How To Intervene With An Addicted Loved One

Four ways to intervene with an addicted loved one. We're gonna go through each of these, and I'm gonna tell you the pros and the cons. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and you are watching the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can make strategic decisions and get your life and and your family back on track. Okay. Option number one, you can continue to do what you probably already doing, which is trying to reason with your addicted loved one. And you may even be doing this while they're living in your house. The issue with this is you've already been trying it for a long time, and probably all that's happening is that you're damaging the relationship that you have with them. Both of you are probably building up more and more and more resentments when you're choosing this option. You're probably not making a conscious choice to do this. You're probably just stuck in the cycle of emotionally reacting to what's going on. And what can keep you stuck in this particular option is because you may see little windows of success or little tiny changes or glimpses of who your loved one used to be, and it keeps you sort of stuck in that cycle. The cycle looks something like this. They make a big, giant mess in their life and develop this giant problem, and you get really upset with them for that. And you get onto them and you tell them why that's crazy and how they need to change, and then you fix the problem for them. You bail them out, you give them money, you solve the problem for them, but you're interacting with them in a way that you're upset with them, you're mad at them, they feel like you're trying to control them. You feel like they're taking advantage of you, and the cycle just continues. That's option number one. I think we could agree, probably not a very good option. Option number two is what I would call like an old school tough love approach. You could make the decision that you are absolutely done enabling your loved one. And usually what that means is cutting them off financially 100%. Most of the time, that involves making them leave your house. And oftentimes that even means cutting them off emotionally. So it's like, until you're ready to change, you're on your own. And so the thinking here is, is that if it gets bad enough, the person will get desperate enough, and eventually they'll make the change. Well, sometimes this can work. I'm not saying it never works. It definitely can work, but sometimes it doesn't work. Most of the time the person just gets worse. Sometimes they will eventually turn that corner and sometimes they don't. I can't tell you how many families we talk to whose child, spouse, daughter, whatever, has been living on the street for a long time. No shelter, no food, no phone, no nothing. And they're still choosing to continue to use. And so when you're in that situation, it seems quite clear that the tough love approach really isn't working either. Consequences don't cure addiction. In fact, most of the time, a ton of consequences can just make it worse because the person just deals with the aftermath of the messes that they're making by using more substances. In normal situations, people will change when the stakes get high enough. But addiction is sort of rewiring the motivational center of your brain, which is why normal things do not motivate people with substance abuse problems to get better. Now, I do believe that things have to get a little uncomfortable, comfortable for someone to change. If everything's working great for that person, they're not going to change because they don't see the need to change. The scale does need to tip. You know, it needs to be more uncomfortable than comfortable. But this idea of if things get bad enough, a person will stop using, if you really think about it, I think that in your heart of hearts, you know that this isn't true. People go to prison, they lose their freedom, they keep using. People lose their children, they keep using. People lose their homes, their jobs, their families, they keep using. Now the third thing that you can do is you could plan an intervention. And I'm sure most of you have like seen the TV show Intervention where you have a trained interventionist come in to the family. Usually behind the scenes, this interventionist works with the family to get together this plan of surprise attack on the addicted loved one. And so we've all seen it, right? The addicted person walks into the room and their whole family sitting there in a big circle. And you know you walked into a trap when that happens. So you know when you see it on tv, what you see is that moment where the person walks in, people read letters and everybody cries and the person agrees to go to treatment. Well, what I need you to know about that is if you're going to do that, then please, please hire a trained interventionist to help you. Do not try to do that on your own, because that kind of situation can go really bad really quick. Now I do think that there Are some circumstances where that absolutely is the best thing to do. And I'll tell you what they are. That kind of intervention is definitely the best thing to do if your loved one is imminently in danger. As in, like, if we don't do something now, they're probably gonna die within the next week or two or three. The thing about this sort of surprise attack is that I guess there's a couple problems really. You have to get the family all has to be on the same page. Everybody, every best friend, every family member close enough has to like agree to completely cut them off if they don't go to treatment. No talking to them, nothing. The chances that everybody's gonna be in agreement on that and actually hold to that are actually kind of slim. It's hard to get everybody there lined up and at the same time where they're ready to cut ties if they have to. So you've got that the problem is like, if there's like grandma left out there or best friend left out there, who doesn' come into the fold, if you got one outlier in this issue, the person's gonna run there and the intervention is sort of null and void. So it's got to be a united front. The other thing that can be a bit of a problem with this kind of old school intervention, which is called a Johnson model intervention by the way, is that it can cause a fair amount of trauma to the person with the addiction. It's pretty difficult to find out that everyone you know and care about has been plotting and scheming behind your back and talking about you. That's a hard thing to get. And a lot of times when people go to treatment that way, they spend the first month being really mad about the intervention in the family. Most of the time they start to get past that eventually. But if you're only paying for 30 days of treatment and they spend the whole 30 days being mad, then you're really blocking the treatment process. That could be making some good positive difference. And some people really never get over it. I've had clients in my office who