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According to the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, about 90% of professional interventions facilitated by a trained, professional facilitator result in treatment for addicts and alcoholics. If you’re concerned about an addicted loved one, this is good news. It means you can play a personal role in helping your loved one get well, especially if an experienced interventionist is involved. While getting into treatment is no guarantee for recovery, it’s a good start, and many have recovered from addiction as a result of alcohol or drug rehab. A professional interventionist can help manage the emotions that inevitably arise during an intervention and guide it to a successful close.

When to Call a Professional Interventionist

Before a professional intervention can take place, families must come out of denial about the truth of the addict’s situation. Getting clear about the need for expert help is important. Here are a few signs for when to call in a professional:

• Your loved one’s substance abuse is causing problems in multiple areas of his or her life – including  financial, professional, school, health, legal or marriage – yet he or she continues to use and drink
• Your loved has failed in the past at quitting drugs or alcohol alone
• An intervention that did not employ an intervention professional failed
• You’re ready to employ tough love, compassion and consequences to help your loved one.
•  Your loved one has recently displayed suicidal behavior
• Your loved one is taking several mood-altering substances

It’s true that one-on-one interventions sometimes work. You can gain the full attention of your loved one by sitting him or her down for a quiet talk, and a non-confrontational style sometimes takes the negative charge out of what can be a challenging situation for an addicted individual. However, pressure from a group of individuals who care about the addict or alcoholic can also be a powerful motivation for getting help and should be considered a strong option for facilitating a loved one’s recovery, especially considering the statistical evidence for success.

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A drug addiction intervention is typically thought of as a structured confrontation involving a group of family members and friends who come together to facilitate the recovery of a loved one. According to the Mayo Clinic, the ideal number of individuals on the intervention team is 4-6 individuals plus a professional facilitator. The goal is to help the addicted individual find his or her way to a rehab center and embark on a course of treatment. The team cites specific consequences if the individual refuses to enter treatment, and members of the team may go on to seek treatment for themselves through programs that address codependency.

On the other hand, one of the most common ways to help an individual reach treatment is through one-on-one interventions, in which a family member, close friend or co-worker sits down with an addicted individual and asks him or her to stop abusing drugs or alcohol. This form of intervention has both its benefits and its challenges.

Benefits and Drawbacks of a Personal Intervention

A drug addiction intervention that occurs between an addicted individual and a close friend or family member is usually impromptu and doesn’t allow time for planning. If someone says “yes” to treatment and there are no suggestions for where to go or what beds might are immediately available, the moment may be lost and the individual may shut down completely to the idea of rehab. In addition, without planning, it’s easy to say the wrong thing out of anger or with other emotional tones that could place a wall between the individual who needs treatment and the treatment he or she might need. Even if there is a planned script and ideas about treatment centers in a one-on-one intervention, one person alone may not hold enough weight to convince someone to enter rehab.

Nevertheless, a drug intervention between the addicted individual and one person can work. Team interventions typically put someone in the awkward position of having to admit the problem and make a decision for or against treatment on the spot, whereas in a one-on-one intervention, an addicted individual may feel more comfortable responding to someone’s concern and even asking for help. It’s also easier for one person to maintain his or her calm while trying to intervene. Emotions can run high in a group intervention, and it may be hard to reign them in.

For best intervention results, it’s best to consult with a professional before attempting a one-on-one intervention, in order to determine appropriate language and course of action.

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Particular circumstances may differ in the life of an addict, but the desire to escape reality by using alcohol or drugs is consistent across the board. Addiction knows no bounds in terms of age, gender, economic status, geographical area, religion or ethnicity. Addicts can be found in the most elite country clubs as well as on the dirtiest of streets. They can be wearing Gucci and diamonds, or they can be wearing soiled rags. They can be model perfect, or they can be common and plain. They can be Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist. Despite outward appearances, the inward reality is the same. Addicts drink alcohol and use drugs because they don’t like the way they feel, and they want to escape their feelings and alter reality. They choose to do so with drugs or alcohol because it works. It works until it stops working. As dependence grows into addiction, the substance begins to take over. The substance is in control of decisions and actions. As the disease of addiction progresses, addicts enter into a life of guilt, shame, deceit and despair, putting their lives and the lives of people who care most into a chaotic whirlwind.

