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How to Help
Someone Struggling with Addiction |
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Being in a relationship
with someone who struggles with addiction can be agonizing. It is
hard to see (and experience) those we care about hurt themselves.
The natural reaction for most is to want to help, but unfortunately,
few people really understand how best to help. The common wisdom is
that someone who struggles with addiction needs professional
treatment, and once they get it, things will be alright. Therefore,
your primary task is to find some way to get your friend or loved
one into treatment. This most often involves pleading, threats, or
arranging some kind of formal intervention where the person
struggling with addiction is surprised by a roomful of family and
friends who encourage them to enter treatment. It is true that
treatment can help, but studies have also shown that when a person
enters treatment with low motivation to change (which
is most often the case when the previously mentioned tactics are
used), they very often don't engage in the process, frequently drop
out early, and usually resume their addictive behavior shortly after
discharge. As a result, it does not take more than a couple of
failed treatment episodes before we begin to lose hope that things
will change, get more and more angry at the person struggling with
addiction, and become resentful of all the time and effort that we
have put into attempting to help them. Further, our resentment
deepens when the person struggling with addiction causes us (and
other family members) pain as a result of their behavior. It is a
very serious problem with no simple solutions.
So what is the
optimal way to proceed in such a case? I believe the following steps
provide the best path for success for anyone who wants to help a
person struggling with addiction:
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Step 1:
Gain an accurate understanding of the problem of addiction.
Knowledge is power, but unfortunately, many people will spend
countless hours attempting to change a person who struggles with
addiction without ever really taking the time to understand
addiction. Chances are, the person who struggles with addiction,
also has very little knowledge of the problem. By educating yourself
about addiction, you will be in a much better position to understand
how people change and the best methods for long-term success. I
would start by reading the
Top Five
Things You Should Know About Addiction
(of course the rest of this site also has information
that would be useful to know).
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Step 2:
There are few really good, science-based publications on how best to
help someone who struggles with addiction. One exception, is a book
titled
Get Your
Loved One Sober: Alternatives to Nagging, Pleading and Threatening
by
Robert Meyer and Brenda Wolfe. Although the book focuses
primarily on helping someone with a
 drinking
problem, the information is applicable across all addictions (drugs,
gambling, sex). What makes this book unique is that it is based on
many years of scientific research into an intervention model called
the
Community Reinforcement and
Family Training (CRAFT) approach. The previous
link will give you an overview of the Community Reinforcement Approach
(in which CRAFT is an offshoot) until you are able to
purchase the book. Also, Robert Meyer did a
presentation on CRAFT
that also can provide you some background information on the
approach. A word of caution, it is not a magic bullet and requires
effort on your part, but at least there is solid evidence that if
you follow the suggestions in the book your chances of truly helping
someone with an addiction increase substantially.
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Step 3:
Seek out your own therapy (if you are not already engaged in the
process) - but this suggestion takes some clarification. Seeing the
wrong therapist can actually make matters worse if they have less
understanding of addiction than you do (because you have already
done Step 1), and they are unaware of the information you learned in
Step 2 and push for a classic intervention that does not have a high
success rate. The goal here is not to seek out an expert that will
tell you what to do in relation to the person struggling with
addiction, but to
find a competent counselor
that can help you developmentally gain greater insight,
skills, and emotional resources to better cope with your situation.
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Additional resources you
may find helpful:
What
to do when an alcoholic does not want to quit
Spouses of alcoholics may complicate the problem
Helping Family Members with Addiction
(Nice
article by a well-respected clinician from Harvard) |
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