Drug & Alcohol Intervention Help - We Get Them In to Treatment : NYC Intervention Specialists

What in the world can you do when faced with the addiction, the dependency of someone you love?

The news is this – the woman driving the wrong way on the highway, who crashed and killed eight including herself – was drunk and high. A broken Absolut bottle in the car, along with the autopsy report tells the tale of a woman gravely impaired. Behind the wheel, on the road, driving a time bomb.

A relative reports he knew something was wrong, but…

Fear gets in the way.

“She won’t talk with me again!”

“She’ll be mad at me.”

“She’ll leave!”

These are some of the excuses I hear folks using when deciding they’ll stand by rather than act to help change someone they love get better. Their loved on is stuck in the vice-grip of impaired behavior and fear stops family and friends in their tracks.

Stand by and pray? Hope against a history that tells you things don’t change, unless you change them?

Prayer without action is worth little in getting someone you love to breakthrough a drug or alcohol dependency to accept help.

Be brave. Step in. Speak up.

Give voice to fear you feel and turn it into the hope of action.

Take three and call me in the morning. Three breaths that is. I invite you to do something different. Different action yields different results. I promise.

I spent an hour on WFAN this morning, the nation’s biggest AM radio station. I share it with you here: http://podcast.wfan.com/wfan/1821613.mp3

Onward,
Brad

He drinks like me.

A lot. A real thirst there, to get into the zone, and out of his head. Four rehabs. Six years of effort. Three years clean. Two careers. Many friends. We’re getting worn out by it.

He’s ghosted again. Pete has.

Told his job that his “sister is on life support…”

Imagine that. I can pretty easily, as I said crap like that; lies to cover the addicted life spinning, spinning, spinning. I can picture him now. Holed up in his cramped studio apartment. Last time he was alive, but drunk and spaced on opiates when I banged loud enough for him to let me on in. The time before that he was on the floor when the NY Fire Department took the door off its’ hinges. They saved his life that time. Heart rate low. Breathing shallow.

So what the next few days hold, I’m not sure. I think he will likely lose his job this time, and with that his insurance. He has no family he is close with, and the friends in his life – his family of choice – are at the point where the relationships are deeply strained from the lying, scheming and relapse.

God, I am glad I am clean and sober today. Grateful that the obsession to get high has been lifted.

Change begins. x, Brad

I am flying on a plane now. Internet working. Amazing.

My Grandma Lamm – Leona Lamm to be precise – told me back in 2002 at her 100th birthday that she was most amazed by:

1) her family and friends and the love she shared + gave

2) the incredible jaw-dropping technological advances her eyes had seen

Leona was a school teacher in Nebraska before the big old depression gave everyone fits for a bit. She married Charles, a farmer, and they lived in wedded hard working bliss until the Great Depression hit and just like that the old family farm that had been passed down, was gone.

Not to be discouraged to pause, they kept moving. After all, they had four young boys and a lot of love. They were hungry sometimes, but they never starved.

Headed west on a train they stepped off in Boise, Idaho and settled just outside Boise in a Quaker community called Greenleaf. They lived in a tent for more than a year, put apple box wooden slats on the dirt “floor” to make it less about  sleeping on the ground.

Amazing.

No telephones, no wifi, no emailing while you fly right across the country just like that!

In tough times she was always resilient, and sweet really. She’d tell you she wasn’t always sweet, but I would. She was strong as an ox and pretty as a lady could be. She raised four boys just fine, and they all lived to tell about it their hide still on’em.

What I remember most about my Grandma Lamm was that she was kind and brimming with love. She made the best of tough times, and kept moving, knowing that an unkind word wouldn’t do anybody a bit of good, and that forward action would yield results. Maybe not always the best results, but soon that apple cart box floor gave way to an apartment and then their own home. Change back then was achingly slow sometimes, but make it through they did.

One minute at a time sometimes.

Here’s to Leona. A good woman, and fine lady, and the woman who shaped me as much as anybody, into the man I am today through her practice of resilience and love.

- Brad

Just home this evening from the Association of Intervention Specialists (AIS) conference in Denver. What a great time! I presented a case study on Jason B.. With his family we intervened to help three + years back. I hadn’t spoken with Jason in over a year, and moments after I presented an email arrived from him, sending love and gratitude and good weather wishes from Hawaii. I share it with you because it means a lot to me:

___

Aloha Friday!Brad,
Sending a little shout out from the big island of Hawaii.
Congratulations! you are a wonderful human being. Thank you for all
the help along this journey. We are grateful for the important work
you bring into  this world. it would be great to hear an update of
your story. what is new? what is old? is the book out yet? inquiring
minds would love to know.
talk to you soon, Love Jason

___

UKESAD

Heading to London on Wednesday next to present at UKESAD. Very exciting times these are. To change!

- Brad

Before and after pictures. Amazing!

Please pass the cure! Now. Right now! Be quick about it.  

One truth is that to get to recovery there is more than one route to travel. None will be easy, (short of being locked up away from that which compels) but accessible and available to most.

So we craft a plan, with options.

True, ‘Plan A’ is the one that resonates most strongly with the family and myself prior to introducing it. But the goal is recovery and wellness – not  a specific way to get there. There is more than one way, and certainly more than my way.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program is pitching an addiction cure book. It’s a commercial. They guarantee money back if your loved one is not completely cured. It’s like the intervention hotline that pitches a 100% success rate. Makes fear feel better, but it’s not true. Nothing is 100%, except water maybe; which is 100% wet.

‘The Plan’, crafted in love, delivered with care, conviction, purpose and authenticity continues a conversation from which may spring another plan. 

Change is hard, dusty work. The skill set required to carry through with a plan is often more challenging than the agony of sitting in defeat. We are comfortable in the mess, the despair, the pain. We know that. We know how it feels, and smells, and tastes. This recovery stuff, is different entirely.

So here’s to making hope happen. One plan at a time, one family at a time. And if ‘Plan A’ is not the one, craft another. 

Onward!

Brad