Love Isn't Enough: The Power of a United Front

Ever wondered why addiction interventions sometimes fall apart, even when everyone wants the same outcome? In this powerful episode, addiction interventionist Matt Brown tackles the vital role of family unity when helping someone struggling with substance use.

Drawing from both professional expertise and personal recovery experience, Matt reveals how people battling addiction become masterful at detecting family division. "We as addicted individuals are going to be looking around the room looking for the weak link," he explains. "We want to know where's the chink in the armor? Who is the most likely person in this group that I could sway to see things my way?"

This episode dives deep into why families struggle to maintain a unified approach despite shared goals. Matt explores how differing beliefs about addiction (choice versus disease), misunderstandings about trauma, and overemphasis on mental health diagnoses can create fatal cracks in family cohesion. He offers practical guidance on educating family members, designating leadership during difficult conversations, and preventing emotional escalation that derails intervention efforts.

Perhaps most valuable is Matt's compassionate understanding of family dynamics. He acknowledges that unity doesn't require everyone to like each other—many successful interventions happen with blended families where relationships are strained. What matters is agreement on the approach and commitment to the goal of getting help. Through compelling storytelling and actionable advice, Matt provides a roadmap for families to set aside differences and present the united front their loved one desperately needs to begin recovery.

Whether you're currently struggling with a loved one's addiction or supporting someone who is, this episode offers invaluable insights that could make the difference between a successful intervention and a missed opportunity. Subscribe to Party Wreckers for more wisdom from Matt Brown, and visit partywreckers.com to connect directly with resources that can help your family find its way through addiction.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Party Wreckers podcast, hosted by seasoned addiction interventionist, Matt Brown. This is a podcast for families or individuals with loved ones who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism. Perhaps they are reluctant to get the help that they need. We are here to educate and entertain you while removing the fear from the conversation. Stick with us and we will get you through it. Welcome the original party wrecker, Matt Brown.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Welcome to another episode of the Party Wreckers podcast. My name is Matt Brown. I am your host. I am an addiction interventionist and also a man in long-term recovery. I want to talk today about the importance of unity in the family system. This is something that's come up with a couple of the cases that I have been working on over the last couple of weeks, and some things have fallen apart with a couple of the families just because they can't find a way to work cohesively together, and there's a number of reasons that that happens, and it's not because people don't want the same thing. I think everybody involved has wanted for their loved one to be able to get sober and stay sober, but everybody's got a different opinion on what the real problem is, how to solve the problem, and it has really led to some contention and some dissolution in just the way that everybody has been willing to work together, and so I guess what I wanted to start out by saying is let's talk just for a minute about why it's important.

Speaker 2: 2:11

As someone who has been on the receiving end of an intervention and certainly done many, many, many interventions over the last 20 years, the need for unity is so critical because we, as addicted individuals are going to be looking around the room looking for the weakling. We want to know where's the chink in the armor? Who is the most likely person in this group that I could sway to see things my way? Who's not completely committed to really having me get the see things my way? Who's not completely committed to really having me get the help that I need? Who's not in agreement with the way we're going about doing this? And so, as I have learned to read the room over the years as somebody who relies on every person in that room to enable me and to enable my addiction, I learn how to read the room. I learn what you're thinking before you even say it out loud. And so I'm looking in the room, I'm surveying everybody's expression, I'm surveying their body language to see, okay, who isn't completely bought in on this. And I may not come right out and go full press, full court press on that individual, but I'm going to find a way to sway them to see things my way or to at least back me up on some of the points that I'm going to make it down to do the intervention. I'm going to want to talk with the family members to really make sure, okay. Does everybody here feel like the path that we're on is the right path, that the course of action we're about to embark on is the right course of action? Does everybody feel like this individual needs the kind of help that we're about to offer them? Does everybody see the problem being what it really is? Is there anybody that sees this differently or sees a different way to go about this? Because unless everybody that's in that room is in complete agreement, you don't have to like each other. I've done plenty of interventions where there's a stepmom and a stepdad and you know a divorced family where they'd rather, as my friend Sam Davis would say, they'd rather unplug each other's life support to charge their iPhones rather than be in that room and do the intervention. But they love the person that they're there to talk to and to talk about, and so it's so important that we find a way to get you and to put differences aside, and that's not easy to do. That's not easy to do Because every family system carries with it, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot of dysfunction.

