Sophie Gruber
Communications Intern
MARR Addiction Treatment Center

Drinking at Bible Study and Getting High at Hobby Lobby

Before Bible study, the other day, my friend and I were sitting in the car waiting for our other friend to arrive so that we could all walk in together. While we were waiting, my friend mentioned that she was craving wine, which is nothing too out of the ordinary. My concern peaked, however, when she commented on how easy it would be to sneak wine into the event in a water bottle. I thought, “Why would you want to be getting drunk during Bible study?” 

Around the same time, I went to Hobby Lobby with a friend of mine, and we spent about two hours looking for very specific things she wanted for her room. Later on, she apologized for how long we spent in the store and informed me that she had smoked weed beforehand. This was surprising to me because she was acting how she normally acts while we were in the store. I then realized that she was acting “normal” in the store because she is high most of the time. I started to not even notice when she would smoke because I was so used to seeing her doing it. 

In fact, frequent drinking and marijuana use is so common in college, that turning these things down in social settings can be stigmatizing. For example, I went through a period of time during my sophomore year of college when I stopped consuming alcohol for a few months to help my mental health. I noticed that almost every time I drank, my mental health would worsen, so I stopped. It quickly became clear to me that college students don’t know what to make of someone their age who doesn’t drink. My peers would urge me to go out with them and would call me “lame” or a “buzzkill” when I declined. People questioned me every time I said that I wasn’t drinking. It was a foreign concept. Drinking is so normalized in college that anyone who doesn’t participate is seen as the anomaly. 

When Does Partying Become Problematic?

For all of college, alcohol has been a part of my routine. I never saw this as a problem, because everyone drinks in college. I have always viewed college as a time to drink, party, and make mistakes. However, the more I pay attention, the more I start to notice the tendencies of myself and those I surround myself with. Finishing a whole bottle of wine every time I have a get-together with my friends isn’t healthy. Getting so drunk that I throw up every time I go to the bars isn’t normal. Going to class the morning after a party still drunk isn’t normal. Unfortunately, for the majority of college students, it is. 

According to the Partnership to End Addiction, half of all full-time college students (3.8 million) binge drink, abuse prescription drugs, and/or abuse illegal drugs. Almost one in four of the nation’s college students (22.9%, some 1.8 million) meet the medical criteria for substance abuse or dependence, which is over two times the proportion (8.5%) of those who meet the criteria in the rest of the population. 

When my internship at MARR began, I was excited to learn more about addiction. I have addiction in my family, so I thought I knew what it looked like. However, the further I got into my internship, the more I found myself questioning things that I had previously perceived as normal. 

When I was still in the bubble of college life, I never thought twice about going to the liquor store multiple times a week for whatever events we had to go on that week. Sometimes, I would have a wine night for Bachelor Monday, a sorority social on Tuesday, go out for Karaoke Wednesday, and then hit the bars on Thursday. That’s four nights out of my week focused around alcohol, four mornings going to class hungover. But it was fine because that’s just what happens in college, right? Through my time at MARR, I’ve been able to take a step back and question the actions of myself and my friends. I began to ask myself a lot of questions- Is it normal to drink this much in college? Are these just examples of college students being college students? When does normal college drinking or drug use cross over into addiction? I wanted to explore these questions more deeply, so I interviewed one of our counselors here. 

Bob Day is a primary counselor here at MARR. His role involves treatment planning for clients, as well as facilitating group and individual therapy. Since he is one of the younger primary counselors, he mostly works with younger clients and has seen first-hand what addiction looks like in my age group. 

I was interested in finding out when people are crossing the line from normal college drinking and recreational marijuana use into addiction. “Binge drinking is woven into the fabric of college culture,” Bob stated, “But what I see here with the clients at MARR is that the negative consequences that come along with their drinking and drug use are happening faster.” 

A lot of times this difference doesn’t show up until after college is over. Bob mentioned that most people are able to adapt to slowing down their drinking after college, but some people cross that threshold going through that process and aren’t able to cut back. That’s where it becomes an addicting behavior rather than simply college behavior. 

