Bill Maher, Interventionist

Specializing in Gentle, Respectful Intervention of Alcoholism and Other Addictions

Parents— Don’t Try This at Home

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teenage alcoholismIt’s mind-boggling to me that families often try to treat the medical disease of addiction at home. If your teenager broke his arm, would you set the bone at the kitchen table? If he had an asthma attack, would you lecture him about getting his act together?

Of course not.

Still, families grapple with addiction at home for two reasons: First, addiction can look an awful lot like bad behavior, especially at the outset.  And second, parents feel embarrassed that addiction has found it’s way into their family, so they try solving the problem behind closed doors. There is a lot of shame related to this disease— parents feel as if they have failed.

In my 30 years as an interventionist, I’ve come to understand that addiction is one of the most complicated medical diseases to date. Few addicts recover on their own. And when they do, the hidden components of the disease have often gone untreated. An incomplete treatment leaves the entire family vulnerable to relapse. It can fracture families, which is counterproductive to your loved one finding and remaining in recovery.

Addiction treatment is never as straightforward as, say, cutting out a tumor or setting a broken bone. This disease is confusing and crazy-making. In the beginning, addiction looks a lot like a behavior problem. The manipulative behavior and the stealing feels like such a personal assault when in fact, it’s part of the disease process and there is an appropriate way to react to these behaviors that is not what you’d think.

We pull out our parenting tools and crack down with strict limits and consequences. Our intentions are good but, as the disease progresses, families don’t have the tools to deal with it on their own.

That’s why it’s important to seek help from a qualified addiction counselor, preferably one with experience in intervention, so that you make educated decisions and utilize your funds in the best way possible. Sure, I’m biased since that’s what I do.

But consider this. While a specialist costs money, just like a doctor costs money, they can direct your loved one to the best treatment for that individual and also save you money in the end– money that may have been wasted on the wrong treatment option for your child.

At the very least, find support for yourself.

Finding Help for Addiction

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Someone you love is showing signs of addiction. You’ve devoured books with titles like “Walking on Eggshells”. You’ve nudged, you’ve argued, and you’ve threatened. You’ve seen counselors and sought the advice of trusted friends. Still, the crazy-making behavior is accelerating like a runaway train and, by now, you’re feeling desperate.
Where do you turn?

Your next step is to seek the guidance of a certified addiction professional, ideally someone with experience in substance abuse intervention. But how do you find a reputable one? Who can you trust? As an addiction interventionist for 30 years, here’s my best advice:

Step One: Call a respected treatment center and ask them to refer you to an independent addiction professional in your area. Ask who they’d recommend for interventions. Who are their best referring case managers, addiction specialists, or interventionists in your city? Three programs I’d suggest calling include Milestones at Onsite in Tennessee, Cirque Lodge in Utah, or Saint Christopher’s in Louisiana. Jot down the names they offer, then call a second treatment center and ask the same questions. After a few phone calls, you’ll start hearing the same names. (In the Richmond, Virginia area, in addition to my intervention services, I recommend Gail Santarelli, LPC at Richmond IOP or Maryann Cox, LCSW. In Charlottesville, VA. I’d suggest Dr. Kevin Doyle).

Step Two: Now, start calling your list of recommended professionals and pay attention to their initial response. My approach is to ask family members to take some time before hiring me to watch my video talks about addiction and alcoholism, and read the client testimonials and client stories on my website. I also ask them to call two of my client references. My former clients will often say something like, “When Bill told us to do this, we thought he was crazy. But in the end, he was right.” This background research helps new clients establish trust in me before we begin the arduous process of intervention, recovery treatment, and aftercare. The road to recovery from drug addiction and/or alcoholism is often bumpy. When I work with families, there are often rough patches, such as when parents balk when I tell them to stop paying an adult child’s rent or confiscate a teenager’s cell phone. But they’ll remember my former clients’ words: “We thought he was crazy but his advice worked”.

Trust is everything in this process, and trust in who you are working with for the intervention is essential. In the end, you know your loved one better than I do. But I know the disease of addication better than you do. Together, we’ll work as a team to help your loved one get onto the road to recovery.

Bill Maher, Interventionist, is a Board Registered Interventionist II and Member of the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors and member of The Association of Intervention Specialists.

Your loved one is in treatment for alcoholism or addiction – now what?

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family intervention

Mary Gray with her brother, Fitzhugh

By Mary Gray Johnson

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but during the first month that my brother was in treatment I didn’t miss him. In fact, I was glad he was there. I could take a sigh of relief knowing that he was alive and safe – one I’d been holding in for the last five years.

