How To Help Loved One With Addiction

Pretty much everyone said that there's nothing you can do to help an alcoholic until they decide they want to stop drinking. Or sometimes they'll say, until they decide they want it for themselves. That's actually not quite true. You know, I'd even say that the majority of treatment providers and treatment centers have kind of a similar mindset and philosophy. It's sort of this idea of, hey, we're here when you're ready, or, you know, keep coming back. It's basically when you decide you want to get better. Here we are. We can tell you how to do that. But the missing piece is, how do you get someone to want to be sober? And despite what everyone else says, you do have some influence over that. In fact, as a family member, you actually have the most influence over that because you control the frame. You actually have a lot more power than you might think. You've probably just been using it all the wrong way. But don't worry, I'm going to tell you how to fix that. I've been an addiction counselor for 20 years now, and I've had to learn this lesson the hard way myself. When I was counseling in addiction treatment facilities, if you had a client who wasn't doing good and you talked to, like, the other counselors about it, your supervisor even, they would pretty much tell you, well, they're just gonna have to want it. And everyone just throws their hands up in there and gives up. And there's a little reason behind that, and that's because when you try to make an addict or an alcoholic decide to stop, and that doesn't go so well. So after years and years of doing that, everyone just throws their hands up in the air, and they say there's nothing you can do. But I think they're just doing it wrong, because most of the time, there are things you can do. I think I actually learned this sort of, kind of by mistake. There's this sort of weird uncomfortableness a lot of times between the addiction treatment provider who's seeing the person who's struggling with alcoholism or addiction, and their family member. There's some reasons for that, but here are the biggies. A lot of times, the addiction treatment providers, they get all these phone calls from the family members, like, constantly telling on their loved one, and they just want to tell you every single thing they did. And they're, like, putting all this pressure on you to save their loved one, which builds up a lot of stress on the addiction treatment provider. So what they do is they just sort of try to talk to you very, very minimally or screen your calls or do something, because that pressure coming on you is just too much. And honestly, it will make you kind of mess up with your client. And then on the family member side, family member stays constantly frustrated because you see this person isn't making progress. I think they're lying to you. They're not even telling the counselor the whole trut. So the treatment professionals are pushing the family away. The family's frustrated with the treatment professionals for not listening, for not understanding, and they think that you're just believing a whole bunch of lies. As long as we have that system going, it just doesn't work. Actually, we all have to learn how to get on the same team, which is a big, big, big part of the reason why I started this YouTube channel, because I wanted to help you, the family member, get on the same team with the addiction treatment professionals that can help your loved ones. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but I can't even get them to go see an addiction treatment professional. I hear you. I know what you're talking about. And you're right. That is the first big obstacle. It actually reminds me of a client that we had several years back in our IOP program named David. I can actually remember exactly where I was when we got the phone call from his wife saying, can you please help my husband? Talking to this guy's wife. And she was telling me, look, my husband, he's been in a lot of treatment. I don't even know if I can get him to come see you, but this is it. If he doesn't do something, I am at my wit's end, and I don't even know what to do because we have to go on a vacation in two days. And I know he can't go without drinking. He is literally going to go and withdraw. I have no idea what to do. And I was like, dang, that does sound like a bad situation. And actually, once I list her, I was like, I think you're right. I think he can't go on a vacation without drinking. So trying to make him stop drinking before you get on that airplane probably isn't a great idea. But what I can do is I can get you in here to see Campbell, one of our family therapists, at least once before you go, and we'll get you set up for when you come back from that vacation, and we can help you work with him to get him in here. Now, it wasn't smooth sailing from there. Don't get me Wrong. I can remember meeting David, and he was like, sit in the group room. And he hadn't done treatment so many times before, and he just wasn't even the kind of guy that should just sort of play along, to play along. It just wasn't his style. And he. So you'd try to ask me, him a question, and he'd just be, what does that have to do anything? Like, he wouldn't even do, like, friendly banter with you. He was just that kind of guy. And I thought, oh, gosh, I don't know what we're going to do with him. He didn't talk much in group, but he did stick around, and he would listen pretty good. But he didn't stop drinking right away. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, Campbell's still working with David's wife, and they're working on this plan. And eventually it gets to the point where he says, okay, I know I need to stop, but I can't stop. I've got to go to detox. And so then he agrees to go to detox, and he ends up actually doing, like, 30 days in this treatment cent. And when he came back from this treatment facility, he came back into individual counseling. And that's when I really started to get to work with David a lot more intensely. Now, when he first came out of this treatment center, he was better. He was detoxed, but he wasn't great. He was just sort of raw and edgy, but at least he was sober. And now he had this team approach going on where Campbell was working with the wife, I was working with David. His wife was doing a lot of positive reinforcement, and we actually started to get some really good momentum. And within about. I would say within about three or four months, he was much, much better. Not only was he sober that whole time, but his business, he actually owned a business, was doing really good, better than it had done in several years. He had got back into playing softball, which he used to really love, but had stopped playing because of the drinking. He started fishing again. He actually started taking his kids fishing with him. And so then him and his kids started to get closer. And then in about nine months, he started to sort of eat healthy and exercise, and that brought him up to level. And these days, he's doing really great. I hear from David every now and then if something's going on, he just wants to process something. But he's done remarkably well in his sobriety. And if you would have heard that phone call that I heard from that wife that day, who was literally at her breaking point. You would have thought, there's no way. This guy's never gonna get it. If his wife would not have been willing to do the hard work that she did, they would not be in this place. The counselors and the treatment providers, we can help, we can be a positive reinforcement, we can be a support system. We can tell them the steps that they need to take. But you, the family member, you're the one that has the influential power to set up the situation and the frame in such a way that's more likely to get them to, number one, want to be sober and number two, engage in some kind of treatment or recovery process. Because we have so many families that are out there, like, working this system on their own, like from watching these YouTube videos, from being in our invisible intervention program that we get calls all the time now from people who want to be in our, like, positive strength based coaching program. And when I ask them, hey, you know, how did you find us? They'll say, well, my wife found you, actually. She's been watching your videos and she recently told me about you and I watched a couple of your videos and I was like, okay, I'll check that out. Not only do we get these calls who say, hey, I'm ready to get some help, but when they come get help, like, they're so ready and we hit the ground running, I'm telling you, it's amazing. I have been doing this for 20 years now, and I have never seen so many people in the active stage of change. Last week I was working with a guy in our strengths coaching program, and he was like, well, I've really cut it back and I'm going to do better. And we had about two sessions where he's trying to cut it back. And then I talked to him about it. I said, hey, I think that this will happen if you would just stop all the way. And I talked to him about. And then after about two sessions, I really got to sort of understand his personality really well, understand what his motivations were. And then on that third session when we were talking, he was saying, well, you know, I've cut it back. I feel really good about it. I'm not drinking near as much as I used to, but my wife still wants me to stop completely. And I don't know if we're ever going to get on the same page about it because he was already, like, mostly there already. And because I knew a lot about his personality, what motivated him, I said a few things to him about what I thought would change if he would just try the whole sober thing for a while. And later that night I get an email from him saying, hey, I've decided to do it. I'm going to go completely sober. Here's my plan, it's going to start tomorrow. And he like had this whole plan mapped out. He was completely serious about it. He had all this whole systems and he was actually kind of excited about it. And when I talked to him the next week, he was a week sober at that point and he was already like a completely different person. And he was even saying, hey, I feel different. Oh my gosh, me and my wife are getting along so much better. I have more energy, I'm sleeping better. It had only been a week. And just before I recorded this video, I got an email from someone in our coaching program who says, hey, how do I get one of them sober Links? What kind of recovery monitoring should I sign up for? That may not seem like a big deal to you, but to me, who's worked with this for years and years, for someone to say, hey, hook me up on an alcohol monitoring device, I think that would help me. I think that will help my relationship. Seriously, that almost never happens. And the reason it's happening now is because of. It's a lot more because of what the family's doing than what I'm doing. The big picture formula for how to help an alcoholic loved one is the first thing you have to do is build credibility and trust. Trust with them. That means you've got to get out of this power struggle and fight. The next thing you got to do is you got to let them try their way a few times. It's probably not going to work, but you have to let them try it their way. And you have to actually be on their team with them while they do it and cheer them on. And then you wait for exactly the right moment. I call it that moment of clarity when they realize that the whole cutting it back thing isn't working. And then you suggest something else. And if you've done all the other steps right, you've built the credibility, you've let them prove their way doesn't work. They see you as a teammate and an ally, then they're really willing and actually ready to listen to what you have to say. And they're open minded. At this point, this is how you get someone with an alcohol problem to let the walls down enough to actually hear what you have to say. So don't let other people tell you there's nothing you can do, because it's just simply not true.