This behavior not only applies to alcohol but to drug use as well. Marijuana is widely used among college students, and from my experience, is just as normalized as drinking alcohol. As I mentioned previously, I have friends who smoke casually every day. It’s seen as normal because it’s “just weed” and is believed to not have the same negative effects as other drugs. 

When I spoke to Bob, he mentioned that people who had been smoking regularly before coming to MARR will express that they are experiencing withdrawal symptoms, but will be told by others that what they are experiencing isn’t real because of the belief that marijuana doesn’t have those effects. This can be invalidating for the person experiencing the symptoms. In reality, withdrawal symptoms will arise they will just be different than those of other drugs. 

It may be helpful for people in or coming out of college to notice whether they are having trouble cutting back or stopping smoking to make sure they are not crossing over into exhibiting addict behavior. 

Social Media and Substance Use

Communication on social media contributes significantly to how college students think about substance use. In general, I have noticed a lot of normalization of alcohol and drug use across different platforms. 

Discussion and representations of substance use vary across platforms. For example, on Instagram, you won’t really see videos of someone blackout drunk at the bar, but you’re more likely to see things like that on someone’s Snapchat story. Tik Tok is a different story, however. There are almost no boundaries to the types of videos posted on Tik Tok. I’ll be scrolling and see an informational video about politics, and the next video could be a group of friends doing mushrooms. I follow one person who posts things like “drinking every day until Chipotle has good queso.” This content is entertaining, but it has the potential to minimize the risk of alcoholism

This is one of the negative aspects of social media. We use it to get a glimpse into others’ lives, and oftentimes, their lives involve substance use. I’m in no way saying that college students need to get rid of social media; rather, I’m pointing to the reality that their ideas of substance use are likely going to be shaped by what they see on these platforms. 

While some users might be promoting drinking or drug use, I’ve seen a lot of people using their platforms to promote recovery. People will create videos or posts saying how many days sober they are, and the comments will be flooded with support and encouragement from others in recovery and the general public. Things like this can encourage people who are on the fence about seeking treatment to take the next step and get help. 

What College Students and Parents Can Do

Interning at MARR has opened my eyes to thinking more critically about substance use and when it potentially crosses over into substance abuse. For college students, it’s difficult at times to tell the difference between experimentation and when that crosses into problematic behavior, but as Bob suggested, watching for mounting consequences and the ability to discontinue or decrease use when necessary can be key indicators. 

I think it’s also crucial for college students to be aware that social media images and videos are curated representations of college life. They only show part of the story. Hitting the bar Thursday night can easily leave out failing a Friday midterm. 

Some partying in college might just be that. Or it might be the beginning of more damaging and problematic tendencies caused by the disease of addiction. Regardless, being aware of the patterns of addiction will allow college students and their family members to be more aware of what they are looking at. I have personally found that MARR’s resources are a good place to start to get an education on what to look for.

By Rick McKain, MAC, LPC

What’s the Connection?

Men who struggle with intimacy in relationships often entertain consistent and unrealistic sexual fantasies. From my experience working in this area, there is a reason why many of these men fantasize the way that they do. Their sexual fantasies are often failed attempts to resolve trauma that they carry around with them from childhood.

I covered some of this information in the article “Sex, Drugs, and Intimacy Issues,” which I wrote for the last New Meanings magazine. The article generated a positive response, and I was asked to write more specifically about how childhood trauma relates to sexual fantasies, and how our clients unpack these parts of their history in the BBR (Building Better Relationships) group that I lead. 

As I mentioned in the last article, the BBR group started out of a need to address sex addiction with some of our clients. Over the years, it has evolved into a supportive 12-week therapeutic group that addresses issues beyond sex addiction to intimacy in general. It is an optional part of treatment here at MARR, and men volunteer to participate if they identify relationship struggles and are willing to address them.  

As part of this group, participants complete and share two very significant exercises with the group, a life story exercise that helps identify trauma and an exercise looking at their sexual fantasies. These help provide a key to understanding their intimacy issues. Though intensive and difficult at times, these self-examinations viewed together can lay the groundwork for closer emotional intimacy with their partner and a stronger recovery going forward.  

I help the clients map how their deep-seated pain connects to the unhealthy coping mechanisms they’ve developed. This provides these men with new information about themselves and a road map to begin resolving these traumas so they can meet their needs in more healthy ways.  

