When your Loved One has substance use and/or mental illness, communication can get sticky and prickly pretty quickly. Yet there's no world where we'll never need to have difficult conversations with our family members. CRAFT provides an incredibly effective toolbox for developing more easeful relationships. In this episode, our co-hosts—family members dealing with a Loved One's substance/mental health struggles—share how they've come to approach sensitive topics.

The skillset they've learned from Allies in Recovery, and the dedicated way they have practiced using those skills, has helped them to recognize the best times to share a comment, the best tone/mindset to adopt when doing so, and what reasonable expectations are for these exchanges.

Every human can benefit from this conversation which is overflowing with wisdom, humility and common sense approaches.

Learn more about Allies in Recovery and how we can help you help your Loved One.

What goes around, comes around. Kenny, Bridget, and Elizabeth came to Allies in Recovery as family members looking for help with shifting the dynamic with an addicted Loved One. At the time, rather than recording episodes for the world, they were listening and learning, like you. Listen to them speak about their all-time favorite Coming Up for Air episodes and why they were so impactful.

One Families Speak family member recently referred to Allies in Recovery as “the Bible of Healing Ourselves.” Visit alliesinrecovery.net today and see why.

Here are the episodes referred to by our co-hosts:

Handling Hard Feelings

Don't Let Perfectionism Get In the Way 

Progress, Not Perfection  

Rupture & Repair

Intention vs. Perception   

How Do You Deal with Unknowns and Unlimited Contact? 

Interview with Linda Aber 1 

Interview with Linda Aber 2 

How Do You Negotiate When your LO is coming home? 

Reflective Listening, intentional dialogue & improving communication 

What are the challenges of Reflective Listening? 

How do you get past accumulated trauma? 

When Your Loved One is Homeless

Kayla checks in with Annie Highwater, a regular contributor to our blog, about ways that CRAFT and Allies in Recovery's member site have changed her as a person.

Is your Loved One struggling with addiction? 

Allies in Recovery’s online program can help. You’ll learn a powerful, evidence-based approach to improve your wellbeing and that of other family members. Allies in Recovery provides the strategy, words, and actions a family needs to successfully move their Loved One with addiction toward stopping substance misuse/addiction.   Allies in Recovery also teaches families to navigate the world of addiction and recovery, including working towards engaging a Loved One into care and treatment. The program trains families to be effective participants in the journey to wellness for a Loved One with addiction. Let's get you on the road to becoming an ally! Visit alliesinrecovery.net

To learn more about Annie Highwater, you can check her out on FB, listen to her podcast "The Unhooked Podcast", or check out her books, Unhooked and Unbroken.

Money is already such a huge issue for almost everyone, before you even add Substance Use Disorder (SUD) into the mix! Things get exponentially more complex when it's your loved one with addiction issues asking for money. Whether it's "just 20 dollars" or rent for an apartment, families often experience the feeling of being hostage to their fear for their loved one. Giving your loved one money can play into that dynamic. Our hosts share their stance re: money before finding CRAFT, and what changed (for the better!) once they were using the CRAFT toolkit that we teach at Allies in Recovery. A fascinating conversation that brings helpful perspectives for the sticky issue of money.

In part 2 of 2, Isabel, Kayla, and their co-hosts -- family members with direct experience -- discuss their favorite tools and tips they've picked up from working with the CRAFT method through Allies in Recovery.

Our Families Speak series features a wonderful team of people navigating life with an addicted loved one. They are all members of Allies in Recovery, an online platform providing training, guidance, support and resources to families ready to shift the dynamic with their loved one struggling with substance use.

With grace, compassion, humility and deep generosity, the Families Speak team shares openly with Coming Up for Air listeners. We can thus benefit from their experience, their process, and the work they do with group facilitator and psychotherapist, Kayla Solomon.

Visit alliesinrecovery.net to learn about our membership options, read our blog posts, meet our team, and much more!

Isabel, Kayla, and co-hosts with direct experience discuss their favorite tools and tips they've picked up from working with the CRAFT method through Allies in Recovery. Part 1 of 2.

Our Families Speak series features a wonderful team of people navigating life with an addicted loved one. They are all members of Allies in Recovery, an online platform providing training, guidance, support and resources to families ready to shift the dynamic with their loved one struggling with substance use.

With grace, compassion, humility and deep generosity, the Families Speak team shares openly with Coming Up for Air listeners. We can thus benefit from their experience, their process, and the work they do with group facilitator and psychotherapist, Kayla Solomon.

Visit alliesinrecovery.net to learn about our membership options, read our blog posts, meet our team, and much more!

If you have an addicted loved one, chances are you're all too familiar with "hyper-arousal" or "survival mode." As Emily explains with brio, this state is meant to serve us when there's danger, then pass. What does it look like when we're chronically in this mode?

Physical and mental/emotional signs are there and can serve as signposts, Emily explains, indicating we're heading down a certain path. Awareness is KEY in being able to begin the process of observing, naming what's happening, then (once the actual crisis has subsided) gathering tools and rehearsing a response for the next time.

At AlliesinRecovery.net we train, guide and support families using the CRAFT method. Self-care is a cornerstone, for so many reasons, but many of us need to learn it from scratch. Visit alliesinrecovery.net to learn more about membership.

To learn more about Emily Cooney, and her coaching offerings, visit emilycooney.com or @goldfinch_wellness

Sometimes, our Loved Ones' situations call for incredibly difficult decisions. Co-host Hazel shares a recent high-stakes moment that felt like a necessary betrayal.

Our Families Speak series features a wonderful team of people navigating life with an addicted loved one. They are all members of Allies in Recovery, an online platform providing training, guidance, support and resources for families ready to shift the dynamic with their loved one struggling with substance use.

With grace, compassion, humility and deep generosity, the Families Speak team shares openly with Coming Up for Air listeners. We can thus benefit from their experience, their process, and the work they do with group facilitator and psychotherapist, Kayla Solomon.

Visit alliesinrecovery.net to learn about our membership options, read our blog posts, meet our team, and much more!

When there's substance use disorder and mental health diagnoses, what do you do? Can you use CRAFT? Yes, most of the time you can, unless the mental health issues make you or them unsafe. Co-host Bridget offers a central point: with this difficult combo, think of what is, not "what if."

How do you deal with having hard feelings around your loved one's substance use? Kayla, Carolyn, Bridget, Elizabeth, and Kenny discuss their experiences and feelings of anxiety, frustration, and fear and their tools for handling the situation.

The Allies in Recovery program (alliesinrecovery.net) and the CRAFT Method for families seeking to help a loved one with addiction, teach concrete skills to shift the dynamics between you and your loved one. Paying closer attention to your own feelings, and taking a bit of distance from them in order to not add unnecessary weight to them, is part of our eLearning program.