4 Conditions for a Successful Drug & Alcohol Family Intervention

4 CRITICAL CONDITIONS FOR A SUCCESSFUL FAMILY INTERVENTION

SUMMARY: In this video interview, Bobby Newman discusses 4 critical conditions to improve the chances of success of a family intervention:
(1) Discussing the ROOT PROBLEM at the base of the addiction;
(2) Preparing the family for the OBJECTIONS that the addict will throw at them to avoid going to rehab;
(3) Preparing the family for the REACTIONS that will inevitably happen during the family intervention;
(4) Making sure that the family members who are part of the family intervention team do “HOLD THE LINE” and do not concede anything.

Transcript of the video

Phil Chavanne:
So just for the audience, Bobby is a professional interventionist. He’s also a Certified Substance Abuse Counselor with 20 years or so of experience in his field. He’s seen it all, done it all, done hundreds of interventions. And that’s what we’re going to talk about now, which is, what makes an intervention successful? What heightens the probability that a family intervention is successful?

We can’t rule out that an intervention is not successful. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but by doing certain things, and being prepared for certain things, you increase the likelihood that the intervention is going to be successful, and that the life of the person will be saved. So, Bobby, I know that you articulate the preparation of an intervention, and the implementation of an intervention around four major points. And so we’re going to take the first one, which is what you call The Root Problem. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Bobby Newman:
One of the things about when dealing with an addict, a lot of times they’ll tell you, even though they have a raging problem with substance abuse, they’ll tell you, “I don’t have a substance abuse problem. I can stop any time I want.” Alright. And my next question is, “Alright. How’s your life going?” And they’ll usually have… they’ll say, “It’s terrible.” “Okay, what’s going on?” And they’ll tell you, “I don’t feel well.” There’s always some other problem that they could have. And they’re taking the drug as a solution to that problem… A lot of times they are taking the drug to solve that problem.

I’ve had this example, I did a family intervention and I tell this story quite often, but this kid, out in Hawaii when he’s out there, and he obviously had a huge alcohol and pill problem, but to him, he’s, “I don’t have a problem with that, but I do hate people.” His problem was society as a whole. And I’m, “Okay. So if I could help you with that, would you be in treatment?” He said, “Yeah. How are you going to help me with that?” So I started explaining to him how the treatment program was going to help him with that. And he became very interested at that point.

Bobby Newman:
So we want to identify all the problems that the person has, that they might be using the drugs or alcohol to solve. If we could do that, then we are likely to have a good positive discourse, or conversation with this person. As a result of… In trying to get him to get help.

CONDITION #1 FOR A SUCCESSFUL FAMILY INTERVENTION: GO TO THE ROOT PROBLEM

Phil Chavanne:
Okay. So do you find that this going to the Root Problem, you have to go through a number of fancied problem? Like, I have this problem, I have this problem, but they don’t touch anything real. And then digging in, you get more to the thing. Is that part of the routine, or is it a different process?

Bobby Newman:
Well, that’s a great question actually because sometimes people will give you unsolvable problems. In other words, they’ll give you a reason why there’s absolutely no way that you can solve it. So the only excuse is to continue to use drugs or alcohol. And you obviously at that point know this person has got… He’s… And it could be legitimate, but most of the time it’s not. And it’s usually what I call, it’s the addiction talking for the person. What they’re saying does not make any sense.

Bobby Newman:
And although the person is doing all the talking, and you look at the person and you think they have somewhat of some sense about them, which I’m sure they do, not to say they don’t, but they’re addicted to drugs. And so the drugs, and the addiction is doing all the talking for them at that point. So it’s good to… That’s a great question because now you can separate that from… You can… and then it helps the family and friends know what’s really going on because they’ve been having all these discussions with the person, and it’s been very confusing and very chaotic and very trying, and drains the person. So the family.

Phil Chavanne:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, so that behooves you to find out the root cause, the root problem of this guy, or this person?

Bobby Newman:
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You’re digging in and having these conversations and you find out, and you can see where you’re at, but if you know you have it at the time, the family, you can actually see a lot of times when we properly prepare for the intervention that you’ll… Some of these things will start happening and then the family will go, oh, okay. The light comes on because now they know because they’re ready. They’re prepared for it.

CONDITION #2: PREPARE FOR OBJECTIONS

Phil Chavanne:
I see. Okay. So then you go to a second point, which is The Objections. So, this guy is going to blast some objections, maybe many objections, or maybe one or two major, major objections to you and to the family who’s doing the intervention. Tell us how that goes. And how do you prepare the family for that?

