I'm always telling you how when you're dealing with an addicted loved one, you need to:

• Hold things back
• Don't say everything you're thinking
• Hold your feelings in
• Be positive.

I know you're thinking, "Okay, but when do I get to say what I think and feel? When do I get to confront them with the truth?"

There are many things you can do, but the biggest one is learning how and when to confront someone with an addiction.

Storytime...
One of my first jobs was in a psychiatric hospital, and this hospital dealt with the most severe mental health problems. They had a unit for teenagers who were seriously struggling with suicidal thoughts, addiction, and psychosis.

This is where I spent a lot of time in my early days as a counselor, and I learned a lot of lessons, and it's where I learned about therapeutic confrontation from a therapist named Cindy S.

One of the things I had to do as a baby intern was to walk around the hospital and pull patients aside. My job was to get their...

When you're an addiction counselor, one of the first questions you face is, "Are you in recovery?"
People want to know if they can trust you and if you're going to understand them, and to be honest, early in my career, I used to be nervous about this question. I was pretty insecure about the situation and tried my best to avoid it. Not only am I not in recovery, but when you go to counseling school, they teach you practically nothing about addiction.

Right out of grad school, one of my first assignments was to build and implement an intensive outpatient program for adolescence on my own. Essentially that's dealing with teenagers who have drug problems. Not only am I not in recovery, and I didn't have much education about addiction, but here's a little secret.
I've never even been cool. I've been around a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties, but I've never been that girl. So I was a little insecure about it. I can remember thinking to myself, How am I going to deal...

Using this one statement, you can instantly win the trust of someone who has an addiction to drugs, alcohol, or anything else. Are you ready for it? Drum roll, please. The statement is, "I was wrong." When you tell someone with an addiction that you are wrong, guess what happens?
Their walls go down, they retract the spikes, their ears perk up, and now you've got their attention. Now they want to hear what you're about to say. It's powerful because the person is expecting some punch or stab; they're expecting you to come at them to be negative, criticize them, call them out on something, lecture, nag, or preach.

If you don't do any of that, you can show your vulnerabilities and weaknesses and act with humility. Not only will they pay attention to and listen to you, but they will also trust you much more. Best of all, you're modeling humility.

Humility triggers humility in another person. Think about the last time you were in a big argument with someone, and finally, either they or...

The worst thing you can say to someone with an addiction is, "You are a terrible person."

Saying this will backfire on you. It will blow up in your face, so do your best to avoid this.

Any version of this includes comments like:

• You're such a screw-up.
• You're the reason this family's falling apart.
• You're costing us everything.
• You don't care about anyone but yourself.
• How could you do this to us?
• You're ruining it for everybody.
• You're ruining my day.
• It's your life you're wasting.

Those are all different ways of saying to someone that they are a terrible person.

Not only is it not going to help them be a better person, but it's also going to backfire on you because when you say something like that to someone, they're going to get very, very defensive. The walls will likely come up, and the spikes will most likely come out. Even if they're doing terrible things, they're probably not doing it because they want to be a horrible person. They're probably doing it...