Speaker 2: 5:09

There's baggage, there's hurt feelings, there's resentments, there's bitterness. Oftentimes there's jealousy, there's resentment, and all of those things come to bear. And so if you're a family member and you're sitting there trying to figure out, okay, how do I get this group together on this? You're not alone. This is something that so many families struggle with, and so when I'm talking to a family, usually I'm getting a call from a spouse or a parent saying, hey, I think we need to do an intervention on my loved one. How can we do this? My first question is okay, who else in your family or in this support system close loved ones, family, friends who else is as concerned about this person as you are, whether or not the relationships between you and them are good, whether or not the relationships between the person that we're going to be intervening on in them are good? Who is as concerned as you are? And we'll start to put the list together.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Okay, is everybody completely united, whether or not you've talked to them about this or not, in terms of the actual intervention or how we might be approaching this, do you feel like everybody sees this problem for what it is? Well, not really. You know grandpa keeps just telling him that, hey, if you just get a job and quit being lazy, then you know we probably wouldn't have to be going through this. And you know I say grandpa because typically it's that older generation where it's like, well, if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get busy, then you know, quit being such a lazy slob. They may not say it that way, but you know, if you just get busy and get active and quit laying around doing nothing, then you know you'll be all right. Yeah, and what I'll typically say is like, look, if being busy were the answer to this, I wouldn't be running an intervention company. I'd be running an employment agency, like, hey, let's get this guy a job and get him working.

Speaker 2: 7:12

But most of us, by the time we need an intervention or we need some sort of a residential treatment experience, we're not employable for the most part. That's not to say that some of us haven't managed to hang on to jobs. That doesn't mean that some of us aren't the sole breadwinners in our families. But generally speaking, we get to this point where there are certain things that are starting to be in jeopardy and we want to throw around this term of well, he's a functional alcoholic, he has a job, he's bringing home a paycheck, he's supporting the family or she, and you know we don't want to put that in jeopardy, be to the point where, where mine was, where I had lost every job that I'd ever had, I I, you know nobody was was banging my door down to try to hire me to come work for them. Uh, the people that I was able to get work for, especially there, at the end they, they really did it just more out of pity. I think, um, hey, let's see if we can't. You know, kind of the same thing. Let's see if we can't get this guy a job and get him back on his feet and see if that that fixes the problem. Um, but these were people that knew me, people that were, you know, I'd been friends with and and who were just really trying to do me a favor. Um, as far as the unity piece goes, it's really important that the family get educated.

Speaker 2: 8:39

Most of the time, a lack of unity is happening because people don't really know what it is. Sometimes it's because they think addiction is a choice versus a disease. Why can't they just make better choices? Why can't they just stop doing this? There were so many people in my life that asked that question. Why can't he just stop? Why does he keep doing this? Can't he see that he's burning his life to the ground. Well, of course I could see it Maybe not as clearly as everybody else, but I could see it. But this thing that I was driving didn't have any brakes. There was no stopping it. It was like one of those Fred Flintstone cars where I just had to stick my feet on the ground and try to slow things down and it wasn't working, you know. And so, to really help educate the family of, let's really learn what it is we're dealing with.

Speaker 2: 9:39

Let's talk about the fact that it's not just that this person needs to stop drinking or stop using that. This person is dealing with a real crisis that has person needs to stop drinking or stop using that. This person is dealing with a real crisis that has nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. Yes, is that making it worse? Of course it is, but that's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is this person has an untreated health condition. This person has untreated trauma. This person has abuse and neglect and abandonment and rejection that they haven't dealt with. This person has abuse and neglect and abandonment and rejection that they haven't dealt with. This person has a real issue around grief and loss. There's been things that have happened, that just the bleeding is still happening. It may look differently than it did when the original injury happened, but the healing has not even come close to starting yet. The healing has not even come close to starting yet.

