How Family Interventions Lead To Lasting Recovery

 

In this episode of I Love Being Sober, Tim Westbrook sits down with Andrew Engbring, co-founder of Reflection Family Interventions, to break down why most addiction interventions fail—and what families can do differently to create real, lasting recovery.

Too often, families are told to wait for “rock bottom” or simply attend support groups while their loved one struggles. But according to Andrew, this outdated approach can actually make things worse—delaying recovery, increasing risk, and leaving families without the structure and guidance they truly need.

Drawing on years of experience leading high-stakes interventions and working with hundreds of families, Andrew shares a powerful, family-centered model that reframes intervention as a process—not a one-time event. This conversation dives into the critical role families play in recovery, the biggest mistakes that lead to relapse, and how early, structured intervention can change the trajectory of someone’s life.

If you’ve ever tried to help someone you love and felt stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure what to do next—this episode will give you clarity, direction, and hope.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why most interventions fail to create lasting change
• The truth about “rock bottom” and why waiting is dangerous
• How addiction impacts the entire family system
• What effective, structured family involvement actually looks like
• The biggest mistakes families make when trying to help
• How to take action—even if your loved one doesn’t want help yet

This episode is for individuals in recovery, families navigating addiction, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how healing actually happens.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How Family Interventions Lead To Lasting Recovery

A Family-Centered Approach To Intervention, Early Action, And Creating Lasting Recovery—Not Just Short-Term Compliance

This episode is a powerful one, especially for anyone who has ever loved someone struggling with addiction or mental health. We talk a lot about recovery, treatment, and what the individual needs to do to get better, but what often gets overlooked is the family system, the people who are living in the chaos, trying to help, and often not getting the guidance or support they actually need. My guest is someone who has made that his life’s work.

Andrew Engbring is the Founder of Reflection Family Interventions, a nationwide organization focused on complex mental health and addiction interventions, but with a very different approach. His work is centered on the idea that recovery is not an individual event. It’s a systemic process that requires the entire family to heal, grow, and engage. He’s held leadership roles across the behavioral health field, from director of admissions, program director, director of operations, CEO, and through all of that, he saw a major gap. Families were being left out of real, structured care. Since then, he’s helped hundreds of families navigate high stakes crises and move toward long term recovery with clarity and direction. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

The Problem – Families Are Underserved

Yes, so we’ve been talking about this for a while and I’ve seen your work, so we’re here with our our outpatient group. We’ve got people that you have worked with and then we’re also going to talk a lot about family. I’m not exactly sure where the conversation is going to go, but I think this is going to be valuable for anybody that’s here, that should be here, or family members that that want to read. Why do you believe the current standard of care is failing families?

The approach that I see most often is people tell families, “Wait for the problem to get worse, go to Al-Anon. You have to wait for them to hit bottom, there’s nothing you can do, go to Al-Anon.” There’s no area of medicine where we ever tell anybody, “Your problem’s not bad enough to get help yet. Wait for it to get worse before you get help.” There’s no area in treatment where we’d ever tell the patient, “Go to a couple of support groups and you’ll be fine.”

For some reason, the family system gets this double standard. We tell families, “Go to a support group and you’ll be fine and there’s nothing you can do, wait for it to get worse.” It’s mind blowing, especially because one of the biggest predictors of outcomes is the environment that we return to post treatment. We’re all part of systems. We’re part of a system with employers, we’re part of a system with families, with support.

Humans were not designed to live in isolation. We are designed to live within a system and we become that system that surrounds us. Oftentimes, that family system, especially when addiction’s mental health is involved, is more dysfunctional than the actual addiction. If we don’t do anything about that, we can stabilize the problem, but then we send that problem right back into a system that spins it all out all over again.

The system that helped create the problem in the first place, or the issue, or the disease, or whatever you want to call it. Let’s back up for a second. Is there an event or something that happened that that caused you to be so passionate about working with families?

I don’t know if it was a single event. I think back on my own story and my mom on her hands and knees after finding my my little kit, my little sunglass cases with the case, with the spoons and needles and all of that. Hands and knees just begging me to stop, which was not a fun experience. Through work in recovery, I think the real inspiration just came from watching what happened to people after treatment. Yeah, because I’ve worked in the sober living, I worked in the outpatient, worked in the residential, the detox. I went through all of that, and I noticed that the families that were actually working on themselves just had better outcomes.

Families who actually work on themselves get better outcomes. Share on X

Maybe some of it’s a little ego. I love it when people will tell us, “That’s impossible, you can’t do that, you can’t change things, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Hold my coffee, watch this. It’s just fun to be able to show people there’s a lot that can be done. It’s not hopeless, especially when the illness, the disease, whatever verbiage you want to put on there, depends on the very system supporting it. If we can change the way that everybody shows up around, then you change the problem itself.

It’s like the environment always wins. I’ve heard and I’m sure you’ve heard this too, “My son, my daughter, my wife, my loved one, they’re the one with the problem, they need to go get better. Go fix them. You make them better and then send them back to me.” I’m sure you hear that. How often does that work?

