Drugs, legal or otherwise, are part of nearly everyone’s daily life, but when does it become a problem? Around 21.5 million Americans aged 12 or older suffer from a substance abuse disorder, but if you yourself are suffering, it can be hard to tell if you have a problem. This is where an intervention can be useful.
If you have a friend or family member suffering from substance abuse, we’ll give you 5 intervention tips to make sure the confrontation goes as productively as possible.
1. Pick a Team
An intervention is only as good as its participants. When deciding who should be attending the intervention you’re putting together, you need to consider a few things. First, they need to be people that love and care about the addicted person, and the addicted person should ideally love and respect them.
If these feelings aren’t there, the intervention can become unproductive or hostile.
2. Seek a Professional
Ultimately, an intervention is a complex process, and the addicted person’s mental health can be at stake, so you should always bring a professional psychologist or addiction counselor with you. You can read hundreds of articles about interventions online, but nothing beats actual experience. So we strongly recommend bringing someone qualified for these things along.
3. Establish Clear Goals
The purpose of an intervention isn’t just to make the addicted person feel bad and tell them all the things they’re doing wrong. An intervention is also supposed to draw clear goals moving forward and inspire hope and redemption. So before you even bring your intervention team together, you should think about what you actually want out of this meeting.
4. Practice
An intervention needs to hit certain beats to be effective. To make sure everything goes smoothly, you should get your team together and rehearse what you want to say, what order you want to do it in, and how you want to do it before the actual intervention. To do this, everyone should write an individual script and then work together to decide the order of events.
This will help everyone feel prepared and calm during the actual nerve-wracking intervention.
5. Stay Empathetic
Lastly, and most importantly, everyone involved should stay empathetic. It’s easy to get angry or hostile if the addicted person becomes bitter or defensive, but we all must remember that we’re here to help the addicted, not degrade or chastise them.
To make sure cool heads prevail, prepare yourself emotionally if the addicted person gets hostile, and think about how to best react if the worst outcome occurs.
Now That You Have These Intervention Tips…
You have the building blocks you need to get your intervention planning started. It may not fix all of your problems, but it’s an important step on the road to recovery for your friend or loved one.
If you’re looking for someone to lead your intervention, be sure to contact us. Our professionals have years’ worth of intervention tips.