Speaker 2: 10:30

Gabor Mate has a really good way of talking about trauma and the way he puts it, and I'm trying to remember which book that this was from. I think it was from one of his more recent books. But he talks about you know, if two people are in a car accident, the accident is the event. The car accident is not the trauma, because one person may get up out of that car accident and not have a scratch. Another person may have very, very serious injuries. So we tend to look at the accident hey, you know what, both cars got totaled and we want to look at it and say, okay, that's the trauma or that's not traumatic, but it's the injury that results from the event. That's the actual trauma.

Speaker 2: 11:18

You know, you may have people that have gone through very similar circumstances. One came out of it fairly unscathed on an emotional level. Another came out of it with some serious emotional injury and some serious emotional damage, and that's how I want you guys to really look at trauma. It's not what happened, it's the injury that occurred as a result of what happened, and a lot of that has to do with how strong is this person emotionally, what kind of tools does this person have from an emotional standpoint, how resilient are they? And oftentimes the lack of some of those things can lead to greater injury than if somebody has some of those things in place already and so don't look at oh well, this person was molested, or this person was sexually abused, or this person was violently beaten. The injury may look different for each of those people. The trauma is going to look different for each of those people, and some people may come away from that and may not have any underlying emotional trauma and may not have any underlying emotional trauma.

Speaker 2: 12:27

But try to look at it through the lens of of injury versus experience, if that makes sense, and so sometimes educating families on okay, what? What is trauma? What is what is? You know what's really left a mark here that needs healing and and what hasn't, because trauma is one of those words that gets thrown around these days that I think can get really misinterpreted. I think a lot of times, especially in this up and coming generation. Trauma is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around pretty flippantly.

Speaker 2: 13:01

In my experience, trauma is something that can get assigned to anything that's uncomfortable. You know I'm being triggered. My trauma is being triggered because of the way you're speaking or, you know, because of this experience that I'm having right now, and what oftentimes that is is that's just a lack of resilience or that's a lack of capacity to handle heightened emotions. It's not necessarily trauma, and so we really need to sometimes get educated on what trauma really is and what it's not, more importantly, and not get sucked into conversations where we're being led down the road of. You know, I have a real issue here that nobody's going to understand.

Speaker 2: 13:48

Well, I think everybody understands what it's like to go through very emotionally difficult situations. The details of that situation may not be the same for each person, but we all understand what it's like to just feel completely underwater, to feel completely overwhelmed and completely stuck and have that fight, flight or freeze. To feel completely overwhelmed and completely stuck and have that fight, flight or freeze reaction kick in. That doesn't mean we're in trauma. That doesn't mean we're having a traumatic experience. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does and I think that a catalyst for somebody going down the road of addiction can be real, unresolved trauma, and it can come from a variety of different sources. But until the family gets united on that and either stops diminishing the real issues or stops attributing some things to or assigning problems to issues that may not necessarily be real, that's a key piece.

Speaker 2: 14:42

The other thing that I think a lot of times families struggle with is this need to assign everything to a mental health condition. Well, they've got ADHD, or you know they've got bipolar disorder, or you know they've got this diagnosis it's depression, it's anxiety, and you know, if we could just treat that, then the addiction will go away. And I think that's often inaccurate as well. Don't get me wrong. I think that a huge contributor to ongoing addiction is unresolved and untreated mental health stuff. I know that my life improved when I got my clinical depression treated and I continue to have it treated today, and it's made my life that much better today and it's made my life that much better. Was it the catalyst for my addiction? I don't know. Was it a problem for me in early recovery because I wasn't actively treating my depression as I got sober Absolutely, and my recovery, my sobriety, got that much richer and that much more fulfilling when I started to properly address my mental health.

Speaker 2: 15:48

But I think that for families and I'm just going to say this plainly and hope that I don't offend too many of you I think a lot of you wish that it were a mental health issue versus an addiction issue. For one, I think that mental health is a much easier conversation to have because the stigma around mental health isn't as significant in our society today as the stigma around addiction. Mental health is seen in a much more acceptable way today if somebody's having some struggles with mental health versus somebody who's struggling in active addiction, no-transcript without realizing it, want this to be a mental health issue because it means that the system doesn't have to change as significantly as it otherwise might. And so, as you're looking at this and you're thinking, oh, you know, what do we need to do here, I want you to go into this with open eyes and, as we're talking about, you know, creating some unity in your family system before we ever address your loved one, it's really important that you know we're not going to go through an entire psychiatric or psychological evaluation before we go and do the intervention. I'm not qualified to do that and, frankly, it doesn't need to happen. Before we get this person the help that they need, I need as the interventionist, I need to have a really good understanding of what we're dealing with.

