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Family Intervention Services

A family intervention often requires the assistance of an intervention services professional who offers intervention services as well as family intervention counseling.

Intervention service professionals are usually ex-addicts, or therapists who have some degree of experience doing family interventions. 

Personally, I have done around 200 family interventions, plus a number of difficult transports.  I have over 20 years of experience as a practicing addict, and many of my family intervention services and strategies are the result of my years as an addict.  My other arsenal is the result of working on the intervention service front lines for eight years, and has enabled me to have a 90% intervention success rate today.

Family intervention services should be, when done by a consummate professional, a larger set of changes in the relationships around the addict.  You should look for an interventionist with this big picture perspective on what is possible during a family intervention.

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Family Intervention Services Myths

A family intervention, no matter the drug, is about getting the person into drug treatment or detox. 

Contrary to some older ideas about what family intervention services should include, like getting the addict to admit to having a problem, or ask for help, I have found that complicating a family intervention with these additional agenda’s can severely bog down the intervention process and are, for the most part, completely irrelevant.  I measure an interventionist’s success by the number of people in treatment, not by how many confessions have occurred during the family intervention itself. The fact is that an addict will admit whatever you want them to admit, if they think it will get them what they want. And, they will change their minds on a dime, so confessions should not be a big priority during a family intervention.

Whether or not an addict asks for help during a family intervention is not a measure of their willingness, or of how well they will succeed.  It is only a measure of what you have managed to get them to say in the midst of the family intervention.  I have seen addicts go to treatment willingly and fall flat, and I have seen them come in kicking and screaming and end up the brightest success stories ever. Statistically, addicts who go to treatment unwillingly do slightly better, in fact. Therefore, getting them to agree to go and getting them there is what is important as your number one family intervention goal, even if they are in denial. Bigger picture realizations can, and will, come after they are thinking like a human being again.

Family intervention services are not necessarily what you see on TV, or what you hear about at a 12-Step meeting.  It is a larger set of solutions that should be well managed, which can succeed without fireworks, and which can be made permanent.  Please call our family intervention hotline for more details.

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Basic Family Intervention Services

Family intervention services should be customized every time.

The goal of the family intervention is to get the addict to agree to go to treatment and to figure out the most likely way to accomplish this.  It is not to have a family intervention meeting if there is some other strategy that will work better, for example. An alcoholic can have more severe physical issues, more severe withdrawal symptoms, and therefore need a very carefully planned and executed strategy which accounts for literally every hour of the final steps of the family intervention process. Transport should also be included. If these intervention services are not included then look somewhere else.

The Family Intervention Services Counselor

Hiring a family intervention services specialist is a very wise move for most families. 

A family intervention is difficult even with a professional interventionist, much less the difficulties a family will encounter in trying to do a drug intervention on their own.  An intervention services professional can bring a wide selection of intervention services for each problem encountered, and since they are not family, the interventionist can maintain a distance and neutrality during the family intervention, family members cannot.  Click to read Family Intervention Article.

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