Trauma Exercise

Over the course of over 20 years, every single man I have worked with as a client at MARR is dealing with the trauma of abandonment on some level. And many are also dealing with the trauma of emotional invasion to varying degrees. The purpose of the Trauma Exercise is to pinpoint specific examples of when these types of harms occurred. 

The clients look at their past trauma and share them with a group.  By the time they’ve gotten to this phase in their treatment, they have certainly looked at and discussed some of this material before, but likely not in as much detail as is asked for in this exercise. 

All the participants in the BBR group are at least 90 days sober, and as a client at MARR, this means that they have already done a First Step Exercise, a Life Story, and usually a 4th and 5th Step with their sponsor. Through these exercises, they have shared painful and difficult aspects of their story with their community members, peers, counselors, and sponsors. In all likelihood, some healing has even begun to take place related to their trauma and their capacity for intimacy. 

However, the purpose of the Trauma Exercise is to really zero in on relational, sexual, and trauma history to see how these things played a formative role in shaping the way the clients view themselves and others. 

In the Trauma Exercise, each man creates a timeline of events, beginning with his early life and his descriptions of early memories of his caregivers. As part of the timeline, he records painful stories about his sexual history, as well as instances of abuse or boundary violations.  The exercise also includes recollections of profound disappointment, betrayal, deep embarrassments, or crises. 

If this is done well, this timeline takes multiple hours to complete. In sharing the results with the group, the participants tell a version of their life story, which allows them to see that although the details may differ, many of them struggle with many of the same core difficulties. 

Part of the purpose of this is to expand our idea of how our past has shaped us.  For example, abandonment trauma is a broader category than most people realize. When we think of abandonment, we often think of a father or mother leaving the home, or perhaps not being around at all.  This can certainly cause abandonment trauma, but abandonment can occur more subtly. 

For instance, abandonment trauma also occurs when parents might be physically present, but not be emotionally available for their children. Parents don’t do this intentionally. Often, they are unable to discuss their own feelings because they were not taught how to do so. As a result, they might not be able to provide the mirroring, empathy, sense of belonging, and nurturing that every child needs to develop a stable emotional life and healthy sense of self.

An easy way to define abandonment trauma is to think of it as what didn’t happen in childhood that should have happened. 

The other main type of trauma is invasion trauma, also referred to as “emotional invasion.” This usually consists of harmful messages, whether verbal or non-verbal, that got through to the person at a young age, and provide unhealthy modeling and experiences that become the familiar patterns of acting out later in life

In addition to physical abuse, Dr. Mark Laaser points out that one of the most common ways emotional invasion happens is through “put-downs” and verbal abuse. These messages can be yelled or screamed, sometimes with profanity. The message can be direct, as in: “You’re dumb, stupid, and/or ugly!” Sometimes, the message can be indirect, as in when you overhear, “I regret the day he was born; he was a pain then, and he’s always been a pain.” Emotional invasion can also come in the form of a question: “Did you screw up again? You’re always screwing up! Do it right this time, if you can.”

A simple way of defining invasion trauma is what did happen in childhood that should not have happened. 

Sometimes, these violations are simple traumas, meaning that they can be traced back to isolated, life-disrupting events. Other times, they cause more complex traumas, related to repeated trauma or abuse or to repeated, subtle messages received from parents or others that they were not worthy of time, attention, and acceptance. 

Regardless of the cause, the takeaway the person holds is: “I am unworthy of time and attention”  or at the other end of the spectrum, “I am unworthy of having autonomy and reasonable boundaries.”  This exercise helps us see where these ideas first started to take root and how they have shaped the clients.  

Sexual Fantasy Exercise

To treat these deeply held negative beliefs, men often develop an active sexual fantasy life.  These idealized scenarios are often attempts to resolve these traumas and soothe themselves into believing they are “man enough” or just “enough” to handle life.

We start out this exercise with the understanding that the fundamental problem in regards to sexual fantasy is not one of willpower. Most of the men I have worked with have tried, oftentimes very strenuously, to stop the problematic sexual fantasies.  Whether their fantasies actually leads to infidelity, activity inconsistent with their values, a pornography addiction, or just an inability to connect with their partner on a deep level, it is something they are usually actively trying to stop, but failing to. 

