A Book Review by Henry Steinberger, Ph.D.
To help people seeking sobriety for their loved ones, Get Your Loved One Sober offers a revolutionary program: The Community Reinforcement And Family Training (CRAFT) intervention. The subtitle, Alternatives to Nagging, Pleading, and Threatening more aptly describes what this book is about. Getting a loved one into treatment is not the first goal. Arranging for one’s own safety and finding a happier life independent of the drinker’s situation, takes priority. Getting a loved one to moderate, choose sobriety, or go into treatment, are offered as roads to a better relationship.
Still, CRAFT can boast phenomenal success getting people into treatment. An alternative to Al-Anon’s 12-Step tradition and “detachment” recommendations and the Johnson Institute’s confrontational interventions, the CRAFT program is based on non-confrontational behavioral principles like reinforcement. It gives the reader tools and instructions for changing their interactions with their loved ones, which in turn changes the loved one’s behavior. In repeated clinical trials, CRAFT proved twice as likely as the Johnson Intervention and six times as likely as Al-Anon to get loved ones into treatment.
Get Your Loved One Sober, in an easy engaging presentation, offers an organized tool kit of helpful behavioral strategies and realistic encouragement to apply these tools while dropping the often overused and ineffective nagging, pleading and threatening. Using simple terms and metaphors, dramatic story examples and hands-on activities, the book teaches the skills professionals call: behavioral analysis, goal setting, reinforcement and extinction, problem solving and communication.
Though the key to change is planned reinforcement, behaviorism and its terminology are only mentioned when Meyers pointedly recommends looking for treatment programs congruent with CRAFT. Such programs are described with phrases like “social skills training,” “behavioral marital therapy,” “cognitive-behavioral treatment,” “rational-emotive therapy” and “motivational treatment.” Though Meyers notes that some treatment groups “use a Twelve-Step format as their treatment,” he suggests the reader look for treatment that helps the drinker “figure out the triggers (stimulus cues) and reinforcers of his unhealthy behavior.”
SMART Recovery® offers the self help program for addictive behaviors that is perfectly congruent with CRAFT. Both are based on proven principles of behavior change, and both offer cognitive-behavioral strategies in a friendly, accessible, do-it-yourself format. Both are supportive and non-confrontational, and both offer alternatives to common ineffective strategies and other better known programs. And now SMART Recovery® Family & Friends offers a message board forum and a weekly online meeting for Concerned Significant Others.
Could a revolution be starting in the addictions field when Hazelden, a bulwark of twelve-step treatment, publishes a book touting cognitive and behavioral approaches above others, in which clinical trials recommend CRAFT over Al-Anon or Johnson interventions for getting people into treatment, and moderation is suggested as a worthy goal for some people? I find it very refreshing and encouraging that Hazelden press has chosen to publish a book that acknowledges the effectiveness of behavioral treatments.
Get Your Loved One Sober: Alternatives to Nagging, Pleading, and Threatening
by Robert J. Meyers, Ph.D., and Brenda L.Wolfe, Ph.D.
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Just taking a moment to let you know you have a brand new fan! This article was a nice read. I have bookmarked your site.
Let me start this by saying I have always thought most self-help type books were corny and never thought I’d get anything out of reading them. I picked up Getting Your Loved One Sober about a month ago and am already on my second read. It has helped me get a totally new and refreshing perspective on things and regain a feeling of control of my life. The techniques are simple and amazingly effective, they just take practice. I am early into starting to use the methods but the amount of tension in my household has already been greatly diminished and in general I am much less stressed out by my loved one’s drinking–which has also decreased since I’ve started using the methods. Whether or not he gets into some sort of treatment remains to be seen, but I can say that the simple first steps I’ve taken have worked. I couldn’t recommend this book more highly.
I am currently on my third time reading this book. I did all the exercises and practiced much of what I learned through the first reading. I went back to read it a 2nd time while having difficulty with my addictive loved one, but that time I just simply read as a refresher. I have just recently gone back, this time with journal in hand and am reading for a 3rd time. I have found this book invaluable in learning how to communicate and how to look at what I really want from my relationship with someone who struggles to find sobriety. I have noticed that if I truly work the CRAFT methods I do see positive results. I wish I could say that my Loved One has choosen to seek recovery but I think he is one of those tougher cases that will take more time than others.
I love that this book offers some real, hands on methods that we can implement in our desire to communicate to our loved ones that sobriety is better for them. The title of this book is completely true. There is no need to plead, threaten, nag or anything else negative in order to get our message of love through to them. As a matter of fact, we learn that this can actually reinforce the very behavior that we are desiring to stop.
I highly recommend this book for any and every who loves someone who struggles with addiction and sobriety.
I am a member of http://smartrecoveryforum.org/ and find it and its Monday night meeting for Concerned Significant Others (CSOs) invaluable to my life. I am in the process of reading the book, and what I have learned so far has positively & demonstrably changed my relationship with my Loved One.
So precious to me to have some answers beyond “just detach” and “let him hit bottom”. I feared his bottom was death, and I am so relieved to know I can do more to encourage recovery.
Recovery is still my Loved One’s journey, but I am learning how to be his cheerleader thru the message of CRAFT! Bless you Dr. Meyers for spreading the word. I hope we have face to face support groups for the friends & families are in our horizon.
This is Pretty helpful. Thanks.
I used SMART Recovery on line: the message board, the tool box, the chat room, on line meetings. I did not go to f2f meetings. I found it all quite useful. The experience was positive and I am now living normally.
That is an issue I have to do more research into, appreciation for the article.
Hey great to see the new blog!!
I read books for a while but now I changed it to great blogs. Your place is one of the examples why I decided to pay more attention to internet because they are much more updated than books and these days information is generated very fast.