Never does that work. We get those calls on the back end a lot. “I sent them to the treatment center, I paid the money, I did the thing, and they came back and nothing changed.” If I’m in a really sarcastic mood, I’ll start asking the questions of, “How were they doing while they were in treatment?” “They were doing great.” “How did they sound when they came up towards the end of that program?” “They sounded good, they were looking good, everything was great.”

“Where did the problem re-emerge? When they came back home? When you came back to you? Was it the treatment center that was the problem or is it home that’s the problem? We need to do something about that.” You don’t know how to have hard conversations. You don’t know how to be loving and hold somebody accountable at the same time. You don’t know how to own your own part in this equation. If you can’t own your own part, there’s no authenticity in the relationship. Which means there’s no meaningful connection. If I can’t feel connected to my family, then why am I around them?

That leads to sometimes it’s probably better for the person not to go home after treatment. It’s better for them to stay engaged and build this new community, sometimes build a new family of people that are in recovery, people that are supportive, people that they actually want to be like, as opposed to go back home.

Yeah, and staying away from a chaotic system is only one of those reasons. When you just look at the recovery journey by itself, if I don’t do anything that matters with my recovery, if I don’t do anything I can be proud of with my recovery, then what was the point? If I’m just going to be sober and that’s the end of it, what was the point. There’s no self-esteem. If I don’t feel good about what I’m doing, then it just makes this whole relapse cycle infinitely more likely to happen. There are very few people that become proud of themselves living under their parents’ roof, or just being sober and simply existing.

What do you think needs to change?

What I’d really like to see is in a perfect world, take all practicality out of the equation, I think family members should be required to go to treatment too. If your loved one’s going in, you need to check in as well. Different place, but that’s not even remotely practical and very few would actually follow through with that.

 

This model we’ve been really developing and have seen a lot of wonderful traction with is that the family’s more or less in an outpatient program while their loved one’s in treatment. We got seven group sessions on top of their individual session. They’re doing nine hours a week on themselves. They’re in an IOP three level of care. All to look at their own relationship with this problem. What is my part in this? That’s where the real healing happens.

As they say, you either grow together or you grow apart. Everybody in the family system has to do the work in order for it truly to work, so the family system can grow together and change and transform and become a healthy, happy family.

It almost never happens at the same time. Everybody’s going to be on different stages of their journey, what they’re ready to hear, what they’re ready to look at, what they’re really willing to do in that moment. Usually what we see is it comes in stages. Of course, all the work we’re doing surrounds interventions. You get this really fun crisis point that everybody can rally around that becomes the day one for everybody involved.

That moment creates a really special opportunity that can put everybody onto a different path. Absent that, you might find where a spouse wants to show up one day differently but then reverts back. A parent’s going to show up differently on one day and revert back. Me with the addiction, I may be ready to do something about it in the morning but then by the afternoon, it’s beer thirty. Everybody’s showing up and ready to do something at different times, and that becomes the real hard part of it. How do we get everybody to align at the same time?

What does family involvement usually look like now and why isn’t it enough?

What we see industry wide is that family involvement in treatment tends to be like the therapist provides an update call. “This is what happened this week. Cool, go to Al-Anon. Bye.” That’s about what the family involvement so it creates a dynamic where family involvement really looks more like surveillance than it does participation. We wonder why I don’t want to sign a release of information for my wife. I don’t want to sign an ROI for my parents because what are you going to do with that information? They’re not going to do anything helpful, they’re just going to do that to find more control, which becomes their drug of choice.

Family involvements unfortunately look more like surveillance than it does participation. Share on X

Has anybody ever reneged their ROI? We see that. To your point, you’re giving them fuel. Without them having true support or them knowing really what to do with that information. I understand why someone would take a family member off of the ROI.

If my family member showed up with an amends, “I’m sorry, I’m committed to doing things differently, I’m doing my own work,” there’s very few people that would have an issue with an ROI at that point when it becomes about active growth and not surveillance. Again, it’s there’s a difference between that passive I know what’s going on and active participation in a process. That’s really what I want to see changed industry-wide.

 What actually happens to a family system when they’re only getting updates instead of real support?

Continued crisis. Let’s just take a super simple family system, and say you’ve got mom, dad, brother, brother’s wife, and then over here you have alcoholic. Alcoholism enters the family and it creates a whole bunch of chaos, so naturally mom’s attention’s going to start going this way. “My baby’s dying. How do I help?” It’s a normal mom response. Of course, dad’s going to have a different thing. “Yeah, my baby’s dying and I need to help,” but in a very stereotypical way, mom wants to help with love and kisses and hugs and support and give and if I could make your life easier for you, you would do better.

Where the stereotypical father role is going to be more of accountability and boundaries and better job and better crowd and tough love thing. A brother’s going to sit there and say, “Here I am doing everything right and nobody even knows when my birthday is. This guy over here gets sober for three minutes and we’re throwing a block party.” You’ve got the brother’s wife that’s sitting there saying like, “You guys are all nuts.”

What happens is they all start building resentments with each other because while there’s all this attention going to the alcoholism, now we have a husband looking at his wife saying, “When’s the last time we were romantic? When’s the last time we went on a date?” He starts forming resentments on his wife because there’s not a lot of attention to that relationship anymore. The brother’s forming resentments through all three of them.

