Successful Intervention Tips. Tip #2. This video is about assembling your intervention team. In this series of video’s Bobby Newman, an Internationally Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor discusses the Successful Intervention Tips that help family and friends of addicted loved one’s learn how to help those struggling with addiction. Assembling your intervention team is the second step in this process and very vital to the overall outcome.
Are there any brothers and sisters? How many parents are there? Are there two sets of parents? Is their grandma and grandpa? Any cousins? Anybody involved. We kind of want to get the lay of the land. So after we get the treatment program lined up and we get this approved, now, usually we’re dealing with one person and sometimes that person actually can help finance the program or pay for any type of expenses that would be incurred during getting your loved one treatment, sometimes they’re not. So what we do is we try to go through the pecking order of who’s the next person we can talk to. Okay, if there’s a grandfather or a father or someone who may help but we’re not quite sure, who’s the opinion leader of that person? So we kind of go through the order so we can actually properly assess how we’re going to handle this particular situation. There’s a sequence of events that need to take place.
And having a very strong group in your corner is very important. It’s going to be hard enough to actually get your loved one into treatment. We’re going to be dealing with all the emotions. A lot of times, the addiction’s been going on for 10, 15 years or significantly a long time. And it’s going to be a lot of emotions involved and people get caved in. They actually have so much force that comes back at them when they try to deal with this addict, that they become very apathetic about it. So we have to kind of run a little therapeutic process to get their willingness to confront this issue up.
With that said, we have to evaluate our team members and we have to get everybody on board. We have to get all the questions answered. We can’t have any doubts or reservations about what we’re doing, any questions about the treatment program. Because we’re only as strong as the weakest link. And if we’ve got somebody out there, we’ve got a grandma that’s going to go into agreement with the person as soon as he starts pitching a little bit of a fit and wants to cave in, then we’ve got to handle grandma because like I said, we’ve got one shot at this. Because he’s not going to stop using drugs or alcohol and he’s going to keep going and it’s actually going to get worse after this. So we have to push through, and for his sake, get him through this.
I’ve been able to work with some of the greatest people in the country. And once I actually explain to them what we need, what the tools are and what the methods are, the mechanics of an intervention are, the family and the friends will actually put together the plan. They actually, “Oh, okay. That’s what we need.” Then they’ll start figuring it out. So we go through the five stages of the intervention, the planning, the preparation, the execution, and then the introduction of the consequences if they say no. That’s after we’ve executed. And then the fifth and the worst case scenario is actually continuing to hold the bottom line on if they refuse to go. But the first, we’re in the planning stage and the preparation stage, and we can’t get to the execution stage and have somebody yank our legs out from under us.
Learn more about our drug and alcohol addiction intervention course for families
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:15 Assembling Your Intervention Team
0:57 Finding the Opinion Leader
1:52 Dealing with Emotions and Addiction
3:54 Getting Everyone on Board with the Intervention
6:28 The Five Stages of an Intervention
