You can't force someone to admit that they have an addiction and to be honest the harder you try
the more that they will dig in that they don't have an addiction but there are some ways to get
someone to admit to the issue without trying to force them and that's what I'm going to
tell you in this video for those of you who are new here welcome to put the shovel down
I'm Amber Hollingsworth and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand
the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track get
back out there and live the life that you want to live 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 get back in control of your life subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure
you are always five steps ahead of addiction
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now I've been working with people who have addictions for like almost
20 years now I have certainly seen a ton of denial I mean you wouldn't believe some of
the things that I hear people say and I'm like literally you can't see it like wow
it's like right there in front of your face red blinking light but denial is very very powerful
there are reasons why people either can't see the issue or won't see the issue but I
wanna give you five tactics that I use that will help you sort of circumvent
that denial ego defense mechanism now first and foremost and maybe even
most importantly keep the conversation as casual or light and short as possible
don't try to have a big talk with them because as soon as you start
all that serious talk their defenses go up wouldn't yours it feels like you're in the
principal's office your walls are gonna go up immediately if you're casual and comfortable in
a conversation the other person's gonna be casual and comfortable in the conversation
so don't make it too serious I know it's a serious topic which is why I'm giving you a
serious strategy on how to get through to someone take my word for it keeping it lighter will help
them see it faster now strategy number two is to somewhat normalize the idea of having an
addiction basically you have some bad image in your head and if you can help people see
that these days addiction is everywhere and kind of like almost everyone develops an addiction
then what you're doing is you're making the concept of having an addiction
feel not so terrible which means admitting that you have one doesn't make you a terrible person
in fact it's a pretty common problem to have these days
now the third strategy I'm gonna call it to give them an excuse now calm down
this is not as bad as it sounds I'm not saying give them an excuse to continue
to make bad choices I'm saying give them a way to accept the fact that they have an
addiction without destroying their sense of self and ego without tearing them down and
triggering up all their shame let me give you some examples of what I mean by giving an excuse
you can say dude is no wonder this happened to you look at blank or you can say dude
you're under so much stress it's no wonder you're drinking or anyone whose been through what you've
been through in your childhood would probably end up with some kind of negative coping skill
what you're doing is you're saying Hey you were in this situation and you have this problem
not because you're a bad person but because of X Y or Z now when you combine that with the
normalizing of it what you're doing is you're trying to take the shame
away from the issue which of course makes it a lot easier to admit to now another strategy that
you can use to help someone kind of admit that they have an addiction is to help them reshape
what they see as an addiction because most people when they think about addiction think
about like end-stage addiction as the worst of the worst but actually people that are
addicted go through a lot of stages before they get to this worst of worst and my goal,
of course, is to get people to see the issue and deal with the issue
long before they lose everything you guys know on this channel you do not have to hit bottom
to get better you hit your bottom when you put your shovel down so I have a lot
of clients who haven't lost everything whose lives are pretty good in other
areas who maybe even are really successful but nonetheless they do have an addiction
so I try to help them see that there are many stages of addiction and then I validate the
fact that they're catching theirs really early this helps people actually feel
good about admitting that they have an addiction cuz they're like you know what
I had this it happens to a lot of people here's why it happened to me
and I'm going to be one of the people that catch it early and I'm not going to
lose everything so you're shifting it from this terrible horrible like a confession of your sin
to you know what okay I got this it's a practical problem and I can deal with it and in fact,
I'm gonna deal with it faster and sooner and better than other people deal with it
so they feel good about it now another strategy that I sometimes use to help
people figure out where they're at in those stages is I actually read them the official
clinical criteria for having a substance use disorder that's what it's called clinically
and officially it's called a substance use disorder or actually it's called an alcohol
use disorder or an opiate use disorder or a cocaine use disorder or stimulant use disorder
it's actually officially it's broken down into those categories but the criteria actually all
the same for substance use disorder it's just that you insert different
words for the different types of addiction and I will go through those criteria and have them
count up how many of them that they have so they can diagnose themselves
it's not me saying Hey this is what diagnosis you have it's them looking at the criteria and
them deciding where they are at on that spectrum now if you wanna know what those criteria are
keep watching because at the end I'm going to link up a video where I read you the criteria
just like I would do it in session and you can either count them for yourself
or if you're thinking about someone else in your life you can kind of get an idea about where
they may be in their stages but of course getting someone to see or admit that they have a problem
isn't the same as getting them to do something about it that's a little bit more complicated
but there are strategies and techniques that are very very effective for doing that as well
in fact, it's what we teach inside of our invisible intervention online course
for family members we teach things like motivational interviewing and the craft
method and all these other techniques that are research proven to get people out of denial
and into recovery if you wanna see some of those techniques in action
I have a real-life session that you can watch for free
and in that session you'll see me using motivational interviewing techniques which
are specialized counseling techniques used for getting people out of denial
and committed to change I'll put the links for that in the description below
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