He’s like, “Again, here I am, I got a scholarship to an Ivy League school and everything in my life is going so well and nobody even notices. I’m trying to outshine by accomplishment.” As soon as you take that alcoholism out of the picture, just take that addiction, move it into a treatment center, all those resentments on this side of the family continue to cycle. That energy doesn’t go anywhere. In fact, it often times gets amplified because we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know what to say, we don’t know how to have those kinds of conversations and for so long often times years, maybe even decades, we were blaming it on the addiction.

Now the addiction’s not here and we find ourselves at odds with each other still. It amplifies that whole chaotic dysfunction because the whole system became dependent on having dysfunction present. We form this crisis orientation and we have to have that present to maintain our normalcy. You see those baby mobiles. My daughter’s over her crib, she had one with little pink stuffed elephants that spun around. You take any one of those animals off, the whole thing is off kilter. The whole system has to now re-adapt in a new way. Without some guidance, you have people with terrible coping mechanisms and bad communication skills trying to re adapt in a healthy way. It’s just a roll of the dice to see what might actually help be helpful and more often than not it turns out worse.

My experience is most a lot of people, most people don’t have the courage to have these hard conversations, and without the courage or the tools or the knowledge or the experience or the coaching or the guidance to have these difficult conversations, the difficult conversations never happen. Issues get just pushed to the side and the resentments build. From your experience, how does that lack of structure show up later? Relapse, resentment, or enabling?

A lot of times, it shows up during the treatment process. My favorite is when these whole step down conversations come up. “I finished detox, I’m finishing residential, what’s the next step? Am I going to do outpatient? Am I going to go home and get a job? What am I going to do with my life from here?” On one side of the fence, you have a therapist saying, “No, you need continued care. Let’s do PHP, let’s do structured housing. We’re 30 days sober. If we stop this process right now, you’re looking at a 97% relapse rate.”

Very few people, if any, stay sober on 30 days alone. You’ve got the whole treatment side beating this from the rooftops. This is what we actually need to do if you have a therapist with a little bit of guts to them. Some therapists just want to make their clients happy and they think that’s helping. At the same time, you’ve got this chaotic family system on the other side that’s saying, “We don’t know how to function without crisis.” Without our person home, we have all these issues in our marriage that were so much easier to ignore because we had the chaos present. I know that’s not anybody’s intention, but subconsciously we there’s almost this craving to bring that back because that’s what we know.

Here at Camelback, we see families desperate for direction. What do you think they’re missing most?

Just that. Direction, guidance, actual help that has nothing to do with their person. Much so we started a nonprofit that’s free clinical family programming for anybody. It’s actual clinicians, real programming, this isn’t go to a 12-step support group. It’s an actual structured program and we’re doing that online for free now. Doesn’t matter if your person’s in treatment or not, where they like this isn’t tied to anything. It’s just show up and get help.

I think this whole idea of dysfunctional families, nobody wants this. This isn’t what anybody asked for. It just happened. I’ve never seen the family that enables because they like the problem. They enable because they’re scared. I’ve never seen the family that wants this to continue. “We just don’t have confidence, we don’t know what to do, we don’t know how to do it, when to do it, what to say, what not to say.”

We spend so much time in our own head we’re not actually supporting our person anymore. What we did was here you can come and get education and guidance and real information that goes way beyond like let’s just support each other. It’s like what’s the difference between an AA meeting and a group therapy session? AA is supportive and helpful. You’re going to get a lot more actionable guidance from an act real therapy.

Rock Bottom Myth & Early Intervention

Where did the idea of rock bottom come from and why is it so harmful?

I hate that word, rock bottom. As I said earlier, there is nowhere else in medicine where we tell people, “Wait for your problem to get worse. It’s not bad enough yet for you to get well.” That whole idea just implies like, “I have to wait until there’s all this damage and then by the time I make it into a treatment center, all I’m doing is damage control and I’m not actually getting help for the core of the issue because there’s just way too much surface level damage to even get to that yet.”

The rock bottom, the way I understand it, this whole rock bottom myth stems from the 12-step groups. Back in the ‘40s, when AA was the only answer to recovery, you had to be pretty darn motivated for that to be helpful. There wasn’t a lot of accountability, you had to show up to the meetings, like you had to dedicate your entire life to this group, and there really wasn’t a lot of consequences if you didn’t. To show up to the meetings day in and day out with people I don’t like and get the sponsor and work the steps and go through without the accountability on the back end, you’ve got to have an incredible level of desperation for that to help. A lot of us get there at some point, but why do we have to wait that long?

In more modern forms now, there’s entire clinical modalities that can help us with motivation. I don’t want to get sober but I want the problems to stop, that’s where I stuck for a long time. I don’t want to actually get clean but I don’t want all these consequences either, like it’s starting to get uncomfortable. If we have entire modes of therapy designed just to build motivation, we don’t need it anymore.

We have multiple avenues of recovery, we have different levels of care, we’ve got so many resources that we can just be honest with ourselves and say that. I don’t even want to get clean, I just want to stop hurting. That can give a clinician enough to let’s try motivational interviewing. Let’s work on this. Have you tried this avenue, have you tried that? We don’t need it anymore.

What are the real risks of waiting too long to intervene, especially in 2026?

