Intervention

Some of you may already have seen my posts on my sister. I'll give you a quick history of my situation so you don't think I'm a crazy.

I am the oldest of five I have three sisters and one brother (I am the mother hen and worry wart). I have a sister who is a heroin addict and is currently in rehab and doing well for the moment. I have written about my sister before, this one is for my brother. My brother has two young children (daughter 6 and his son will be 5 next month).

My brother has an alcohol and crack addiction. He was already in the hospital for kidney failure and was very close to needing dialysis (he will be 29 this month). He insists on trying to kick it himself. He just fell off the wagon (again) after 3 mo of sobriety (I know that's not very long but it seemed like he was doing so well). He is definitely doing crack again and drinking heavily again (hard alcohol). I talked with my family about having an intervention before and I don't want to do it half assed. He is a big guy (6'2"), I'm afraid he would just bulldoze his way out of the room. I was thinking the only way this is going to work is if we do it Soprano style but I don't want anyone getting hurt and I don't need any trouble. Plus he's going to take this very personally, he is already very insecure. Are there specialists who do this? If so does anyone have a contact number and does it cost anything? I'd like any kind of information or suggestions. Has any ever had one and did it work for you or make it worse?

Thank you!

Dear vetswife before you take any action please take a few moments to read this. www.rational.org/html_public_area/family.html
Boz

The Intervention Plot
©2006, Jack Trimpey, all rights reserved.


This blog often uses male pronouns when
gender is irrelevant, the old-fashioned way.
Family addiction intervention is a practice with its origins in the 1970’s, when American society was in flux from social unrest stemming in part from an outbreak of mass, runaway addiction to alcohol and other drugs. The result of that turmoil has been the emergence of a social movement based upon the values and beliefs of addicted people themselves, a quiet shift in mainstream thinking that has gained considerable momentum in recent years. Concepts from the recovery group movement have given rise to an enormous addiction treatment industry, hungry for the lucrative, repeat business of clients in the throes of unresolved, chronic addiction. One anomaly spawned by the addiction treatment industry is an aggressive marketing concept, addiction intervention, which was hijacked from its legitimate 32nd cousin, crisis intervention.

Addiction intervention is based entirely upon 12-step recoveryism, which denies that free will exists among addicted people. An intervention is a conspiracy by a family to abduct a family member, whom I’ll call a subject, into a treatment center. Not surprisingly, a professional guild of interventionists has formed around this legally and ethically challenged practice. Under the guidance of an Interventionist, families convene a little “surprise party” for the addicted family member during which they use highly manipulative, frankly dishonest, and deceitful means to coerce submission to addiction treatment. These house parties are usually presided over by an Interventionist whose professional ancestry is closer to bounty hunter than to social worker or therapist, although many social workers and therapists engage in or advocate addiction interventions. Nearly always, Interventionists are members of AA/NA themselves, giving rise to inherent conflict of interest.

Interventionists work weeks or months in advance of the planned hit, making preparations for abduction with the cooperation of the family. The Interventionist recruits the subject’s near and distant relatives, co-workers, employers, old friends, neighbors, and anyone else who can be enlisted into the noble cause of abduction. Various means of emotional blackmail and intimidation through shame and guilt are rehearsed, and sensitive information about the subject is collected for later use during the hit. Interventions are carefully scripted, to be done “just so,” so that the chances of escape or backlash are minimized. Informed consent to treatment is denied and suppressed, often under the pretext that the proceedings are ethically proper, legally sanctioned coercion similar to arrest or detention.

In essence, the intervention is sprung exactly like a surprise birthday party, except that the prevailing mood and agenda are considerably different. The room is already stacked with VIP’s from the subject’s life, and the Interventionist calls the abduction to order. Each VIP exudes love as the only purpose in being present, and then recites rehearsed lines about the subject’s disgusting behavior and betrayals. Outside, is likely an idling, white van, treatment center logo on door. When the intervention is successful the subject implodes emotionally, falling into a sobbing heap to be led off to the waiting van.

Discussion
If addiction treatment benefited addicted people, one might defend the practice of addiction intervention based upon that data. Family interventionism is quite controversial, inviting criticism from many quarters. However, there is no data showing that addiction treatment is better than doing nothing about the problem, nor has intervention produced any basis in successful outcomes.

