# How Craig Melvin Helped His Dad Conquer Alcoholism | Clips | Dad Saves America

**Creator:** Dad Saves America
**Platform:** youtube
**Duration:** 16m
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU

## Summary

Craig Melvin shares his journey of confronting his father's addiction to alcohol and video poker, detailing the impact it had on their family dynamics. Through a series of interventions and therapy sessions, Melvin and his family learned to address their feelings of disgust and contempt towards his father, ultimately leading to a successful intervention that helped his father seek treatment and begin recovery.

- Melvin first recognized his father's addiction during middle school when his drinking escalated to dangerous levels.
- His father's addiction included not only alcohol but also video poker, leading to significant financial loss.
- The family's attempts to intervene initially failed, as they did not approach the situation effectively.
- A pivotal therapy session helped the family articulate their feelings and confront the long-standing issues caused by the addiction.
- The family devised a plan to stage an intervention, using letters to express their concerns and feelings clearly.
- The intervention was successful, leading Melvin's father to enter rehab, although he was heavily intoxicated at the time.
- After treatment, Melvin's father transformed, becoming actively involved in his recovery and reconnecting with his family.
- The experience emphasized the importance of addressing addiction with compassion and the need for the individual to desire change.

## Transcript

[[0:01]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=1s)
- When did you first realize that your dad was
suffering from addiction? - [Craig] Hm, that's a good question. - How old were you when it
went from, my dad's not around, he's not with it to, oh,
something else is happening, something else has its grip over him? - You know, it's a hard question to answer because we view addiction differently now than just a few years ago, but certainly 35 years
ago when I was growing up, we just thought that Dad drank too much, but there were other folks
in the family who drank a lot and there were other people
you'd see from time to time.

[[0:45]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=45s)
My dad, you talk about
drinking and driving, he would literally drink and drive. I remember being in the car with him, front seat, '73 Pontiac
LeMans, no seatbelt. He's got the Budweiser
tucked between the two seats and he'd take a swig and
he'd drive and we'd stop and he'd take a swig. He threw the can on the floor,
he'd take another one out. So I grew up like that
with Dad literally drinking and driving, despite my
mother even back then saying, "Lawrence, really, you can't
drink and drive with the kid."

[[1:13]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=73s)
And he said, "I'm gonna two, I had two!" (John laughs)
- [John] Oh no! - I think we knew it had become a problem when he would drink to the
point where he would throw up or he'd be passed out for a day. And that didn't start
until we were probably in middle school. - Oh, and that's a hard time
for that stuff to hit, too. - Oh, and what did not
help is he would go up to this place called Tom's Party Shop.

[[1:45]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=105s)
And back then, video poker
was legal in South Carolina. And my dad, he didn't just
have one vice at a time, he had multiple vices. Typically, they lead to others. So in addition to his alcohol addiction, he became addicted to
video poker to the point where he blew pretty much
his entire life savings. - Well, I think that's what we see, right, I mean, that addictive
personality, it overlaps. - [Craig] Oh yeah. - And a lot of times, to get out of one, you've gotta replace it with another.

[[2:12]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=132s)
- Right, and so he would
go up to Tom's Party Shop, he'd have his tall boy Budweiser and he's sitting there
playing video poker. And as I get older, my friends
would go into the party shop to buy chips or soda, whatever and they'd see my dad in the back. And by the way, he's driving this lime
green '73 Pontiac LeMans, which is pretty recognizable
in the late '80s. And it was a small neighborhood. - He's got like a Batman villain car.

[[2:37]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=157s)
- Right, so my friends
would come to school and go, "Yeah, I saw your dad up at Tom's." And he worked third
shift at the post office. So he'd get off work, he'd go
to Tom's, he'd drink his beer, play his video poker and my
friends would see him in there, come to school and say,
"Hey, I just saw your dad." And so, imagine the
embarrassment as I got older of having my friends see my
dad drunk playing video poker before 10 AM and coming to
school to tell me all about it.

[[3:06]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=186s)
And it only got worse from there. He got in a little car accident when I was probably in middle school. He runs into this woman's
yard and he knocks over a bush and he convinces the woman
not to call the police by telling the woman he would
come and replace the bush with the help of his son who has to get up on a Saturday morning at 0 dark 30 to go dig up the bush, replace it.

[[3:30]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=210s)
So we knew he had some
issues in middle school, but we didn't know he was a full-on addict until I was in my early 20s. And we tried to get him some
help, we staged an intervention before we really knew how to do it. And basically, the intervention consisted of us sitting him down and
berating him with stories of his drunkenness and
insisting that he get help. And so naturally, that didn't work. - Yeah, what was the thing that you think worked the last time 'cause I understand that
you did ultimately succeed in helping him change his path.