In the fantasy exercise, participants are asked to inventory, without judgment, the extent that sexual fantasies are part of their daily life.  As the activity continues, they are asked to describe their ideal sexual fantasy in a non-graphic and straightforward way. They complete this part of the exercise as if they are to describe it like a newspaper reporter. They also share the end result of this exercise with the group, which helps to destigmatize their experience and relieve them of some of the shame they likely carry with them as a result. 

It’s important that this exercise allows the clients to see and describe their fantasy objectively. This objectivity allows them to start to see their fantasy life as a symptom and response to a series of losses and traumas that they experienced in life.  

Linking Their Trauma and Fantasy 

I tell the men in the group that by understanding the fantasy, we can start to understand the trauma and vice versa. To help them with this, I closely read both of these exercises and give them a written synthesis of how I see their specific traumas and fantasies informing one another. 

I explain to them that the objective isn’t to figure out a way to stop fantasizing. Many of them have already tried this and failed. Rather, the goal is to find healthier ways to resolve the trauma. Ultimately, healthy relationships and healthy trauma resolution will free them from fantasy.

In the synthesis I write for them, I highlight the specific ways their trauma created a vacuum. I also help them see the connection between this vacuum and the specific “magic” person and situation they have created in their fantasies. This person and situation typically embody perfect nurturing to the client by treating those sore spots of their negative self-image. 

This process is not meant to lay blame on our caregivers or create resentments. We must avoid these tendencies. Rather, the purpose of the work is to give the clients the space to grieve what was missing. Emotional healing takes place when we accept that we can’t return to the past and get the love and nurturing that we needed when we were younger. Even if the people who abandoned them are more available today, it can’t make up for what was missed in childhood. Accepting that means that they must grieve the loss.

The written synthesis of their trauma and fantasy helps them to see how their trauma has fueled the energy for their sexual fantasies. In presenting their individual reports to the men at the end of the group, I stress that they can heal from these wounds. But healing takes time, and they may need help. I highly recommend that they take the information that we have gone over to an individual therapist for them to continue to work on. It is a lot to process.

Moving Forward

This work is meant to allow space for grieving and growth, and, if done thoughtfully, this type of trauma work will not create a sense of victimhood. In fact, such understanding offers us increased capacity for empathy, forgiveness, and intimacy.  

As part of wrapping up the group, the men create a Mission Statement where they decide what direction they want for their life going forward. Through this, they get to see that they are not defined by past hurts. They then are on firm ground to use the difficult parts of their past for healthy growth and connection with others in the future. 

As the A.A. Literature so beautifully states: “No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we can use our experience to benefit others.” 

In other words, no matter how great the hurt received or inflicted on others is, I firmly believe that with proper healing there is always a way for good to come from the past when it is truly embraced and understood. 

By Matt Shedd
Host of Stories of Recovery Podcas

Ego-Based Spirituality

When we commit ourselves to a path like Twelve Step Recovery, or any other spiritual tradition focused on serving others, it can be easy to unconsciously begin to apply the same ego-based mindset of competition and self-aggrandizement that we were previously living by to our new way of life. 

Since we know we are supposed to be “spiritual” now, we may start to think along these lines, without even realizing we are doing it: “I’m going to devote all my attention to really increase my spiritual growth. I’m going to be doing more service work for my church or community than anyone else. People are going to recognize me as the best A.A. member in the group and citizen in this community.”

As mentioned before, this usually happens unconsciously. The ego can be a resilient shapeshifter. Right when we think we’re getting rid of it, it has the ability to morph into a different form and attach itself to something new. It can even secretly prop itself up with the same tools we are trying to use to minimize it. The ego loves to dress itself up in spiritual terms, all the while pulling our attention back into self-obsession, paranoia, and constant comparison. In this way, spirituality or religion can be the perfect cover for the ego to keep thriving unchallenged.

In short, we can sound pretty good when we talk about things like “compassion” and “self-sacrificial love,” when really the same competitive, self-seeking attitude that governed our lives previously continues to guide our thoughts and actions. 

