Motivate An Addicted Loved One To Get Sober

What are the three main factors that go into motivating an addicted loved one to get sober? Now, before we go too far into this, some of you, especially if you're new to me, you may be thinking you can't make someone get sober. They have to want it for themselves and all that kind of stuff that you hear all the time, everywhere. But actually, you can help motivate someone to get sober. There are things that you can do to influence them. And in this video, I am going to go over three. Three main factors involved in helping to motivate an addicted loved one to get sober. Now, there are more factors, but these are the three big ones. And I'm actually going to give you a bonus one at the end, so make sure you keep watching. And if you can do. If you can put these three plus the bonus factor in place, then your chances of having success are going to go way up. So let's get in and get started with what those factors are. Now, the first factor is, and this one is a little, like, contradictory, I guess I would say. But the first factor is that when a person feels like they have some choice and some say in the matter, they're a lot more likely to go in the right direction. And the reason that is, hey, A.J. the reason that is is because nobody likes to be forced, nobody likes to be pushed into a corner. And when you come directly at your loved one with a, you've got to do this, you need to do this. You're, like, ruining the family, you're hurting yourself, you're hurting people around you, all that kind of stuff. What happens is immediately they start putting up their walls and their defense mechanisms. And one of the things that I know from dealing with people who have substance use disorders is that deep down inside of them, there's almost always some motivation already inside them that they want to get better. Now, there are some roadblocks that they're facing that may be keeping them from taking those steps. But there's usually some things deep down inside it may be as small as. Well, I know if I quit drinking, I'd lose some weight. That's still a motivator, you know. So if you can find what those motivators are and nurture them, you're going to have a lot better results. A really good way to find those motivators is to not press someone into a corner is to help someone feel like that they have some choice in the matter, because, like I said, they're not going to put their guard up as much a second Factor. Looking at my notes here, a second factor that you can do. Hey, Tango. The second factor that you can do is to positively reinforce your. Any behaviors that are in the right direction. So if, you know, if they. If your loved one comes home and they're not intoxicated or they choose to spend time with the family or they, you know, did really good on a school project or a work project, reinforce those behaviors. Because what you're actually trying to do here is you're trying to almost, like, compete with this addiction. What you're trying to do is you're trying to say, choose this and not your addiction. And the biggest problem that most families do is they make this over here like this. Choose this thing. Very unappealing, because this. Choose. This is. Choose your angry family. Choose, you know, your life that's a mess. Choose all this stress or your addiction. Well, that choice doesn't look very appealing. So you need to change that choice, that viewpoint of what this over here means. And if you can make this life seem somewhat rewarding, somewhat better, then obviously they're going to be weighing out those options. And this choice over here, the choice of getting sober or into recovery is going to seem a lot more appealing. And the way you can do that is by focusing on reinforcing positive steps in the right direction, Even if it's not 100%, even if it's not like they're completely 100 over all the time, and that they're totally humble and willing. If you'll just take those little seeds of progress and pay attention to them and validate them and connect to them, then you're going to grow that. And like I said, they're going to feel more connected to you. They're going to feel more like, you know what? This over here is not so bad. And then the wheels are going to start to turn. So that first factor is to sort of not back there in the corner, which gets the walls down. The second one, reinforcement, kind of gets those wheels turning. And then the third thing that you have to instill in someone is hope that they can get better. And one of the ways you instill that is when they hear from other people who have done it. When they hear stories about people who have done it, they think, you know, if they can do it, I. I can do it, too. So that begins to sort of feed into this belief that things can get better. And we are on live. So if you're on live and you have a question or a comment, pop it up there. And as soon as I Finish with all of these factors. I'm going to go through and answer some of your questions. And if you're on the replay, you can put them in the comments and I'll come back and address those for you the best that I can. Once you've got those three factors in place, the bonus trick I'm going to tell you is if you can help the person feel more confident in themselves, like that they have what it takes inside in order to get better. Now you've got a combination that works, right? So it's like I'm less defensive. I'm beginning to think it might not be so bad to get sober. Other people have done it. If they can do it, I can do it too. And you know what? I've got what it takes in order to do that. And the way you can help someone find that confidence is find their characteristics, their strengths and values, validate those, or make comments about those, or remind them of times in their past where they did other really hard things and were successful. That's kind of, kind of bolster their sense of self, which is going to help them feel like, I can do this, I've got what it takes. Because a lot of people feel like they just