were just seeing a bunch of bad signs and the daughter kind of cut off communication and they were really worried and the daughter wouldn't talk to them. So they felt like she was in a relapse and the daughter wouldn't even talk to them at all. And after we worked with this family, we started working with them on June 3, and by the middle of July, the daughter had made an appointment for herself and came in willing and ready to do something different. Just by doing a combination of the relationship building, the pulling out, motivation. And in this situation with this family in Ohio, we had a. We actually had to coach the family on how to do a little leveraging. And leveraging basically is either a series of boundaries that you set that kind of make it not easy for the person to keep using. I don't call it tough love because it's not that cut you off kind of boundary. But you don't want to be enabling to them to the point that they're not ever going to do anything to do anything about it because just working too good. So this family had to use a combination of leveraging, relationship building and then just over the course of those like looks like it's like maybe just a little bit over a month that this daughter actually called the treatment center herself, made an appointment for an assessment. That's a big turnaround from a family that literally the child would not talk to them. And in the Smith case you had the husband and wife where one of them had actually left the house and was like, seriously done, Like I'm calling a lawyer, I'm done, I'm out of this. These techniques work and they work relatively quickly. And that's not even the best part. The coolest part about these situations is that not only it's like how do I get my loved one to go to treatment? Because like I bet a lot of you seen the show Intervention where people all get in the room and they sort of do the surprise attack on the person with the substance use problem and they read these letters and say if you don't go, we're cutting you off emotionally, financially and all this stuff, you can do that. I got a video coming out about intervention soon, but. But the person, you may can get them to go and there are times when you want to do that, but they spend the whole first like month of that time at least being really mad and not doing anything. Treatment, they're just like doing what they have to because they did it only because they're back into corner. But using this method, this relationship building method, not only does the person like actually end up going to treatment and getting help, but they are ready for it when they get there. They're not antagonistic, they're excited about the change. And so what happens when someone comes to me in that kind of mindset, I can work with them so much faster and it doesn't have to be coming wherever treatment center. I usually say like, I don't care what's the reason they come in. If they come in reluctant, I can still work with them. But it takes me the first bunch of sessions to build any kind of rapport or work on motivation for change. And when people are using our invisible intervention system, which is what we call it, that behind the scenes, how to get someone through denial. When people are using that, they literally can skip the first month of sessions of what it would take for me to have to do that work. Not only are they getting their loved ones to treat, but they're getting them there in a way. It's like they've tilled the ground. It almost feels like that it's like the person is ready to make the changes. And that is, number one, is great for us because it's like a lot less work for us. And they come in and we can skip all those first stages, because a lot of those first stages of what we normally do in our offices, mend the family relationships, build the trust, you know, get the person to be ready to change using the invisible intervention, like, all that's done, and now you're in a treatment. And now we can, like, move right into what we call, like, the action stage of helping someone figure out how to take those action steps to actually getting better. So in my mind, that's pretty cool. And the best thing about it is just when we've been getting these calls from the loved one, when they eventually call us the one with the addicts problem, they're like, ready to talk to us. There was another lady that we talked to, and I think she was like, from Virginia. We talked to her three times. And after the third sex session, the husband called us and said, hey, I think my wife's been talking to y'. All. You know, there's been a problem. You know, yeah, I'm ready to talk about it. And so in these situations, it doesn't mean that the addicted loved one was immediately done. It's not like they stopped using completely, but they did initiate a huge, huge, huge, like, steps towards change and was ready to make it happen. And I can't tell you how much easier that makes our lives as therapists. And like I said, it's that way no matter where you go. Hey, hey, from Northern California. It's really cool. People are, like, watching me from super far. Let me know in the chat, where are you watching from? Because it just blows my mind. Think about people being so far away. Like, watching is super cool. And the last story I'm going to tell you about, literally we talked to this. This was a wife, again, talked to this wife of one and a half sessions. So it's like a total of an hour and a half. And this was a couple that was completely split, like, had not even been living together in quite some time. It was a pretty extreme situation. And it didn't happen immediately after we talked to that person from one session. Hey, from Wisconsin, I got a photo bomber down. He says, yeah, that's Weston running around there in the background. He's doing some chores. But in about. I think we talked to that person on the first time on June 29th is what I have in my record. And their loved one called us themselves on July 21st in a state that could not be more ready for change. Like, said, I can't Disney more. I'm so sick of this. I never want to do this again. Like, you can't get somebody in a more ready state than that. Is that New Hampshire? New Hampshire, Janet, is that where you come from? Massachusetts. Pat's from Southern Arizona. Super cool. I'm a double winner. Just celebrated a year in June. My husband went to treatment. Right now we have a two month old and a nine month old. That's so cool. Thank you for sharing that. So just want you to know that I know you hear out there. People say there's nothing you can do. You didn't cause it. You can't control it, can't cure it. And those things are true. But you really can influence this. Hey, Carrie from Florida and Olga from North Carolina. But you're not powerless. There are things you can do. Even in situations where it may feel to you like, my situation's too bad, like, it's off the chain. All of these situations I just told you about, the family was already like. Except for one of them, the family was already like split. Like, not even living in the same place together. Like, a lot of tension. Hey, Heidi from Atlanta and Mary from Ohio. And we got people from all over. That's so cool. Oklahoma, some of these places, if you told me to put them on the map, I wouldn't even know where they were. It's so neat. But you're not powerless. There are things that you can do to influence the situation. But I will tell you this. If your goal is to get your loved one to take action for treatment, and that does not have to be your goal, like, your goal may be to get out of the relationship, and I get that. And that's okay. And sometimes you have to do that or your goal maybe just to heal from some past trauma where you were in a relationship and I, that's totally fine too. But if the goal is to get your loved one from denial into like an action stage, a readiness for change, you're gonna have to, like, Feels like a withholding to me is the best way to tell you you're gonna have to get strategic. You're gonna have to dial down the emotional responses and follow some specific directions. And if you'll. It works, like, almost every time. Like, I would say every time, but I don't ever say that. But I can't think of a time when it doesn't work. Your loved one will change because families are like water, and so water will shape. Will take the shape of whatever container you put it in. If you change the container that your family's in, everybody shifts. You can influence it by changing the environment, by changing the dynamics, by changing the relationship. And those are the things that we teach people to do. Sometimes it's changed the environment. Sometimes that means you gotta quit giving your kid $2,000 a month. They're just on the company payroll, and you're just paying them for nothing. We see that actually kind of a lot. Sometimes change the environment like that. Sometimes it's just change the environment as in, stop spying, stop snooping, stop trying to catch them all the time. Like, you cannot be aligned when you got this, like, cat and mouse going on. And sometimes it's build a better relationship. It's a communication issue. But if you shape the container and the relationships, you can shape that person. You cannot control another person. But we, you know, humans are relational people, so they react to what the other people around them are doing. It's the same thing. It's literally exactly what I do with your loved one when they're sitting in front of me. You know, it's build that relationship. And so if you can't get them in to go somewhere, maybe you want them to go to inpatient treatment or whatever it is, you may have to take these steps. You may have to learn to do what I would do to get them there.