Since we usually don’t realize we are doing this, it can be helpful to have a community to draw attention to our blind spots. For those in recovery, this comes in the form of a sponsor and their recovery network who they stay in touch with regularly. And for our clients at MARR, this accountability also comes in the form of their community members and the counselors.            

Pride in Reverse

But being “the most spiritual” person isn’t the only way the ego hides in plain sight. Perhaps just as common is the tendency to overindulge ourselves in guilt and self-pity.

On the surface, constantly putting oneself down can look like humility, but in fact, the A.A. literature tells us this is just a different form of self-obsession. And it can be just as harmful. 

In contrast, the ego’s tendency toward grandiosity, Twelve Steps, and Twelve Traditions describes the other end of the spectrum. When we are in this position, we have merely become victims of “pride in reverse.” We get to a point where we have “self-pity oozing from every pore,” which we then “inflict on everyone around us.”  Self-loathing and shame can become so consuming that we don’t have any time or attention to be helpful or available for anyone else. 

This tendency is not unique to people with substance abuse issues. Thomas Merton, a 20th-century Christian thinker, and writer, also recognized this tendency for people to separate themselves in their religious life by inordinately putting themselves down. Merton recognizes this as a false sense of humility, a “pathological inferiority” and “self-love in reverse.”  We do this because we secretly want to be the best, but being angry that we are not the best, we’ll settle for being the worst. If we buy into this, our ego can at least celebrate that we’re different than everybody else.   

What Merton says is really needed is “renouncing the spirit of competition.” In this, we find actual humility, which ceases to focus on the self as a point of concern and opens the opportunity for the community.

The Freedom to Be Ordinary 

Neither end of this spectrum is helpful in recovery because, in both cases, we are in competition with our brothers and sisters. These comparisons cut us off from community life. Twelve and Twelve describes both of these ego extremes in the following way.

“Our egomania digs two disastrous pitfalls. Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend on them far too much…We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap or hide underneath it.”

If we renounce competition and just accept ourselves as another member of the community, the workplace, or the human race, this is, in a sense, a very radical approach to interacting with others. Such an approach is profoundly counter-cultural in a society that is dominated by comparison and competition. 

Whenever we are around somebody who has surrendered herself to not trying to stand out in any way, we feel a sense of relief around that person. 

There is no sense of competition or defensiveness in the air. That person has nothing to prove and is not trying to get anything out of us. They are usually willing to step up if that is helpful, but it is not something that they need to do in order to feel good about themselves.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief in the presence of such a person. She is the type of person we want to be around and have in our community. 

Like any other addiction, the solution to comparing ourselves to others ultimately resides in the community. 

If we can be healthy members of a community, “fitting ourselves to be of maximum service to those around us,” as the Big Book says, we find that we have all the resources we need to live under any circumstances. 

We can realize we no longer need to distinguish ourselves as the best or the worst but are profoundly okay with being just another ordinary human being. 

Paradoxically, by accepting our ordinariness and renouncing comparison with others, the uniqueness of our personality can emerge. We are finally free to be who we really are because we are not caught up in trying to measure up. 

There is something beautiful and revolutionary in being this type of ordinary. 

By Dr. Brian Moore
Psychologist and Interventionist
Founder and Director of The Intervention Group

The intervention has become a familiar ritual in our culture. It’s often depicted in television and movies, and many of you reading this may have even participated in one. 

But despite our cultural familiarity with the idea of the intervention, people are often unsure about how to go about it, which makes sense. Discussing a loved one’s substance abuse with them is obviously a difficult and sensitive conversation, and approaching this topic should be handled with thoughtfulness and great care. Engaging with resources like this is a great beginning to finding the most healthy and effective way to communicate with your loved one about their substance abuse. 

I’ve been a psychologist for over 30 years, and for 25 of those years, I’ve worked exclusively as an interventionist, providing services to families and corporate clients. At my practice, The Intervention Group, we provide a complete continuum of intervention services. This means that we help people organize, prepare, and implement interventions, which includes making arrangements for travel and checking that person into treatment if the person makes the choice to get help. 

In addition to drug and alcohol dependence, we also work with families confronting behavioral addictions, such as sex addiction and gambling, as well as mental health concerns like depression. 