Speaker 2: 17:37

The times that I've gone into interventions where there actually has been physical violence and that's only happened three times in the last 20 years but each of those times that it's happened it's because I walked into a situation where there was an unknown mental health issue that the family just didn't know to communicate with me whether it was schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. There was something going on mentally with that person that I wasn't aware of and things escalated to a point where, luckily, nobody ever got got hurt. But it got to a point where someone was willing to get physical with me or with someone else in the room because the mental health issues I I most of it happened long ago, early in my career, where I, you know. Luckily today I feel like I'm in a much better place to recognize those things and deal with those things in the moment. But early on in my career it was one of those things where, hey, if I know about it, I'll learn about it and I'll do what I need to do to be prepared for it.

Speaker 2: 18:44

But I got caught off guard a couple of times and things escalated in a way that they didn't need to it, in a way that they didn't need to, and so I guess the reason that I'm going down that road is that I want to make sure that, as a family, as you're looking at, how do I get everybody united? It's really about, okay, what do I need to do to properly educate the family system? If you are going to use someone like me as an interventionist to come in and help you, what kind of information is the interventionist going to need? And we'll ask you the right questions. Don't worry about that part of it. It's not that you have to know ahead of time exactly what to share. If we're not getting the information that we need, we're going to ask you the right questions. But in terms of you know, if this is a situation where I'm coaching a family on how to do their own intervention, uh, it's going to be really important that everybody knows going into this, okay, this is what we're not going to say. This is what we need to say, this is what we have to avoid. We're not going to escalate, we're not going to try to push each other's buttons and and we're not going to take things personally and so, as you look at trying to organize this experience for your family, that unity piece is so important.

Speaker 2: 20:00

Because the minute things start to go sideways and the minute that people start to get uncomfortable or feel like, you know, I'm in territory here where I'm not really sure I know how to handle this. I'm in territory here where I'm not really sure I know how to handle this, the addiction gets so much stronger at that point and your loved one doesn't even realize that this is happening. But they begin to feel that unity break and they begin to feel like, oh, okay, I'm getting a little bit more control here. And it's not that they're doing this maliciously, they're not doing this because, oh, I'm going to exploit this opportunity so that I can hurt people. The addiction is trying to survive and we learn how to manipulate, we learn how to control, we learn how to get people to enable us. And ultimately, that's what this addiction is fighting for is it's fighting to stay in control, not just of your loved one, but of the entire dynamic. Because if I can keep people in confusion, if I can keep people in ignorance, or if I can keep people in conflict, then the addiction gets to stay in control, and so it's going to be very important that everybody understands exactly what is happening and what's not happening in terms of what addiction is and what it's not, what mental health is and what it's not, what trauma is and what it's not.

Speaker 2: 21:23

If there is a professional in the room that you absolutely let them take charge, do not do anything that the interventionist doesn't ask you to do explicitly. If the person in that room asks you a question, if they make a comment to you, look at the interventionist before you open your mouth. That gives you the moment to stop. If you're likely to have that immediate knee-jerk emotional reaction where, hey, my button's getting pushed and this is how I'm going to respond, and it's not even a conscious decision that you make, but it's just one of those things like, oh, I'm not going to let him talk to me. Like that, things quickly escalate to the point where they're not controllable anymore. So giving yourself that moment to just not say anything look at the interventionist to see what they want you to do will prevent you from having that immediate reaction and it'll give the interventionist an opportunity to direct you on what it is you either should say or shouldn't say.

Speaker 2: 22:26

If you're doing this as a family, if you're doing your own family intervention, it's probably a good idea that you designate somebody in that group the person who really has the most emotional intelligence, the person who's least likely to get their buttons pushed. Not that you want somebody that's completely disconnected and not invested in the outcome, but somebody who can detach from taking things personally and who can really hold the respect of not just your addicted loved one but everybody else in that room, so that if things do start to escalate, they can say hey, I need you to stop talking. Hey, can you step outside and, you know, gather yourself. When you feel like you're ready to come back in, come on back in and let's have a different conversation, but for right now I need you to stop. If you don't have somebody in the room that can really do that, it's probably not going to work. That is another critical piece to creating that unity is allowing some leadership in that room whether it's a professional or whether it's a family member to really be the leader and to direct that experience towards the goal and not lose sight of the goal.

