An Intervention is a clinical instrument used by addiction and mental health professionals daily to help increase the probability of a successful outcome. Interventions are specific strategies used to address problematic addiction, mental health behaviors, or any other concern that must be corrected. The chosen strategies seek to achieve a specific goal to improve the problem, condition, or behavior.
The addiction and mental health interventionist is part of the integrated professional intervention services team. In collaboration with the intervention coordinators and clinical staff, the interventionist comes to your home to begin implementing strategies to address the problem and achieve the set goals. It is impossible for an interventionist who operates alone or has only one or two support staff to fulfill the clinical obligations of an intervention.
Coming to someone’s home or coaching the family over the phone to perform a paid twelve-step call with a quick overview of the dos and don’ts of enabling is not an intervention, nor should anyone call themselves an interventionist with this approach. In person, professionals should perform interventions focused on why the person is not advocating for their own care. It is not when they want help, it is when they have to get it. There is a difference. Helping a family see the difference and making the necessary changes to achieve that goal is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful outcome.
Local Addiction & Mental Health Interventionists
“The Number One Predictor of Successful Outcomes in Addiction and Mental Health Intervention, Treatment, and Counseling is the Client Counselor Relationship.”
A family member finds one of our state pages for our intervention services and inevitably asks, “Are You Local Here in Our Area”? The short and quick answer is yes, we are. Family First Intervention is a nationwide provider of addiction and Mental Health intervention services, with professional Interventionists positioned throughout the United States.
Many family members are unaware that just because we have an interventionist in your area does not mean the one near you is the best fit for your family, your loved one, and your situation. More often than not, when families retain our intervention services, we may not send one of our local professionals based on the family dynamics, clinical assessment, or background of the loved one needing addiction and mental health treatment.
Addiction and Mental Health Interventionists are not widely and readily available, like therapists, doctors, lawyers, or any other needed professional. If someone doesn’t like the doctor in their area, they choose another one, maybe even in the same building or practice. You do not have the luxury of selecting a local interventionist, as you do with other professionals. If the one or two local interventionists you find are not the right fit for you, your family, your loved one, or your situation, you can’t just keep looking; they are not there.
“Studies have found that the right professional can get farther with a client with the wrong information and approach than the wrong professional can with the right information and approach.”
Think about that for a second. Just because the interventionist is local does not mean they are the right fit for your family, and they may not be the right fit for your loved one or the problem at hand.
If the interventionist you retain only has one strategy, and that is the gift of gab, that may get your loved one to treatment, and it certainly will not help your family. The field of professional intervention has been flooded with newly sober individuals eager to give back. That is wonderful and noble, but it does not make them qualified professionals to give professional advice. Hiring a professional with this background is not wrong; it is just a waste of financial resources. You can get that same service for free through Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous with something called a twelve-step call.
Most interventionists’ families find are through treatment center referrals or local listings. Interventionists who work for or depend on treatment centers for referrals are often only delivering speeches to inspire your loved one to enter the center. Most of them do a great job at that and only do what we stated above – doing a paid twelve-step call. In these cases, you are basically paying for an admissions person from the treatment center to come and talk to your loved one about treatment.
When considering an interventionist, the family should ask themselves what they are trying to accomplish. An intervention is a strategy to address a problem, with a specific goal to achieve the desired outcome. If your only goal is to have a local person come and talk your loved one into treatment, then you should go that route. Suppose your family would like to address the problem and help the entire family that has been put through enormous stress and heartache. In that case, you should consider an intervention company.
The easiest part of the intervention process is meeting with the family and the loved one with a substance use or mental disorder. The hard part is getting the family to commit to the process and stay on track after the intervention. The Team at Family First Intervention would like to help your family understand that you can still help your loved one; you just have to make some changes. The hardest part for the family is following through with the changes. For some families, the guidance runs counter to any helping instincts. Once the families realize these instincts apply just about everywhere other than to the treatment of addiction and mental health, they will see why they need to change and what will happen when they do.
Cost of an Addiction & Mental Health Interventionist
When we think of poverty, we immediately think of financial poverty. We know mental, emotional, and spiritual poverty is far worse than financial poverty. When we discuss the costs of interventions, we will focus on the forgotten mental, emotional, and spiritual costs.