The obvious one is fentanyl. That’s taking a lot of people out. That’s something we’ve never actually seen with addiction before, like something that lethal and widespread. The one we also see a lot now is cannabis, weed is not the drug that it used to be. The weed I got to smoke, Chacho brought in his tire over the border of Mexico. You had to smoke a lot of it. It still had stems and seeds.

 

What we see now is that especially the vape pens are just so ultra concentrated that we’re seeing incredible psychotic features that can last a long time. This whole idea of waiting and waiting just increases the chance that there’s going to be difficult to solve if not irreversible problems. A lot of times, we could have done something about it a long time ago. We did an intervention. This guy’s low 50s. His brother died of alcohol medical complications 4 or 5 years prior. He hasn’t been in a good way in a long time.

Family is calling, they’re ready to do something about this, let’s get him some help, he just lost his job, things don’t seem to be going well. One of the questions on our assessment is so how does he react when you ask him to go to treatment, when you ask him to get some help? This is not an uncommon response in intervention world. Nobody’s ever asked the guy. Nobody’s ever actually asked him, “We’ve made this possible for you. We’ve taken care of everything. You have help available.” Nobody had even asked him that question.

We show up to do the intervention that intervention lasted all three and a half minutes. The interventionist just showed up and introduced himself, “This is why I’m here, this is what we have worked out for you,” and he’s like, “Let’s go.” There were no letters, no fanfare, no fight, no nothing. It was just mind blowing to that particular family of did you really need an interventionist? Just to ask him. In their experience, they did.

They didn’t even know how to have that question. There was so much fear around can we do something, should we do something? How does that work? If we looked at it in terms of any other illness, I love the diabetes metaphor. Medical problem with a behavioral solution, a lot like addiction problems. If you had a diabetic person and you found them eating an entire chocolate cake and refusing to take their insulin, you’d have a lot to say about that. You wouldn’t say, “They’ll stop eating the cake when they’re ready. Just don’t say anything, don’t challenge it, just let them keep going.” For some reason, we don’t treat these issues the same way.

How can families recognize it’s time to act, even if things don’t look that bad yet?

How bad does it need to get? If something seems off, then something’s off. If we address the problem earlier, now we can do it with less invasive care, maybe even bypassing residential and detoxes entirely. None of these issues start in somebody’s 20s, 30s, and 40s. They usually always trace right back to the teenage years. Why weren’t we doing individual and family therapy after school back in middle school? High school? Had we done something about that then, would we be in the same circumstance today?

What do you say to families who are afraid they’ll push their loved one away?

They’re already gone. If you have that fear, they’re already gone. If you can’t have an honest conversation with your loved one, what relationship do you have? It’s the relationship’s already gone.

If you cannot have an honest conversation with your loved one, what kind of relationship do you have? Share on X

Can someone actually get better if they don’t want help?

Yeah. If we’re truly going to look at this like we would any other medical problem, since when do I have to want any medical treatment to work for the treatment to actually work? The real metric is participation, it’s not willingness levels. That’s been something that’s extensively studied. That’s also mind blowing to me how few people actually look at that data, actually look at the clinical studies, because there’s never been a clinical study that has said willing people have better outcomes.

In fact, all the studies on the on the subject actually prove there’s no difference. People who are pressured into treatment have the exact same outcomes as the one who went on their own. There was actually one study out of Norway that went on it was a 40-year case study. I want to say there was like 3,000 or 4,000 participants in this study. They actually started to say that pressured or coerced treatment was more effective than voluntary.

I see that all the time. I got sober to get my wife back and she ended up leaving me anyways. Eventually, I I got sober to get her back. I was planning on just getting sober for a little bit and then making her happy and then going back to my old behavior. Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to do it for me. I see that happen all the time, and especially at residential or even in outpatient.

People are here just because they have to be here. Whether they’re court ordered or their family, their wife is going to leave them, their parents are going to disown them or whatever, whatever it may be, a lot of times, they originally get sober but then somewhere along the way, in my opinion or in my experience, they have to want to do it for themself.

Eventually, you get some clarity. Isn’t that the whole basis of CBT therapy? Our feelings create our thoughts, our thoughts create our behaviors, which reinforce our feelings and around and around we go. It just goes in that cycle if we can interrupt that cycle, eventually, I’m going to get some clarity and feel better and then I’ll actually want it. At least that was my issue and my issue personally.

I wasn’t sitting there in elementary school and when Susie said she was going to be a doctor. I didn’t raise my hand like, “Yeah, I want to be a heroin addict when I grow up.” That was not what I wanted to do but it happened. I didn’t want to get sober not because I didn’t want my life to change, like I didn’t like what I was doing, but I truly did not believe that I could feel okay without it. Once I actually felt okay without it, it was a game changer.

Why Interventions Fail To Create Lasting Change

Why do so many interventions fail to create lasting change?

It’s because we look at interventions as a one-time event. A real intervention is not a let’s sit in a circle and read some letters. That might be part of the process, but we like to look at interventions as a series rather than an episode. Sure, there’s the first intervention of just getting the family to pull their head out of their rear end, give up control and listen to a professional. That happens long before you ever approach somebody about going to treatment. Usually, there’s a multitude of interventions that need to happen just to get some family alignment.

