Daniel A. Feerst | Creates New Workplace Intervention Model for Families and Businesses to Help Resolve Problems with Alcoholics
Daniel Feerst, a clinical social worker, and internationally recognized employee assistance consultant and the author have created an intervention model to help small businesses and family members help an alcoholic become motivated to enter treatment immediately without delay for the addictive disease.
Addictive Disease is also known as alcoholism or alcohol addiction and has been considered a mostly genetic-based disease by the American Medical Association since 1957. It affects about 1 in 10 drinkers in the United States.
Daniel Feerst calls his intervention model for businesses the “Performance-based Intervention Model” and his model for families or close friends of an alcoholic, “The Family Empowerment Model.” Both approaches divert strongly from archaic and problematic models of intervention first promulgated in the 1960s that followed the publishing of the book, “I’ll Quit Tomorrow” by Vernon Johnson, who found of the Johnson Institute.
What’s unique about Daniel Feerst’s approach is his model’s reliance upon the “influence” and “leverage” naturally afforded by close relationships between people. Discarded is the reliance on the guidance, persuasion, or anxiety-inducing presence of an intervention professional acting as a babysitter and participant-observer, sitting with the family and being a distraction, surprise to the addict, and often an awkward roadblock to the intervention’s success.
“When I was assigned by my employer to conduct interventions while running a 25-bed addiction treatment program for teenagers in Los Angeles in 1982, I had no interest in surprising addicts at meetings with me being a stranger in their midst while a family I had trained attempted to conduct an intervention. It’s simply too awkward to expect family members to explain to the addict that I was only present to offer support, a calming influence, and be clarifies of concepts and addictive disease idiosyncrasies. How unnatural can one get!”
Daniel Feerst continues, “Have you seen how rarely this sort of model described above is used?” If it was successful, you’d hear about it all the time. I challenge anyone to find two people in your state who are traditional interventionists. They are rare because traditional family intervention meetings are exceedingly cumbersome and emotionally draining. They are also time consuming and expensive. And, frankly, no one likes to do them very long.
The old-fashioned and quite risky approach to intervention with numerous hazards is as expensive as it is rare. Some so-called certified interventionists charge 3, 4, or even five thousand dollars for arranging interventions, and the price can prey on desperate families.”
“And there is another rub — the traditional intervention is usually considered a one-shot deal. If it doesn’t work, it’s usually deemed a failure and the interventionist is not coming back a second time for another surprise meeting. Not so with the Empowerment Model, and I will explain why.”
Working for the Arlington Hospital, Daniel Feerst observed that 99% of admissions to drug and alcohol addiction treatment programs happened successfully because family members and friends “laid down the law” and employers used the threat of firing the worker to motivate the addict to accept an assessment or treatment — as an accommodation if the employee wanted it — — with no fooling around or manipulation. There was no professional interventionist guiding the process!
The intervention technologies that Daniel Feerst has created are teachable and anyone can learn how to implement them.
So, admissions to treatment occur because people give the addict an ultimatum. And they don’t blink. This, however, must be taught, and this is what Daniel Feerst does.
“To me, what I was observing with families,” says Daniel Feerst,” was the natural use of leverage (something you give or take away that the addict does not want to experience) or the influence (the value or weight of the relationship the addict has with a particular individual) as tools in the intervention process. Influence persuasion always comes first. If needed leverage comes next.
For decades, the failed and risky model of promoting the use of a mental health professional as a baby-sitter in a surprise intervention, and enormous cost, risk, and god-awful problems of timing has been the most popular version of what been come to be known as a family intervention. The one big monstrous problem with this approach — risk, cost, and a false model of how people think and act. It is also a dependency model that essentially states that family members can’t help themselves or help an alcoholic in their midst without someone smarter than they are being present to hold their hand. This is nonsense.
Daniel Feerst says is Performance-based and Family Empowerments work so well that he can help 10X the number of people than the average interventionist. “Rather than showing up at someone’s house after pancakes on Sunday morning, along with all of the anxiety, logistical coordination, and risk such an approach takes, Feerst trains family members in two meetings of two hours each to become unstoppable people of power — runaway trains — with a non-negotiable mission of convincing the addict to accept help without delay.”
Daniel Feerst says his success is enormous, and there are two big reasons why. One is the ability to train families quickly and educate them about addictive disease properly so they do not shoot themselves in the foot with improper statements and misconceptions, such as psychiatric explanations for addiction and alcoholism. He also gives them superior knowledge in understanding how to use influence and secondly (it does not work) leverage that the addict can’t bear to accept, which will motivate him or her to accept help. Examples might be divorce, loss of association, removal of grandchildren, financial support, jail, or other severe and adverse consequences for refusal at this moment in time to accept help.
“The beauty of the Empowerment Model and Performance-based Intervention model,” says Daniel Feerst, is its teach-ability. Once understood, it is possible for an employer or a family member to teach it to another person or group by focusing on the model’s key principles. Gone are the elitist days of a family being told literally that they cannot be successful with an intervention without an uppity mental health professional overshadowing the process.
And there is another bonus as well says Daniel Feerst — repeatability. There is absolutely no such thing as a failed intervention — only a failed or missed opportunity to try again. It is actually a beautiful thing, says Feerst. “It’s a fact,” Dan says, “addicts have problems and crises, and they will continue if the affected person is drinking or using drugs. This guarantees another shot, and each of these crises is an opportunity to intervene — conduct the intervention on the heels of each one until success is achieved — don’t stop unless death comes first.
Thankfully, death is rare and people will respond at the moment they are feeling remorse for problems their drinking has caused. Most families will be successful if they stick to the model, see the need for treatment as absolutely non-negotiable, and ultimately any engagement with the addict not focused on moving toward a decision to enter treatment is viewed as enabling, undermining motivation, and buying the addict’s next drink. To Learn more about intervention and consult with Daniel Feerst, MSW, LISW-CP phone 1–800–626–4327 or visit the YouTube Video at this abbreviated link: bit.ly/INTERVENTION10 .