Frequently asked questions

We have built our reputation around the very positive results we’ve been achieving with Sober Interventions since early 2008, though Ian Young has been offering drug and alcohol interventions and refining his skills since 2001. Our standard model includes interaction from the surrounding family — in the USA this is called the Johnston Method, or “Family Intervention” — tweaked for the specific family we’re working with to improve its chances of success even further.

Traditionally, the most obvious changes are in their behaviours, attitudes, attendance, achievements, restlessness, irritability, reduced interest in things that used to excite them, and missing work, family events or appointments. You may find all or just some of these traits showing up in your loved one. These are all signs that help is needed.

This happens so often. The first hurdle is reinvigorating the family to accept that help is available that actually has a high chance to succeed. If you really want them to recover, you have to put actual consequences in place — working with a skilled and trained interventionist to create these consequences with love, honesty and respect. When the whole family walks the difficult path of structured, guided bottom lines, the addict or alcoholic has a chance to arrive at their own emotional “rock bottom” and finally surrender to the recovery process. That is what we bring in our Sober Intervention process — the reason why they should accept the help on offer.

We have found time and again that offering love and respect from the absolute outset helps deal with the natural fear and anxieties they are feeling. By splitting the intervention into an assessment followed by two stages, we can predetermine the best member of our team to build rapport as soon as possible. Each family system is different and may require a different model — it’s best to be trained and experienced in many different processes and scenarios of intervention.

Sober Services leans towards the 12-Step Recovery Programme because it has been proven to work when its principles are applied — and most of our staff recovered through it themselves, so we speak from actual experience. That said, we are open-minded to other evidence-based approaches. In our experience there is one ingredient that is an absolute must: the person must have felt enough pain from their addiction and be prepared to apply themselves to an abstinence-based model of living. This is why our interventions are so powerful — they induce that willingness to change.

Without hesitating: alcohol. Alcohol is so socially accepted within our culture that the denial around it is incredibly hard for friends and family to witness or confront. Whatever the addiction, the common thread is that the person must be motivated to want to recover — which is exactly where the consequences we introduce in our Sober Interventions come into play.

Every Sober Intervention is different and takes on its own specific course — just as every addict or alcoholic is a different person. It’s not just the technique for each substance that differs, but the bespoke plan for their recovery. Really getting to know the actual family is very important, and that’s often what gives each intervention its direction and specific process.

Thirteen is the youngest we have personally been asked to intervene with; Ian Young worked at the UK’s only Young Persons’ 12-Step rehab in 2003 and learned specific tools for young people. Sober Services is generally an adult service (over 18s) for legal reasons, and the average age of people we intervene with is around 25–45, though we regularly work with people from 18 through to 60+. The oldest person we have helped so far was in his late 60s — and there’s absolutely no reason not to get well in your 70s or 80s. When is now the right time?

Sober Services operates out of London, across the UK, and has taken on Sober Intervention contracts right across Europe, South Africa, parts of the Middle East including Israel, and India. We are always happy to travel around the globe to use our expertise to help.