In this article, I am going to be focusing on drug and alcohol interventions. These are some of the key things that I regularly work on with people to help them lovingly and effectively communicate with their loved one about their substance abuse. 

There Is Something You Can Do 

When families or friends of people in active addiction see their loved one’s drinking or drug use getting worse, too often, they are told by well-meaning but misinformed people: “There is nothing you can do. You have to wait for the person with the problem to want to get help.” 

As a licensed psychologist, interventionist, and family member of multiple people in recovery, I can tell you: this simply is not true. 

I firmly agree with what they say in Al-Anon about the three Cs: (1) You didn’t CAUSE the addiction or alcoholism; (2) You can’t CONTROL it; and (3)You can’t CURE it. 

But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. We cannot control or cure their disease, but we can provide opportunities to allow that person to get the help that they need.

In my work as an interventionist, I have seen, over and over, that there are concrete things that loved ones can do for people in active addiction or alcoholism. 

Let me be clear, we cannot make their decision for them to get into recovery, but we can at least provide them with the opportunity.

The reason we can help is that denial is the biggest obstacle to recovery. 

When people are in denial, they are not able to appreciate how ill they are or how much help they might need. They are not intentionally being difficult, but they are simply incapable of seeing their sickness the way others can. The lens they are using to process their reality has been distorted by drug and alcohol use. Their disease has rendered them incapable of seeing cause and effect relating to their drinking and use the way that the healthy people around them can.

People do not typically snap out of denial of their own accord; an outside force usually helps in this process. 

Everybody in Recovery Has Had an Intervention

Whether they call it an “intervention” or not, everybody in recovery has had one. Something or someone has gotten in the way of their dependence on the substance and punctured their denial about their illness and its effects. 

There are structured, formal interventions, like the ones that I help people with. In these interventions, family and friends plan a meeting in which they express their love and concern for the person struggling with the addiction. They set supportive boundaries to help the loved one address the illness they are in denial about. They then continue to hold those boundaries after the initial conversation. 

Sometimes, professionals like myself are called in to help facilitate these conversations; sometimes, people do it without the help of outside professionals. But in either case, an attempt is made by people who care about the person to draw attention to the illness that he or she is in denial about. 

Then there is the other category, unplanned interventions, in which people are simply intervened on by the cold, cruel world. They are forced to confront the consequences of their illness, often without the benefit of loving, supportive people surrounding them to offer a tangible way forward into recovery.  

The world intervenes in any number of ways, such as taking the person’s job away from them or having their spouse leave them. Maybe the person abusing substances loses custody of their children, has a car accident, or gets arrested. As a direct result of this unplanned intervention that comes through natural consequences, the person is then offered the opportunity to address the illness they had previously been in denial about. 

Both of these types of interventions can be valuable and lead to long-term recovery, but of course, the first one can be performed in a safe and loving setting, whereas we have no control over how the unplanned intervention will play itself out. 

In a structured, planned intervention, people close to the person can give him or her the opportunity to begin addressing the denial before serious health, legal, or professional consequences force them to. 

As an interventionist, what I’m helping people create is a loving crisis in the person’s life instead of waiting for the world to create a very cold and uncaring crisis.  Our goal is to interrupt the person’s dysfunctional behavior pattern and offer him or her a pathway to real help and recovery, rather than waiting for extreme consequences to force them into a desperate situation.  

You Don’t Have to Wait for Things to Get Worse 

Many of us have this illusion that doing a structured intervention should be a last-ditch effort. This is a mistake. 

We do not need to wait until things are desperate or the person is at death’s door before we provide an opportunity for our loved one to start getting better. 

As far as I can tell, treating addiction is the only area of healthcare where the general attitude is: “It’s not bad enough yet to intervene.” 

If our loved one had cancer, we wouldn’t want to wait until they were emaciated without the strength to walk before we did anything. And yet, with substance use disorder, that’s how we often approach it. We wait until the situation is critical and the person is at risk of dying. 

Anywhere else in healthcare, we would be outraged by this attitude. In every other area of healthcare, we want to have a treatment that’s aggressive and helps to get people to a better place before they’re badly affected by their disease. 