[[4:10]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=250s)
- You can't help someone who's an addict unless they want to
actually change their lives. When someone decides, you know
what, I do have a problem, I do wanna fix that problem,
I am going to get help, that's when you can do it. - Do they have to hit rock bottom, is there a rock bottom thing? - You have to get pretty close. And my dad was headed for rock bottom. And the fact is, he had a couple of DUIs.

[[4:38]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=278s)
- Not great. - Yeah, I mean, he had been
detained by the police once or twice, but he had not
thankfully hurt anybody. He hadn't killed anyone, he hadn't... But that's where it was headed and that's what we saw as a family. So for him, he retired
from the post office after 40 years as a mail clerk, and what was recreational
pretty heavy drinking quickly turned into binge drinking to a point where he would drink
all day Monday, black out, spend Tuesday hung over and recovering and do it again on
Wednesday, Thursday recovery.

[[5:20]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=320s)
So this became his life. And he was out driving on
a main thoroughfare there in Columbia, South
Carolina, Broad River Road and I get a call. I'm at the Today Show and I'd
gotten a call from someone who is in law enforcement. And they said, "Just so you know, "your dad is developing a bit
of a reputation in the area "for driving drunk, and
it's just a matter of time "before something bad's gonna happen." - So you were at Today
when this was happening.

[[5:50]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=350s)
- Oh sure, sure. - So that's also weird, 'cause
you're on a national stage. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
was in the spotlight, although that wasn't really a concern. He ends up hitting this woman, not terribly, but there's a fender bender. He's coming back from Wendy's,
doesn't remember any of it and he hits this woman. Fortunately, we knew the
woman and we convinced her that we would take care
of the damage to the car and we would get my dad some help.

[[6:23]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=383s)
The woman was fine, my
dad definitely was fine. But my younger brother and I
had a conversation after that. And we're like, you know what? Forget Dad being an
embarrassment or hurting himself, he's gonna kill somebody. - I mean, my dad was
rear-ended by a drunk driver and it ended his medical career. So this stuff hits me hard
when I hear these stories. - And we didn't want that to happen. And we knew that's where it
was headed, so this time, thankfully, I'd been a
journalist for awhile and I'd done a number of
stories over the years.

[[6:59]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=419s)
In fact, I did a big piece
a few years ago for Dateline on addiction and how the
way that we treat addiction in this country fortunately
has changed dramatically, the ways in which we can treat it. And so I was armed with
some new information. And I had an assistant at the time whose stepfather ran a
non-profit called Shadow Proof and they dealt with addiction. I was talking to her, she's like, "You should talk to my stepdad."

[[7:28]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=448s)
And her stepdad had some friends who'd been in that space for awhile. So I call him up and I'm
being a good journalist, I'm information gathering and
this goes on for about a week. I call my brother back,
I'm like, you know what? We've gotta bring in a professional. And we found a woman, thank God, down in Columbia, South Carolina who talked me through the
steps that we should be taking. And step one was to sit the family down and to have a therapy session- - Without your dad?

[[8:02]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=482s)
- Without my dad.
- Yeah. - And I'm like, well, this
doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but okay, this
is part of the process. - Was that partly about trying
to wring out some baggage so you don't bring it into the
room when there's that time? - Ding, ding, ding, John. That was part of it. And the other part was to just let us vent about all the ways in
which his alcohol addiction had bothered us, almost
destroyed our family.

[[8:31]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=511s)
And we had not... And you know, and this may be
true in your family as well, but in my family, you
don't talk about (blank). You bury it, you just
pretend it didn't happen. I mean, maybe if it's huge, you might acknowledge
it during the holidays, but you certainly don't
go talking about it. And so, it's me, it's my
younger brother, it's my mom, it's my dad's nephew. There were six or seven of us in this room and the session's supposed to go an hour.

[[9:03]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=543s)
We're in there for three
hours because people had been bottling all
this stuff up for years. Finally the therapist is like, "We're gonna have to probably
do another session, guys, "I gotta go." And she said after the
fact that she wanted us to hear how my father's
alcohol addiction had... I mean, I had developed this
borderline hatred for my dad that I hadn't even realized was there. I was disgusted by him, I just...

[[9:34]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=574s)
- That's something that
a good friend of mine, Arthur Brooks, has talked
about this a lot, the disgust. Disgust is this poison, it's
right there with contempt of relationships where you
find yourself rolling your eyes at your spouse or this just ugh! And it's a toxin that you ingest and it takes over the system
if you don't get rid of it. - And my mother, and we talked about it. My younger brother and I had
gotten to a point with her where we used to just
tell her all the time.

