"The SHOCKING Reason Why Your Attempts to Help Your Addicted Loved One May Be Failing"

You're trying to help your addicted loved one. But there are other people involved in this situation, like family and friends who just keep sabotaging your efforts. And so pretty much everything you do is really just a waste of time. I want you to know you are not powerless. You do not have to hit rock bottom. And there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one. If you want to be back in control of your life, subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure you are always five steps ahead of addict. Forget hit the little bell if you want access to the bonus episodes. Okay, so back to our topic. It's maddening enough that you're dealing with an addictive person who's probably not being rational, who's causing some trouble and pretty much making your life difficult. But when you pile on top of that that you've got other people who are either not coming on board or making it worse, it can feel quite overwhelming. Now, if you've watched this channel for very long, you've probably heard me talk about how the other people in the family need to be in alignment to get a positive result. But what do you do when they just won't come into alignment with you? In this video, I'm going to tell you about three really common types of situations where that could be the case. And we're going to talk about how to respond to those people and what to do about the situation. Now, the first common way that you're likely to be experiencing this is if, if there is another person in the family, maybe it's your mother in law or father in law, or maybe it's your spouse, but this other person in the family just refuses to see the problem. Or maybe if they see the problem, they refuse to see like the seriousness of the problem. It's kind of like they just want to put their head in the sand and ignore the situation. Which leaves you feeling like you're all alone on this battlefield. And to be honest, there might be quite a bit of truth in that. Calling this category the classic enabler, you're trying to allow natural consequences to happen, but they keep running in and fixing them. Maybe they're giving them money, maybe they're keeping secrets, maybe they know something the person's done but they're not telling you. Maybe they're running interference for the addicted person. If you've got a classic enabler on your team, then what I want you to realize is that, is that their denial about the situation is a protective defense mechanism for themselves. And if you Stop. And you think really hard about it. There was probably a time when you were in denial about the situation yourself, and you probably did some of those same behaviors, sort of in that not knowing kind of way. Now, since then, you've done a lot of research and studying, and you went through a lot of experiences which have made you pretty much come to terms with the situation. And now you want everyone else in your life to come to terms with the situation and get caught up and get on board. The problem is, is the faster you try to rush them into sort of seeing the light, the longer it's going to take them to see the light. Because just like when you confront an addictive person, they start spending all their emotional energy and time defending their choices. The same thing happens if you're trying to confront an enabling person. They're just going to spend a lot of time and energy defending their choices. And to be honest, they're probably going to start to think that you're the problem, not really the addictive person, and they're really going to work against you at that point. So what do you do in that type of a situation? Well, basically, you use the same. The exact same techniques that I teach you on how to get someone with an addiction out of denial. You use those exact same techniques on the family member who's in denial. So maybe you're practicing the craft method, or maybe you're participating in our invisible intervention program, all of those same techniques that you've learned. I want you to back up a couple of steps and start applying those techniques to the family member and focus on getting that family member on board meeting, maybe even before you focus on getting the addictive person on board, because once you have that other family member or family members on board, your things are going to move so much faster because everybody is going to be working from the same playbook and going in the same direction. Now, there are a couple of other types of situations where a family member, a friend, or some external person may be sabotaging your efforts to help your addicted loved one. And the second one of those I am going to call the withdrawing person. So the first one was the enabling person, and the second one is the drawing person. And this is the person that's sick of the drama. And they're probably angry at the addictive person, and they may even be angry at you for how you're responding to the addicted person, because they've sort of had it up to here and they're done and they're sick of it, and they just want to get away from it. And this could be frustrating you because you've watched my videos and you're like, connection is the key and they really need to stop judging that person. And this is an illness. And you want them to come on board and have some compassion for the person who's struggling with an addiction. This happens a lot to siblings. So the brothers and sisters of the person who has an addiction, oftentimes the siblings can get very frustrated about the dynamics between the addicted child and the parents, and they can feel like all the attention goes there and everybody else in the family gets ignored, and so they build up resentment about it. You can also see this in a situation like maybe one of the parents is addicted to drugs or alcohol and one or more of the children are mad at that parent. And you know that that dynamic between the child being mad at the parent is triggering the other parent to continue use more. And you're frustrated with that dynamic. Now, as tempting as it is to want to try to like, educate them and send them my videos and tell them it's an