can't do it. Maybe they've tried a whole bunch of times and they're not successful and they're really down on themselves. So many people out there think that you have to tear someone down, that you have to back them into a corner, that they have to hit bottom in order to get sober. But sometimes that works, but not very often. The whole tear them down thing can work only if they're, like, locked up in some kind of like, treatment facility and they don't have anywhere to turn. You can do that in those kind of situations. But other than that, you have to make people feel confident enough in social. You have to build them up to the point where they think, I can do this and I want to do this, and they feel supported enough by you to even talk about. Those are the major factors in helping someone to actually make the choice to get sober. And like I said, you can influence that decision. I know all of you out there think and believe that you can. Hey, Maria. Hey, Pamela. I know all of you out there think that you can do things to make it worse. Right? We all know that. So if you can do things to make it worse, doesn't that mean, conversely, that there probably are some things you can do to make it better? Exactly. So let me take a look at some of these comments and Questions we have up here. Let's see. I'm gonna pop them up so you can see them. So tango47 says, can you talk about or make a video on someone who is the alcoholic or addict? Most of your videos seem to be towards the family. Yes, Tango, I do have some videos. I do have some videos specifically on functional alcoholism. And when I hop off here, I'll give you a link to some playlists to some of those videos. But if you have an idea about a specific topic you'd like to hear, like I know you're saying for the addicted person, but something specific for that person, let me know and I'll definitely put it on the list because I'm always looking for ideas. Let's see. Paige says she's tuning in from work. Hey, Paige, glad to have you tuning in. Don't get yourself in trouble. How to deal with an addict in recovery. That difficult personality. So what you're saying, ha. Is that the person is in already sober, but their personality is still difficult. Is that what you're saying? Most of the things that I'm teaching you now about how to get someone to make choice to get sober will actually continue to work even after some get sober. You're just positively reinforcing good behaviors. You're just connecting to them. You're making them feel positive, and that's going to bring out the better part of their personality. Pamela says talked about your last video in jail here with the girls last week. Oh, hey, Pamela. Thank you. Do you mean the one where this Tuesday one that I released where I talked about that you don't have to want it for yourself? I think that's the one that you mean. Hey, Maria, let's see, we got. Kevin's got something. I keep trying to get my ex girlfriend to go to rehab, but she won't go, go, go. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. Many days I explained that our relationship couldn't work and she disappeared. So, Kevin, maybe one of the things you could do is instead of saying, hey, our relationship can't work like this, you can say the same thing, but just say it in the positive direction. You could say something like, I feel like our relationship would be so much better. I feel like we could go to the next level. You know, talk about how good it can be over here on this side, rather than talking about how bad it is currently. Because the thing about people with substance abuse problems is when you introduce a lot of negativity towards them, stress, negative situations, bad relationships, they just use or drink or whatever to deal with that. So the more you come with them with that, the more walls they put up and the more they want to run to the substance. I know that's kind of counterintuitive, but I find that it works a little better. Ashley says, I made my husband leave. His addiction was causing dangerous chaos in our house. He spent one horrible night on the street, went to detox and got help. He's home and attended his first meeting today. So what Ashley's saying is she had to put a hard boundary, and I'm sure that was painful and difficult decision for you to have to make, but it sounds like in this case it worked out for you. Thanks for sharing that, Ashley. Rachel, have you ever had encouragement backfire, like, tell someone they have what it takes and they get livid with you? What's behind that? You know, I had this same kind of scenario recently. I was talking about some kind of topic where I was talking about, like, giving people positive reinforcement, and people were commenting about how that sometimes backfires. Rachel, tell me what they say to you when you say backfire. What is it they say back to you? And that might help me understand what button you're hitting them and how to maybe go around that button. Jude, does narcissism work with addiction? Does that change any approach? Narcissism and addiction definitely go hand in hand. I actually have a video already made and edited. It's going to come out for you guys in the next sometime in August about that topic. But I'll give you the just the short version of that, Jude, and that's that a lot of addicts and alcoholics can come across as narcissistic. And they come across because it seems like to the other people, it seems like, well, you're putting your needs ahead of ours and, you know, your what your feelings matter more and all that kind of stuff. