Why Ultimatums Don't Work

Have you ever said the words, if you don't stop, I'm done? In that moment, you absolutely 100% meant it, but then something shifted and you didn't follow through. And now you've said it again and they've heard it again and nothing has changed. Or maybe you followed through, you draw the line in the sand, and somehow you still end up back in the same place wondering why the line didn't hold. If you've ever done that and been in that situation, I want you to know it's not because you're weak. It's not because they don't care about you. It's because there are 3 specific reasons why ultimatums almost never work in an addiction situation. And most people just don't realize any of these, and most people just don't know what they are. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Amber Hollingsworth. I'm an addiction specialist, and I've been helping people and families overcome addiction for more than 20 years now. And for years, I watched the addiction treatment system fail families. I mean, families in crisis. They would call the treatment center and they would get told, call us back when they're ready. And then they basically just send the family member back home to wait, suffer, and hope something happens. And then people with addiction were met with ultimatums and finger-pointing, which only makes them want to shut down and definitely not open up. And to be honest, it seemed unfair and frankly ineffective on both sides. So I started teaching approaches that actually work, strategies that help families stop pushing people away and help people feel safe enough to take an honest look at their lives. Because I've watched this pattern play out more times than I can count. So today we're breaking down so you can stop doing the thing that isn't working and start doing what actually is going to work. But first, I need to tell you something important before we get into those 3 reasons. Giving an ultimatum is a completely logical response to a completely desperate situation. And when you love someone and you've watched them choose alcohol and drugs over your relationship and your family and their health over and over and over again, at some point your brain says, I have to do something. And that's when giving an ultimatum feels like you're doing something. It feels like you're taking back control. Like finally you're making the stakes clear once and for all. Pick a side of the fence. I say all that so that you know I'm not here to make you feel bad for trying it. I'm here to show you why it doesn't deliver the results that you want and what you need to do instead. All right, so there are 3 reasons why ultimatums almost never work and they build on each other. So stay with me. Reason number 1 is you're running on fumes when you say it. The first and most common and most uncomfortable reason is because most of the time when you give an ultimatum is when you're at your absolute breaking point. Something's just happened. You found the bottles. They came home at 2 AM again. You had the conversation that you've had 50 times and it went absolutely nowhere. It ended exactly the same way it always does. And something in you just snaps and out it comes. That's it. I'm done. If you drink again, if you smoke again, if you use again, I'm out. And you mean it. You completely mean it in that moment. But here's what happens next. A few days go by, maybe they're being really good. Maybe the kids are happy and things feel almost normal for a minute. Or maybe you just get scared about what leaving actually means and you realize you're not prepared. And the fire you felt when you said those words has kind of cooled down. The problem is they noticed and their brain, which is wired to look for any opening, filed that information away back there in the back drawer. If I wait this out, if I just keep the peace for a while, this'll blow over. I had this client once, I'm going to call her Diane, but that's not her real name, obviously. Who had given her husband some version of the same ultimatum for 7 years. And when she finally came to see me, she said, Amber, he doesn't even flinch anymore when I say it. It's like I'm reading him the grocery list. He had learned from 7 years of evidence that that ultimatum was the loudest thing she did right before things went back to normal. Kind of like the peak of an argument. This is not a character flaw in you. This is what happens when you're trying to make big life-altering decisions from inside of an emotional crisis. The ultimatum gets delivered when your emotions are at their highest, but follow-through happens when the emotions have calmed down. Your love for them is more present when the picture of your life falling apart is very real. When the last thing you want to do is blow everything up, you can't make a sustainable decision from an unsustainable emotional state. All right, that was reason number 1. Let's move to reason number 2. Reason number 2 is because you've Made it a black and white ultimatum. The second reason ultimatums fail is that they're almost always framed as an all or nothing situation. One more time and it's over. You drink again and we're done. And I get it. I understand why you frame it that way. It's because you're exhausted and you're not interested in any more gray areas. You're tired of circling. You're tired of going around the same old cycles. You just want it to be over one way or the other. You want a clear line in the sand. Here's what black and white ultimatums do in the real world of addiction and recovery. It No room for game time decisions. Let me give you a real scenario. Let's say your person has been sober for like 6 months. You've seen real effort. You've seen them fighting for it. Things have been genuinely better, but you go out of town, you know, for like a little weekend work conference. And while you're gone, they have a slip just one night. And when you get home, before they even ask, they tell you on their own because they don't want to hide it. Now, you had already told them one more time and it's over. So here's my question. Are you actually going to throw them out at this moment after 6 months of real progress? After they told you the truth without being caught? Most people in that moment would probably say no. But here's the problem. If you didn't follow through, you've just proven that the ultimatum was negotiable and