The FRAMEWORK Counselors Use to BREAK DENIAL (And Get Your Loved One Moving)

Have you ever felt like that no matter what you do, you just can't get through to your addicted loved one? No matter how bad the problem gets, they're just stuck in denial. Maybe they make promises every now and then, but they never really follow through. Well, if that's the case for you, you're in luck because in today's video, I'm going to show you a very simple model called the Motivation Matrix that's going to help you figure out what is actually going to get your loved one to change, why you're getting stuck, and what's going to help you get your loved one to move In the right direction. For those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth and you're watching the YouTube channel, Put the Shovel Down. Our goal is to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction from every perspective, including from the perspective of the person who has the problem and the family's perspective on the issue so that you can get your life and your family back on track. The first thing you got to understand about getting someone with an addiction out of denial and into recovery is that there's this sort of optimal balance point between consequences they're experiencing and positive influence in the right direction. Now, most of us understand that if a person who has an addiction is going to change, they're probably going to have to get uncomfortable in order to be motivated to make that change. The problem is that we as the family member, we're in a hurry for them to figure this out. So we turn up the heat inside the relationship or inside the home thinking that that's going to get their attention. Like for example, we may say things like, if you don't stop drinking, I'm going to take the kids away from you. If I find drugs in this house, I'm going to call the cops. But in the mind of the person who has the addiction, that's actually a punishment. And punishment has the opposite effect from what we want it to have. Punishment actually gets a person to focus on you as being the problem, not the addiction being the problem. Now you may think, well, if I leave, that's a natural consequence of their addiction. And in some ways you're kind of right, but I promise you that the addicted person is going to see that as a punishment and not a consequence. If you want your loved one to understand the consequences of what they're doing, the best thing to do is let the world give the consequences. So let's take a look at the difference in consequences and punishment. So let's take a look at this. This is my consequence versus punishment. This is just a tiny little list, but I want you to kind of see the difference. A punishment is something that you impose on the person, or that at least feels like it's coming from you. Like you can take away a privilege, you can tell on them to someone else, like another family member or a friend. If you refuse to talk to them, if you are yelling at them, all of those things are going to feel like a punishment. Consequences are things that come somewhere else other than from you, like getting a bad grade, like getting a DUI, or not being able to pay your bills, or lost relationships. It's super important for it to be clear that this bad thing that's happening to them is coming from their choices, not from your choices. So for example, If someone gets a bad grade in college, high school, whatever, because they got a bad grade, take away a privilege from them, right? Like you take their car away from them because they got a bad grade. They're going to totally miss the point of the consequence. They're going to focus on how you're unfair, you're mean, you took their car away. They're going to focus on the punishment of it versus the consequence of it. Whereas if you just simply let the grade be the grade, and maybe the consequence of the bad grade is that you're not going to pay for their school or their college unless their passing, that would be more of a consequence versus taking a car away based on a bad grade. Hopefully you can kind of see the difference, and it's very important for you to be able to see the difference because punishment's going to make them mad at you. Consequences are going to make them self-reflect on their decisions and the direction that they're heading in life. You want it to be very blatantly obvious that their choices result in these uncomfortable things that they're experiencing. Your job is not to block the view on that by playing the bad guy. As long as you're the bad guy, they will see you as the problem. How do I know this? I know this because I've been helping people who have addictions for 20+ years. And when the family member's in the bad guy role, all they can talk to me about is the family member, how it's unfair, how controlling, how you're critical, how you don't get it, how you're unreasonable, on and on and on. That's all they can talk about in therapy or coaching or treatment or wherever you have them. Until you get out of that role. Now, once you get out of that role, they'll start to be able to see and focus on these negative outcomes that are happening because of their choices, and then we can actually get somewhere. So that's the consequences piece of this formula. So hold that in your mind, and let's mix it with the other piece of this formula, which is credibility. So credibility is basically, which is influence, and influence is basically all about building credibility with your loved one. Of course, you want your loved one to listen to what you have to say about it. You want them to see. your side of things. You want them to, you want to be able to influence them into getting help or getting treatment or making different decisions. If you're in the bad guy role, the only influence you have on them is you can influence them to get really mad at you. And a lot of times they'll just keep doing whatever they're doing just to spite you. So I guess you have influence in that way. But if you can get out of the bad guy role, and we'll talk about how to do that, you will have some positive influence on them. And having this positive influence is all about building credibility. In our Invisible Intervention program, we call this your credit score, and we actually teach you in that program how to measure your credit score. Just like if you're going to buy a house and you need a certain credit score to be able to do that, if you're going to influence change, you need a certain credit score to be able to have positive influence on someone. And the way that you do that is you help this person understand that you see who they are. You see the situation that they're stuck in. You can do this by acknowledging and seeing their good qualities. One of the big things I hear from people who have addictions is they only see my mistakes. They just totally neglect everything good that I do or that I've helped with or positive that I've achieved. And they just fixate on this one thing all the time. So if you can sort of see their situation more fully from their point of view, the good, their good things, their efforts, if you can look at their situation from their point of view and see why they're stuck, Like for example, maybe they feel like their smoking or drinking or whatever they're doing is the only thing that helps their anxiety. You can acknowledge that point without encouraging that behavior. For example, you can say, yeah, I can see that you're super stressed and I could definitely understand why you need a little relief from