Family Perspective: Goals

Hey, guys. Topic of video today is about talking to families whose loved one, son, brother, daughter, husband, wife, whoever is beginning their journey, so to speak, into recovery. Or maybe they're going to treatment for the second or third time. What I usually do when I get on the phone with the families is I focus on what is the end game? What is the ultimate goal? What are we trying to get? Because the path is not going to be straight. It's not going to be direct, it's going to be messy and sometimes very disappointing, sometimes amazing.

What I always tell parents, and let's just take a young girl, for example, who's starting recovery. There might be all kinds of issues. There might be some trauma in the background, there might be some eating disorder stuff, there could be some behavioral stuff. Depending on the substance, whether it's fentanyl or booze or whatever. We can have all those conversations and we can talk about the specific sort of guardrails based on the experience of the addict. But in the end, what we're looking for is a different lifestyle.

And how do we get that lifestyle? How do we get to a place where the lifestyle and the perspective starts to change? That happens in this over community that happens over time, surrounded by other addicts and alcoholics. So regardless of how many times you go to treatment or whether you go to treatment and then a sober living home or whatever you do in terms of your continuum of care, I always tell parents, we need to end up in the community. We need to end up living somewhere safe with whatever structure is necessary at the time.

Living alone in your apartment and doing your recovery by yourself is difficult. The numbers to are terrible about the success rates. Living with other alcoholics in a house or in an apartment, maybe with two or three, or maybe a sober house with eight or ten, the likelihood that you're going to stay sober, or I should say the likelihood that you're going to do the things to help assure that you stay sober goes up when you're surrounded by more people goes down the closer you get to being alone.

I always say that suppose somebody just got out of treatment and they're sitting in their couch in their apartment and they're thinking, oh, the meeting's at 05:00 I should probably get ready and get ready to go, and it's all on you. It's all up to you to get up and go to the meeting. And if you're sitting in an apartment or a silver house with other people and a few people walk in front of you and say, hey, man, let's go to the meeting. You're a thousand times more likely to go to that meeting.

And that's just the way human nature works. So, back to the young woman. What I would suggest for the parents, regardless of the history and regardless of how many treatments or what kind of other behavioral stuff is going on, we need to put her in a place where she can have the right level of structure while figuring out what a sober lifestyle looks like. Because that lifestyle change can be difficult. It can take time. It can be messy. It can be amazing and rewarding, and parents are blown away about how quickly their kids become alive again.

But nobody does it alone. Nobody does it alone. You don't go to AA meetings and hear people who get two and three year medallions say, I did this all by myself. I live in a tent in the woods, and I did this alone. Nobody says that. They all say, I did this with my dudes or my girls, and everybody's crying and hugging, and everything's beautiful. It's a we thing. It's always been that way. For some of us, it's a big, big shift because the using lifestyle is about isolating and about hiding and about clandestine lifestyle, and the recovery lifestyle is about.

I'm open. Here I am. This is me. This is me with all my faults. This is who I really am. And that can be scary. So the conversation with families or loved ones or whoever that I have, generally trying to get someone into treatment or into a sober house, I always try to build into their psyche, like into their get it, drill it into their heads that this has got to be the end. This is the end of the path, is the community, the sober lifestyle. It looks like everyone else's life, job, friends, s*** to do, but it's sober.

And that's got to be the end. That's got to be in mind, because that's really where long term recovery lives. And it's so amazing how supported that lifestyle can be once you find it.