You can pay less now financially and much more later mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as you find yourself no better off and often worse than before if you go down the wrong path or choose the way of inaction. Selecting an inexpensive interventionist that only focuses on your loved one going to treatment is as detrimental as paying large amounts of money for a long, drawn-out process that keeps the addiction and mental health problem going at the expense of the family’s sanity and your loved one’s safety.
Most people do not cut corners on costs when it comes to something meaningful. When someone wants something bad enough, they find a way to get it. This is not always the case with addiction and mental health intervention and treatment.
One of the primary reasons for this is the mental and emotional state of those affected by their loved ones’ addiction and mental health behaviors when attempting to make rational decisions. Families often make decisions through the lenses of codependency, dysfunctional family roles, and fear. Others make decisions based on being the primary enabler. The enabler and other family members who have adopted unhealthy family roles are more worried about what will happen to them due to the intervention than they are concerned with what will happen to their loved ones.
“The enabler and other family roles do not see the intervention as a solution being provided to them. They see the intervention as their solution being taken from them.”
Families in a flooded and biased emotional and mental state are vulnerable. They are often willing to go with the solution that feeds the comforting narrative, even if the cost is higher. In our experience, families will pay more for an intervention service company that does less than one that does more. Families will pay more if they feel they don’t have to change; only their loved one does.
Families would prefer to control the intervention by doing it themselves while being coached over the phone. The coached intervention and do-it-yourself approach allow the family to remain in their dysfunctional family role while avoiding looking at themselves. Not having a professional present feeds the false narrative that the family controls the therapeutic confrontation with their loved one. Interventionists who prey on these vulnerabilities by offering soft solutions while assisting families to kick the can down the road with coached interventions and long-drawn-out encouragement approaches contribute to the ongoing dysfunctional family system with little to no insight into improving themselves.
The more the family is led to believe they can continue to control the substance user and drag out the process, the more they will pay for that. This is why coaching interventions and long-drawn-out interventions that allow your loved one to remain in control are so profitable. They are much easier for the interventionists, and the family continues to pay for ongoing efforts that could be applied much more efficiently and cost-effectively with quicker results.
What you can’t do when you do interventions correctly is avoid the immediate positive change that families would prefer to run from. Families fear an intervention’s unknown outcome more than the current situation. This fear allows families to hang on to their dysfunctional family roles like an addict or alcoholic hanging onto their addiction.
The family believes their way of doing things is effective, like an alcoholic or addict believing the same. The reasons families believe this is not their fault, nor do they realize what they are doing and why. Families mistake familiarity with comfort and solution. The fear of confrontation or the fear of betraying their loved one leads them to believe they must be the interventionist. Interventions that do not consider this are not interventions and are a disservice to family and loved ones.
“Families often ask us, What if our loved one says no. The real fear isn’t what if they say no. The real fear is what if they say yes.”
Families have been living with a ‘no’ to addressing the problem for quite some time and have adapted to it. Maladaptive family roles have formed to cope with the dysfunction and day-to-day insanity. Families are in uncharted waters when an intervention ends with your loved one undergoing treatment. Everything the family has known has been disrupted, and a new way of coping must be relearned.
The dysfunctional family system must rebalance itself as it returns to health, a process that takes time. As your family system is healing and your loved one is in treatment, the family must look at themselves, and the loved one’s addiction and mental health struggles are no longer to blame. In other words, hiding the family’s dysfunction behind addiction or mental health is no longer an option, and families struggle with that.
We understand this is not easy, and if other approaches were practical, we would offer them; there is a reason we do not. We could schedule many more interventions and increase our revenue by providing intervention services that cut corners that do not help the family. Interventionists who make it all about the addict or alcoholic and do not understand the importance of how to involve family are telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear.
Having implemented interventions since 2005, we have tried every approach and, in the end, they all require a face-to-face intervention that addresses dysfunctional family roles. Trying to reinvent the intervention wheel for money and comfort for the professional is unfair to a vulnerable family system that is none the wiser.
Hiring a Professional Addiction and Mental Health Interventionist Considerations & Checklist
A solo person with little preparation, only attempting to talk your loved one into treatment, is not an interventionist; they are getting paid for a twelve-step call.
