Anything that you want to do with regard to drugs and alcohol addiction is going to have its risks. That is just the nature of the beast. Addiction itself and by itself alone is a huge risk. It’s actually a life-threatening risk. A lot of times individuals who abuse drugs and alcohol actually die as a result of their habits and they never actually have a chance to be intervened upon or to go through rehabilitation. As sad as this may be, one must not lose hope but at the same time one must know the risks that are being taken when one professes to attempt to intervene on a loved one’s addiction.
You know without any benefit of a doubt that you love your family member or friend who is abusing drugs and alcohol. This in itself is what makes you willing to attempt to help them. This is certainly admirable, but keep in mind the risks that are involved with performing any kind of intervention.
Risks Involved with an Intervention
The first risk and perhaps the most obvious one is that intervention will not work. Then you have wasted all that time and all that money to attempt to convince the addict to go to rehabilitation and understand that he or she has a problem and now he or she probably doesn’t want to talk to you anymore or be around you. Now you feel as though you have blown your chance. The silver lining on this though is that no attempted intervention is ever a waste of time because any type of intervention will still plant the seed of concern in an addict that he or she might need to start making some changes at some point in the future and his or her life. It’s just a matter of when he or she decides to make those changes that matters the most.
Another risk that goes along with attempting an intervention is that it will break whatever thin relationship you already have with the addict. A lot of people worry about this because they feel like they are the addict’s last lifeline. There is some truth to this, and certainly there have been some case studies of field interventions that eventually resulted in the addict cutting ties with his or her family and then overdosing and dying later. The silver lining for this though is that this is a numbers game and attempting to intervention is 90% more likely to be a much better idea than to not intervene.
Just as with any course of action in life, when you attempt to force another human being to do something against his or her well you to a degree trap and burden that individual in some way. Humans as a part of their nature do not like to be forced to do things. A lot of the time, an individual has a much higher chance of success in rehabilitation centre if it was his or her decision to go there in the first place rather than the result of intervention. The debate here is whether or not to wait for the addict to realize on his or her own volition to go to rehab or to attempt intervention first and get him, and essentially forced him, into rehabilitation. It is a judgement call to say the least, but one must realize that one is never doing any wrong with trying to help another human being.
In the end, there are certainly risks that go into performing an intervention. There are risks with anything in life and there always have been. This does not mean that one should not take them. No one ever achieved anything by being incredibly safe and cautious and doing nothing when fast and decisive action should have been taken. Addiction is a life or death matter, and while occasionally performing an intervention actually makes the situation worse, this is a very rare occurrence and 99% of the time it was made worse because the intervention wasn’t performed properly in the first place. Ensure that the intervention is performed properly and the odds are you will have good results out it will help the addict get his or her life saved as an end consequence of it.
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