Most of the time, it’s not even alignment, it’s just getting them to stop coming up with their own ideas. Not unlike a getting sober process. We stop coming up with ideas, things start to work better. There’s the intervention of will you go and get some help? There’s the intervention of can we continue this process even when it’s hard?

There’s the intervention of you guys are crazier than your loved one in treatment, we need to start working on that. There’s the intervention of give up control and let them have their own life, which they’re not going to like in the beginning. I didn’t. The stop enabling, then there’s the intervention of reintegration. Can we actually build real, vulnerable, authentic relationships in recovery? A lot of interventions fail because they’re looking at it as a let’s sit in a circle, read some letters and see what happens.

Family interventions are not a one-time event. It is a series rather than an episode. Share on X

Intervention is so much more than that.

No, the intervention’s more for the family than it is for the person. Often, we just have to ask the person like will you go to treatment?

It’s like I’ve taken my dog to training classes, and really, those classes are for me. The classes are not even for my dog. It’s for me to learn how to treat my dog because I wasn’t giving my dog what my dog needed in order to become a great a great pet, whatever. My dog’s had bad behavior and they had bad behavior because of me.

What’s funny I was actually a dog trainer before I got into this world.

That is not really a dog trainer, you’re really a people trainer.

It’s all about the people because where most people are going wrong with their dogs is that they’re making it about them and not what their dog needs. You’re not learning how to communicate with your dog. You’re just making it all about what you want your dog to do and you don’t leave them with a whole lot of autonomy to be a flipping dog.

Dogs bark.

They run around. You can’t just expect them to do everything you want them to do at every moment their entire life. You’ve got to give them room to be a dog. You’ve got to have a relationship and actually care about their needs. That works the same way in family systems.

How should an intervention actually be structured to work long term, not just to get someone into treatment?

That’s the million dollar question. The model that we’re on that we’re having a lot of help, a lot of success with that, we’re really liking and of course this is likely to change six months from now because it’s uncharted waters in the intervention world. Yes, we’ll help you get your loved one to treatment and we’re really good at that. We’re really good at that part. However, if we’re going to engage on that process, you need to commit to six months of family work yourself. If you’re not willing to commit to family programming, we’re just not going to do the intervention. Go find the cheap 12-step guy that’ll do it for $1,500 and teach you how to set some ultimatums that won’t stick.

We ask for the family to make a commitment, a real commitment to their own growth. You’re going to look at your part, you’re going to look at what is your fault. Some of it is. You’re going to look at yeah. It drives me nuts when we keep telling families like, “It’s not your fault.” Some of it is. You’re going to commit to your own programming. That’s a real structured intervention.

The piece that I’m really liking that we’re doing now is reintegration. Family goes programming, loved one goes to programming, they all got issues separate, different issues they need different kinds of help, but then we’re actually connecting the dots several months down the line. Working on shared goal setting and communication and relationship building. It’s really cool.

Do you have any suggestions for our audience here, the people that are in treatment, how can they encourage their families to be more involved with the aftercare process?

I think the first thing is stop looking at family aftercare as if it’s about you. Stop looking at their healing as if it’s going to control you, do something to you. Everybody here’s adults. Your life is your responsibility. Our families don’t actually owe us anything. The first piece is I have to overcome that. I’m taking accountability for my life and my future. I can then start to really evaluate how do I want them involved, which most often the best answer is they need to do some of their own work.

 

My favorite conversation coming from the person in treatment is, “I’m doing 9, 12, 18 hours of therapy a week. How much have you done? Have you done any work on yourself since this whole thing started? Here’s some things that are, that would be helpful to me. I want a real relationship so much so that I found a program you could go to or foundation in the non-profit that’s free and it’s online. They only have to wear pants.”

There is no barrier to entry. If you have a smartphone, you can participate. You can even start building some boundaries around it. “I’d love to sign a release of information. Will you sign one with your team? Can we actually integrate a real recovery journey here? I’m doing my part. Will you do yours?” Just start asking these questions. They’re fair questions to ask. Just because I have an addiction doesn’t mean I don’t have a brain.

What Actually Works In Structured Family Care

We’ll talk a little bit more about how people can get involved with your family program towards the end of the show. What does effective structured Family Care actually look like during treatment?

Most of the time, it’s less updates and more questions. The trend we see from a lot of programs is this. Family involvement means the family knows what’s happening in treatment. We’re real structured family. Involvement is no, you don’t need to know what they’re talking about therapy, and let’s talk about why you want that information. Why do you need that?

It’s why we call the intervention outfit reflection. Start looking in the mirror. Why does the answer to that question feel important to you? Get people to just flip that script and that’s what we really want to see. That’s what structured family involvement looks like. We have containment. We have self-reflection We have internalization. We’re all starting to grow. We’re less concerned with what’s somebody else should be doing and a lot more concerned with what’s my piece of this process.

I’ve heard family members say, “When is my loved one going to call me and make amends?” What do you say to that? My response is you just got to let him go through their journey and their process and they’ll come to you when they’re ready. What’s your answer to the family member that’s waiting for the amends?