After catching my breath, the reality of his absence set in. I began to miss him, and I started thinking about his return home. This would be great! My brother was sober and healthy! Everything would go back to normal!

Do you see where I’m going with this? When someone gets out of treatment, things can’t just go back to “normal.” And that’s a scary realization for most people – like my Dad, who had literally maintained the same daily routine for the past 25 years.

We realized that if my family kept living our lives like normal, we would be making it significantly harder for Fitzhugh to stay sober.

You see, we had become professionals at helping Fitzhugh’s disease thrive. Our lives revolved around it. Mom kept him from flunking out of school, Dad paid his bills, and I covered for him whenever trouble arose. We kept him from suffering any of the consequences of his alcohol and drug abuse.

I’ll go ahead and sound like a broken record – addiction is a family disease. Everyone in the family is affected, not just the addict.

Before Fitzhugh came home we had to take a hard look at ourselves – our habits, our family dynamics, and the trauma that we had been through. We had to change. With the guidance and support of Bill Maher and the support we found in Al-Anon, we found a new normal.

It wasn’t easy, or fun necessarily. But we decided that if keeping old habits meant hurting Fitzhugh’s recovery, that wasn’t going to work for us. To our pleasant surprise, the new normal has been hugely rewarding.

Mom found a new troublemaker to keep tabs on in our new lab puppy – allowing some breathing room for both she and my brother. Dad started meditating and going to Al-Anon regularly, making him a bit more flexible in his daily routine. And I’ve reaped the huge reward of helping many friends whose family members have gone through the same thing as mine.

Through these changes to better ourselves, we’ve created a stronger support network for one another. And we’re doing all that we can to support my brother in his health and recovery.

If your loved one recently went to treatment, call Bill so that you can learn to support them in recovery, rather than making sobriety harder. Bill can be reached at bill@interventionctr.com or call (804) 677-7728.

 

Family intervention: Escaping the chaos of drug addiction and alcoholism

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family interventionBy Mary Gray Johnson

The morning after my last exam of sophomore year of college, I woke up to a phone call from my mom saying that my brother was in a drug-induced coma and the doctors didn’t know if he would wake up. She didn’t assure me that everything “would be okay.” My normally unshaken mother couldn’t fix this.

My brother is one year younger than me, and at the time we were both attending colleges in Virginia about an hour from each other. He drank a lot. He smoked a lot of pot. And he also took a lot of anxiety medication, as far as I was aware. In retrospect, his incessant substance use clearly showed signs of addiction and/or alcoholism. Since early adolescence he had caused my family huge amount of pain and embarrassment. I knew that his habits weren’t healthy, but I justified it because he was in college. I thought that one day he’d outgrow it. Little did I know, he didn’t know how to stop using.

The one-hour drive to the hospital, knowing that my baby brother might be dead was the worst hour of my life. I was physically sickened because I knew that I could have done something to avoid it.

Five minutes before I arrived at the hospital, my brother woke up. Fast-forward to a year and a half later, he is thriving in recovery, committed to the 12-step program, starting college again. And my family has found a peace that we never knew in the chaos of addiction. It sounds wrong to sum up such a life changing transformation in a few sentences, but the reason I do so is because there’s a common denominator of our multi-faceted progress as a family. Our success wouldn’t have been possible without interventionist and addiction counselor Bill Maher, CIP, CADC, BRI II, ACI.

He has offered gentle guidance from helping us select a rehabilitation center to facilitating our own recovery and educating us on how best we can support my brother in his sobriety. The only thing we regret about our journey is not involving Bill sooner. I wish I had known there was such a resource available – someone who could facilitate a family intervention that would have possibly prevented that unforgettably traumatic, life-changing hospital visit.

Bill Maher, CIP, CADC, BRI II, ACI is a member of the Action Intervention Training team, which includes Jean Campbell, LCSW, T.E.P., CET III, and Jim Tracy, DDS, MA, CADC II, LAADC, CET II, CIP

Their next training is in West Palm Beach, Florida hosted by the Hanley Center of Origins Behavioral HealthCare, February 25th – 27th, 2015. Register at actioninterventiontraining.com

If you’re worried about a loved one, call Bill. Remember – college isn’t an excuse for unhealthy drinking. If you know a college student that’s standing out from their peers in terms of drinking or partying, it’s not a warning sign, it’s 911. Bill can be reached at

Interventionctr.com or (804) 677 7728