Using an Intervention to Push for Long Term Sobriety
If you do an intervention in order to push someone towards recovery, will this help them to achieve long term sobriety? It is possible that a good intervention can help someone to stay clean and sober for longer periods of time?
In a word, no. An intervention is almost a mistake in itself, but in a few cases they might be useful. But they are misleading to many people because they sort of emphasize the idea that there is a clear path to recovery, that there is a “cure” out there, that an alcoholic or an addict might be “fixed” somehow. Just ship them off to a treatment center and they should come back OK. Of course, this is not how recovery works at all.
The decision to get clean and sober has almost no bearing on long term sobriety. The moment of surrender does not have any bearing on whether a person stays sober for one month, one year, or ten years. There is not magic way to start someone’s recovery so that they stay clean and sober forever, or even so that they increase their chances of doing so.
Recovery is such a complex journey that our first days in sobriety are almost irrelevant. If we go to treatment, and stay sober for five years, do our first few days in rehab really have a bearing on whether or not we drink after 5 years? Hard to say, but most alcoholics can look back and say “no, my early days in recovery are no longer affecting my ability to stay sober today, five years later. I have learned so much since then and evolved so much on a spiritual basis that it no longer matters what I experienced on my first days of sobriety.” Thus, the alcoholic must concentrate more on living a long term life of sobriety rather than on short term outcomes in early recovery.