Services
Services
What is coaching with Robin Star all about?
What can you expect from me? Coaching is a partnership which enables insight, realizations, understandings and awareness that can ultimately lead to action plans. Coaching involves working in a partnership between coach and client to provide structure, guidance and support for the client to:
- Learn how to be supportive without enabling (doing for someone what they can do for themselves) when your child is struggling with drugs or alcohol.
- Shorten the learning curve so you can help your child desire a change and move them towards recovery.
- Take better care of yourself, be more grounded and less in a panic.
- Help make sense of the struggle.
- Make better decisions and have more clarity about next steps to start the healing process for you and your family.
- Self-care is encouraged for a healthier you.
- Become less anxious and stressed about what’s going to happen next.
- Have a clear understanding of what you can do for yourself which will in turn help your child.
- Feel more confident about helping your child in an appropriate way.
- Learn evidence based strategies to help yourself and your family.
- Helping you identify and employ new practices and skills which will increase your impact.
- With coaching, you will have a guide who will help you create positive change rather than just react to your child’s negative behavior.
“Worry doesn’t take away the pain of tomorrow, but sucks the happiness and joy for today.”
“It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.”
“One of the hardest lessons in life is letting go. Whether its guilt, anger, love, loss or betrayal. Change is never easy. We fight to hold on and we fight to let go.”
Ego says: “Once everything falls into place, I will find peace.”
Spirit says: “Find peace and everything will fall into place.”
“I am committed to own my own problems and let others own theirs.”
“What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?”
“Don’t expect everyone to understand your journey, especially if they’ve never had to walk your path.”
Piglet: “How do you spell love?”
Pooh: “You don’t spell it, you feel it.”
“If you stumble, make it part of the dance!”
“Treat others with kindness. You never know what burdens people bear or what they are going through. You may have power to lift their spirits or break them.”
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
“One of the happiest moments ever is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.”
“One of the hardest decisions you’ll ever face in life is choosing whether to walk away or try harder.”
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy. I think I will be happy today!”
“It’s not selfish to love yourself, take care of yourself, and make your happiness a priority. It’s necessary.”
“Storms in your life can be followed by rainbows.”
“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
“You don’t need a plan, sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go and see what happens.”
“Pessimism never won any battle.”
“Be selective in your battles, sometimes peace is better than being right.”
“Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“Let go of what I cannot control.”
“Promise me you’ll always remember that you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
“Until you realize you are the creator of your own misery you will never be truly happy. For it is how you react to any given situation that brings you happiness.”
“My worst fears can come true, whether I anguish over them or not.”
“Celebrate what you want to see more of.”
“Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amidst the storm.”
“Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day.”
“One day can change everything…”
“Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness yet become something beautiful.”
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
“When life changes to be harder, change yourself to be stronger.”
“Sometimes we’re tested. Not to show our weaknesses, but to discover our strengths.”
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better do better.”
“Sometimes we need someone to simply be there…Not to fix anything in particular, but just to let us feel we are supported and cared about.”
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude about it.”
“Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”
“We liberate children not by making them work for our love, but by letting them rest in it.”
“So, for now, laugh at the confusion, smile through the tears and keep reminding yourself everything happens for a reason.”
“I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms…let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.”
“To let go is to fear less and to love more. To let go is not to care for, but to care about.”
“Living Life fully means not waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance between the raindrops”
“Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and start being positive about what could go right.”
“The past does not equal the future.”
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“Worry is a choice.”
“Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, let go of what you can’t change.”
“When someone is trying to change their ways, the worst thing you can do is keep bringing up the past.”
“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.”
“Worry is a total waste of time. It doesn’t change anything. All it does is steal your joy and keeps you very busy doing nothing.”
“You never know how STRONG you are until being STRONG is the only choice you have.”
“Strength is when you have so much to cry for, but you choose to smile instead.”
“Just because something is not happening for you right now does not mean that it will never happen.”
“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
“One small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.”
“Sometimes we get angry with people, when we should be angry with ourselves, because we gave them the power to change our mood and feelings.”
“At some point you just have to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening.”
“Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but by how we react to what happens. Not by what life brings to us, but by the attitude we bring to life. A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. It is a catalyst, a spark that creates extraordinary results.”
“Forgive them even if they are not sorry. Holding on to anger only hurts you, not them.”
“You can’t force someone to respect you, but you can refuse to be disrespected.”
“Don’t keep taking the same road, expecting it to get you somewhere else.”
“May your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears!”
“Transform sorrow into strength, pain into growth and fear into trust.”
“We must let go of the life we had planned so at to have the life that is waiting for us.”
“We don’t have control over the actions of others. We do have control over how we allow their actions to affect us.”
“Sometimes people with the worst pasts end up creating the best futures.”
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
“Don’t judge a situation you have never been in.”
“Don’t expect anyone to understand your journey, especially if they’ve never walked your path.”
“Every child is gifted. They just unwrap their packages at different times.”
No one should have to face the disease of addiction alone.
Individual coaching appointments are scheduled at your convenience: Choose face to face meetings, Zoom or FaceTime individual coaching sessions, or opt for a renewable 4-session package. The coaching relationship can include phone calls or emails as needed. Fee schedules are available upon request.
Schedule your confidential complimentary 30 minute consultation with Robin today!
What is Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT)?
