If They Won’t Stop Drinking, You Only Have 3 Options

If you have an addicted loved one, you've probably been told there's a few ways to handle it. You can go the tough love route, you can go the big giant intervention route, or you can just kind of sit back or detach yourself and hope for the best. Wait for them to figure it out, decide they have a problem, and decide they want to get sober. But what if I told you there's actually a 4th option? There's something else that you can do. Knowing your options can make all the difference. It's the difference between strategically helping your loved one find recovery Or staying stuck in the chaos of addiction. In this video, I'm going to break down the 3 main approaches that you can take, what works, what doesn't work, when to use which type of intervention, when to use each type of strategy, and we'll talk about the research-proven, most statistically effective method you can use. For those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth. I have been helping people and families overcome addiction for more than 20 years now, and for most of my career, I've been dealing with people in the very early stages of change, as in either I don't think I have a problem, or I have a problem, but it's not that bad, or I'm only here because my wife made me. The early stages of change, most people call it denial. The fancy word for it is pre-contemplation stage of change, which I know is fancy counselor talk. Anyways, I tell you all that so you know I have a lot of experience with bringing someone from denial all the way through those stages of change into recovery. I've done a lot of trial and error over the course of 20 years, which means I know a little something about what works and what doesn't work. If you're interested in learning how to stay 5 steps ahead of addiction and you're not subscribed to this channel, you definitely should be because that's what we talk about every single day over here. That's what we're here for. So subscribe. If you're not new here, welcome back. Give me a little hand emoji in the comments. Say hello so I can say hey back. All right, let's get into those different options. You know, there's always the whole like step back, hope that they figure it out. Maybe they'll hit a bottom. Maybe they'll decide they want to get better. I'm really not even going to include that as an option because it's not, it's so passive. It's not really doing anything. So let's just put that one over here. Yeah, you can be passive, but I'm not going to count it as a strategic option. All right. Since we moved that one over there, let's move to the next one. Tough love. This one has been around since forever. It's all about letting someone hit rock bottom, and it usually involves kicking someone out of the house or cutting them off emotionally and financially and every other way, hoping that if they suffer enough, they can finally figure out that they are an addict and they need to do something about it. This is probably actually the most popular approach. It's been around forever, and even people in recovery themselves will recommend this approach because what they remember is that it got really tough for them and they finally decided to get better. But even for those people in recovery, there are probably a few other factors that came into play that they might not be remembering. Now, it is true that when you're dealing with someone in denial, it has to get to the point where the addiction isn't working for them anymore. So you do kind of have to back off to some degree and allow some natural consequences. But as strange as it may sound, there's a little bit of a delicate balance here because going full-blown tough love style can backfire on you. Let me tell you a little story so you know what I mean. A few years back, we worked with this client. Her name was Susan. She'd been following us for a while on YouTube, And she sent us an email saying, oh my gosh, I wish I had found your videos earlier. I think I really screwed it up. I kicked him out. It's not going well. That's sort of the point where she got involved with us. Basically, her son, we're going to call him Jake, not his real name, we're calling him Jake, had just gotten worse and worse. He had been using since he was about 14 and he was 26 at this time. So it'd been going on a long time and just wasn't getting anywhere. Mom was at her wit's end. He couldn't keep a job for more than 3 or 4 weeks. He wouldn't even help around the house. And eventually Susan was just sick and tired of him treating her like crap, taking care of all his responsibilities, putting up with him coming in and out day and night, and occasionally even stealing from her. So eventually she had enough. She talked to some friends and they said, you need to put this kid out. And I'm not saying that's the worst advice ever. If you are going to put someone out, sometimes you do need to do that. There's some ways to go about doing that. If you go at it from the angry, I've had it, I'm done with you approach, I get it. That's the way you feel. That emotion is totally valid, but it's not always the most effective if what you're trying to do is get through to somebody. Because what ended up happening with Jake and Susan is she did throw him out and she thought, you know, he would spend a few days couch surfing and then he would come to his senses and he would agree to go to treatment and he would get better and she would let him come back home. But that's not what happened. She kicked him out. He did spend a few days couch surfing and then he ran out of couches. He called her. He said, can I come back home? And she was like, no, you You can't come back home until you go to treatment. And he actually ended up choosing to just be homeless instead of going to treatment. And as you can imagine, Susan was pretty shocked. But that's the thing about addiction. It continues despite the consequences. That's the actual definition of addiction. So consequences piling up isn't necessarily going to break through to someone and get them to change. There was a time when Susan basically lost complete