Why do you need an apology? Why do you really need that apology? Maybe your loved one will be ready to make their amends about the same time that you figure out what you need to make amends for and you’re ready to do that as well. Where’s your amends in the equation? I’m sure you didn’t do everything perfectly. Its like the difference between a boundary and an ultimatum. The ultimatum says, “I want you to change so I don’t have to,” versus the boundary says, “I have to change regardless of what you’re going to do. This is what I have to do to protect myself.” The same thing with that amends thing. I’m waiting for them to do something so I can feel okay. That’s called codependence.

I’ve never heard that before, the difference between a boundary and an ultimatum. An ultimatum is, “You need to change so I don’t have to,” and a boundary is, “I’m changing because,” probably that person has never been able to hold a boundary before and so they are changing. Holding boundaries is sometimes difficult. It’s much more than just saying, “This is my boundary.”

The best boundaries are the ones you don’t even say out loud.

The best boundaries are the ones you do not even say out loud. Share on X

You just have the boundary. How do you handle it when a loved one refuses help?

First, we want to look at why are they refusing. Did we present an impractical solution? Did we present A solution that just wasn’t the right one. Sometimes, we have to look at what help are we even presenting? If we’re not presenting help that makes sense, how could we expect them to do that? When we know we’re following criteria, let’s take all that stuff out of the equation.

Let’s just say we’re following everything by the book. It’s all right. Intervention world most often is detox. They need detox. They fit all clinical criteria for detox. We know we’re presenting the right solution and really about the only solution that has any chance of being affected. Sure, people win the lottery, but not many.

We’re presenting the right thing. They are just downright refusing. What’s the system that’s supporting that dysfunction? There’s very few mental health disorders, substance use disorders that are surviving on their own, like they’re a part of a system. When we have a system that is more dependent on dysfunction than healing, there’s your problem. If we can change the way that everybody in that system shows up, that refusal might not be a no never. It might just be a not today. If everybody around me changes the way that they show up, It’s going to make healing look a little more attractive to me.

If a family feels stuck, what’s the first step they should take?

Get help. Think about the first step you want your loved one to do and just do that. Do the exact thing you want your loved one to do. Most often, it’s get some help. Follow directions. Take advice. Do it first.

Answering Questions From The Audience

All right, so we’ve covered lots of powerful stuff in this conversation and now I want to open it up to you guys. Anything that we talked about here that made you think of something? The floor is open.

I’m Luis. For me, before I came in, my little sister broke down to my family saying that I took all the attention away from her, that she wasn’t getting the attention she needed because of what I was struggling for the past five years. She grew up with my parents not giving her the attention she needed. Your program, can that help her out in a way and how?

Yeah. Let’s look at it honestly. The first real solution is well what’s your part in this. You’re doing what you need to do obviously. You’re here in group listening to a show that probably two months ago, that never would have happened. You are doing your part but you got to continue showing up differently because that is a major source of that feeling that she has. Some of it is your fault. I’m not saying let’s get in our feelings and really hard on ourselves, but recognize the reality. Here’s me taking accountability and I’m going to show up differently in the future.

It’s important that you do that. You stay with it, even when you don’t want to. Yeah, the other part of that is she gets help too. Of course she can come to the foundation, there’s help there. She can get a therapist, she can go to ACOA. I would really encourage professional support, though. Twelve-step groups are fantastic but I’d really encourage like actual professional support in combination with maybe a group too. Yeah, there’s options.

Thank you.

My name’s Nicole. Thank you for taking the time to talk about it. My family doesn’t even know that I’m in treatment, but I do also want them to get help so that we can just be a better family. How would you suggest that I approach that?

Do you mind if I ask why don’t they know?

I don’t want them to worry about me, and it’s like I know that I’m doing this for myself. I just don’t want there to be issues that come up like Tim asked earlier, like I did a revoke like my ROI for my family members. I just don’t want them to worry.

They have no idea that like you’re sitting here right now?

That’s correct.

That would be the first step. Have that conversation. I’ll speak from experience. I thought I was hiding things really well and people weren’t worried and they didn’t know. At least in my experience was that everybody knew something was wrong even though they couldn’t necessarily put their finger on exactly. Nobody knew exactly what was happening, but they all knew that something was seriously wrong.

Leaving them with that question where they’re questioning their own sanity of is something wrong, is it not, like that mental gymnastics that they go through is horrible. A lot of times the truth is not nearly as bad as their imaginations. Just rip the band aid off and have the conversation. You already said it. You can include in that exact same conversation and there’s support for you and I’d like you to do it.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Drop the bomb but move it immediately into solution.

I appreciate your coming down and chatting with us. One of the things that you mentioned in your chat was that with loved ones and people at home going to treatment. What about for people that may have done this 15, 20 years ago who have recovered to a degree but yet still fight with employers, employment situations, coworkers?

I have to go back to work at some point. I’m going back into that lion’s den. Do you have any options for employment type programs or how to take this type of approach into the corporate world? I really believe that the corporate world is broken. There’s broken people in the corporate world that are part of this circle, but yet we don’t talk about it, because it’s corporate world.

