How CRAFT, ITC, and SMART Recovery Help Loved Ones Change: Meet Cordelia Kraus

Today, I’m excited to welcome Cordelia Kraus!

Cordelia is a certified CRAFT clinician based in Portland. She’s the founder of Helping Families Help. It’s a website with many CRAFT resources and group information.

In this interview, Cordelia shares why she wanted to be involved with helping families as a clinician.

Here are some notes, but there is much more, so check out the full interview in the video.

Cordelia covers the main aspects of CRAFT, including the Invitation to Change Approach and SMART Recovery.

CRAFT stands for Community Reinforcement and Family Training. The community reinforcement piece starts by looking at how treatment centers can interact with their clients.
Instead of having a more punitive approach, it’s looking at what’s happening at the moment. What does the day look like? Were you able to practice abstinence for today or practice your plan for today?
Treatment centers were starting to offer a different path forward. And they were highly successful. The problem is when their clients go back to the place where there had been before, they very often started using it again because of the dynamics around them.
So the question then became, can we take what’s happening with this environment, these behavioral, encouraging positive reinforcement principles, and teach families to do that?

Behavior Analysis

We’ll teach families about the function of behaviors. Let’s do a behavioral analysis and look at why your child might be smoking pot the way they do. You know, let’s really break it down.
And we take that and start thinking about whether we can have compassion for that.
We provide some competing things (they can do) that don’t have the cost of what the substance use has. So we’re really starting to listen to them, understand and watch their use.
What are the natural consequences that are happening? How can we help allow some of those natural consequences that we’re willing to have happen? I’ll allow that struggle to happen a little bit more, but not in a cruel way. We’re willing to allow them to happen so they can actually feel the impact of it.
How do we move forward? How do we allow the consequences? Can we have compassion for what’s happening?

Communication Skills and Self-Care

Teach communication skills, really specifically around listening.
Bob Meyer specifically talks about ways of expressing oneself that are more likely to be listened to.
Some of the self-care parts are happiness. CRAFT talks about a happiness scale to notice what other parts of life are going well and what isn’t.
Is there a part of this I would like to focus on for myself? So there’s more of this self-investment piece of it.
And then there’s the invitation to treatment conversation that gets taught in CRAFT as well, which is a specific conversation with d different pieces like how can I know what kind of treatment might be interesting possibilities for my loved one? Or why they might go. Can I watch for those opportunities that open up?

CRAFT Outcomes

Families get taught that in about two-thirds of the cases (approaching 66%), of the loved ones will enter into treatment from their own sense about why it’s meaningful to them in the space of a year.
Now it is housed within them why it’s important for them to go into treatment, which is huge. That makes all the difference when talking about what outcomes look like over time.
CRAFT also tends to reduce substance use over time.
The well-being of the family member also tends to increase.
It’s not the go-to response, especially when we’re talking about having responses based on fear.

CRAFT, Al-Anon, and Intervention

I want to recognize my bias and offer this from my perspective. I don’t have many years in Al-Anon and am not an interventionist.
From my perspective, the way that I see this working with Al-Anon itself is that that community of people coming together to support each other can be incredibly powerful, I appreciate that and how accessible it is.
There’s variation within meetings.
I understand that the idea of hitting rock bottom isn’t in Al-Anon literature.
From what I understand, Al-Anon focuses on whether we can bring this focus back to ourselves. We’re going to talk about what we do here and support ourselves in this process
Where CRAFT and CRAFT-based work starts getting a bit different is this recognition that families themselves can be a helpful part of changing the environment around a loved one.
I’m not only going to try to connect with people for support. I’m not only going to try to invest in my own life again and bring the focus back to me and what I can do to enrich my life.
With CRAFT, I will also notice what’s happening with my loved one using substances. And times that are going a little bit better, even if it is the 10 minutes before they start smoking in the morning. Like, if I can catch them there.
It’s finding those ways of communicating. So there, there’s more work around what happens between me and my loved one that we also have great research on that can strongly affect how the loved one navigates their life and substance use.
It expands beyond I’m just going to survive here and do what I need to do, to what are the skills and perspectives that are helpful for them and me to create this different dynamic to potentially move forward. So that’s part of what I see.

Helping Families Help

Helping Families Help has two different sides to it. So there’s the front page, the family side, and especially if you’re looking at the menu bar, there’s a section that has to do a little bit more about what CRAFT is in the first place, information about CRAFT and craft-based approaches.
I find it’s the Family Resource Hub; that’s probably the most powerful piece there. There’s a section that has to do with books, websites, and videos you can access. These are things that anybody at any time can reach.
There’s also a part that has to do with ongoing online groups. They’re listed by day. So you can scroll down and say, okay, it’s a Tuesday, and you know what’s happening on Tuesday.
And you’ll find different groups, based on CRAFT, that are meeting. Most of them are free. Most of them that are listed there are online. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, some in-person ones are also listed by state in the United States.
There’s another section within Families that has to do with events. These are time-based types of trainings that are available, or maybe other groups that are happening that are time-limited. You must sign up by a certain time because it will be a 13-week course.
One study is listed there right now. It’s recruiting family members to participate in a study if their loved one is using opiates. There’s going be another one that I will add when I’ve got the information.

There could be so many different pieces to explore here. And that’s really what we’re looking for with CRAFT treatment. What could be possible?

Cordelia Kraus, LPC, CADC-I, Certified CRAFT Clinician, is based in Portland, Oregon. She became passionate about working with families struggling with their loved one’s substance use after her personal experiences as a mother. She received training in CRAFT from Dr. Robert Meyers in the spring 2017 and completed the CRAFT clinician certification process in 2018. She has been an Invitation to Change trainer since 2016 with what is now CMC: Foundation for Change. Cordelia has run CRAFT-based groups, including Invitation to Change and SMART Recovery Family & Friends, from 2017 to 2021 and has facilitated a free CRAFT/Invitation to Change provider peer consultation group since 2018. She took over ownership of what is now HelpingFamiliesHelp.com in 2019. HelpingFamiliesHelp.com connects families with CRAFT-based resources and offers community and support for the providers who serve them.