that stress at the end of the day. So you can validate that point of view without necessarily saying, so yeah, it's totally fine if you do whatever. And the, and this other thing, which is really huge, is When they experience those consequences, the ones we talked about just a minute ago, if you can respond to those with empathy, now we have a formula that's going to work because responding to someone in a tough situation with empathy actually activates the learning part of our brain. If we don't respond with empathy, we're more likely to activate the defensive part of their brain. It's like a reflexive reaction to how you're coming at them. Empathy creates safety and safety creates the space for us to look at hard things. Coming at someone with I told you so's and you shouldn't have done that and you promised you wouldn't and all those other things is just going to put this person in a position to have to defend themselves either out loud or at least in their head. It depends on their personality. Now let's put these things together so you can see how this situation actually works. This is what I call the motivation matrix. So if you think about this whole situation like a graph with consequences being over here on the left side and influence being down here on this bottom axis. Right? As those consequences go up and influence goes up, the key is to get over here to the action stage. This is actually the exact process that I've used for all the years that I've been helping people. So people come to me, they get themselves in a bad situation, and I use all of my energy creating this credibility and influence with them. I understand them. I listen to them. I'm there for them. I see their positive attributes. I see their positive efforts. I encourage them. And then I I just sit back and wait for the consequences to come. And because I've gained a positive influence and credibility with them, they care what I think. They listen to my opinions because they feel like I understand their situation. And so when I have a thought or an opinion, it carries a little bit more weight. So when these consequences come and then I have a thought or opinion on maybe how to solve the problem or what they could do different or a suggestion, then that credibility that I have, it's like cashing in that credit score. Now I have positive influence to actually lead them in the right direction. The more consequences and the more influence gets us to this action stage of change. It's kind of like the consequences is the push, the influence is the pull. And when we get that to meet in the right place, then we get movement. If the consequences are low and the influence is low, then they're going to just stay in denial. Meaning, for example, if you have a situation where you may feel like the consequences are high, but what most families do is they go around and they Fix all the external problems, like they pay for the lawyer and they call the school and ask for extra credit and they make all these adjustments and they get all this help and they do all these things for the person not to burn these bridges. Maybe you're covering for them with other people. You're fixing their problems that they're creating, but you're being mad at them inside the context of the relationship because you're taking care of their responsibilities because they're not treating you well. You're mad at them because they're lying to you. You're mad at them because they're making their life a mess and your life a mess, that creates a low consequence, low influence situation, and that keeps people in denial. Now, on the other hand, if you have really high consequences but low influence, what happens is they move up here into this end of the matrix. And oftentimes what happens is they just sort of give into the addiction. A lot of people believe in this super tough love concept. And usually when people say that, they kind of mean like, I'm going to kick them out. They're not going to have a place to go. I'm going to cut them off emotionally. all these other things and they're going to learn their lesson. But actually what you do is now you don't have any influence over them. They have a lot of consequences and they just sort of give up. That's why you see people living on the street. You see people who've lost everything who continue to engage in that addiction. It's important to remember that the definition of addiction is continuing a behavior despite the consequences. Okay? If those consequences get extremely high, but there's no positive influence there, meaning from you, from supportive person, from a sponsor, a 12-step group, a counselor, there's no positive influence there, they're likely to stay stuck. The consequences are still relatively low, but you're building influence. You can at least get the person to move over here to what I call the contemplation stage, which is where the person begins to recognize some of the consequences of the problem, and they're not focusing on you as being the bad guy. They'll start to realize That they need to do something about the issue. They may not be totally ready to go completely abstinent or sober or whatever, but they'll start thinking, I need to cut it back. I need to make a change. I'm letting this get too far. Get into this contemplation stage. If you watch my videos, you probably hear me talk about this a lot. I call it the bargaining. I'm going to only use on weekends. I'm going to spend less money on it. I'm only going to do it on special occasions. I'm only going to use this substance and not that substance. There's a lot of ways this bargaining can show up, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. So this stage will go on for a while, but it won't work. In 12-step recovery, they call them half measures. Those half measures might get a little progress, but they ultimately, they just won't work and the consequences will continue to rise. So as long as you're holding your positive influence and those consequences are rising, that's the formula that makes it most likely that someone is going to not only consider the fact that they need to get sober, but get determined about the fact that, hey, this whole cutting it back thing doesn't work out for me. This is ruining my life. And because you have a positive influence, and like for me, for example, I use that positive influence a lot to say, oh my gosh, you're going to feel so much better when you get sober. It's actually going to be way easier than this whole managing it thing. And I'm planting all these seeds along the way. And at some point there will be an event that hits. Usually it's just kind of one more consequence. It doesn't have to be the hugest consequence. It's just kind of like one more on top of the pile of them, like the last straw. Then we move into this action stage of change. Remember, consequences is the push. Influence is the pull. Once you really grasp this, you can work with the natural consequences of what's happening and influence your loved one into the right direction. If you want to learn more about this, we have tons of videos right here on this channel all about this. We have videos about dealing with someone in denial. We have videos about motivating someone to change. And if you're just really ready to go all in on this, we have our Invisible Intervention program, which I'll put the link for that in the description. But if nothing else, make sure you're subscribed to this channel so you can learn even more strategic ways on how to get your situation to move in the right direction.