Watching a loved one suffer from heroin addiction, or addiction to any substance, is a wrenching and crushing thing to bear witness to. There’s a certain helplessness that comes with it because it feels totally out of your control.
Heroin is an opioid so make no mistake, it’s no easy task for someone who’s using to just up and quit on their own.
We all know the horrors of the ongoing opioid epidemic and the staggering death toll from 1999 to 2018 brings it into stark relief. Around 450,000 Americans died in that stretch and with respect to heroin specifically, more than 115,000 died from overdoses related to it in that nearly 20-year time span.
In 2017 alone, 652,000 people suffered from a heroin use disorder in the United States.
The potency and highly addictive nature of the drug means heroin is something that very quickly takes over and lays waste to a person’s life.
And while the ultimate choice of committing to rehab boils down to the user reaching a tipping point, or to put it more bluntly, hitting rock bottom, there are things that you can do. Things that remain in your control.
A particularly powerful option, that’s far more proactive rather than reactive, is staging an intervention.
It’s an intimidating thought, no doubt, but it’s not something you need to handle on your own. More on that in a moment though.
What Is an Intervention?
There may be many ways to organize an intervention but the overarching theme is that an intervention is a deliberate process by which change is introduced into an individual’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The overall objective of an intervention is to confront a person in a non-threatening way, allowing them to see their self-destructive behavior, and how they affect themselves, family and friends.
The sheer gravity and weight of turning a mirror on someone’s behavior, especially when the people holding the mirror are their closest family and friends, can’t be understated. For that reason alone, an intervention can be an extremely persuasive and potent motivator to finally nudge someone enough to get the help they well and truly need.
How to Stage A Heroin Intervention
Staging any intervention, let alone a heroin intervention, takes careful thought and planning. Something like this can’t be thrown together haphazardly or at the last minute. Doing so is a surefire way to diminish the effectiveness of the process.
So, everything starts with a plan and contacting a professional interventionist makes things easier by leaps and bounds. You’re already consumed with the state of your loved one and juggling the ins and outs of an intervention is another heavy burden to add to your shoulders. A specialist can help immeasurably.
From here you’d get the intervention team together, i.e., who is going to participate in the intervention itself. You’ll discuss the specifics of time and place as well as making sure you have the structure of the day itself cemented.
One of the more difficult aspects of the planning phase, if not the most difficult part, is coming up with consequences. These ultimatums can be genuinely heart wrenching to even ponder because they’re quite literally the last thing you’d want to do. Unfortunately, for an intervention to achieve its desired result, which is getting your loved one into treatment, there needs to be real, set in stone and tangible consequences to declining treatment.
Get Help With an Intervention Today
Staging an intervention is something no one dreams of doing, it’s a stressful and tough process but the circumstances dictate our action and sometimes an intervention is the best course to take if you’ve exhausted all other options. In the end, the goal is always to get your brother, mother, sister, father or friend on the path to recovery and free them from the shackles of addiction.
At Footprints of Serenity, we can help you and your family through the entire process, from planning to the intervention itself and through to family aftercare. Give us a call and let us know how we can assist you.