My employer doesn’t know that I’m here. They just know that I’m out for my life for some reason. They can all suspect possibly what it is. I would love to be able to know how to go back to corporate world. I’m just afraid to go back to the lion’s den is really what it is. I don’t discuss my personal life at work. Obviously, that’s my choice.

It’s none of their business.

Correct, but I am part of this group like you wouldn’t believe, more so. This is my struggle. Do you have options? Have you ever thought about taking your program into Corporate America or introducing it into Corporate America? There’s a major mental health tragic drama, whatever you want to call it happening and I just think it’s not being discussed and talked about because of employment law, ADA, all that stuff. HR.

That’s the struggle we’ve run into. We do these interventions all the time and it’s a similar struggle every time. How do I go back into work and what’s going to happen if I do, when I do? We do those interventions and we’ve thought about like is there an employer-based training, anything? The roadblock we hit and just abandoned the idea real quick was they’re just not going to do it. How do you actually get that participation? You’re just not going to on top of all that complication of privacy and all of that.

The reality of where at least personally I stand and the approach we generally take is you know what, my job is my job. I go back to work, I hold my head up high and I do my job. If I need my job to define me, if I need my job to define my self-worth, if I need my job to define how I’m feeling, there’s an internal battle in there I have yet to fight. Why do I care so much about what the employer thinks?

I have to start wondering. Is there further work I need to do here? Sometimes the question is, is this even the job I want in recovery? That comes up a lot, especially when you’re on this whole like treatment, healing journey. This is a really good time to start asking those questions, like, “Is this actually what I want to be when I grow up?”

I appreciate that feedback, thank you.

Most often though it’s hold your head up high because there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I had some issues, I’m taking care of them. I don’t want to talk about it any further than that. That is a perfectly healthy response.

My name is Reina. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I really liked how you compared that there aren’t any other health issues that we deal with that you say it’s hit you got to go get worse before you get better. In that same vein, are there any ways that we can approach, I guess, addiction in a preventative sense?

The same thing we say with any other area. Early intervention. The word intervention’s a really broad term. That can mean a lot of things. It’s an action taken to improve a situation. Usually used in a medical sense. We say early intervention on everything. I go back to even when my daughter was born. Things were going fine and they want the babies to hit all these certain milestones. By this age, they should be rolling over, by this age they should be doing that.

She hit one of those magic ages and she wasn’t crawling yet. Immediately, the doctor’s like, “You need to go to the physical therapist. You’ve got the insurance to cover it. Just go.” Why would we not do this? There was no questions of is it bad enough yet, should we wait another month? Just go to the physical therapist. Sure enough, the day before the first physical therapy appointment, she’s crawling all over the house. She just did it.

The minute something’s off, address it. Most often, especially when we’re talking areas of substance use and mental health, you approach it like you would any other medical problem on the planet. “Doc, what should I do?” I follow their advice and usually patients that follow their treatment plans have a decent prognosis, patients that don’t follow their doctor’s treatment plan, usually their prognosis is pretty poor at best. You ask for help, take the advice and actually follow through. Take accountability for, “If I didn’t do what they were telling me to do, no wonder nothing changed.”

 

Thank you, I appreciate it.

I’m just wondering about relationships that you get after you’ve been sober for a while. How do you help manage the baggage that you and your family have but this person was not part of?

First off, you probably will want to actually heal as much of that as you can. You’re talking a romantic relationship. First off, I’d say you probably want to heal as much of that as you can because if I’m really wanting to get into a real relationship, I should have a goal of minimizing the amount of baggage I’m bringing into that in the first place. Heal as much of that as you can. You’ll end up finding the path that’s right for you from there.

Relationships are a funny thing. When both people can equally contribute to that relationship. There are some days I need more, there’s some days my wife needs more, of course. Not to get too the hokey on you guys but I believe there’s a pecking order in how things should be structured. God comes first, then spouse, then children, then extended family. If we can keep some of these priorities straight, things tend to flow a lot better. This is not me here trying to convert anybody. Really understand how your system is structured and how that should be structured. You’ll find exactly where that relationship fits in.

I’m Jon. Thanks for coming. During recovery, they say every time is different. This time, everything’s resonating. I’ve always wondered that whole thing about rock bottom myself because I look back at the times that I was in recovery the circumstances why I was in it and there were times where I was in it where I felt like it could work but in the back of my head, I knew that I was always going to do something else so it’s almost like I had a reservation.

I can totally see how circumstances of someone who maybe was pressured into recovery could they could still come out on the other end so that gives me even more hope, changes my viewpoint that now that you’ve gone off on all these different scenarios. It brings me a lot of hope and more hope for other people and I think it’s an awesome thing that you’re doing. What’s your company called again?

Reflection Family Interventions.

I think I’ll mention that to my family, but at the same time, I’m just trying to control my own side of the street and keep on keeping on.

If it helps at all, I had reservations until I was probably darn close to a year clean, still convinced I’m going to drink and smoke pot. I don’t need to do the heavy stuff again, like I’ll probably go to a rave and eat ecstasy on a weekend. If I could just stick to that, everything would be fine. I still carried that belief well into about like a year of recovery almost. What solved that reservation for me, I had to have been like 10, 11 months sober.