Life of An Addict Leads To Betrayal And Chaos

When alcohol or drugs take control, they become a priority. Any kind of moral character addicts may have falls by the wayside as they behave in ways they would not otherwise. They become unreliable in terms of showing up for work on time or meeting their friends for dinner or taking their spouses to a special event. They feel sick and hung over, so they lie to their bosses and families. They spend all of their money – and sometimes money they have stolen – on obtaining  more alcohol or heroin or meth or whatever their drug of choice. They suppress their guilt and shame by drinking or using even more, and they blame others – often their closest family and friends – for their behavior. The life of an addict is full of anxiety, fear and despair, which they attempt to cover up by still more substance abuse. Help and hope comes with the willingness to seek the help they need.

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If surrender and stopping drinking are the turning point, then developing emotional intelligence is the key to putting real distance between yourself and the last drink (and the next one). In 12-step work, the process is described in terms of spiritual growth, but even Bill Wilson, AA’s cofounder, admitted that he was lacking in emotional sobriety, regardless of the step-work he had done.

Researchers Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer stated a working definition of emotional intelligence in 1990 that is as follows:

“. . . the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor ones own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”

Salovey and Mayer identified four components of emotional intelligence:

• Perceiving emotions—Initially, it is important to notice and identify emotions. Sometimes this includes awareness of non-verbal cues like body language and facial expressions.
• Reasoning with emotions—Emotions play an important role in how we prioritize what we pay attention to.
• Understanding emotions—Emotions are triggered by perception, and understanding the perception gives insight into the emotion. If your spouse is angry, it may be that you did something disagreeable to him or her, or it may be that some other circumstance is upsetting.
• Managing emotions—Developing emotional intelligencemeans nurturing an ability to regulate one’s own emotions and respond appropriately. It also means responding appropriately to other people’s feelings.

Alcoholics and drug addicts, having spent years suppressing emotions by self medicating, often find themselves emotionally raw in early sobriety, and ill equipped to deal with their own random and wild emotional fluctuations, let alone the feelings of others.

Developing emotional intelligence means becoming aware of and deliberately outgrowing impulse control problems, boundary problems, the suppression of feelings, a tendency to be manipulative, and a host of other symptoms that interfere with emotional well-being and the ability to develop healthy relationships.

 

A common adage in recovery circles is that alcoholics and addicts stop maturing when they start using alcohol or drugs. As a result of the truth of this observation, many newcomers find themselves teenagers trapped in adult bodies. A forty-year-old who started drinking at the age of fifteen will often discover herself, in the absence of alcohol, mired in a haze of adolescent feelings and confusion. Many alcoholics—and drug addicts—simply stayed high as a coping tool for the challenges of their teens. The frustrations and anxieties of dating and social intercourse, interacting with authority, and responding to life in general are often smoothed out by substance abuse, and the needed and appropriate growth in these and other areas is stunted.

In 1958, Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote a letter to the A.A. Grapevine called The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety, in which he acknowledged this problem and urged AA members to confront a kind of immaturity that Wilson admitted to in himself.

He writes that the “adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance—urges quite appropriate to age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven” and states that the quest for fulfillment in these and other areas—and the inevitable frustration that follows any demand for perfection—is a recipe for pain, unhappiness, and depression.

He then equates emotional sobriety with humility and spiritual development.

In the world of psychology, emotional sobriety is defined by the following qualities:

• An ability to regulate strong emotions and mood—this begins with the ability to self-monitor and recognize negative emotion or mood (10^th-step in recovery mode), and then to shift perspective on the circumstances at hand so that one doesn’t go into reactive mode and exacerbate them
• An ability to simply allow feelings, and to identify and fully experience them, as opposed to avoidance through self-medication or other destructive behaviors
• Impulse control and deferred gratification—two areas many in recovery find difficult
• Acceptance—the relinquishing of control over people and situations, and a commitment to responding with one’s best efforts toward positive change, leaving the results to unfold as they may
• Honesty (with oneself and others)—the ability to value the truth above a cherished self-image.

These are a few of the components of emotional sobriety. And even though there are some days when it has to be enough to simply have made it through the day without a drink, real recovery requires a willingness to mature. Otherwise, the pain and frustration of an extended “dry drunk”—untreated alcoholism—may eventually lead back to a drink.