How To Help Someone Get Sober (using the CRAFT Method)

The video you're about to watch is step one in the process of how to help motivate a loved one with a drug or alcohol problem to get sober. This is actually one of the videos in our Invisible intervention course, which is a step by step process on how to get your loved one to go from active addiction all the way to long term recovery. If you'd like to learn more about the invisible intervention process, there's a link in the description below. If you're not making progress, it's probably because you're shooting at the wrong target. Let me explain what I mean. Most parents and spouses, when they call our office and they bring their loved one in and I say, you know, what can I help you with? Basically what they're telling me is I want you to get my husband to stop drinking or I want you to get my kid to stop smoking pot. I want you to make sure that my college kid never use drugs again. These are giant goals. That's like coming in and saying, I want you to make my kindergartner an Olympic gold medalist or something. When you come in and say that, it's not that it's not doable, it's just that if you go straight in for that, you're skipping so many super important things. You've really got to back up and break that down into the steps that go into how do you make that happen. And you've got to set your goals there. So in this lesson, I'm going to explain to you exactly how to do that. So I want you to start this process by completing the Relationship Happiness Scale. And the reason I want you to do this is because you're probably so frustrated with your loved one that it's hard to see the whole situation clearly. You know, when you're mad at someone, you just can't stand everything they do. And like, the way they breathe gets on your nerves, the way they chew their food makes you angry. You're probably to that point. Most families that come to us, at least one of the family members is definitely to that point, the breaking point. So we want to back up and take a look at what's going on in this relationship even more than just the drug or the alcohol use. Let's look at all the areas. Some of those areas include communication, affection, how are they doing at work or school? How are they doing with being financially independent? How are they doing helping around the house with their responsibilities? They do, they do well in social situations? Are they good with money management? So these are some of the things that it's going to. The Relationship Happiness Scale is going to ask you to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, one being you're totally dissatisfied with what's going on in that area, and 10 being you're completely happy and ecstatic about what's going on in that area of the relationship. Doing this is going to help you get a more accurate overall picture of what's really going on and what needs to be targeted first. If the end goal is to get your loved one to stop drinking or drink a lot less or stop doing drugs, you've got to start, you got to break it down. So after you've completed the Relationship Happiness Scale, I want you to pick one of those areas, one of those problem areas to focus on each week. So. So, yeah, that's right. We're going to do this each week. Each week I want you to complete a new happiness relationship scale so that you can see where you're at. So you can see, am I moving forward or am I going backwards? Where are we at from week to week? And I want you to target one of those problem areas. Let's say you want your spouse to spend more time at home. So I want you to set a goal for that particular area. And when I say want your spouse to spend more time at home, or maybe your kid to spend more time at home, that's still even a little bit too vague, because are you gonna, like, count the minutes that they're at the house now and then count the minutes that they're at the house this week and see are they making improvement? Or maybe something more specific? Like, I'd like my kid or my spouse to eat dinner with the family at least three times a week, or I'd like to sit down and watch our favorite Netflix show together, at least on Tuesday nights with my husband. Something like that, Something specific, and you'll know if you met it or you didn't. It's going to be real clear it happened or it didn't happen. Once you have that goal, I want you to brainstorm some possible solutions for making that happen. So is it a conversation that you need to have? If it is, if you're going to have a conversation with them about it and ask them to do something different, then don't do that before you've watched and listened to the communication lessons, because we don't want to set the stage wrongly for that. So we want that to happen. We want to do it in the right way. So if it's a conversation, you can Say, I'm gonna have a talk with him about it. I'm just gonna ask him, hey, could you come home on Wednesday nights and eat dinner with the family? Something like that. Or if the solution is we need to make sure the kids are in bed so we can have some time to hang out and watch our favorite Netflix show together. Brainstorm possible solutions. What are some ways to make that goal happen? Once you have those solutions written down, I want you to go through them and I want you to cross off the ones that you know are just like totally ridiculous. Like for example, if your solution was have my husband home three times a week to eat dinner with a family and you think one of the possible solutions might be call his boss and tell him he has to let him off work at 4:30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Probably that might be sort of a solution you could brainstorm, but probably not the best one. So just cross those off the list. Or if you know something's going to start a huge giant argument, cross it off the list. Or something's just not doable, cross it off the list and keep doing that until you narrow it down to the top one or two best solutions to this problem. And then once you get down to that, even if it's not down to one, but it's down to two, pick one to try first. You don't want to do several things at once because it's hard to know what's working and what's not. So pick one of those solutions. Now that you've got your solution, I want you to stop and think about, because you're already thinking it anyway. So let's just bring it out and open and put it down on paper. Let's think about what are roadblocks to make that solution not happen. Maybe a roadblock is your husband's in the middle of this big giant work project right now, which is taking even more of his time. Maybe a roadblock for your kid is, you know, they're right in the middle of baseball season and they have baseball practice three times a week and it's going to be hard to make that work. So write down those reasons why your solution might not work, and then I want you to write down some solutions for your roadblock. So you're really problem solving here. You've identified a problem area, you've set yourself a goal, you found a solution to fix that. Or to address that goal, you've identified roadblocks that might interfere with your solution. Now you're going to come up with ways you're going to get around those roadblocks and then you're going to put it into action. So in order to put it into action, I want you to set yourself a specific task and timelines. Like by Thursday I'm going to have had the conversation with him or whatever it is that your solution or how you're going to solve that problem. Set yourself a goal of exactly what you're going to do to make that happen and when you're going to do that. And then the last step in this process is at the end of the week. I want you to evaluate the process and see how you went. So give yourself a score. How did that go? Was it helpful? Was it not helpful? Did you meet your goal? Did it make you feel better? Did it make them feel better? Did it do anything to help the relationship? So I want you to evaluate that and then the next week we're going to start again. Now maybe you want to target something else right in that same problem area. It may be that you want to come back and look at that same issue and come at it in a different way. Maybe try one of those other solutions if it didn't work out the way you wanted it to. Or you may want to target something totally different. If you're having a hard time coming up with what to target, make sure you look back at that relationship happiness scale because it's really helpful, because it breaks down into the little categories. And when you think about those categories individually, some things are probably going to pop into your head about things you want to focus on, you want to make better and you want to make move in the right direction. If you can do this, you will make progress every single week. I know I told you in lots of these videos that this is going to be an up and down process and it is. There are going to be times when you feel really good and times when you feel bad. But if you will consistently use a lot of self discipline and do this process every week, you will move forward week by week by week. Because if nothing else, you're going to be addressing the relationship and your relationship with your loved one. That's the key thing that you have to leverage to reaching your ultimate goal, which might be to have them stop smoking pot or stop drinking or whatever that is. Now if you want to make progress 10 times faster than just that, then make sure you listen to the positive communication lesson. Because if you'll combine the positive communication with, with this goal setting process, you are going to expedite this process. I mean, you're going to 10 times your progress. If you found that video helpful, you're definitely going to benefit from watching how to Reverse the Dysfunctional Roles in an Addicted Family System. I'm going to put it right up here so you can watch it next.