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're really like true, like narcissistic personality disorder. A lot of times that's just a defense mechanism. If you're dealing with a true narcissist, as in was always that way, even before the addiction, then that does come into play and it changes the approach. Because if you're dealing with an addict that acts narcissistically, they'll probably get a lot better if the addiction gets out. If you're dealing with a narcissist who has an addiction, it's kind of like what's the primary? Then you can take the addiction away, but there's still going to be a Narcissist. And there's not nearly as much. There's not nearly as much that can be done about that. I hope. I know that's the short answer. I hope that helps a little bit. Kevin says I feel powerless, and she chooses addiction over me. I left the door open that if she ever needed help, I would be there for her, but I couldn't have the drugs, could get arrested and lose my job. Yeah, sometimes, Kevin, you have to set a boundary. Like, you can't let what's going on with them totally destroy you. And unfortunately, we do get back into that corner. Sometimes we have to. We just have to say, hey, you know, I care about you. I hope you get better, but I can't let this take me down. How many of you out there have had to do something like what Kevin has had to do, set a boundary like that? I bet a lot of you have. Pam says she's a peer recovery specialist, so she brokers hope. I like that I broke her hope. That's kind of cool. I like that, Pamela. I told them I got clean from my kids and my grandkids. That's right. Getting clean for your family is a wonderful, wonderful reason to get clean. And I don't know why so many people out there try to tell people that they can't get clean for that reason. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Like, that's a great reason to get clean. But it's crazy. Like on that video where we talked about that this week, somebody put a comment on and said that they had recently been in treatment. And in treatment, they said, yeah, I'm getting clean because I. I don't want to be that kind of husband or father. I want to be better than my family. And he literally got told by the treatment professionals, like, that wasn't good enough. That wasn't going to work. He had a one for himself. I just don't know why these kind of things happen. It doesn't make sense. It's just. It's just mind boggling to me. I hate it when I hear things like that. So I'm glad, Pamela, that you're out there telling people what the real truth is. You know, the craziest thing about Pamela is that sometimes people will actually have this thinking pattern that leads to relapse. Like, maybe they get sober, but then they start thinking themselves, well, I didn't really do this for myself. And people don't really stay sober that didn't do it for themselves. And then that thinking leads to Relapse, it's just, it's just crazy. It doesn't make sense. Any reason is a good reason, especially doing it for your family. See, Kelly, my 25 year old alcoholic granddaughter got arrested on DUI last night. I've been doing your family academy to learn and is this a good time to intervene? Can you help me with a few openers? She's also in denial. Yes. So Kelly, if she's like locked up and she's not out yet, you can leverage that. Maybe we'll help her get out if she'll agree to do X amount of treatment or take some steps. And even if she's already out, she's probably going to have like to still go to trial and face the legal charge and all that kind of stuff. And you can leverage helping with that if they'll take action steps. Not. I never don't help with a legal problem if, if you don't have some action steps in place and if you're doing it and they're already out, make sure they take those action steps before you take your action steps. So yes. And if she chooses to get sober because she needs to get out of legal trouble, still a good reason. No, bad reason. So I'm all for it. Let's see. Elizabeth says for someone who's literally lived their whole adolescent and adult life on some form of substance, is now on Suboxone. How to go about convincing them that life is worth living or bearable even without that crutch. Ooh, that's a tough one. Elizabeth is asking us tough question. What she's saying is I don't know if it's herself or another person, but someone's on Suboxone is like a maintenance drug, which means that they're on a replacement drug. So they coming off of one drug, an opiate in this case, and they're taking another opiate legally being prescribed in order to keep them maintained and stable. And there are pros and cons of Suboxone. Elizabeth and I have some videos on that if you want to check that out. But it's kind of like Suboxone gets you sort of halfway there. But there's a little bit more like, like what Elizabeth saying is that there's more out there to life if you're able to get on the other side of that. Tina says, I had to set a hard boundary with my friend. He is a DUI and always ask for rides, but often is trying to drink in my car. So I have left him at the gas station before it was awful. He must have pushed you to the brink, Tina. You must have just been like, you know what? Just have it. But you're right. It's like he gets a DUI and then the consequences. He can't drive, but then it's like you're paying the consequence for his decision, and that doesn't work so well. Bobby, our daughter's on the road to recovery but is entertaining medical marijuana dovetails off sub boxing. Question from Elizabeth. Any advice? Yes, Bobby. About three weeks ago, I think one of the other counselors in my practice, her name is Campbell, we made a video about this, and the video is called can I Can someone in recovery ever drink moderately? And that. And even though the title talks about drinking, marijuana is the sort of counterpart of that. So people a lot of times either say, I can still drink. I just can't do these other drugs, or they'll say, I can still use marijuana as long as I stay away from those other drugs. And I'll let you check out that video because the answer is a little bit complicated. And Melissa says, great question. All right, guys, I am gonna jump off of here now because I've got to actually go and see some clients. But I really appreciate you hanging out with me. And I will be here next Thursday with you live again. And so if you have questions or video topics, make sure you put those in the comments, because I'm always looking for good ide is.