A short YouTube talk by Amber Hollingsworth (Put the Shovel Down) addressing situations where someone else is undermining efforts to help an addicted loved one. Hollingsworth divides sabotaging behaviors into two common scenarios—(1) a drug-using 'bad influence' friend and (2) a family member who enables or sides with the addicted person—and gives practical guidance: stop trying to control external people, focus on building your own credibility and influence, and apply the same motivational techniques to the other family member (listen, avoid arguing, let them experience consequences). She emphasizes addiction as an "inside job," warns against power struggles and splitting, and points viewers to related videos on manipulation and splitting.
Chapters
Okay. So you're doing everything possible to help your addicted loved one find recovery. And I mean everything. You're watching all these videos. Maybe you're going to Al Anon. You're reading books. Maybe you're in our invisible intervention course. You've had consultation sessions. You're doing it all. But there's someone else out there who's sabotaging your efforts. I know it makes you want to pull your hair out. It is for sure crazy making. In this video, I'm going to tell you how to handle that situation. Well, actually, I'm going to break it into two sort of different versions of that situation. And I'll tell you how to handle both of them. Now, if you're new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your loved ones back on track and get back to living the life that you want to live. Because I know what you've been going through. That's not the life that you want to live. And for those of you who are already familiar with this channel, I've got to tell you a little something before I give you this piece of advice I'm about to give you. Go ahead and you can pause this video right now and go to comments and write. You're killing me, Amber. Because I already know when I was thinking about this video and what I'm going to say. We're like, oh, my gosh, I'm just going to wear out the people that are trying so hard. They're doing everything possible. And now I'm going to tell them this little piece of advice, and I think they might just pull their hair out. Okay, so we're talking about when someone else is sabotaging you. It's like everything you're doing, someone else is coming along and undoing. I know it's about the most maddening thing possible. I'm going to break this into two categories, and these are. There are other ways that this can happen, but these are the two most common ways that we see it happen. The first way you is if your loved one has some kind of using or drinking buddy, and this person, you feel like, you know, they're just like that bad influence friend. And no matter what you do, it's like you can't compete with them because that's their best buddy. They're always meeting at the bar. They're always going to smoke or whatever it is that they do. And that person has a ton of influence over your loved one. What do you do about that person? Well, ready? Get your first eye roll ready, because here it comes. You don't do anything about that person. How many of you knew I was gonna say that? Some of you that watch this channel a lot, at least you should have known that if you know my philosophies. But let's get into why you do nothing. I tell this all the time, especially to, like, parent. And you just know that every time they're with that person, they get in trouble or, you know, it's just a bad influence situation. You can't control this problem externally. So I want you to stop putting your efforts into trying to run people off and boyfriends and girlfriends off and drug dealers off and pouring out the alcohol or whatever it is. I want you to stop putting your energy into trying to control addiction by controlling all these external factors. It's not possible to win the war that way. If you run off one friend, there's going to be another one lined up right behind them. So in the next one might be worse than the current one. So don't put your energy there. Recovery is an inside job. So what I want you to think to yourself is, you know what, Mr. Bad Influence Friend, I got a strategy, and I'm going to outsmart you. You are going to gain more credibility and trust with your loved one so that your influence eventually overpowers their influence. That's the strategy we talk about on this channel. It's about gaining that credibility, your influence, your credit at the trust bank, as I like to call it. So once you can do that, you can sort of win the war that way, Especially if this is your kid and it's like some boy or girl they're dating, seriously mistake. And I know how maddening that can be to watch this other person have such a bad impact on your loved one. You know, trying to get them to sort of like choose between you and them or something like that. Can't win that way. And whatever. For whatever reasons, your loved one has an attachment to that person. And it's going to be easier to get them to figure out how to give up the drug than it is to give up the friend. Now, a lot of times your loved one in recovery may end up ultimately having to make that choice, but it's probably not going to be because you ran that person off. So just give up that method. It's not going to work. All right, here's the second scenario that you could be facing when You've got like another person sabotaging your efforts is when you've got another family member who is sabotaging you because they keep enabling the person