Bobby Newman:
One of the things about it with a family intervention, most of the time, it’s a surprise to the addict. There’s several different types of interventions, and sometimes family members feel guilty about, I don’t want to be tricking him, or deceiving the person. And we just have to show up and sit down and have a conversation with the person. But with these objections put to the person, a lot of times they’ll come up with anything. Their usually number one, “Well, I can’t go because of my job.” “I can’t go because I have court.” “I can’t go because I have a doctor’s visit.” “I can’t go because I don’t want to be away from my kids,” or “I can’t go because this, this, I have to pay some bills, or I have things I got to take care of.”

Bobby Newman:
If I’ll go… So the truth is there’s nothing more important than handling this drug or alcohol problem because it obviously could kill the person. So we have to put, even if it’s in legal situations, we never put anything ahead of getting the person into the treatment program. So we list these things out, and we know what to expect and we 99.9% of the time have legitimate rebuttals that the person could then go, oh, okay. For instance, with work, there’s The Family and Medical Leave Act, there’s federal laws in place to protect the person’s employment. There’s also… And you talk about with kids, I don’t want to be with my kids that long, don’t you want to be with your kids the rest of your life?

Bobby Newman:
This is the greatest gift you could give your kids. And a lot of times they’ll say, “oh, I can’t believe you did this to me”. “The truth is Sir, I love you so much, but I really honestly can’t believe I’m having to do this. But I will because I love you so much”. So we prepare ourselves for any… Everything that this person’s going to say. They may say some things that I haven’t heard before, but it’s going to be very weary… I’m very curious to hear it because I’ve heard a lot of stuff.

Phil Chavanne:
Is there a possibility that the family itself, the people who are part of the intervention also have objections and feed these objections or justify the objections of the addict with their own objections?

Bobby Newman:
That’s true. That’s another great question because we handle those things before we ever get in front of the addict because I don’t want that have to be going on because we can’t have any point of agreement. And sometimes people will. “Oh, my son has a court date on Tuesday.” The truth is we can handle the court. I’ve never had anybody get in more trouble for going into treatment and getting help. The only time that’s ever happened is out of 20, over 20 years, there’s one time, and the person was actually absconding from the law and lied to the treatment center and everything else. That he was basically trying to hide out. And that was the only time that it ever made it worse for the person because he wasn’t being honest, and he wasn’t there for the right reason. So we can handle… The treatment center, a lot of times can handle a lot of those legal issues. So, we handle the family ahead of time before we ever get in front of the addict. So.

Phil Chavanne:
Give us another type of objection that people can have and that would prevent the family intervention from going smoothly.

Bobby Newman:
There’s usually external… A loved one, like a relationship like the wife, or the girlfriend, or the boyfriend, or somebody that doesn’t want… Or a drug using friend that doesn’t want the person to get better, or doesn’t want to leave the person to go away. There’s situations where the person, maybe there’s some sort of an agreement there that there’s substance abuse agreement there.

Bobby Newman:
And sometimes people are afraid, if the person sobers up and they get better, they may not want me anymore. It’s a really… The dynamic is you really… After doing this and understanding it, sometimes people go, oh no, it couldn’t be that way. Surely that person is not that selfish or evil or whatever you want to call it. But the truth is, they are. Their own feelings are more important to them than the actual survival of the person a lot of times. So we have to very carefully go in there and expose these things and get everybody’s agreement that this is what we need to do.

Phil Chavanne:
I see. So this is part of your pre-work, like pre-intervention work?

Bobby Newman:
Yes.

Phil Chavanne:
The ground work that you laid down before, the whole family coalesces around the exact workout of the intervention?

Bobby Newman:
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And people say, “It’s not going to work.” Well. If we go in and do what the family’s been doing over, and over, and over again for years I can tell you, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not going to work.” If you’ve been doing it for 15 years and it’s not worked yet, so why would we go… We have to change things up and we have to approach this differently.

Bobby Newman:
I’ve got another example of a kid that was just absolutely refusing to get help. And his parents were, you could tell, they were what helicopter parents. They were just all over him, and I, finally, I pulled him into the room and I said, “Look, man,” I said, “Are your parents all over you?” And he said, “Yeah, I can’t get away from them.” I said, “Well, I’m trying to help you here. I’m trying to get you to go. If you go to treatment, you can get them off your back for a minute.” And I said, matter of fact, he was going to California. So I’m like, you can go to California, been a nice place. And I didn’t think of it like that.

Bobby Newman:
I said, “Yeah.” So I walked back out there, I said, “Yeah, he’s going to go”. And I told the parents, I said, “His motivation is to get away from you guys for a minute. He’ll go to treatment, but if he can get away from you.” So… And I wasn’t mean to them. They understood, they didn’t care. They didn’t realize it. They didn’t realize what the effect they were having. So they were more than willing to say, “You know what? We’ll

we’ll do whatever we need to do because we love our son.” So anyway, there’s just all types of things. And you try to do your best to prepare to go in there ahead of time and understand the dynamic of the relationship so.