I’m in a sober living out in California. I’m not advocating for this, but this is what happened. A couple of us had snuck out of our sober living home the middle of the night and we met up with a girls’ sober living home and we all climbed this radio tower and watched the sunrise. There was nothing nefarious going on, like there was no hanky panky or using or anything like that. We just snuck out and climbed a radio tower and we’re watching the sunrise and just having a good time and connecting. We sneaked back into our beds before they wake us up for the morning meeting.

There was something about that moment for me that was like I can still get in trouble, I can still do things, I can still have fun, I can still have connection. For some reason, that really helped with some of those reservations that it started to make sense to me that I don’t actually need a rave to do that. Raves were a big part of my story. Something about that helped reinforce this idea that I don’t actually need that to get the same effect. The nail in the coffin, I went to an international young people in AA convention and that was an experience. Have you been to one of those?

No, I haven’t. I’ve been to the roundup here in Arizona but I’ve never traveled to one of those national conventions.

Yeah. ICYPAA. It’s a whole like subculture of AA that it’s just people under 35 and they rent out an entire conference center, multiple hotels. Every gas station within a 15-mile radius sells out of energy drinks before this conference is over. You cannot find a Red Bull anywhere by the time this is done. It was just like people are just staying up for days on end just to have fun. Doing meetings, doing recovery things, connecting on life, getting in trouble in the pool, sleeping with each other, whatever your fancy is, but the majority of people were there doing it sober. It helped with those reservations for me that I could actually experience some of these things in life but do it without drugs and alcohol.

I don’t know if this is a disease or not but I will say when I threw in the towel, I threw in the towel for good. That sounds cliché or I don’t know but it just makes me realize not to judge others. I’m walking to Target one day and my mind was telling me, “Go get your DOC,” but I didn’t want to. I didn’t. There were maybe some certain factors revolving around that, but to your point, that shows how it can definitely work for somebody who’s pressured into it and somebody who really wants it for themselves just as equally. The statistics are, like you said, that people don’t look at those studies.

The data is the data. What I will say on the disease argument is we do have conclusive proof that there’s altered decision making, like the brain is altered. The way we make decisions is absolutely compromised, especially when addiction’s involved. It’s fair to say that, what I can’t always trust my decisions, which is why I should have therapists and sponsors and support and all of these programs and stuff.

I can total my best thinking got me where I am now, so let me listen to somebody else. We’ve had a great conversation. Is there any question I should have asked you that I didn’t ask?

No. I didn’t really come in with a lot of expectations either.

Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words

Where can people find you, learn more about your family program, your nonprofit? Talk to me about that.

There’s Reflection Family Interventions and it’s just that, ReflectionFamilyInterventions.com. That’s the actual company, where we do interventions, family programming, all in a real intimate way. Everything on that side is expensive and private pay. It’s not a cheap undertaking, what we’re doing there, and insurance doesn’t cover a lick of it. It’s a battle we’re working on, but that’s a whole other project. The nonprofit side it’s TFRFoundation.org. The Family Recovery Foundation. Right on that website, =there’s a big blue banner on the top of the website.

Register for our family groups. You type in your name, your email, it sends you this Zoom link and you’re in. One of the cool things we’re doing with that foundation is we’re actually turning that into a research vessel now. I’ve built it into an app and found out there was no clinical assessment for determining family member progress over time. We got to invent that and the foundation will be a part of that. Soon, you get prompted to download an app and that app is going to feed you surveys and collect outcome studies. We’ll take that to the insurance providers and get them to pay for it.

Good idea. The person in recovery, the addict, the person struggling with mental health, should that person also sign up for the family program or is this just for the family?

The foundation really is better served for the family members. If we’re doing the real intimate intervention family programming on that side, then absolutely. That can include the person in treatment or the person graduated treatment, the patient, if you will. We can do that but that takes a little more finesse than a free family group can provide. There’s a lot of loaded topics in there. Foundation really should be family members. If we’re doing the actual paid family program, that’s something we can do a little deeper.

Andrew, I appreciate you. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here. Let’s give it up for Andrew Engbring.

 

Important Links

• Reflection Family Interventions
• The Family Recovery Foundation
• Andrew Engbring on LinkedIn

 

About Andrew Engbring

Andrew Engbring is the co-founder of Reflection Family Interventions, a nationwide organization specializing in complex addiction and mental health interventions using a structured, family-centered approach. With extensive experience across the behavioral health industry—including roles as Director of Admissions, Program Director, Director of Operations, and CEO—Andrew has developed a deep understanding of what works and what fails in addiction treatment and intervention.

Throughout his career, Andrew identified a critical gap in care: families are often excluded from meaningful, structured support during the recovery process. In response, he co-founded Reflection Family Interventions with his wife to elevate the standard of care and provide outcome-driven, accountable models that actively engage the entire family system.

Andrew’s work focuses on reframing intervention as a long-term process rather than a one-time event. He has led the development of measurable frameworks that help families track progress, improve communication, and create lasting change. Having guided hundreds of families through high-stakes addiction and mental health crises, he is known for helping families move from chaos and uncertainty to clarity, structure, and long-term recovery.

In addition to his clinical and operational work, Andrew serves on the board of the Family Recovery Foundation, where he supports initiatives that expand education, resources, and support groups for families navigating addiction.