CRAFT is a pragmatic highly-effective family coaching methodology, which has been extensively studied by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, and has significantly outperformed other approaches. This evidence based program incorporates a set of very positive strategies to guide you to motivate your child (of any age) to change or enter treatment. The approach teaches skills in rapport building, positive reinforcement, communication and problem solving, supporting sober behavior and discouraging using behavior. CRAFT teaches families motivational techniques, how to analyze substance abuse patterns, how and when to intervene with treatment and how to support the individual once treatment has started. CRAFT teaches families behavioral and motivational strategies for interacting with their loved one. I teach you how to help a loved one without detachment or confrontation.
By using the CRAFT method, you will learn helpful ways of talking to your child so they are more likely to listen, learn ways of understanding what’s going on from their perspective, the importance of recognizing positive change when it happens, how to allow them to learn from the natural consequence of their negative behaviors, an how to care for yourself in the process.
Kindness, collaboration, positive reinforcement and good limit setting….these are all part of real change. What we know is this: it works! You can stay involved, you can help, and you can take care of yourself as well, and this combination is powerful and effective in helping your child decide to make positive changes.
The CRAFT system of care is grounded in the evidence-based principles of motivational interviewing and Community Reinforcement and Family Training developed in collaboration with leading addiction scientists and practitioners at the Center for Motivation and Change in New York City. The purpose of the design is to equip parents to play a knowledgeable and complementary role, working in concert with a specialist to achieve better outcomes for children and families. Our support is a unique and innovative development with the potential to transform the substance abuse field through education, collaboration, training and practice. CRAFT has proven to be significantly more effective than other non-science based approaches and can benefit both the substance abuser and their family. It gives them a plan of action and a more positive outlook. Studies have shown that families who use CRAFT have about a 70% chance that their loved one will enter treatment.
5 Things to know about CRAFT:
- CRAFT is a motivational model of help based on research that consistently finds motivational treatments to be superior to confrontational ones.
CRAFT shows you how to develop your loved one’s motivation to change by helping you figure out how to appropriately reward healthy behavior. You learn how to make sober activities more attractive to your loved one, and drug- or alcohol-using activities less inviting. In this way, you minimize conflict and maximize cooperative relationship-enhancing interactions with your loved one. - More than two-thirds of family members who use CRAFT successfully engage their substance using loved ones in treatment.
- This stands in sharp contrast to confrontational interventions that result in fewer than one-third of substance users entering treatment. The graph depicts one of the alcohol studies that contrasted CRAFT with both intervention and a modified approach supported by Al-Anon, a support group for family members of people with alcoholism.
- Evidence suggests that substance users who are pushed into treatment by a traditional confrontational intervention are more likely to relapse than clients who are encouraged into treatment with less confrontational means.
- People who use CRAFT are more likely to see the process through to success than those who use confrontational methods. CRAFT programs have extremely low dropout rates, while over 75% of the people who try to use traditional interventions quit. The dropouts report that the confrontational techniques are too distressing and they worry about doing permanent damage to their relationship with the substance user.
About the Take Back Your Life™ course:
TAKE BACK YOUR LIFE™ is a family education program consists of 4 weekly sessions. We will learn about the effects of Substance Use Disorder on the family, how to improve communication skills
- Living with substance use disorder and the effects on the family
- Explore the important role communication plays in healthy relationships and about the problems which can hinder effective communication skills.
- Examine and identify healthy boundaries, gain insight into the roles of chemically dependent families and develop practical knowledge which will facilitate changed behaviors that benefit recovery of the entire family.
- Develop better communication skills
- Learn how to appropriately express feelings
- Develop coping skills to deal with stressful situations
- Gain knowledge of chemical dependency as a disease and how it affects family members
- Designed to educate, support and promote healing.
- We provide a safe, comfortable environment where you can share in complete confidentiality.
- Learn how to repair damaged relationships and rebuild trust.
- Learn how not to “lose” your own life in an effort to “save” your child.
Read more about how the Take Back Your Life course is helping people here.
Notes about substance abuse disorder:
- Addiction strikes families from all walks of life!
- One size does not fit all…there are many paths to change. It’s not all about “interventions,” or “boot camp” or “rehab.” Those are necessary sometimes, other times not.
- Emotional and psychiatric issues matter a lot…don’t assume it’s all about drugs…people use substance for reason, sometimes including depression, anxiety, ADHD etc.
- Words matter…stigma keeps people (and kids) from getting help…call it a disease, call it a biopsychosocial problem, but understand that whatever you call it, it’s a hard thing to accept in this culture.
- One member of the family with a Substance Use Disorder effects the entire family.
- There is hope
- You can love a struggling family member and help them change.
Parents of Addicted Children
PAC℠ is a monthly free support group for parent(s) who have a child (of all ages) who is experiencing on-going life problems due to the use of alcohol and/or drugs.
Research shows that helping ourselves is the most important single thing we can do to help those we care about.
Worry does not change the outcome.
In this group we help you to move from feelings of shame, hopeless and helplessness to an increased feeling of hope and a sense of effectiveness. We also learn from each other how to change behaviors in relation to our child, set healthy boundaries and to discover the only behavior we can control is our own. In order to live our lives we need to know how to stop losing ourselves in our child’s problematic behavior.
You are not alone.
While we cannot fix the problem or stop the negative consequences, our community provides, guidance, compassion and validation in a safe environment where mutual support and trust encourages open sharing in a non-judgmental community.
Gain Strength and hope
You can change yourself, others you can only love.
For additional information:
Please call or email Robin Star at;
440-668-3701 or Robin@RobinmStar.com
Empowering parents of children who are struggling with Substance Use Disorder.