or making excuses for the person, or maybe they keep getting the person riled up by fighting with them and arguing with them. And everything you're trying to do over here is being undone by this other like really close family member or friend. This isn't necessarily like a using buddy friend situation. This is just more like someone else that's close to the family situation who basically just doesn't know better when that's happening. A lot of times it's. It's because this other person really doesn't get it, or this other person thinks that you're overreacting or that you're not handling the situation in the right way because from their point of view, they're just sort of seeing probably like. Like this much of the story and they think they've got the picture when they probably don't. The other thing that's likely, are definitely possibly playing out in this kind of situation is that your addicted loved one is splitting that person or those people against you. We've talked about this in other videos and at the end of this one I'll link up to those videos in case you haven't seen it. But it's kind of where your addicted loved one pits people against each other. That is a cl. Addictive, manipulative behavior and it is highly likely to be going on. So let's say if this is a situation where maybe you're frustrated because your spouse is an alcoholic, let's say, and their parent continues to enable the situation and they're running to the parent telling the parent how mean you are. But does it tell the parent all the crazy things that happened that led up to you drawing the boundary that you drew or whatever? So there's just all these other reasons why they just can't see the whole picture, or maybe they are living with it. Maybe your child is the one that's struggling and it's your spouse who just keeps sabotaging your efforts. Well, here's the answer to that. Everything that I teach you to do with your addicted loved one, I want you to back up, stop, wait a second, pause. And I want you to take all that stuff I've taught you and apply it to that other loved one. Because what's happening here is you're changed. You've got it. You've learned all this stuff. You've stopped enabling. You know what's going on you got your strategy and you're trying to apply it, but this other person over here who has a lot of influence isn't on the same page as you. And I know what you want to do. You want to wrestle them down, you want to tell them what's up, you want to get angry at them, you want to shake them by the shoulders, but it just doesn't work in the very same way it didn't work when you tried to do that to your addicted loved one. All the things that I teach you guys on this channel work to get people to get their walls down, to get people to change and gain insight no matter what that change is. Now, I know we talk about how to get people to make the decision to get into recovery, but I'm telling you, whatever decision it is or whatever it is people need to see the truth about, maybe someone's in denial. The techniques that I teach you work. So it's almost like taking a prerequisite course for like some kind of college class. You need, you need chemistry one before you can get chemistry two. So if you keep trying to help your addicted loved one, motivate them to take steps toward recovery, but you keep running into this wall with this other family member, then you need to stop, back up and deal with that other family member. You need to listen to them, don't argue with them. And mostly what you need to do is back up out of the way and let them get burned by it for a minute. You know, if it's like a grandparent or if it's like your mother in law, your father in law, and they think they know better. I bet if you let it go over to their, their house for a few months, they'll see the same picture that you're seeing. It's probably that they're not seeing the whole picture or they're getting a warped sense of the picture because your loved one is sort of skewing the information that comes across. So you're going to have to back up out of that power struggle that you've got going on with that addicted loved one and just remember that your addicted loved one has probably pit you against people before too. So before you go get mad at them, I want you to remember all the times that it worked on you, all the times that your kid told you, this boyfriend is mean to me, this teacher's mean to me, and you fell into it and you got mad at that other person and trying to protect them. Well, that's the same thing that's going on now. It's just now you're the bad guy all of a sudden. So back up and deal with that. And that may just mean stop fighting with that other loved one about it. If you just get out of their way, they'll see it faster and clearer. Now, those of you that have been watching for a while, I bet some of you knew that. Let me know if you already knew. That's the answer I was going to give you. If you did already know it. Bonus, extra credit for you. It means you're really getting it. But once you get the philosophy, you understand the techniques, you can sort of generalize it to other situations and you got it. And ultimately that's where we want to get you to. So if you're still struggling with this other person and your loved one is doing all this manipulation and splitting and keeping people all pit against each other, then what I want you to do next is watch this video about manipulation and splitting. I'm going to put it right up here for you. All you got to do is click it.
