Alternatives for Family & Friends
-Roxanne A., SMART Recovery® Facilitator
Chances are you were never taught how to manage a relationship with someone who is struggling with a substance abuse problem. You may find that without the necessary skills, your role as a family member or friend of someone with addiction becomes increasingly stressful as the addiction progresses.
Ignoring the problem or attempting to change it with harsh confrontation often makes the emotional, financial and physiological problems that accompany the substance abuse even worse.
CRAFT: An approach that gets people into treatment
There is an alternate, non-confrontational, scientifically-validated approach to managing the problem. This approach is outlined in the books Get Your Loved One Sober: Alternatives to Nagging, Pleading, and Threatening and Beyond Addiction, How Science & Kindness Help People Change. Using Community Reinforcement And Family Training (CRAFT) these books teach family members and friends how to improve their own lives while at the same time providing skills for improving their relationship with their loved one. In repeated clinical trials, CRAFT’s approach proved twice as likely as the Johnson intervention and six times as likely as Al-Anon to get a loved one into treatment.
SMART Recovery resources for Family & Friends use a combination of SMART Tools and CRAFT strategies.
SMART Family & Friends learn:
how to build social support and peer support networks
how to communicate with loved ones in an assertive but non-confrontational way
how to establish healthy boundaries in a relationship
how to manage emotional upsets
how to use proven behavioral principles like finding and rewarding positive behaviors to support addiction recovery
the importance of self-care and its value in the relationship
Online: SMART Recovery provides a designated message board forum and weekly online meetings for Family & Friends for tool training and peer support.
Face-to-Face: The number of face-to-face meetings for Family & Friends is growing! You can use our interactive Meeting Map to locate a SMART meeting for F&F near you. Online meetings are always an option if there is not yet a meeting in your area. New “local meetings” are being added to the map every month.
Materials: The SMART Recovery Handbook for Family & Friends is available through our online bookstore.
For more information, please visit SMART Recovery Family & Friends.
The work carried out by SMART recovery is by far the most important tool in anyone achieving recovery. I was one of the mothers back in the 90 screaming for change, there’s no evidence base of what works they said, so while expanding all of this methadone maintanice we will evaluate & create an evidence base. To my knowledge the only study on methadone ever done – 3 year study announced in a blaze of publicity DORIS study. Neil Mcgeghany) Their was no fanfare to the results p, in fact it was kicked under the table. Methadone costs millions has achieved nothing, with people parked on it for 16 years still injectioning, still committing crime…still in extremely poof health. The money spent on methadone has far better uses. My son was introduced to heroin at 15 he’s still alive unlike a lot of his friends. He’s about to start a DTTO today & I fear for him. He said to me last night I don’t want to live like this I want to stop ….but I don’t know how? “This has been half of my life,” “the whole of my adult life”.I wish I could send him to a “classroom” where he could be taught these things …..when an addict starts using they don’t grow up ….but continue to be the age they started. Another reason they should now stop this methadone madness – many of the are no longer using heroin, it’s cocaine ,crack ,tablets theirs no substitue for these drugs. I’m actually quite convinced that it’s the methadone that in some ways prevents them getting clean, because their mind is never clear.