Intervention

Healing doesn’t happen on its own. That’s an important lesson, for drug addicts and their families: Drug treatment and drug recovery aren’t self-generating phenomenon. On the contrary, drug rehab can only work when it’s sought out, and those individuals who check themselves into drug rehab centers are very often individuals who’ve been motivated to do so by an intervention. To put it as simply and as starkly as possible: Interventions save lives. If someone you care about has succumbed to a habitual pattern of drug use and abuse, you can’t afford not to act.

It bears noting at the outset that there is no such thing as an easy intervention. An intervention, after all, is ultimately a crisis-response mechanism…and that which can be easily resolved wouldn’t be a crisis in the first place. The point, of course, is that those individuals who commit themselves to conducting an intervention commit themselves to hardship, and to struggle. Anyone who approaches an intervention without being ready for a challenge is, unfortunately, only kidding himself.

But the fact that interventions are hard doesn’t mean that interventions aren’t worth the effort. Again, interventions really do save lives…and they really can be effective, as difficult as they might be, if the individuals involved in them are able to maintain supportive and loving attitudes. If you really want an addict to get better, you might say, you’ve got to show him how much you care in the course of the intervention process.

The information contained here is by no means the final word on interventions, but it should at the very least illuminate the key dynamics at work in a successful intervention event. The Storti model, rightly applied, fosters the sort of warmth and compassion that are so very vital to intervention success. If you’re going to conduct an intervention, you’ve got to do it right…and if you’re going to do it right, you’ve got to understand how the thing works. For the sake of the addict you care about, let today be the day you start leaning what you need to know.
(Article courtesy of Sunset Malibu)