Two treatments focus on providing family members with skills to help a family member to seek AUD treatment. CRAFT helps concerned family members to change contingencies for drinking by decreasing behaviors that protect the drinker from naturally occurring consequences of drinking, increasing positive family responses to changes in drinking, learning self-care and protection from intimate partner violence, and learning how to communicate positive requests for change and/or help seeking.17 Compared to Al-Anon, CRAFT results in significantly greater rates of help seeking, and comparable rates of improvement in family members’ depression and anxiety. The ARISE method (A Relational Intervention Sequence for Engagement) provides a series of steps that family members may use to encourage their loved one to seek treatment; ARISE also is effective in encouraging persons with AUD to seek treatment.24 In addition to treatments for the affected family member alone, there are several treatment models and approaches that involve both the affected family members and the individual with AUD. Treatments with strong empirical support have drawn largely from cognitive behavioral and family systems concepts; the following sections review these approaches.