this happened to years ago and they're still not quite over it. Now. The fourth option that we're going to talk about today is called, is what I call, we call at Hope for Families the invisible intervention. And this is the process that we use most often in these types of situations. It's really sort of a four part process. Basically it's not a surprise attack. It's more of this gradual process. And I'm going to tell you what the four big components of that really are. The first, probably most important piece is you begin to slowly re establish trust and positive relationship with your loved one. Because I know that if you've had this addicted loved one, there's like all this animosity and splitting between families and resentments and you don't trust them and they don't trust you because you're always trying to control them and you've got a lot of tension between everybody. The building trust does this huge thing for you. It helps you build credibility. Because see, what you've been doing is you've been trying to tell this person what they should do, what they shouldn't do, how they're all wrong, but you have no credibility with them. They don't trust you. In fact, they're really angry with you, most likely. And so they may just do the opposite of what you say, just despite you. And so when you have no credibility, you cannot begin to tell someone what is a good thing to do. Counselors learn somewhere along the way in counselor school or something that they always the saying is this, people don't care what you know until they know that you care. And so what that means is you've got to establish a relationship first. If you skip this step, it isn't gonna work. So step one of the invisible intervention process is to build a trusting relationship with this person. Now that doesn't mean doing everything they want. It's trust, it's openness, honesty, non reactiveness. Step number two is to dig around in there until you find the motivators that that person has. Because everybody has some inside motivation to get better. And a lot of times if they're defensive towards you, they're not going to show it to you. And that's why you got to get them to put those walls down in step number one. And once you find those things inside that maybe those little granules, grains where they actually do really want to get better. So you're going to find those and you're going to find inside of that person, what are the things stopping them? What are they scared of? What are they worried about? Are they worried their kids are going to get taken away if they talk to someone about an addiction? Are they worried withdrawal is going to be so horrible and they can't stand it, it's going to be awful? Are they worried that life is just going to be horrible and it's not even worth living without the substance? What is their fears? So you're going to identify those fears and help to find ways around those roadblocks or help them see that actually it won't look that way. Maybe it will look this way. And when you have that trust in place, they're actually going to listen to that. Now, you're not making them do anything. You're just helping them think differently. And simultaneously, you're taking those little pieces of motivation we call that change talk, those little things that you hear where you kind of know deep down inside they want to change. And they'll show you this. If you've got trust and you sort of what I call pour water on it, it's like pouring water on a seed that you want to grow, and you pull that motivation forward. Now, the third step is really behind the scenes. So while you're doing those first two things behind the scenes, you're looking at different, various help options. That could be treatment, that could be counseling. That could be good books or podcasts, that could be support groups or 12 step or church supports, whatever. You're identifying options that you feel like might be good, helpful options for your particular situation. Now, you've got to have these options in place before you do step number four. So you can't forget this part. You've got to be out there educating yourself and gathering some resources together. Because step number four is when they have that moment of clarity, when that door finally opens, where they're ready to make a change, they're actually ready to take an active step, to do something different. Then all you have to do is open the door for them and offer them a solution, or you can get them to open the door for themselves. Basically, you just have to get that door open and then offer them a chance to step through the door. And so everything you've been doing leading up to that has been setting the stage, setting the stage, setting the stage. And then the time is right. You just open the door, and they step through it. That is exactly what we do in our office. If your loved one was sitting in front of me and they were still actively using and they were, like, in denial and they didn't want to change, that's exactly what I would do. I would do that process, no matter how long it took, whether it was some weeks or a few months or whatever it was. And then usually what happens is I open that door for someone or I say, hey, have you thought about this? And then this person feels like, oh, my gosh, like, thank you so much. You were so helpful. You got me out of a jam, man. You rescued me at the right moment, or whatever. They feel like, not only is this easier on you and easier on them, but it's so much more effective because think about it, what do you think the chances of change are from someone who's actually gone through this process before they ever make those big giant steps? Now, many of you have heard me say you don't have to be willing to go to treatment. I stand by that. I still agree. You can go into treatment totally mad as heck. I don't care how you got there, you know, leveraged by the law or whatever. But the first weeks of treatment you're going to be spending digging through that. If you keep them in there long enough, they'll come out the other side of that and then treatment will begin to take place. So I'm not opposed to forcing people in. Let me just put that up there. But if you can get someone ready, then open the door. When they step through that door, the treatment process is going to start to take so much faster. And the chances of staying clean and sober long term are way better. When you do it this way, you're joining them. You're not enabling them, but you're joining them and you're helping them make the decision to make a big change. That's what we call the invisible intervention, which is what we do in our office and which is the. And we teach this step by step process in our family recovery academy. Basically, we tell you in detail how to go through each one of those four stages that I just told you about. If you want to know more about that, click the link in the description. And if you want to know more about how I actually have those conversations with people in session, then watch this video about building trust.