Suppose your interventionist has convinced you to allow them to coach you over the phone or via video chat on how to do your intervention. In that case, your doctor can coach you on healing your ailments, or your lawyer can teach you how to defend yourself in court over the phone or via video conference. If you’re paying for a long-drawn-out process that leaves you in limbo for months while your loved one runs the show and attempts various treatment options and levels of care, you can do that, too, for a large fee. Our point is, let’s not reinvent the wheel of what works.
“An Interventionist that does not primarily focus on the family is Nothing More than a paid twelve-step call.”
An intervention is about helping a family change their behaviors and environment, so your loved one doesn’t want or need help, and doesn’t hit bottom. It is about the family being educated, regardless of the intervention’s outcome, so they can learn to detach with love and know they did everything they could to help themselves and their loved one.
Our intervention families have been on the merry-go-round with their loved ones for years. How is the family or having someone talk your loved one into treatment different from what you have already done? If your interventionist and their support staff are not helping your family address the behaviors that keep this merry-go-round going, nothing will change.
Effective communication is essential. Family members who are not on the same page can and will compromise the intervention’s outcome. Families will benefit from being on the same page and understanding the effectiveness of not rewarding bad behavior.
A professional intervention is two days. The first day is preparation, the second is the intervention. Families will apply what they are learning in real time as the volatility of their emotions and their loved ones’ behaviors play out after the intervention.
When families are engaged in recovery after the intervention, it helps them understand that if they’re not setting boundaries, holding their loved one accountable, and taking care of themselves while considering the rest of the family in their decisions, they’re doing what they have always done. When you do what you have always done, you will receive what you always have.
When reading the suggestions below on choosing an interventionist, please remember that some may need clarification. Your family is most likely looking for a professional through the lenses of codependency, control, enabling, dysfunctional family roles, and maladaptive coping skills. Families almost always instinctively look for a professional, like someone with addiction and mental health struggles, who looks for their solution. The common denominators are shortcuts and quick fixes that feel less difficult and contentious.
Families and their loved ones will almost always go the route that feels most comfortable and is less likely to make their loved ones mad. If we have learned one thing about addiction and mental health recovery, we have learned that if there isn’t fear, anxiety, and anger in the solution, it is probably an easy one that will not work in the long run. If your loved one is mad at you, you are probably helping them get better. If your loved one is happy with you, you are probably helping them stay healthy.
- Please make sure you aren’t being left behind as a family.
- Please be aware of the Coached Intervention, which involves guiding a family over the phone through their intervention.
- Please ensure your intervention services company has at least one Master’s-level person overseeing the curriculum. People in recovery are wonderful and not professionals.
- Do not pay for a twelve-step call.
- Do not get sucked into extended, drawn-out models that cost you enormous money.
“When Interventionists offer family support after the intervention and charge additional fees whenever you need help or speak with them, they take advantage of you. Imagine if your loved one went to treatment for a flat fee and then had to pay for each group and therapy session or any time they needed something; how many groups would they attend, and how often would they ask for help?”
Many things make the job of an interventionist difficult. Of all the challenges we face, nothing makes helping your family and loved ones more difficult than a family that has tried ineffective intervention strategies and treatment selections before bringing us in. The more you address the concerns through distorted lenses, the less confidence and faith you will have in the intervention and treatment process.
How Our Intervention Services Are Different
The client-counselor relationship and the environment for addiction and mental health disorders are tied for the number one predictor of outcomes. Interventionists who do not address this leave the door open for relapse for both the family and their loved one. If nothing changes, then nothing changes.
At Family First Intervention, we could undoubtedly offer coached interventions. We could expand our services and offer sober coaching, sober escorts, interventions that take six to twelve months to complete, and intervention training, but we don’t. We offer an intervention service that works and does not cut corners on the environment, the client-counselor relationship, and addressing what is not working in the environment.
We do one thing and do it well: Interventions. We do not need to add additional services that prey on the codependent fears and vulnerabilities of the families who need us. Having done addiction and mental health interventions since 2005, we have failed many times early on by trying other models and approaches. We see what works, and we know what doesn’t. What we offer works, and families and their loved ones can get better if they let us show them the way.
