Families Motivating Recovery: Empathy, Skills and Self-Care
Having a friend or loved one who abuses drugs and alcohol can feel like being on an emotional rollercoaster. These group offers a safe place where community members can receive support and learn more effective ways to communicate with their addicted loved ones. The focus of the groups is how families can use collaboration and kindness rather than confrontation to support behavior change.
This combined psychoeducation and support group uses the tools of CRAFT (Community Reinforcement Approach & Family Training). CRAFT was developed by Robert Meyers, Ph.D. CRAFT is an evidence based approach that aims to teach family and friends self-protection and non-confrontational skills to help their addicted loved one find recovery. The group also incorporates the evidence based practices of Motivational Interviewing and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The book we have found to be most helpful to our families, which best describes our approach, is called Beyond Addiction: How Kindness and Science can Help People Change by Jeff Foote and Carrie Wilkens.

Benefits of Attending A Group
The groups help family members make small but impactful changes in how they relate to their loved one who is using. Group members report being less frustrated and having more hope about their situations. They report having more productive conversations with their loved ones about their choices, and they feel more helpful. And most importantly, their loved ones sometimes make surprising changes in a healthy direction.
No One Size Fits All
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Or call 304-984-6669
What To Expect
The groups provide a safe and supportive place for family members to share about difficult situations and consider new ways to deal with these situations. Group Leaders facilitate discussions around four topics:
- Understanding addiction and the process of change
- Helping your loved one with your words
- Helping your loved one with your actions
- Practicing self-care so you can be more helpful

KPCC Counseling’s Sky Kershner with
Beyond Addiction authors Carrie Wilkens and Jeff Foote
He said, “Mom, I don’t know what you are doing in that group,
but keep going. It’s really helping me.”
What you are doing in West Virginia with these groups
is nothing short of amazing!
My husband and I could not be more grateful. This group is helping us face reality and understand why and how to cope and communicate effectively with our daughter and her addiction. We both were so broken as parents and the skills we’ve learned in this group have slowly but surely put us back together. That’s not to say we won’t face more challenges – but now we can deal with them using a more effective approach.
FAMILIES MOTIVATING RECOVERY GROUP LIST
As these groups operate independently we recommend contacting the group leader listed to confirm the meeting time
While it is our pleasure to provide contact information for these Families Motivating Recovery support groups, and many of the leaders of these groups were trained by those of us at KPCC Counseling to provide the assistance they do, these volunteer groups are not operated, managed, or supervised by KPCC Counseling. Any questions, comments, or issues that you have should be directed to the host listed for the group you wish to reach at the contact information provided.