you know it. And now you're both operating in a completely unclear agreement that neither of you have actually talked about. Now let's flip that around. What if they don't tell you? What if they know because you've told them that one slip means it's over, that the only safe thing that they can do is hide it? So now you have a person in early recovery who slips up and And instead of reaching for honesty, which is exactly what people in recovery need, they lie because the ultimatum made lying the smart move in this situation. You didn't just fail to create safety. You accidentally made dishonesty the logical choice. Thing is, recovery is just not a straight line. So if your ultimatum is black and white, you've probably set both of you up to fail. All right, moving on to reason number 3, which is you're asking for the wrong thing. Now this one surprises people because this is like, even when the ultimatum is followed, It often doesn't get you what you really wanted. Here's the classic version of this. Get help or get out. I know that sounds clear. You're not saying be perfect. You're saying at least try. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, that leaves a little gray area. That's not completely black and white because it's like, get help. But let's think about what get help means. Like, for example, they could start going to meetings. Maybe they're going to meetings every single day. You get proof that they're getting help. You even have proof that they're going and they could still be drinking. They could check into a 30-day program, satisfy every condition of the ultimatum, and walk out the door and on day 31 relapse within a week. They could see a therapist, take a medication, read every book you put in front of them and still not be sober. Because the thing is, getting help is not the same thing as solving the problem. What you really want is for them to stop using, full stop. You want to feel safe in your home again. You want to trust what they tell you. You want to stop bracing for that next thing and you want your partner back. Get help is a means to an end, but when you make it the condition of an ultimatum, you've given them a checkbox to check instead of an outcome to achieve. I've seen this happen tons of time, worked with families where their person was doing everything on the surface, meetings, therapy, check-ins, but they were still using on the side and the family felt completely stuck because technically the person was getting help. The ultimatum had been satisfied, but the problem was still growing. So instead of get help or get out, what if you got specific about what you actually need to see? What if you got honest with yourself about what you actually need to see? Like maybe what you need is consistent sobriety or honesty during the hard days, or maybe you just want to be able to Trust them again, and you need to be able to see that they're actually working on this. Those things are a completely different conversation. It's different than get help or I'm leaving. Those conversations open the door instead of drawing the line. So if you're sitting there thinking, Amber, if I can't give ultimatums, if I can't be black and white, and I need to ask for the right thing, what do I actually say? What does that real conversation look like? The truth is, is influence works when pressure doesn't. If you have the right words in the right moment, said in the right way, they do more than any ultimatum could ever give. That's way more powerful than any ultimatum, but you have to know how to find the right moment and you have to know what to say when you're in it and then what to do after the fact if they push back. Those are the kind of things that we teach in our Denial Breakthrough Challenge. We teach you how to actually look for what motivates your loved one already and pull those things forward instead of trying to push them into recovery or leverage them or force them into it. Because at that point, everything just becomes a power struggle. You got to remember, you're not trying to just get them to get help. That's not the end goal because yeah, you You can leverage someone into saying, okay, I'll go to the counselor or I'll go to treatment. And they're saying yes because they feel like they don't have any other choice, but it's just not going to get you the result in the end. It may be true that they need to get help, but you want them to be in the right frame of mind when they get that help so that it actually sticks. So you're not wasting thousands of dollars on the wrong thing, months and months going down the wrong path. There is a part inside of everyone that doesn't like whatever's going on. There's a part of them that wants to change. You just have to find that part and lean into it. So if you want to get deeper into how denial actually works and what to say and how to get through it, actually, like the specific words, the strategies that move people out of denial, and not just in theory, like as in your person and your situation, the conversation you've been wanting to have, but you've been afraid that you wouldn't do it right. The link for the Denial Breakthrough Challenge is in the description. So I want to invite you to that process. It's a 4-day live coaching event directly with me where we help you build your master plan For breaking through denial. You're going to come up with exactly what to say and what not to say to your specific loved one based on all those little individual factors that make your situation unique and their personality and the dynamics. The spots are limited. So if this is landing with you, go ahead and sign up and grab your spot because we only do this about every 6 weeks or so. If you're new here, you're just finding this channel, we want to say welcome to our little community. I'm sorry that you're in a position to have to need to watch these videos, but we're glad you're here nonetheless. So introduce yourself in the comments below. Tell where you're watching from. And for the rest of you, say hello to our new community members. Drop a comment. Tell me if you've ever been in this ultimatum situation on the giving the ultimatum side or on the receiving the ultimatum side, because it helps people to hear these stories from the people that have been there, not just me talking about it in theory, but you know, in the hard, cold reality of the situation.