contact with Jake. She continued to pay his cell phone bill because she wanted to be able to get in touch with him, but he hadn't responded to her. In months, and when she tried to call, it just went straight to voicemail. She didn't know if he was alive or dead or what, and as you can imagine, that is a horrible way to live. Ultimately, Jake did end up getting better, but not in the way that you might think. He actually had a big overdose. He ended up in the hospital, and I guess the, like, paramedics or the hospital staff or whatever, they found her contact, and so they contacted her and told Susan that he was in the hospital. And of course, she went straight to the hospital to show up to try to figure out what's going on. And she naturally thought, okay, this is it. This is hitting bottom. Like literally you died because of this. Surely he's going to do the right thing here. Going to go to treatment. So she gets to the hospital room. She talks to Jake. He's immediately defensive. He's pretty nasty with her. And he basically, he says, why do you even care? Where have you been? You didn't even care about me. You threw me out on the street. I've been on the street for almost a year now. He was just mad. And Susan, Tried to talk with him about it. She tried to talk him into going to treatment, and he just wasn't having it. A day and a half later, they released him from the hospital, and again, she lost contact. She didn't know where he was or how to help. Now, I told you that eventually Jake did get better, but it wasn't because of the tough love. Eventually, Jake got involved in some kind of program where they're trying to reach out and help people with addictions, and some person I think that volunteers for the program kept coming along, kind of made friends with Jake, started to be sort of mentorish, and eventually that relationship. led Jake to get into treatment, to start going to meetings, and he did get sober. But there's still a little bit of a sad ending to the story because Jake never did forgive Susan. Even though he was sober, he was still angry for the way she handled things. Now I get it that that's really not quite fair. And as a mom, you don't know what to do and you just do the best you can do. And trust me, she had tried for many, many years and hadn't gotten anywhere. So I'm not telling you this story to say, oh my gosh, she did the wrong thing. I'm telling you this story just to say that this is a common way to go about things and it doesn't always end the way you think it's going to. Most of the time when people kick someone out, they think that they're going to choose to go to treatment versus getting kicked out, or they're going to choose to go to treatment versus getting a divorce. Occasionally they do, but a lot of times they don't. So you got to think twice about the tough love thing, and you need to think 3 or 4 times before you bluff the tough love thing. Okay, so let's move on to the next option, which is to do one of those big dramatic full-blown interventions like you see on TV. You know, the ones where everyone gets together behind the scenes, they write these letters, the addicted person comes in, everyone reads the letters, there's tears, the person goes off to treatment, and hopefully the story ends well. Now it's true, those types of interventions can be effective. And when you are in a situation where your loved one is really out of control, like they're literally going to kill themselves or someone else if they don't get this under control quickly, like it's bad and You know it's bad and they know it's bad, then sometimes this kind of intervention, it is the way to go about it. But there are some drawbacks to doing it this way. The first drawback is the fact that when the addictive person figures out that everybody in their life, all their family and all their friends have been like coordinating behind their back, talking about them behind their back, they feel pretty betrayed. They feel embarrassed and humiliated. And a lot of times they just build a giant resentment over it and they have a really hard time getting over it. Even after getting sober, they just don't trust everybody. They feel like everybody's behind their back. Of course, those people are just trying to do the best they can to help this person. And I'm not even saying you shouldn't do it. I'm just making you aware that this is a thing that can happen. The other way that this kind of thing backfires is if you sort of push someone into treatment that way and they really don't think they have a problem, they may go to treatment. I've seen this happen a million times. They may even get better, but in almost 100% of cases like that, they go back to using because they never were convinced that they had a problem. So you might want to use a traditional intervention where things are really out of control. The person knows they have a problem. Maybe they just don't want to stop or they can't stop, but they know they have a problem. Sometimes pushing someone into treatment, forcing them through an intervention or a legal system or something like that, that actually can work because they need to get sober long enough to figure out that they want to stay sober. But in the situation where it's a person who really is like in denial, You may force them to go to treatment, but they're not done figuring it out for themselves. I worked with a guy a few years back who was a business guy and he was definitely drinking too much. The drinking was a problem. His family did one of these giant interventions on him and they sent him to treatment. The thing of it was though, is yeah, he knew he was drinking too much, but he definitely didn't think he was an alcoholic. He was very successful at work. He was going to work every day. He was driving kids to soccer practice, doing all the things or whatever. So yeah, he went because he was basically pushed into a corner. But he got back out and a week later he was drinking again. And that's the typical kind of result you're going to get if you push someone that's in denial into treatment too soon. The third way you can go about it is