Recognizing and Responding to Substance Abuse
A Guide for Families and Friends to Navigate Substance Use Disorders
Why this book
You have already noticed something. That is why you are here.
Money that keeps going missing. A new set of friends. Someone you have known your whole life lying to you about small things. You have explained it away more than once — and you have probably stopped believing your own explanations.
It is written for the person doing the worrying. Not for the person using. For the mother reading at two in the morning. For the husband who does not know whether to call someone. For the sister who keeps being told she is overreacting.
Addiction is not a character flaw or a failure of willpower — and this book shows you why that is a clinical fact rather than a kindness. But understanding is only where it starts. What you do next is the rest of the book.
What's inside
Nine things this guide will teach you
Recognize
Six categories of warning sign — physical, behavioral, psychological, social, financial, and environmental. Why counting the categories matters more than counting the individual signs.
Understand
What is actually happening in the brain, in plain language you can repeat to a skeptical relative. Tolerance, withdrawal, craving, and why willpower is the wrong frame.
Open the conversation
How to raise it without triggering the defensiveness that ends the conversation before it starts — and what to do when it goes badly anyway.
Intervene
Four intervention approaches compared honestly, including which has the strongest evidence and which is merely the one most people picture.
Choose care
Levels of care, medication options including MAT, and how to tell a good treatment program from a good brochure.
Support without enabling
The difference between enabling and supporting, which is rarely what people expect. How to hold a boundary without it landing as a punishment.
Respond to relapse
Why a slip becomes a return, and what to do in the moment it happens rather than the week after.
Keep them alive
Harm reduction: naloxone, fentanyl testing, never-use-alone practices — the measures that buy the time recovery needs.
Take care of your own
What this does to a marriage. Grief, guilt, shame, and the family roles nobody chooses but everybody takes.
Supported throughout by diagrams, worksheets, a family agreement template, substance-by-substance profiles, a glossary, and the questions families ask most.
The chapter most books leave out
Nineteen real stories. Ten people who made it. Nine who did not.
Names and details are changed. The losses are in the book because a guide that tells only the success stories cannot be trusted about the successes. Families in the middle of this can tell when they are being handled.
What helps is someone willing to say the true thing, including the hard part, and then explain why hope is still the rational position.
Grounded in the evidence
Written from the treatment side, not the sidelines
in business, communication, and human development, brought into counseling and coaching work.
founding and directing addiction treatment centers, detox programs, and recovery retreats in the U.S. and Central America.
Kevin Brough, MAMFT, CHT, is a marriage and family therapist, certified clinical hypnotherapist, NLP Master Practitioner, interventionist, and coach. He has sat with families on the worst day of their lives. And he has watched it inside his own family, which is the part that changed how he writes about it.
Every clinical claim in the guide is sourced. Where the evidence is contested — on intervention styles, on length of medication treatment, on what actually predicts recovery — the book says so rather than picking the comfortable answer.
Also from IntelleWisdom
LifeScaping
A New Mindset for Self-Transformation. Where the SUD Guide is written for the family in a crisis, LifeScaping is for the long rebuild afterward — or for anyone whose life looks fine from the outside and does not feel that way from the inside. Releasing November 30, 2026.
Free companion resources
Warning-sign charts, what to say and what not to say, how to choose a level of care, and crisis numbers — all free at SUDGuide.com. You do not need the book to use them.
IntelleWisdom is the publishing imprint of VisionLogic, LLC — St. George, Utah. VisionLogic.org · SUDGuide.com
This book is educational and is not a substitute for professional assessment or treatment. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. In the U.S., the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is 988 and the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357, free and confidential, 24/7.
LifeScaping™, HealthScaping™, MindScaping™, The P3 Model™, the Significant Event Process™, the Releasing Practice™, the Belief-Busting Process™, and the Peace Building Process™ are marks of VisionLogic, LLC.
