Get Your Loved One To Seek Help For Addiction!

In this video, I am going to teach you strategies for how to get your loved one to actually go to rehab. Now, yes, I know that you've heard you can't make someone get recovery. They have to want it. But I'm going to teach you some ways to maybe help them decide that they want it. In fact, I'm going to teach you three strategies. These are the three strategies that we've had the most success with with the clients that come to see us in our office. And with a little coaching, pretty much every family that comes to see us uses one or a combination of all three of these strategies. And it gets the job done, because these strategies actually motivate someone to want to get better. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and I want to say welcome to Put the Shovel Down. This is a YouTube channel dedicated to helping families understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life back on track. You know, several years ago, after working in a private psychiatric hospital, I had taken calls for years and years from family members totally desperate, not knowing what to do with their loved ones who were just wreaking havoc at home, who were coming in and out of the hospital, had maybe come to detox, like, 10 times. And they would call and they would say, we need you to keep them longer. But because the hospital was an acute care facility, we couldn't keep them much longer than about five days. And I would have to tell these desperate families, you know, there's really nothing that you can do. They're gonna have to decide that they want it. Yes, that was me telling these families that. And after doing that for a whole bunch of years and hearing the desperation in their voices, I decided I just couldn't do that anymore. And so I started working with these families, teaching them the strategies, because sometimes you can't get your loved one in front of the counselor, or sometimes there's just a lot you've got to do before you can get your loved one in front of the counselor. So I would teach families these strategies on how to get their loved one to take next step. But before I tell you these strategies, I strongly suggest that you look into and explore and find and have the treatment option that you want already picked out. In fact, have a plan A, B, and C. Maybe that's you just want them to talk to a counselor, maybe that you want them to go to residential treatment or to a sober living facility. And so if you haven't watched my playlist on understanding treatment options, That's a good place to start. So that'll help you understand all the different kinds of treatment and what your options are so you'll know what you're looking for. Because when you do get your loved one to finally agree to go to treatment, you've got to have treatment lined up, otherwise you're gonna miss the boat. Okay, let's get into the strategies. Okay, strategy number one is to use basic leverage. And by leverage I don't necessarily mean give someone an ultimatum, but sometimes it does come down to that. So like let's say if you're dealing with a teenager who's maybe smoking pot all the time, you may have to say, listen, I'm not going to continue to support unless you do something about this problem. Or you may say, in order to stay in this house you're gonna have to pay rent. You can't just be staying here and not going to school and not working. Like that doesn't work. So you may have to push the envelope just a little bit. And so that can mean that you're leveraging them directly into treatment or therapy, but it could also mean that you're just leveraging them, you're pushing them along a little bit and you're not making it so easy to stay in a stuck spot. I find that people really have to use leverage one a lot if they're dealing with someone who's smoking a lot of marijuana because that keeps people really unmotivated and it does cause life destruction, but not to such a degree that it hits home to them in a heavy weight most the time that makes them think, oh, I've really got to do something about this. It just keeps them stuck. And the other time you might have to think about using a leverage strategy is if you're dealing with someone who's addicted to alcohol or depressants because their denial is a little bit different. In fact, I made a video about why alcoholic denial is different than other kinds of denial. And if you haven't seen that one, make sure and check it out. If you're dealing with someone that's addicted to like Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, alcohol, those kind of things, depressant drugs. And lastly, you may have to use leverage if the person that you're dealing with just has a really stubborn, knuckleheaded, oppositional personality. But if that's the case, I usually say use leverage on that kind of person as a last resort because this, because those stubborn headed people are the ones that really like dig in and it's gonna be hard to win with them going toe to toe. So you can use it on those people. But I would use it as a last resort. You may want to look at one of these other two options if you're dealing with a super stubborn headed type person. You know, the kind of person that just says no because you said yes or says yes just because you said no. Yeah, that one. That's the kind of stubborn headed that we're talking about here. Okay. The second approach to getting someone to go to treatment is what I call the side door approach. So essentially, instead of saying, hey, you got a drug and alcohol problem, you got to go talk to someone you know? And coming at the substance abuse problem straight on, you may want to come in through the side door about getting some help for something that they see as an issue. We just got a young lady back in outpatient treatment who had recently been away in residential treatment. But the way she got there was because she really was depressed and anxious and she asked to go to treatment because she was just struggling with so much depression. So a lot of times the person won't say, I need to go to rehab, but they will say, my anxiety is out of control, my depression is out of control, my ADHD doesn't let me get anything done. So if they have a complaint or concern that's kind of consistently around, a lot of times you can use that as the doorway or avenue to get them to get some help to start talking to somebody. I call that the side door approach. The important thing to remember about that one is that even though you're coming in the side door, whoever you get them to see or wherever they go, it's really important that that person, counselor, doctor, program, whatever, know that there is an addiction issue going on, because the person themselves may or may not bring that information in, and that could get missed. So make sure that you are dealing with people or a person that understands addiction and that knows that there is addiction to drugs and alcohol happening that way, you can at least make sure you know that that's being addressed. Now, the third way that we teach people about getting a loved one to go to rehab is what I call like the long game. And in order to do that, we use something or we teach families something, craft, method, and that stands for community resources and family training. And so this is sort of a systematic way in which you use positive reinforcement to kind of get someone to take those baby steps toward change. And so it's this combination of being sort of neutral when you see negative behaviors and being positive and sort of reinforcing positive steps in the right direction. This one takes a little bit longer, but it actually sticks a little bit better because someone really does sort of move through those steps, stages of change. And the key here is you're really getting them to take their walls down and you're getting them to trust you. And once they trust you, then they're going to want to know what you have to say. They're going to be way more open to listening to your advice and that sort of thing. It's actually sort of a parallel process of what. Of what I would do if they were sitting in my office. But we can teach you as the family how to do those same steps, because maybe you got to plant and water those seeds before you can even get them into an office somewhere. And the other resource that we have that might be helpful for you is our Family Recovery Academy, because in our Family Recovery Academy, that's an online program that has tons and tons of videos that only the people in that program have access to, that teaches you the craft method, the step by step process for that, but also a lot of other really important information, like how do you actually get them to treatment? As in, like transport them there, what do you do if they want to come home, what's good aftercare, what do you do if they relapse, and all this other stuff. It really is sort of a step by step guide on not just how to get them there, but how to help support them throughout that process. Now I'm going to go ahead and link up those other videos on the craft approach right here so that all you have to do is click the button.