To the contrary, addiction intervention is most likely to be harmful to the entire family, for a number of reasons. We believe that the family unit, for all its troubles and problems, is the highest level of human organization, without exception. Families are the cradle of life, where life begins, where life is protected, nutured, and that family bonds amount to a biological guarantee of survival. All for one; one for all. Intervention is surrender by the family to an external source of authority that will forever define the rules of family life. Even so, the original addiction will never be resolved.

The belief that families breed addiction, through their genes or dysfunctions, is a typical inversion so common to addictive thinking, a thinking style we call the Addictive Voice. Obviously, addiction breeds sorrows, anger, poverty, and conflict. Addiction is the embedded traitor, the enemy within. Families, therefore, have no responsibility to protect an addicted family member. The family’s first priority is to protect itself against its addicted member.

Face it; by considering intervention, you’ve already proved beyond any doubt that you cannot come between an addict and his precioussss stuff. That is because addiction is essentially a survival drive, gone amok. In jails, prisons, and hospitals, addicts get high on alcohol and other drugs. Addiction intervention is an impossibility, from the start!

What, then, should we do?
It would be irresponsible for me to discourage the use of intervention tactics but offer nothing better. The better mousetrap you seek is not Rational Recovery, but your own family, which is the carrier of a rich heritage of traditions, beliefs, and values that have withstood the rigors of survival over many generations.

AVRT-based recovery is the application of your original family values to the problem of addiction in the family. It is based upon belief in free will and knowledge of good and evil. The disease concept of addiction is dismissed as an example of Addictive Voice, and addiction is viewed as the ultimate self-indulgence, the quest for physical pleasure at the expense of enormous harm to the family. We know that independent recovery from addiction is commonplace, easy, rewarding, and can be learned. AVRT® is the lore of self-recovery from substance addiction in a brief, educational format.

No family can survive the presence of addiction. There may remain cohabitation, uneasy tolerance, and certain kinds of cooperation, but family bonds are tested and defeated by any member’s loyalty to something that itself is destructive to the family. Addiction demands all of a subject’s loyalty, all of his resources, his very soul. Addiciton is ruthless and will suck a family into the realm of addiction, where everyone plays by the rules of addiction, beginning with tolerance for the continued use of alcohol and other drugs. Addiction will exhaust all of a family’s financial and emotional resources, and demand more.

Neither you nor your family is dysfunctional, nor do any of you suffer from the mythical disease of codependency, but your survival as individuals and as a family is directly threatened by the presence of a traitor within.

Let me be plain about this. Intervention is nothing more nor less than abduction of an addicted person into 12-step recoveryism, a world of never-ending addiction where recovery is prohibited, and where one-day-at-a-time sobriety with the help of a self-made god is the highest aspiration of everyone involved. In that inverted world, the family bears a great burden of change, to become supportive of the subject, to undertake massive personal change, to tolerate the lifelong threat of sudden relapse, to preserve the subject’s privilege to have yummy relapses under certain, undefined conditions, to deny the immorality and betrayal of addiction.

Intervention says goodbye.
If you instigate or collaborate with an intervention, you will never see the original, pre-addiction version of your loved one again. Intervention presents him with the impossible dilemma of choosing between two intolerable alternatives, active addiction and life in recovery. He may flee, almost certainly to deeper waters, or he may surrender his identity, his autonomy, his free will, his original family values, his dignity, and his freedom. From hospital windows he’ll look out to a world in which he has failed, and his release will be to a subculture deeply offensive to his true nature. Most of the people he’ll meet at the hospital will be chronic addicts who have had multiple admissions to detox and rehab, and are now completing addiction’s cycle of despair. Intervention denies your addicted family member the dignity of choosing between addiction and the benefits of family inclusion. Worst of all, intervention denies him the very real possibility of independent recovery through moral action — planned, permanent abstinence.

Addiction itself is betrayal of the family, but intervention is betrayal of the addicted family member. Intervention denies the dual nature of addiction, compresses the human spirit into the mold of addiction, and ships the sobbing heap out the front door to a treatment center. When you do this, the animal within him will see you as the worst kind of enemy, threatening its survival. It will lash out against you emotionally, and the wounds may never heal, and the chances of him emerging whole are slim.