CONDITION #3: PREPARE FOR REACTIONS

Phil Chavanne:
All right, cool. So the next point down the list of things that you have to get off the road and prepare everybody for, is The Reactions.

Bobby Newman:
Yeah.

Phil Chavanne:
A drug addict is not going to go, “yes, let’s go to rehab”.

Bobby Newman:
Right, right.

Phil Chavanne:
There’s going to be a whole lot of emotions and things like this, that are being displayed during the family intervention. So how does the handling the reactions, and being able to face the reaction, how does that interact with the process and how do you prepare the families for that?

Bobby Newman:
That’s one of the things I ask about, “How do you think he’s going to act when we set out and we go over this scenario, and we role play to a degree? How do you think they’re going to take, what do you think? What’s their normal reaction?” Oh, he’s going to get mad. He’s going to… We’re going to make him mad. Okay, we’re probably going to make him mad. Nobody, the truth is, everybody gets the idea. He’s got to want it for himself. That is true. The person needs to want to change their life, but nobody ever wants to go to rehab. Nobody, under any circumstances, that’s not like you graduated high school and say, “Man, I hope I can go to rehab by the time I’m 25 years old,” or 35 for me.

Bobby Newman:
But the thing of it is that, there’s something in the environment that’s caused them, forced them into the program. And we hope to be able… The person has to want to change their life. Matter of fact, the truth is the treatment center won’t take them if they’re not willing to sign up for the treatment so, there’s only two places that’ll take you unwillingly. That’s the psychiatric hospital or a jail.

Bobby Newman:
So, we have to be prepared for any reaction that we’re going to get. And we have to be willing, and very seldom do I get a resounding yes. We go through the process, we get the person thinking about it. Deep down they want to change. A lot of times they’re looking for a face saver, something to save face on agreeing to get help because they feel like a failure, they think they’ll feel like a failure at that point. But we… If they… I’ve had people, a kid, he was so high on methamphetamine, one time he jumped out of a third story window to get away, to run out. And I told him, I said, “We need to block off the windows because we want to confirm if he’s high.”

Bobby Newman:
And they said, “He won’t jump out the window and sure enough he did. He ended up… Yeah, he jumped out the window, jumped over a six-foot stockade fence and then run off down the street. He ended up getting thrown to jail. He was in jail for about three days. And finally came down enough to where we could go talk to him. And then he was an actually a super nice kid once he wasn’t high. So, but he had to go through all that. But we had to be… We prepared for…and anytime the family says, “Oh, he won’t do that.” I always expect them, they probably will. But we have to be not only expecting the reaction, but also willing to endure it and not react to that person.

Phil Chavanne:
That’s interesting point. I was about to bring up that’s I have seen, in my days of dealing with addicts, the addict trying to coax their mother into not sending them away. Is that something that you’ve observed?

Bobby Newman:
Yeah. They’ll say, “I won’t use drugs. I’m going to stop. I told you I was going to stop. You can drug test me every day.” I’ll do this. I’ll do that. And what they’re asking you to do is now manage their addiction for them. They’re asking you to now go through the trouble of having to drug test, having to have more sleepless nights, and worry, and fret, versus them now confronting the problem themselves and stepping up to the plate. And admittedly, going to get treatment is a big scare, is a scary thing. It is in reality person… A lot of anxiety builds up. I remember the day that I went and the alternative for me was Doomsday. I was going to prison if I didn’t go. But I still… When I made the decision to go, I got nervous. Like oh, I’m going to go confront something and do something I don’t know.

Phil Chavanne:
So how do you handle with the mother and their maternal instinct? Or the… “I’m a softhearted mother and I can’t tolerate, I can’t take my… Can’t take it when my son is crying and telling me that he’s reformed, that he’s on his way”. And so how do you handle the mother before the intervention takes place?

Bobby Newman:
That’s a great question. There’s some preparation that goes into it and we have to again, go through that process with the person and make sure that they’re willing to be able to experience that. And that’s where sometimes I will bring in another family member, whether they’re actively or necessarily influential with the addict or not, at least they can come in from a ground support type of thing with the person. In other words, they’ll be there to support the mother in her decision and stay strong because the motherly or humanitarian instinct does kick in. You automatically want to help this person and try to… And believe the person. But the truth is, it’s not the real person because the real person would see the sanity in actually getting help.

Phil Chavanne:
Got it. Yeah. That’s an important point to hear. The other person that you have in front of you, the addict person, the addicted person is not the real person. The real person is way behind the addiction.

Bobby Newman:
Yes, yes. That’s that. Yes.

CONDITION #4: HOLD THE LINE

Phil Chavanne:
So that introduces the last point which you make in terms of what heightened the likelihood that a family intervention is going to be successful. It’s what you call, Hold The Line. So you have this basic things where if you cross this, or if you go below this, that’s not going to work. So tell us a little bit about this Hold The Line concept.

