Coming Up for Air — A Toolkit to Help with Your Loved One's Recovery from Addiction & Mental Illness

Stigma is a story someone makes up about a situation. CRAFT provides a framework, and helps you take the story apart and change it, consciously addressing situations and moving forward with eyes open. Stigma takes power away, but making conscious choices brings your power back.

Your thoughts have power. Anxiety is a thought process. Our hosts share their experiences and most importantly, the tools we need in order to start shifting negative thinking towards positive. When we emanate that positivity, it has a cascading effect on our entire entourage. The CRAFT method for families with an addicted loved one teaches us to get a little distance from our thought patterns in order to see them more clearly. Kayla and Laurie discuss how to handle negative thinking, and why it’s important to do so.

Times of crisis and conflict may seem like the worst times to practice self-care -- yet in those moments, taking care of yourself is key to CRAFT. The more you learn to increase your awareness of yourself and your reaction, the more you can successfully use CRAFT tools. If what you want to happen in those times involves your loved one's actions, it's not likely to be successful. Changing your actions and reactions, however, alters the environment and creates the possibility of change.

How do you communicate when you see (your Loved One's) problematic behavior? We'll show you how to pay more attention to *intention* — CRAFT guides us to observe the behavior, and point it calmly and thoughtfully and without adding your two cents/ personal interpretation. Once you have briefly and specifically told your Loved One how the behavior impacts you, you can then step back without expectation of  an outcome, and give them the dignity of processing what you've said.  Over time, this CRAFT tool can lead to long-term change.We explain how to do this, and when are the best times to communicate.

"Sectioning," or using the courts to force your loved one into treatment, is an extreme tool, and not optimal. It conflicts with some of the pillars of the CRAFT method, but it's also sometimes unavoidable. Use the CRAFT skills to understand when danger is acute, and enough to warrant sectioning.

Kayla and Laurie discuss short-term vs. long-term change -- start by working on one change in yourself rather than in your loved one, like focusing on your thought process, choosing to trust and step back, giving your loved one the chance to make decisions. This gives both of you the tools for slower, but more effective long-term change -- think of erosion, not a tsunami.

How do you ask questions that create space for your Loved One rather than hemming them in? We may have brilliant ideas about what someone should do, and want to share. The skills we need, however, are openness and a willingness to hear the other person and provide space and opportunity for them to process. Learn how to back away, avoid interrupting, and let your Loved One talk without offering your feedback.In this episode, we explain why this approach works better.

You can help your loved one make decisions by creating a safe space -- by listening, being genuinely interested in their perspective, being non-judgmental, and allowing them to slow things down to examine their own thinking. Avoid trying to fix things yourself, and assume that they're wise enough to know what they need. Your role is to help them make their own choices.

How do you take care of yourself when there's a crisis with your loved  one? It's a process of changing how you think about yourself and your  role in the dynamic. If you can change how you think -- even for small  parts of the day -- it changes the dynamic with your loved one, allowing  them the freedom to look at themselves, and not just worry about how  they impact you. Laurie and Kayla share tips.

In all our interactions with our loved one, it's important to be open  to conversation, and seek a way to be collaborative rather than making  demands. Our hosts discuss two listener questions, one about a partner  who wants a debit card back, and another about a friend who's picking  someone up from prison and wants to help continue their seeking of  sobriety.