How Allies in Recovery is Helping Families Change

I’m pleased this week to bring Dominique Simon-Levine to the blog. Dominique is the founder of Allies in Recovery, an online support website for families.

Welcome, Dominique!

1. Please briefly introduce yourself to those who don’t know you?

Thank you, Cathy. I am a substance abuse researcher and a trained medical anthropologist. I cut my teeth working on state and federal grants and innovative programs for substance abuse, which I continue to do to this day. Currently, I’m working in a jail with a hospital team and we’re doing correctional health and working with persons who have HIV, hepatitis C, and substance use issues. We’re helping them transition out of jail. 

Since 2003, my passion has been Allies in Recovery. I fell in love with CRAFT the first time I saw it on a poster at a meeting I was at in Washington.

Allies in Recovery has tried to do CRAFT in several ways. In the beginning, we did it with some one-on-one research with families and trained clinicians. We went out to New Mexico and met Bob Meyers, his wife Jane Ellen Smith, and his training team. We created family groups doing CRAFT.

In 2015, we created an online version of Allies in Recovery. We took the CRAFT approach that we’d been working with for over ten years and created 130 minutes of video, broken up into eight modules with brief sub-module sections. It has interactive exercises and you keep a record of everything you are learning to track about your loved one who is struggling with an addiction issue. It is the very best of everything we have learned about and experienced with CRAFT.

We put all this together on an online platform called Alliesinrecovery.net. 

The state of Massachusetts picked up the site for every resident in the state so for the last few years, it’s been free for everybody in Massachusetts. That is our main example of the site working on a state level.

We’re thrilled with what we’ve been learning and doing. It’s helped a lot of people. Allies in Recovery is a way to get CRAFT out to a wider audience than has been possible through more traditional ways, and it’s low cost. It’s available to anybody who has internet access. The website complements anything else you might be doing in terms of understanding substance abuse, understanding your role as a parent, a partner, or any other person close to someone with a substance issue.

It doesn’t demand you go to a meeting or finding a therapist. You can do it at any time. It teaches you the basics of CRAFT over the internet using examples from real-world situations.

2. What was it about CRAFT that really struck you? Can you share some experiences with families who have used CRAFT to help their family members change?

What I love about CRAFT was the fact that it’s been well studied. For the first time, we were learning about what a family could do that would be more likely to succeed than something else. Bob Meyers from the University of New Mexico had figured out that using psychological behaviorism as the base was an excellent way to ground an approach for families.

They applied behaviorism to how you communicate, how you respond behaviorally, whether you step in or step away from a loved one. With every interaction with your loved one, there is a way that can either help or hinder. 

They studied it so well. It’s the only approach in the country right now that has the term evidence-based. This means it’s been studied sufficiently to be recognized as an approach with scientific backing. The Substance Abuse Health Services Administration recognizes this. And it’s the only one for families.

We’ve spent the last fifteen years really working on applying CRAFT in the trenches. So many people in so many walks of life. I’ve worked with families whose loved ones were transitioning out of jail. I’ve worked with Puerto Rican families and lots of different kinds of families over the years.

Everybody struggles. What I love about CRAFT are the universal principles that are grounded in behaviorism that can be applied to any situation and culture. The details of how you react are going to be different according to your circumstances and your cultural background. The ideas are universal.

I’ve had families get loved ones into treatment. I’ve had families realize they needed to quiet down communication that was negative and not helpful and to replace it with the word “I” instead of “You”.

To figure out that there are simple things that can be said like, “I’m at war with addiction. I’m not at war with you.” “I love the efforts that you are making.” “I see that you are still struggling.”

There are some gentle ways of talking. I’ve had families tell me, “You know, he stays in the room now when I walk in. There was a time where I would go into a room and he would quickly leave in order to avoid talking to me because the minute I had his attention, I would just let go of everything I was scared about, everything I wanted him to do, everything he was doing wrong. I was driving us apart. By doing that, I wasn’t going to be helpful to him when he was ready to do something about substance abuse. In big ways and in small ways, I have found CRAFT to be immensely helpful.”

I wanted to read to you the results of our member survey we did on our site back in May of this year. This is fifty people that responded within a day or two within sending out a survey. This survey is about the website itself and not the coaching. 

The question was “How helpful has this website been to you?”

This is really at the heart of it. Communication is so important for families. It is so vague and difficult when there is substance use.

So this continues to be a success.

For me, the most important approaches that have come around in some years (and I love your work, Cathy), the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids’ work with parent coaching, the Center for Motivation and Change, and Beyond Addiction is a terrific book.

We are finally getting a groundswell and the ideas and the dissemination of CRAFT in a way that is definitely helping the families that come to my site.

3. If a person were to go on the Allies in Recovery site, what would they find there? What are the different ways they can connect with the site? What is your best thought on how to get the information?

It’s Allies in recovery.net. You register and you come on a confidential website that is highly secure. We never ask your name. We ask you to create a username that doesn’t identify you or your loved one. You create a password and you’re on. Once you are on that site, you’ll join a community of 1900 people, some of whom are much more active than others. We direct you first to the modules, the learning section.

CRAFT can be done in any order. It doesn’t have to be done one through eight. Rather you choose the area that you feel you need right away. You may feel you are a little weaker with the communications or how you behave when he comes home high, or whatever is speaking to you at the moment.

I’ve had families who feel that they have to do it fast.  As many of you know, there is nothing fast about getting well from substance abuse. It often takes time. It often takes repeated treatment episodes.