Before he became addicted, he was an original soul, a core person you loved but is now missing. That soul disappeared when he was transformed by the unspeakable pleasure of addiction into an animal — an intelligent, well-spoken, party animal, a Beast whose first priority and loyalty is to the high life, the pleasure of alcohol and other drugs. The original person is still “in there,” but the call of wild is overriding his better judgment and running his life. Only desperate straits will call him out, if at all.

If he does emerge from the addiction treatment center, in recovery, and attends the standard ninety AA/NA meetings in ninety days, then attends meetings less urgently, and then begins to build up “sober-time,” you will have to work hard to keep up with or at least accept his increasing weirdness. You will have to wear the yoke of “codependent” or “enabler,” and bear some of the responsibility for his degeneracy. You will take second place to, “Sorry, honey, my recovery comes first,” and evenings of meetings, meetings, meetings. Intervention consigns addicted people to a sick ward from which only the infirm emerge, self-described, defective people incapable of moral conduct derived from family values, requiring evening supervision to abstain from alcohol and other drugs.

It’s very difficult to see your beloved spouse, child, or parent as a disgusting, immoral, stinky lush or drunk. The disease concept of addiction is simply denial of the moral dimension of addiction and recovery, a viewpoint that requires all other truth to be inverted in order to fit. The disease idea is a wonderful illusion that transforms the *** in your family into a disease victim in need of skilled, professional care. As a codependent, you can stop being angry and disgusted and discover newfound compassion for the sick one who has been frightening the children and stinking up the house. Disease thinking feels better in the short run, but leads to the endless loop of recoveryism.

The necessary confrontation
However, once you have quickly studied AVRT®, you can take advantage of that sophisticated device by planning a confrontation. While intervention is monistic, viewing your addicted family member as a globally diseased, defective being, AVRT® views him as a human being occupying an animal’s body that has come to experience addictive pleasure as a survival drive. Therefore, when you sit down with him, under conditions that make sense to you, you can force him to make a decision between his addiction and conditions you have already decided upon.

A good summary of the zero-tolerance ultimatum is posted at the website, plus an article in the subscription area about how to set the stage for your addicted family member to take positive action that will preserve everyone’s freedom and dignity. As a subscriber to the RR website, you will have access to substantial resources on AVRT-based recovery. Also available to subscribers are the the Rational Recovery Discussion Forums, where addicted people stage their own recovery through planned, permanent abstinence. A Family Forum provides satisfying answers about AVRT-based recovery and zero-tolerance in the family. The bookstore has an audio CD, Zero-Tolerance in the Family, which provides general guidance to families faced with the crisis of addiction.

Plan B
Your addicted family member may choose his addiction over you and the family and storm out of your life. Are you ready for that? Of course, Plan A is that your family member will accept zero-tolerance for continued self-intoxication, but Rational Recovery helps families to formulate Plan B, the action that will be taken in the event of continued substance abuse.

You may already be aware that your addicted family member left you years ago, and you’ve been living with the loveless, animal shell of the one you once loved. It’s possible that, confronted with zero-tolerance, he will say goodbye. However, in the mode of confrontation, which forces the choice, his self-determination is preserved, and you aren’t the one using deception to gain your ends, as in intervention.

The truth is that very often addicted people will choose the family over addiction; in fact, it is the threat of such intolerable loss that summons up the original soul to take command at last. In that event, the crown jewel of addiction recovery, Addictive Voice Recognition Technique® (AVRT®), is available to guide him through the short journey to life after addiction.

I believe in your addicted family member’s ability to summarily quit the use of alcohol and other drugs based upon the basic beliefs and values common to your family of origin. I believe that your native beliefs and family values are vastly superior to those of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, the members of recovery groups everywhere, and of all of the professional counselors of America, combined.

Keep the faith that brought your family into existence, and which is very probably the only set of values that can restore your addicted family member to his original identity, and allow for eventual reconciliation based upon sincerity and common sense.

Fiction, stranger than truth
As if matters weren’t bad enough for addicted people and their families, now the A&E channel has a weekly program, Intervention, portraying the high drama of families struggling with their addicted members. As reality TV, Intervention gets a failing grade due to its orchestration by professional couselors who bend the drama to fit the mythology of addictive disease.

Is A&E’s Intervention a useful resource for families with real problems with real alcoholics and other substance abusers? I think the show should be introduced with the warning, “Don’t try this at home, ever!”