If our loved ones had cancer, we wouldn’t want to wait until they were emaciated without the strength to walk before we did anything. And yet, with substance use disorder, that’s how we often approach it. We wait until the situation is critical and the person is at risk of dying. 

It’s a myth that people have to hit “rock bottom” to get better. Because in many cases, rock bottom is death. The work I do with clients and their families is attempting to raise the bottom as high as possible so that they don’t have to continue losing things and hurting themselves and others. 

Hitting the bottom is just the point at which we turn around and go in a different direction. And that bottom does not necessarily have to include dramatic, tragic, and awful circumstances.

An Intervention Is Not a Single Conversation

An effective intervention is not a one-time event that takes place, followed by everybody returning to things as they were.

Yes, interventions do include an important conversation where boundaries are lovingly and clearly communicated to the person with the addiction. But the intervention needs to continue after that conversation is over. Family members need to hold to the boundaries that were communicated in that initial conversation. 

I tell families that everything that they do in their relationship with the person after that initial conversation is going to fit into one of two buckets. They are either facilitating their loved one’s treatment and recovery, or they are facilitating the disease. And I don’t believe there is any in-between. 

When we uphold healthy and clearly communicated boundaries, we help ensure that we are intervening in a positive way by contributing to the person’s recovery, not strengthening their disease. 

For example, if an adult child is the one with the addiction, I’ll tell the parents that I want that person to always know that the door is open to the child. However, boundaries will help put a shape to that door and help them understand how they get to enter. Healthy families aren’t going to tolerate active addiction in their midst because that simply is not healthy and productive for that person. 

The intervention should be about constructing the choice so the person has the opportunity to get into recovery. That means providing legitimate, tangible steps for the person to get the treatment and help they need. If they refuse that choice, love requires us to hold the boundary we communicated to them in that conversation. 

You Don’t Need to Argue

People I work with often assume that I am going to tell them that they need to get really angry, be a man, stomp their feet, and demand that the person go-to treatment. And that’s not what an effective intervention looks like. 

I believe that the most powerful force that we have to bring to bear is the fact that all of the people in the room love the person. We all want the best for him or her. That is a much more powerful approach than one that is aggressive, combative, or coercive. Having people who care is so much more powerful than anybody being angry and threatening could ever be. 

If you get in an argument with a person in active addiction, you’re going to lose every time. The person with the addiction is perceiving the situation they are in from a place of denial. Essentially you are arguing with somebody who is dealing with a completely different set of “facts,” which actually are not “facts” at all, but distortions of reality shaped by their disease. 

The person with the addiction is seeing things through the lens of their illness and the deeply felt belief that they need to continue using, even though they don’t realize it. No emotional argument that you string together will be able to win out against that.

You Can’t Force Them to Make the Decision You Want Them to Make

I tell people going into an intervention that they need to hold a boundary for themselves that respects their loved one’s autonomy. In Al-Anon, they call this “giving the person the dignity of their own choice.” 

For an intervention to be effective, the loved one’s need to make it clear that they are not here to control that person. We construct a choice, and layout a tangible option of how they can get treatment. But we can’t force them to make the decision we want them to make. 

Regardless of their choice on that day, if we do our part well, the landscape of that addiction will have changed that day.

There are two pieces to the interaction: our piece and their piece. My goal is to help families have control over their piece of the interaction.

Giving the person the freedom to make his or her own decision is often the most difficult part of intervening with those we love. We often need help with this.  An interventionist, therapist, and an Al-Anon group (to name just a few resources) can be helpful in assisting us in letting go of trying to control the outcome of intervening with our loved one. 

Of course, we want the person to say “yes” and accept help. However, even if they say “no,” if we have communicated our boundaries clearly and lovingly, it is still a good day. We are interested in them going to treatment the day after, the week after, or as soon as possible. 

Regardless of their choice on that day, if we do our part well, the landscape of that addiction will have changed that day, and we will have made progress. We can continue to build on that progress by maintaining strong, healthy boundaries going forward.

I wish I could say they always get better, but the truth is they don’t. This disease is an insidious and terrible disease, and we know that we don’t have control of that either. What we do have control over is putting ourselves in the best position to put them in the best position to get better.