The BEST Way To Help An Addict/Alcoholic, (without sounding like a jerk!)

Unfortunately, most family members don't really understand how to play their cards right, and they end up making things worse. You play your cards right, you just might get lucky. But don't worry, I'm here to tell you the exact strategy to help your loved one make the decision to get sober. In fact, this is step five in our series of how to get an addicted loved one sober. And if you haven't seen the first four episodes, that's okay. You can go back and watch them after this. I've put them in a nice, neat, tidy little playlist for you. Now, for those of you don't know me, I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and you're watching Put the shovel down. This YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track and get back out there and live the life that you want to live. Now, beating addiction, whether it's you trying to help yourself or trying to help a loved one, is all about strategy. So let's get into how to play your cards right now. To make it easy for you to remember, I'm going to use the acronym card, C A R D, so you can remember the strategy on how to do this. Now, the C in this strategy stands for curiosity. You want to be curious about what's going on with them. Basically, you want to ask a lot of questions, but listen up. I've got a plan. Now, listen carefully. This is a very important note. You're not asking questions to make sure they did what they said they're going to do or they went where they said they were going to go and all that kind of stuff. This is not an accountability kind of curiosity. I know you've been doing that. That's one of those things that's not that helpful. What you want to do is you want to be curious about their experience. You want to understand what things are like for them. You always want to be curious. So instead of saying something like, did you go to your meeting? Say something like, what are those meetings like? Like, do you ever talk? Who talks? Like, is it ever annoying how to go in there and ask questions in such a way that lets the person know that they can answer honestly, that they don't have to say, yes, I went to my meeting, and yes, I did everything I was supposed to and I'm following the rules. That's not what you're trying to get at. You're trying to understand their experience. Because when you understand their experience, you're going to Know what motivates them and what doesn't motivate them and what roadblocks that they might be facing. Now, before we go on to the A in the card method, I want to stop for just a second because I want to address a little elephant in the room you might be thinking right about now. Amber, I'm sick of trying to understand their experience. I'm sick of being nice to them. You're always telling us what to do and how to help them and we should be nice and we should care about their experience and blah blah, blah, what the heck about me? They're the ones treating me bad. I'm sick of caring about them. I get it. I know you're probably thinking that I'd be thinking it too. I totally, totally understand where you come from. But in this video I'm here to answer the question on how do you help them get sober. I have other videos where I talk a lot about how to protect yourself, how to deal with your own feelings, how to get your own needs met, how to set boundaries. As you can see, this is a big complicated topic. I can't tell you how to do all that in one video, okay? But right now we're dealing specifically with how to help them and moving on. Alright, now that we got that set aside, let's move on to our A in the card method. The A is going to stand for acknowledge. I want you to acknowledge any kind of difficulties that they may be facing. I want you to acknowledge their challenges, let them know that their frustrations are understandable. Let me give you a little example that I run across all the time. Let's say, for example, someone is sitting in my office and they're talking to me about going to meetings and they're complaining about someone in the meeting, about the way the meetings are ran, about how getting to meetings is difficult. Now when they're complaining and they're fussing, it's quite natural. In my own mind, I'm thinking, well, you better figure out how to make it happen because this is life and death. And I might be thinking all that in my head, but guess what? I'm not going to be saying that. That's my inside voice, not my outside V. Be rude. When I find myself thinking that I really want to shift out of it. Because usually what the person is complaining about probably somewhat valid, right? Some valid frustrations might be like, I've heard all this before. I go to these meetings and the same person's always talking or I keep going and things aren't Getting better. What you want to do in this moment is you just want to acknowledge what is happening and let them know that you probably feel very similar or that you've had a similar experience or that you know where they're coming from. I get it. It's okay. This is going to help them feel connected to you, but it is a little against your instincts because it may feel like, well, I don't want to make them think that. I think that they don't have to do that. That's not what's happening here. What you're doing here is you're just acknowledging that it ain't all fun and that everything about it's not helpful and that there are some crummy moments along the way. Moving on to R in the CARD method is reinforce. So now that you're curious, you understand the experience, you've acknowledged where they're coming from. I want you to reinforce the positive steps that they're taking. This is how you get them to overcome all those frustrations and obstacles and challenges that they're telling you about. What you want to do here is you just want to say, hey, I am really impressed that you keep going to those counseling sessions, even though they're expensive. I'm really impressed that you keep going to the meetings, even though sometimes they're not always that helpful. I'm really impressed that you've got enough humility to keep calling your sponsor, whatever it is you want to validate their courage, their willingness, their humility. Because in the back of their mind, let's say they're getting frustrated. Their meetings, you know, because you've been listening to their challenges, they might be thinking about stopping going. They may be thinking about, I want this sponsoring warrior. I don't want to call this person, I don't want to talk to my counselor. But when you validate these positive steps, they're going to be more likely to continue to do it because they're going to start to see themselves as the hero of their story. And we want this. We want them to see themselves as the hero because we want them to see how strong they're becoming. The positive progress that they're making this little step right here goes a long way. Do not skip it. Alright, moving on to the D. The D is a little different. The D is going to stand for damage control. Now, if or when your loved one has some struggles, maybe they have a relapse, maybe they stopped one of their meetings, maybe they did something that doesn't feel like a step in the right Direction. You. Your job is to damage control it. This is not going to be easy, people, because in your head, you're going to be screaming because you're going to be thinking, I'm not going back there. We're not doing this again. I'm not going through all that crap anymore. And so inside yourself, you're going to feel reactive and frustrated and you want to. Want to get angry and yell and scream and you may even want to run away. Now, in the end, it might be what you need to do to back up and get out of the situation or get some distance. No, you're mad. I don't blame you. But if you're still in the game and you're still trying to help your loved one get better, if they make a misstep in the wrong direction, your job is to damage control it. I know you're thinking. I know. And I'm sure you're wondering, well, how the heck do I damage control it? Well, here's what you don't do. You don't say things like, you've blown it now. You've screwed it up. Now, you had 93 days sober. Now you're back to square one. They're going to be thinking that. You don't need to say that or reinforce that. What you need to say is, dude, you had 93 days sober. You got one little step backwards. You won't get right back on track because you're doing awesome. You don't want to tell them they're doing terrible. You want to tell them that they're doing great. You want to remind them that they are the hero in this journey and that they have what it takes to beat this thing. You got this. Beating someone over the head with something that they did that they probably shouldn't have will only increase the chances that they're going to make more bad decisions. Now, I know I'm calling this step five in our series on how to get your loved ones over, but you need to be using this card method basically all the time. These are key ingredients. Now, because the damage control is such an important step, I'm going to link up here for you next a video that is specifically about what to do if your loved one does relapse. I'm going to put it right up here, so don't forget to check it out.