something that we call the invisible intervention. And it's called invisible because it's very sort of behind the scenes and the person doesn't even realize that you are doing anything. It's not a big dramatic read the letters and push you into treatment. It's more of a very strategic way that you Lead someone to come to their own conclusion about the fact that they have a problem and the fact that they want to get better and can get better. And you get them to make the decision to get sober or go to treatment or whatever it is that needs to happen for them to come out of it. Now, some of the methods that we use inside the Invisible Intervention are from the CRAFT method, C-R-A-F-T. That stands for Community Reinforcement and Family Training. And the CRAFT method is all about using positive reinforcement to get someone behaviors to slowly start to shift. So in the CRAFT method, you want to kind of alternate between being neutral and positive. So when you see behaviors you don't like and you don't want to reinforce, you act neutral. You don't want to negatively reinforce that because that ends up backfiring on you. They get defensive. They see you as the bad guy. That blocks them from being able to see the problem. I got a lot of videos on that. You can check them out. You want to go from neutral to positive reinforcement. So when you see things in the right direction, you positively reinforce. That method is actually statistically proven to be way more effective than the other methods, as in like twice as effective, because not only does it eventually get people where you want them, but they're a lot more likely to stay. That's called the CRAFT method. The invisible intervention includes some of the CRAFT methods, but layers in some other communication and intervening techniques that actually speed the process along. Because most people that are in denial, they go through this phase that I call the bargaining phase where At first they don't realize it's a problem at all. Then they do realize it's a problem, but they think it's not that big of a problem. Then they realize, okay, it's a problem. I need to do something. And they try to cut it back. They try all these different things in the middle. And in the Invisible Intervention, we show you how to get someone from complete denial to thinking maybe it's a problem, to thinking, okay, I need to do something about it, to doing some trial and error, figuring out what to do about it, till ultimately, usually they come to the conclusion that Yeah, this is a big problem and I'm just going to have to stop completely. But there's a lot of phases in between. You got to know exactly what to say, what to do and not do to help someone move quickly through those stages. Otherwise they just get stuck in them for years and years and years and sometimes never come out of them. The great thing about the invisible intervention is that it gets someone to figure these things out on their own and it helps them to figure it out much faster than if you just totally took your hands off of it and did nothing and wait for them to figure it out. The problem with that is, is you're dealing with addiction, which is messing with someone's brain and their brain literally can't quite see what's happening. So this is a way of strategically interacting to influence someone in the direction that you're wanting them to go. The other reason why I really like the invisible intervention is because it's so much less confrontational and doesn't do nearly as much relationship damage. And I get to see the evidence of how effective this is. every single day in my office because most of the people that come see me now that are trying to get over an addiction come to see me after their families have done like these techniques. They've used the invisible intervention. And what is great about it is when they get on the Zoom call with me, they get in the session with me, whatever it is, they come in and I'll say, why are you here? And they'll say, well, I've got a problem with this or that, and it's really bad. And I've tried a lot of things and I really want to be done with this forever. Which is very, very different than used to be when I got new clients and I would say, why are you here? They would always say, because so-and-so made me, because I have to or else. Basically, they had to for some kind of reason, which I can work with people in denial, but it takes a long time just to get out of the stages of denial. So it's a long time before we even get into some action work. These days when people come to see me, I can tell that their families have done the invisible intervention because they come in. ready to work. They don't spend a lot of time blaming everybody and everything else, which is the opposite of how people normally come into treatment. I love it. We can hit the ground running. So those are your 3 options. And admittedly, it's really not one size fits all. The tough love option is high risk. It's got a high emotional cost and a low success rate. The more comfortable people get with living at the bottom, the less likely they are to change. So when nothing else has worked and you just can't take it anymore, maybe this is the way to go, but it's not very effective as far as getting someone else to change. The traditional intervention is really good in an emergency situation, but it does have its cons and tends to cause quite a bit of emotional damage. The invisible intervention is gradual and relationship-focused, but it is highly effective. Think of it like trying to move a boulder up the hill. Tough love is like shoving the boulder off the cliff. It's dramatic but destructive. It takes a lot of energy and it might not work. The Invisible Intervention is like using a lever. It's strategic and it works with a lot less effort. Now, if you're interested and you're like, yeah, that's for me, I'm in, I want to do it. The Invisible Intervention, it is an online program, so you can do it from the comfort of your own home. There's a link to it in the description below, or if you just want to learn a little bit more about it, watch this video next.