HELP FOR FAMILIES
You don't have to wait for rock bottom.
You've been told to detach, deliver an ultimatum, or wait until they're ready. There is another way, it has evidence behind it, and you can start it without their permission.
Work with families is coaching rather than chemical dependency counseling, which means we can work together wherever you live — no state lines, no diagnosis, no records going anywhere. Private pay, $180 per 50-minute session.
THE APPROACH
Invitation to Change, not intervention.
Invitation to Change is an evidence-based model drawn from CRAFT, motivational interviewing, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Rather than treating you as the problem or asking you to step back and watch, it treats you as the person with the most influence in the room — because usually you are.
In practice that means concrete skills. How to raise a hard subject without it becoming a fight. How to reinforce the moments that go well. How to hold a boundary you can actually keep. Families who learn this see their person engage with treatment more often than families who issue ultimatums — and they do better themselves either way.
You'll hear me say meet them where they are. It applies to your loved one. It applies to you too.
WHAT THIS ISN’T
No waiting for rock bottom
No surprise interventions
No requirement to detach
No ultimatums as a first move
No blaming you for how this started
HOW THE WORK GOES
You are also allowed to be a person in this.
Most families arrive having organized their entire lives around one person's substance use. The work runs on two tracks at once, and the second one is not optional.
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We stabilize you first. Sleep, eating, your own support. You cannot influence anyone from a state of exhaustion, and you've probably been in one for a while.
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We map what actually happens. The specific sequence — what precedes use, what follows it, what everyone in the house does in response. Patterns become visible once they're written down.
02
We plan for the opening. Ambivalence comes in windows. When one opens, you'll know what to say and what's ready — treatment options, a call already made.
04
We change your side of the pattern. The only side you control. What you reinforce, what you stop absorbing, how you say the hard thing.
I call this discovery rather than recovery. Recovery implies going back to who you were before — rarely what people actually want, and rarely what happens. What happens is that you meet someone you hadn't met yet.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Things families ask on the first call.
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No. All of this works whether or not they ever speak to me. That's the central finding behind CRAFT.
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Detachment and enabling aren't the only two options, though they're usually the only two offered. There's a large middle, and it's where the skills live.
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Common, and not the end. We work on what makes treatment more likely later rather than on winning the argument today.
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Yes, and it usually helps — families pull in different directions without meaning to.
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No — private pay only. For coaching there would be nothing to bill in any case, since insurers pay only when someone carries a diagnosis, and here that someone would have to be you. Sessions are $180 for 50 minutes.
FREE
Empowering Families in Addiction
The short version of everything on this page, in a form you can read tonight and hand to someone else in the family tomorrow.