[[10:04]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=604s)
It's like, you know
we're older, we're fine, you're clearly miserable in your marriage. You could just leave him now. Because what we had done unknowingly was we'd written him off years ago. We had decided he either wasn't worthy of our continued worry or that
he was incapable of change. And I left that session on Devine Street in Five Points, South Carolina,
I remember it vividly, I left that session, it was an aha moment as Oprah would say.

[[10:40]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=640s)
I left more determined
than ever to save my dad. - What was the turn in that moment where you went from the
disgust to the mission? - I saw in that meeting what he had done to my younger brother, what
he had done to my mother and what he was doing to me. And here I was, again, pretty
successful professionally, I'd gotten married, I was getting ready to start my own family and I was having to
grapple with these feelings that I had never really addressed before.

[[11:17]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=677s)
And it became clear that
this disgust, this disdain, this contempt, this borderline
hatred that I had developed, it was a cancer inside of me. And I had to save my
dad, not just for my dad, I had to save him for myself. And so the mission started. And this woman, she helped us in the next meeting develop a strategy to basically kidnap my father
and sit him down in a room. And we had to write these
letters to our dad because if...

[[11:52]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=712s)
And she noticed if we
were just to talk to him, we were all gonna get worked
up and cry and be angry, but if we wrote a letter
and just read it to him, then he would hear us
and we could make sure that our thoughts and our
feelings were conveyed in a clear and concise way. And so on a Sunday morning,
we had developed a scheme to pick up my dad to tell him that my younger brother needed some help with a project at the house.

[[12:19]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=739s)
So first thing Sunday morning- - Little white lie, it's
just part of the process. - My younger brother
goes and picks him up, brings him to the house, he
walks in reeking of booze and we sit him down and
even in his drunken stupor, he realized that something was
amiss, treachery was afoot. And we start to read our letters. - Did he try to escape? - No, he didn't and we thought he would. And we said beforehand,
we were fully prepared for this to take a few times.

[[12:53]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=773s)
He sat and he listened to
all of us read our letters. And my mother brought up the
rear, and she read hers last. And she talked openly and wept about how she over
the years had lost this man that she knew, this guy that
she'd fallen in love with. She didn't know when it
happened or how it happened, but his alcohol addiction
had essentially ended their marriage years ago
and they were roommates. Dad sits there, we had his bag packed for this inpatient rehab
facility that we had found in Statesboro, Georgia.

[[13:30]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=810s)
Said, Pops, gonna throw you in the car and your nephew's gonna
drive you three hours to Statesboro, Georgia
and you're gonna be there for at least eight
weeks to save your life. I said it and the therapist was there, she said something else. Father goes, picks up his bag,
hops in the back of the SUV, goes, "All right, guess
I'm going to Georgia." And we all looked around,
like, oh, did that just work?

[[14:02]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=842s)
- That's amazing 'cause
you've been through this a couple times and it's like- - Well, John, we found out the next day when we called the rehab facility, we talked to the doctor down there who was going to oversee and he's like... I said, how's he doing? He's like, "Well, Mr.
Melvin, this isn't uncommon, "but when your father showed up, "he was three to four
times the legal limit "in terms of his intoxication." - He was lost.

[[14:30]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=870s)
- And we asked him about the intervention, he didn't remember anything. - How did that make you
feel, all this work? - He showed up, he was blackout drunk during the intervention,
he had the letters with him in his bag, he read the
letters, he was deeply moved by them, but "Your dad's
on the road to recovery." And that was John, what is this, 2023? That would've been 2020?

[[15:04]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=904s)
Hadn't had a drop of booze since. It really has been transformational. Part of the treatment
program requires you to go and you have to help him make amends, and we each had to do it individually. And I flew down, I took a
morning off from the show, flew down to Statesboro, Georgia
and as soon as I walked in and we hugged and he's
crying and I'm crying, I knew then he was a different person. And he was the mayor of
his treatment program.

[[15:37]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=937s)
He's taking me around to introduce me to all of his "addict
friends", as he called them. And it was like, "Oh, Melvin," they call my dad by his last name, "Melvin's been talking
about you for weeks." He was so proud, he was so proud of me
and his other two boys. And you know it was one
of those things, John, I was only there for eight
hours and we walked around, we played Frisbee golf,
it was very strange.

[[16:11]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmzpDdBQymU&t=971s)
But I left there knowing that
he was going to be different and he has been. - If you enjoyed this clip, we've got more where that came from. Be sure to check out my full
conversation with Craig Melvin. And one of the best ways
you can help support us is to subscribe to the channel, so you won't miss our interviews and short videos as
they come out each week. (upbeat music)