Loving Someone Who Uses

💡 Insight

This one is for the people who love someone in active addiction. Many families believe their options are to wait for the person to hit rock bottom or to stage a dramatic confrontation. Research points to a third path that tends to work better than either.

It's called CRAFT — Community Reinforcement and Family Training — developed by psychologists Robert Meyers and Jane Ellen Smith. Instead of confronting the person, CRAFT teaches family members to change their own behavior in specific ways: communicating without blame, rewarding sober time with warmth and attention, allowing the natural consequences of using to land rather than cushioning them, protecting their own safety, and recognizing the moments when the person might be open to help. In a well-known 1999 study by William Miller, Robert Meyers, and J. Scott Tonigan, CRAFT got substantially more loved ones into treatment than either a confrontational intervention or a referral to a traditional family support group.

CRAFT has a second benefit that's easy to overlook: family members who go through it tend to feel better themselves, whether or not their loved one enters treatment. You can't control another person's choices. But you have more influence than you think, and much of it comes through how you show up — not how loudly you argue.

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✦ Quote

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

— Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet (1942)

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◎ Prompt

Notice the next time your loved one is sober and doing something you appreciate. Say so, simply and specifically, without adding "why can't you always be like this." Just let the good moment be good.