Bobby Newman:
One of the things, the very first thing you have to decide for yourself, that this person is going… You’re going to hold, you’re going to be firm about your decision that your loved one is going to get help. And you have to be firm with that. You have to hold your position. Now we start from a position of love and care. And we present this in a very loving and very caring way. And we pour… We tell the person what we think of them. Obviously there’s value in this person. There’s a good person in there. We tell them what they mean to us, bring up special moments. And then we tell them how this is affecting us and our life. And most people will, they see what it’s doing and they say, “You know what? I’ll do it.” Because they really care about their family.

Bobby Newman:
But if you have someone who, let’s say… I’ll give you an example of a 27 year old heroin addict in New York who loved her mother, but her mother poured her heart out, wanted her to get help, had a seven year old daughter who didn’t know what we were doing at the time. But once she found out, she sent a video to her mother pleading for her mother to get help. And the girl walked off. Now there’s… If you have a mother that can walk away from their seven year old daughter, there’s not a whole lot of pleading that you’re going to be able to do with that person because the drugs have a hold of them.

Bobby Newman:
If that daughter, that seven year old, can’t convince her mother to come back to her, then there’s nothing that you and I are going to say for that per… The only other thing that’s going to cause this person to want to get help is either they get thrown in jail, they start getting dope sick, or they start getting dope sick, or some external threat is greater than going to treatment.

Bobby Newman:
So you have to sometimes create that, but you have to be… Understand that going in, and you have to hold the line to, and not get you let yourself continue to play that game. Or you’re going to be just, all it is going to happen is you’re going to get drugged down with them. So you have to hold line and be, do it very lovingly, but very firm. And-

Phil Chavanne:
If you feel that the person’s, one of the family members resolve is not strong enough to hold the line, that there’s a risk that he or she’s going to give in during the family intervention, cave in and fuel the addict’s resolution not to go to rehab, what do you do with that? How do you deal with that?

Bobby Newman:
We do our best to head that off ahead of time. If [inaudible 00:20:24] the person, sometimes they’ll, will prepare and the person will say, if it gets to a certain point, then the person will leave. As long as they don’t enable the addict after the intervention, then they could exit the scene. And we stay there and we stay strong. As long as they don’t say the addict comes over and wants 20 bucks or whatever, they don’t give it to them and they say, “No, you need to go to treatment. Don’t call me for help. Unless you’re in treatment, I’ll help you if you go to treatment.” But… so we do our best to predict that and prevent that from happening.

Bobby Newman:
But if they could see that person who, their mother, father, whomever it might be who has been enabling or involved like that is now holding the line and being firm about it, they’re more likely to get help. And the other thing that I want to mention is that I’ve seen literally chaos for several hours. And as long as we were willing to… The family was able to weather the storm, the addict didn’t just say, “Okay, all right, I’ll go.” And then be more than happy to go. But I’m talking like six, eight hours of just knock-down-drag-out. And that we weathered the storm, we got to the other side, and the person finally is like, “All right, I’ll go.”

Bobby Newman:
And then drive us to the airport to get to go to treatment. That’s crazy. I couldn’t, because I thought we’re never going to make it to this stage because he’d been gone on so long, but the guy finally said, “You know what, I’ll go.” And he got to, like I said, weathered the storm and it’s like I always give an example of… It’s like a soda pop that you shake up the fizz and the fizz comes out. Eventually it’s going to stop fizzing and it’s going to run out. It’s going to be there. Okay. So same thing.

Phil Chavanne:
Great. Great, great. So these are great points to use as sticks alongside the preparation for the intervention and the implementation of the intervention. Okay.

Bobby Newman:
Yes.

Phil Chavanne:
Thank you. Thank you for this Bobby, tell us how people contact you when they have a loved one that is addicted to substance or to alcohol, anything that is addictive, what do they do?

Bobby Newman:
They can go to my website https://newmaninterventions.com. Or they can call 866-989-4499.

Phil Chavanne:
Great. So you’ve heard that, contact Bobby, there’s nothing more precious than life when you have the possibility to save the life of an addict, seize the possibility and call Bobby Newman. Thanks very much Bobby, talk to you soon.

CONCLUSION:

Family interventions are a difficult endeavor. Among the reasons for failure, family members do not prepare adequately for the battle. The grip of drugs or alcohol on the body and the mind of the addict is all too often underestimated. Addiction overrides reason. The role of the professional interventionist is to prepare the family and the event carefully, so that there is no option offered to the addicted person other than going to rehab, and that the family members are fully equipped to go to battle. Find out more about preparing a successful family intervention in Bobby’s book.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervention_(counseling)