Unifying Your Family Intervention Team
The attitude of the family is key to the success of an intervention
This video is about unifying your family intervention team. In this series of video’s Bobby Newman, an Internationally Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor, discusses the Successful Intervention Tips that teach family and friends of addicted people how to help them. Unifying your family intervention team is the third step in this process, and very vital to the overall outcome.
The intervention itself, actually, is as much for the family (if not more) as it is for the addict. People ask me, time and time again, what’s the hard part about doing an intervention? And my first and foremost preoccupation is handling the family. This person has gotten into drugs and been allowed to continue to use drugs due to, for lack of a better term, dysfunction or disagreement or lack of coordination amongst family members.
Oftentimes there’s disagreement within the family. There’s not a clear-cut defined code of conduct or moral code that that person has been following, and she or he has strayed from a straight line. And the family will actually somewhat go into agreement with it.
I get told time and time again that, “Oh, he’s just smoking marijuana,” or, “Oh, he just drank this much” or, “He just did that” or, “We’ve bailed him out of jail” or, “He had a car wreck” or, “He lost his job and we didn’t think anything about it”… and this behavior has gone on. Many times, the person who said, “Oh, he’s stolen our credit card. He’s stolen our property. He’s done this, or she’s done that” and now that the person is about to die, the family is stepping up. And this is a common occurrence because we always believe that the person is going to change their behavior.
But all those types of behaviors are warning signs that people should pay attention to: “Wait a minute, something’s going wrong and we need to actually address this.” And it comes down to when they start doing bad in school, or deviating from that plan that they had… There’s all types of things about doing an intervention.
Unifying the intervention team is actually family coming together and having a clear-cut goal as to getting the person into and through a treatment program. And I can’t express enough the success that a person will have if the family members actually are unified and together. It’s a wondrous thing. It is basically very therapeutic for the family as well. I can tell you countless stories, give great examples of people, of family members, large families, that once they were brought together and they understood what they needed to do, and they were willing to do it and they stayed strong, their loved one went into treatment program and did really, really well.
I’ve had family members that were on opposite sides and they didn’t really get along, but the addict, once they saw those people in the room together for the sake of their well-being, were really, really impacted. So it’s therapeutic for the family and it’s therapeutic for the addict to unify, and have the clear-cut goal of getting the person into and through a treatment program and coming back and being a productive member of society.
Learn more about our drug and alcohol addiction intervention course for families
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:22 Unifying Your Intervention Team
0:41 Goal of an Intervention
1:09 Interventions Help the Whole Family
2:45 Family Coming Together to Help Loved Ones
2:54 Addiction Treatment Success with a Unified Family
3:58 25 Tips for a Successful Intervention
4:11 Intervention Online Course
Resource: A scholarly study on family relations and addiction