Speaker 2: 23:42

It's not about having the conversation that the addiction wants to have. It's not about getting lost in the weeds in terms of the facts of well, you guys really don't understand what's going on, or no, this isn't really what's happening. You've misrepresented that. It's about staying focused on what is the end goal here. The end goal is to get this person some help. What's this conversation that's beginning to happen has nothing to do with whether or not we're going to get this person help today. We need to shift gears, we need to get back on track and so to have somebody in the room that's going to be able to do that and keep the cohesive focus of that group on the goal, not on the details, because when you get into the facts, when you get into the details, all of that can get disputed.

Speaker 2: 24:29

When I say you get lost in the weeds, that's what I mean. The addiction wants to create confusion. The addiction wants to create contention and if I can get you focused on nuances, if I can get you focused on the minutiae of stuff that really is just background noise in that moment of how much, how often, who with what am I using you know all of those things. In that moment, those things don't matter. And the bigger goal, of course, is is this person getting closer or further away from getting help? And if they're getting closer, how do I keep moving towards that goal? If they're getting further away, how do I redirect the energy of this conversation to get some coaching from someone who can really help you learn? Okay, this is how this conversation needs to go.

Speaker 2: 25:21

Previous conversations haven't worked. If they had, we wouldn't be where we're at right now. That's something. It's kind of like a step one experience for somebody in active recovery. What I've been doing hasn't been working. So let me learn from somebody, or let me have somebody come in and sit in the living room with us who can help keep this thing on track.

Speaker 2: 25:42

So you know, I won't blather on too much more about this, but I really wanted to address that because I think that, just given what I'm experiencing in my practice right now, that is something that I think a lot of families struggle with and historically I've seen that pretty significantly. It's not something that's going to keep. Like I said, I think most families all want the same thing. The lack of unity comes when opinions get involved and personalities get involved and the baggage that people are carrying for one another in that room can't get set aside long enough to be able to focus on the real reason for everybody coming together in the first place. And so what I would encourage you to do if you're contemplating a conversation like this with your loved one and you see that potentially, hey, we need this person to be a part of this, but they're not on board right now, reach out. I would love to have a conversation with you about how to make that happen.

Speaker 2: 26:46

Whether we're just exchanging some emails, you can reach me at matt at partyrecordscom. You can book a private session with me at interventiononcallcom. There's a number of other providers on there. It doesn't just have to be me. There's some really good providers on there.

Speaker 2: 27:03

Oftentimes, I'm not the right fit. Sometimes you'll see somebody that's going to be a better fit for you, whether you need a female interventionist or whether you need somebody with just a different personality type than what I have. I'm always happy to get people connected with the right resources if I'm not it. So I say this at the end of every podcast. But I, I, I really, really mean it. I think far too many, too many families are trying to go this on their own, and there are, so there's. There's so much help out there to be had.

Speaker 2: 27:35

I would love it if some of you guys reached out to me and just shot me an email and just said hey, here's where we're at. What can we do? I'm not looking to make money off of you. If it's going to take time, yes, I'll charge you for my time, but if it's just as simple as replying to an email, guys, I don't want you to worry about it. I do this kind of work because I want to help people and I don't want anyone to have to go through what I went through or what I put my family through as they were trying to get me help. So thank you for being here, thank you for listening to this. If there's anything I can do to be of assistance to you, please email me at matt at partywreckerscom. If you have a question that you'd like for me to answer at some point here in the next Q&A that we do. Please email me your questions. I'd love to address those and until then, I hope your loved one gets sober and stays sober.

Speaker 1: 28:34

Thank you sober, Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the party records. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a rating and a review. This helps us get the word out to more people, to learn more or to ask us a question we can answer in a future episode. A question we can answer in a future episode. Please visit us at PartyWreckerscom and remember don't enable addiction ever.