Intervention Services in Oklahoma for Families of Loved Ones who are Struggling with Addiction and Mental Health Disorder Concerns

Our Interventionists in Oklahoma and Nationwide Deliver our S.A.F.E.® (Self Awareness Family Education™) Addiction and Mental Health Intervention Services and Family Recovery Coaching Program to Families who can no longer wait for their loved one to ask for help or hit bottom.

How many times has a family heard these words? You can only do something once they want help, ask for help, or hit bottom. Another quote families often hear is you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. At Family First Intervention, we believe there is truth to both things, and the quotes and words are shallow thinking. You must indeed have hope and desire to address your addiction and mental health concerns. Where and how does this desire come about? If we can’t change the person, we change everything we control. We have never witnessed a situation where we could not adjust the intended patient’s environment, which includes the family system. Since the environment is one of the number one predictors of outcomes, we know that it must change for the person with addiction and mental health struggles to advocate for their care. Change will only happen when the intended patient sees more pros for change than cons. In other words, if their path appears to be the best, chances are excellent that they will not explore different paths. Acquiring ambivalence is not our opinion; this is the science called the second stage of change.

Dysfunctional family systems, enabling, codependency, family secrets, fear, dishonesty, manipulations, victim mentality, guilt, shame, anger, and resentments, just to name a few, often prevent the family from doing something different, which in turn allows the loved one to do nothing further. What we are saying is that you can lead a horse to water, and you can make it drink, but how? You need two things: patience and boundaries. You may not be able to make the horse drink with force, but you can outsmart the horse until its survival instincts kick in. We are not saying your loved one is a horse or animal. What we are saying is if it comes down to drinking or dying, the horse will eventually consume. If you enclose the horse inside a fence with a fresh drinking trough, it will ultimately drink after you have led it to the enclosed area. The only way this horse would not drink from the trough is if someone, scared for its safety, let the horse out to run free and do as it wishes with no accountability. The horse analogy is an example of an enabling family system or a family not on the same page. This example did not change the horse; it changed the environment and brought the horse to its bottom to drink.

There is much more to intervention than the above example, yet hopefully, you see our point. Whether your loved one accepts help or not, we try to help everyone answer whether the family feels they did everything they could to help their loved one and stop the path of destruction. 

A Local Oklahoma Interventionist in your area does not equal the best fit for your family, loved one, and needs

Above, we stated that the environment was one of the number one predictors of outcomes. The other number one predictor of outcomes is the client-counselor relationship. People travel all over, sometimes to other states, for the right doctor or medical care. Some people hire attorneys who seek approval to practice in other states because they are the best fit for the job. Interventionists fall under this category of professionals. There are too many moving parts, required experience, and attention to detail to think that a solitary local interventionist in Oklahoma or any other area you are in will be capable of addressing your needs. To put the importance of the client-counselor relationship into perspective, we may not even send you our local Oklahoma interventionist as they may not fit your family, loved one, and needs. Having eighteen interventionists on staff allows us to assign a professional to your family to accommodate your situation.

Interventionists in Oklahoma and everywhere else require a support staff and family recovery curriculum to deliver an intervention based on its clinical definition. An intervention is a specific clinical strategy to address a problem or behavior and meet a particular goal. In other words, an intervention is not an event seen on television; it is a clinical instrument that can be carried out dozens of times in one day on one client in treatment. Because the volatility of both the family and their loved one experiencing addiction and mental health crises is going to require hundreds of interventions before, during, and after the face-to-face intervention, a family cannot expect a solo interventionist to handle this. A person coming to your home to talk your loved one into treatment with a couple of hours of preparation is not an intervention. An intervention requires more attention on the back end than during the process. Interventionists who only focus on getting your loved one into treatment prevent both your loved one and your family from the education, guidance, and support that will be necessary after the intervention, regardless of the outcome. Solo interventionists or those who try to coach you over the phone to do the intervention yourself are not helping you, and they are doing what you can get for free from members at your local Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Oklahoma. Solo interventionists with no team or support staff and those who ask you to pay for an intervention over the phone are not putting your family or your loved one first. They are only doing what others can do free of charge.