As a family member, this is what you will have to take on now. It’s not fair, but you now have to learn about substance abuse, the treatment system, and what you can control. What you can control in this situation is yourself, your communication, your behavior, and your knowledge.

In those eight modules, we have the whole CRAFT approach down. We teach it in a way that is straightforward. You can just go and poke around and go wherever you think you need to go.

If you watch the whole thing in one sitting, that could be dizzying. It’s whatever you feel you need and however fast you feel you can move on. You may want to test things out. It may not work. You can go back and listen to it a second time.

Perhaps it’s three in the morning and your daughter hasn’t come home and you’re flipping out and maybe you need to calm yourself down first so you watch a little of Module 7. And then you’re going to want to think about what you’re going to say when she gets home, so watch a little bit of Module 8. 

There’s plenty of exercises with the eight modules. You actually type in your answers. You don’t have to download anything or print anything. Those answers are kept confidential. You can go back in and amend your answers. 

It’s very important that you learn how to see the situation and those exercises really help focus your mind and eye over six to eight weeks.

You do want to apply everything you are learning without expecting yourself to be 100% perfect at it. You’re going to see what’s helpful, so hopefully, that motivates you to keep going and eventually see it all.

We do insist that you look at the safety modules first and we also talk about how physical violence rules you out for doing the CRAFT work. If you have actual physical violence in your home with your loved one using substances, you want to get help for that before you attempt anything that we’re suggesting with CRAFT. 

We have a discussion blog. The blog is where you write out your situation, your question, your success with CRAFT, or wherever you are. We attempt to put your situation into the CRAFT framework. It’s a way to teach others as well as answer your questions.

We don’t give, necessarily advice, but its a way of providing how would CRAFT respond to what you’re describing is going on. The discussion blog is very popular. We probably answer eight to twelve questions a week on it, so there is lots of activity.

We also provide a sanctuary here. Sometimes the material is original. Sometimes it’s curated material from the web. It could be a piece of art, a piece of music, a poem, a meditation. It’s the counterbalance of doing the CRAFT work. We want you to take a moment for yourself. 

There’s a “What’s News” blog where we curate anything coming up from the media for families. There are lots of blogs out there for people about substance abuse or people with substance abuse, but there’s nothing for the families, so we provide that. We pick out interesting and important studies, findings, stories, and policies that are coming out to share. 

Finally, there is a Resource Supplement where we provide all kinds of links to what we believe is good clinical work with substance abuse, the range of all the peer supports that we know exist both for the family and the person with the addiction issue.

We have on there a treatment finding strategy which we’ve used for years and years when we’ve looked for treatment ourselves for family members. How to look for treatment in places you might not think, like calling the psychology department at the local university and talking to people that work with substance abuse. Looking for SAMSHA grants, which is the federal government agency in charge of substance abuse and mental health. Look for grants that may have been given to clinics in your area where you can get free help. There are lots of ideas that you may not have thought of for finding treatment for yourself and loved ones.

4. What words of advice do you have for parents who are concerned about their child who is struggling with drugs or alcohol?

It’s a process. It’s especially difficult in those early years where you are all of a sudden discovering that it may not be just recreational, that it’s maybe getting out of control and that you may be dealing with a substance abuse issue. That’s really traumatizing for the family. It’s the beginning of a journey for you as the family member, as the parent. 

It’s not fair. You parented as best you could. You’ve raised your child and now they are going into early adulthood and they are not launching successfully. Things are looking problematic and you’re very scared and worried for them. The best thing for you to have to learn is CRAFT.

That (self-care) is paramount in this. Families get worn out. They express a lot of fear and you see signs of trauma after awhile. It’s very, very important that you are calm and that you understand what you are seeing as best as you can. You can talk in a way and behave in a way that is going to increase the likelihood that your child or young adult is going to head towards help.

Help and treatment, whether it’s self-help or professional formal treatment, both private and public, are the best answers we have to addiction. There is lots of good help out there. There’s lots of unevenness too, so take a deep breath and sit down and start to learn about these projects. You’re going to need them.

I’m in recovery for twenty-four years now from opiate addiction and alcoholism. I have a parent, a sister, a brother, a niece; I’m surrounded by active addiction. I am the go-to person. Because I have so much empathy for the person struggling and have so much life experience with it at this point, I’ve become the interventionist in the family. I’m the one everybody talks to because they know they’re going to get somebody calm, knowledgeable, and hopeful.

I’m always hopeful. Anybody can get back on track and get their lives going in a better direction, behave in ways that are healthier for them and safer for them, get into formal recovery and have a life second to none.

That is true for every one of us. It’s just not going to happen overnight. That’s just the reality. It’s about finding constraints and a place to get this training. I believe it will help your family and it will help you immeasurably in terms of getting through this and coming out in a way that you’re going to find hope for your loved one and for yourself.

Dominique Simon-Levine, Ph.D. launched Allies in Recovery in 2003. Her work has been featured on HBO and NPR. She is a facilitator and a trained speaker on issues of addiction and the family. She has worked extensively developing and evaluating federally-funded substance abuse programs for organizations and clinics throughout Massachusetts and New York. With an interest in recovery and substance abuse that spans 30 years, she sees a huge need to help families develop the skills to help a loved one recover fully in a supportive, whole, and lasting way in their families and in their communities. Her mission is to have Allies in Recovery fill that gap.