In this video, I'm going to teach you strategies for how to get your loved one to actually go
to rehab. Now yes, I know that you've heard you can't make someone get recovery they
have to want it. But I'm going to teach you some ways to maybe help them decide that they
want it. In fact, I'm going to teach you 3 strategies. These are the three strategies
that we've had the most success with the clients that come to our office and with a little
coaching pretty much every family member that comes to see us uses one or a combination
of all three of these strategies and it gets the job done because these strategies actually
motivate someone to want to get better. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth
and I want to say welcome to Put the Shovel Down. This is a YouTube Channel dedicated
to helping families understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get
your life back on track. You know several years ago after working in a private psychiatric
hospital I had taken calls for years and years from family members totally desperate not
knowing what to do with their loved ones who were just wreaking havoc at home. Who were
in and out of the hospital, who had been to detox like 10 times and they would call and
they would say we need you to keep them longer. But because the hospital was an acute care
facility we couldn't keep them much longer than about 5 days and I would have to tell
these desperate families you know there's really nothing that you can do they're going
to have to decide that they want it. Yes, that was me telling their families that. After
doing that for a whole bunch of years, and hearing the desperation in their voices, I
decided I just couldn't do that anymore, so I started working with these families. Teaching
them the strategies because sometimes you can't get your loved one in front of the counselor.
Or sometimes there's just a lot you've got to do before you can get your loved one in
front of the counselor. So I would teach families these strategies on how to get their loved
one to take that next step. But before I tell you these strategies I strongly suggest that
you look into and explore and find and have the treatment option that you want already
picked out. In fact, have a plan A, B, and C. Maybe that's you just wanting them to talk
to a counselor. Maybe that's you want them to go to residential treatment or to a sober
living facility. So, if you haven't wathed my playlist on Understanding Treatment Options,
that's a good place to start. That will help you understand all the different kinds of
treatment and what your options are so you'll know what you're looking for. Because when
you do get your loved one to finally agree to go to treatment, you've got to have treatment
lined up. Otherwise, you're going to miss the boat. Okay let's get into the strategies.
Strategy #1 is to use basic leverage. By leverage, I don't necessarily mean give someone an ultimatum,
but sometimes it does come down to that, so let's say if you're dealing with a teenager
whose maybe smoking pot all of the time. You may have to say listen, I'm not going to continue
to support you unless you do something about this problem. Or you may say in order to stay
in this house, you're going to have to pay rent. You can't just be staying here and not
going to school and not working. That doesn't work. So you may have to push the envelope
just a little bit. So that can mean that you're leveraging them directly into treatment or
therapy, but it can also mean that you're leveraging them you're pushing them along
a little bit and you're making it not so easy to stay in a stuck spot. I find that people
really have to use the leverage one a lot if they're dealing with someone whose smoking
a lot of marijuana because that keeps people really unmotivated and it does cause life
destruction, but not to such a degree that it hits home to them in a heavy way. Most
of the time it makes them think Oh I've really got to do something about this. It just keeps
them stuck. The other time you might have to think about using a leverage strategy is
if you're dealing with someone who's addicted to alcohol/depressants. Their denial is alittle
bit different. In fact, I made a video about why alcoholic denial is different than other
kinds of denial and if you haven't seen that one, make sure and check it out if you're
dealing with someone who's addicted to xanax conifin valum alcohol those kinds of things,
depressant drugs. Lastly, you may have to use leverage if the person that you're dealing
with has a really stubborn knuckle headed oppositional personality. But if that's the
case, I usually say use leverage on that kind of person as a last resort. Those stubborn
headed people are the ones that really like dig in and it's going to be hard to win with
them going toe-to-toe. You can use it on those people but I would use it as a last resort.
you may want to look into one of these other two options if you're dealing with a super
stubborn headed type person. You know the kind of person that says no because you said
yes or the one that says yes just because you said no. Yeah that one, that's the kind
of stubborn headedness we're talking about here. The second approach to getting someone
to go to treatment is what I call the side door approach. So essentially instead of saying
hey, you've got a drug and alcohol problem, you've gotta go talk to someone. And coming
at the substance abuse problem straight on, you may want to come in through the side door
about getting some help for something that they see as an issue. We just got a young
lady back in outpatient treatment who had recently been away in residential treatment
but the way she got there was because she really was depressed and anxious and she asked
to go to treatment because she was just struggling with so much depression. So a lot of times
the person won't say I need to go to rehab, but they will say my anxiety is out of control,
my depression is out of control, my adhd doesn't let me get anything done. So if they have
a complaint or a concern that's kind of consistently around, a lot of times you can use that as
the doorway or avenue to get them to get some help to start talking to somebody. I call
that the side door approach. The important thing to remember about that one is, that
even though you're coming in the side door. Whoever you get them to see or wherever you
decide to go it's really important that that person, counselor, doctor, program whatever
know that there is an addiction issue going on because the person themselves may or may
not bring that information in and that could get missed. So make sure that you are dealing
with people or person that understands addiction and that knows that there is addiction to
drugs/alcohol happening that way you can at least make sure you know that's being addressed.
Now the third way that we teach people about getting a loved one to go to rehab is what
I call the long game and in order to do that we teach families something called the CRAFT
method. That stands for Community Reinforcement Approach and Family Training. This is a systematic
way in which you use positive reinforcement to kind of get someone to take those baby
steps toward change. So it's this combination of being sort of neutral when you see negatvie
behaviors and being positive and sort of reinforcing positive steps in the right direction. This
one takes a little bit longer but it actually sticks a little bit better because someone
really does sort of move through those stages of change and the key here is you're really
getting them to take their walls down and you're getting them to trust you and once
they trust you, they're going to want to know what you have to say they're going to be way
more open to listening to your advice and that sort of thing. It's actually sort of
a parallel process of what I would do if they were sitting in my office. We can teach you
as a family how to do those same steps because maybe you've got a plant and water those seeds
resource that we have that might be helpful for you is the Family Recovery Academy. Because
in our family recovery academy that's an online program that has tons and tons of videos that
only the people in that program will have access to that teaches you the craft method
the step-by-step process for that, but also a lot of other really important information.
Like, how do you actually get them to treatment, as in transport them there, what do you do
if they want to come home, what's good aftercare, what do you do if they relapse? All of this
stuff, it really is a step-by-step guide on not just how to get them there, but how to
going to go ahead and link up those other videos on the CRAFT approach right up here.
All you have to do is click the button.