illness and explain the brain situation and say, but you know so and so loves you. You want to avoid doing all that. Don't try to make this person feel guilty for setting this boundary for this person at this time, because for them, it's quite possibly the healthy boundary that they need to set. And even though you may not agree with how they feel about the addicted person, trying to run inter here is really just you enabling the situation, because there's probably some pretty good reasons why this other person is frustrated and upset and needs some distance. So in that kind of situation, I'm going to suggest that you allow that person to have some space and don't try to make them get on board with it and be okay with it, because they may come around on their own. But if you try to force it, just like any other situation, they're going to be even more upset and you're going to be accidentally fueling those flames. So we've talked about the enabling person, we've talked about the withdrawing person. Let me throw a third one out there, and I'm going to call this one the fueling person. So this is a different scenario where some external person is not just enabling the situation, not just withdrawing from the situation, but making it worse, which means they're actually validating and supporting and encouraging the addictive behavior, or at least the addictive thinking and feeling. And there are several kinds of situations where you could see something like this, like most commonly like the person's drinking buddy or using friend. So they have these other people that are involved in the same type of activities, and they're fueling it. And you think of this person as, oh, this is the bad influence in your life. And you're probably right about that. Most of the time when someone's in this fueling category Is because they get some kind of secondary gain from this person staying in addicted state. And that's pretty obvious when you think about a using friend or drinking buddy or something like that. But what might not be so obvious is, is when it's sort of indirectly related to the addiction. Like, for example, let's say you have a parent struggling with an addiction, and there's some kids involved, and the parent who's struggling with the addiction, they get into the good parent category, and they allow the kid to do all kind of things that the other parent doesn't want them to do, like maybe says, it's okay to throw these parties and drink or smoke weed or do all this stuff. So now you've got them being, like, in the kid's eye. This other parent over here, this is the cool parent. And so the kid can be fueling and feeding into the addictive behavior, and most often even aligning with the addictive person against you. And when I was thinking about this fueling category, Another kind of situation came to my mind that I think is probably going to surprise you, and that is that sometimes counselors and doctors and social workers, they can even fall into the fueling phase. Now, usually when a counselor, doctor, professional person is falling into the fueling phase, it's not necessarily because they get some kind of gain out of the person's addictive behaviors, but more because they're clueless and they don't really have access to understand the entire family dynamics in the situation. So usually what's happening here is the addictive person is sort of telling a certain story or narrative about how everybody else is treating them and what's really going on. And so the counselor, the doctor, whoever, can be validating those feelings and behaviors, not really understanding that they're not getting the whole story. So sometimes people can be in the fueling category because of lack of awareness and understanding. I can think of several situations I've had with clients whose physician continued to prescribe them addictive meds Even after they knew that the person was struggling with addiction, even after they knew the person was abusing the particular med that they were prescribing. Now, in that kind of situation, it's easy to jump to a conclusion like, oh, that's just like one of these pill meals or these doctors and they just make all this money off that. That can happen and has happened in some situations, but normally it's not because the doctor has some kind of like evil, you know, self involved plan for why they're doing that. It's usually because of a lack of awareness about addiction. In I know you think, well, they're a doctor, shouldn't they know about it? Well, until recently, doctors probably got about three to six hours worth of training in med school about addiction in all of the years that they were there. So just because someone's a healthcare professional doesn't necessarily mean they understand this issue. And even if they understand like the biological components, they may not understand all the psychology and the family dynamics because as you know, because you've been doing a lot of studying, it's big and it's complicated and it takes a lot of time and energy and motivation to even wrap your head around the whole thing. Now when you're dealing with a fueling person, you've got to be very careful because if you start to align against this fueling person because you see them as sort of a bad influence, you can really get yourself in some hot water here. What you're probably going to want to do is you're going to want to talk to your addicted loved one about how this person isn't good for them and they should get away from them. And then the truth of it is, people will protect their relationship with this other fueling person longer than they will protect their addiction because they see this person as their friend and their ally and their buddy. So aligning yourself very directly against this other person is not usually the smartest move. Now we didn't even get time to really go into all the dynamics of what the addictive person is telling all of these other people about you and how that is really complicating and making the situation worse. Which is why I want you to watch this video next because it's all about exactly that, what the addictive person is telling everyone else and how all that splitting behavior is keeping this problem going.