I don’t know how a trauma in my family a few generations back might show up in my life, that is until I recently passed up buying a pumpkin. I stood in front of a beautiful pumpkin at a farm stand. It was marked half price and I stood in front of it, frozen, unable to decide if I wanted to buy it. I walked away from that pumpkin feeling sick to my stomach.
The process of intervention is an opportunity for the family to come together and manage the addiction in a proactive way. For years, families respond to the chaos of addiction. Intervention is the opportunity for a family to look at that pattern and determine how they will handle future situations.
Families know in their guts that something isn’t right. When they address the concerned person, a process of gaslighting, or turning the warranted concern around on the person that voiced it. As a result, loved ones start to question their premonition and offer the person the benefit of the doubt all the while, the addiction is unknowingly in control of everyone affected.
If you consider yourself a functional alcoholic, are you really functioning at your highest level? Or have you lowered the bar of what’s acceptable to cater to your addiction?
An intervention done properly is actually a very loving meeting. A good intervention is about enabling the suffering person to understand their situation – the goal being to get them to acknowledge that they need help and begin to ask for it.
If the person that needs help is willing to engage and wants to go to treatment, the service that’s best for you will probably be Rehab Placement Services. However, if the affected person is not actively engaged and is unwilling to consider treatment, you may need Intervention Services.
After successfully placing a newly recovering person suffering from addiction in a treatment facility after an intervention, your work with Suntra may not be over. To a certain extent, the hard work is still to come. At Suntra, we offer more than just intervention services: we also offer family support while a loved one is undergoing treatment. We understand and have worked through many of the common problems that come up for families during treatment; we know that, most likely, your loved one is going to call sometime in the first week of treatment asking to leave. This is a common call, and we can work with you on how to handle it. Perhaps even more importantly, while your loved one is in treatment we can work together to look at the dynamics at home that may have encouraged or enabled addiction. Often, family members have inadvertently become caught up in the cycle of addiction. The process begins slowly, without anyone realizing what’s happening, and becomes a cyclone that sweeps up other people, careers, and finances. While the patient is in treatment, the team at Suntra works with the family to set boundaries—firm lines in the sand—of what they are… Read More »The Intervention is Just the Beginning
To cope, I developed a false persona. It wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t fully conscious, but for ten years I lived a painful, false existence. Every morning when I woke up, I woke up in extreme fear of being found out for who I really was. So I quickly put on a mask and lived as my false self.
I have two sobriety dates that are meaningful to me: the date that I attended my first 12 Step meeting, and the date that I finally committed to living a life of abstinence—a date so important to me that I had it tattooed on the back of my arm.
