How to Help an Alcoholic

There are very few things you can do to directly help an alcoholic. There are some things you can do to help but none of them are very direct in nature.

For example, could you hide the beer and alcohol from an alcoholic as a means of "helping" them? Of course anyone could try to do this, but is this really a viable strategy in the long run? Of course not. Anyone can quickly see that a short term fix like this is not going to stop someone who is seriously addicted to alcohol.

What about convincing an alcoholic to get help? This is a possibility as well but it is a tough road to follow. Be prepared to get discouraged and suffer many setbacks if this is your sole means of attempting to help the alcoholic in your life. This does not mean that you should never try to encourage treatment.....it only means that it is a tactic of very limited usefulness. Why is this?

The reason that you cannot seemingly motivate an alcoholic to seek help is because they have to find their own bottom and surrender to the fact that their life is screwed up. Every alcoholic has tried to quit drinking on their own. They simply cannot do it; this is what defines them as being alcoholic. If they could stop then they would not be addicted to alcohol. Period.

So you have someone who has tried and failed to control their drinking. They have been defeated by a chemical and they know they are beat. Now, the fact that they continue to drink alcohol is a form of denial. They know full well that they can never control their drinking successfully. And yet they are trapped because they do not know how to really stop drinking. They can not picture their life without booze. They cannot imagine a sober existence, nor do they want one. Most importantly, they do not really believe that it is possible for them. They think they are unique in the way that alcohol has trapped them.

So the question becomes, how can you pierce through this level of denial? How do you convince an alcoholic that there is life without drinking and that sobriety can be fulfilling and joyous and fun again? You can't. You cannot convince someone of this no matter how hard you try. I know this for a fact because I used to be that alcoholic who was stuck in a cycle of addiction can could not find my way out. Someone tried to convince me once that life in sobriety was awesome and I just did not care. I could not bring myself to care about it. Just give me my bottle and I will be happy. That is the trap of addiction.

So if you cannot protect a person from themselves, and if you cannot convince the person to get help for themselves, what exactly can you do? If you want to know how to help an alcoholic then you need to start examining your own behavior in relationship to them. You can't change them, all you can do is change yourself.

The amazing thing is that by changing yourself, it can actually lead (indirectly) to the alcoholic moving closer to real change in their life. It is through this indirect behavior that you can influence the alcoholic. Here are some suggestions for doing so:

1) Never drink or do drugs with the alcoholic in your life.

2) Never give the alcoholic money, for any reason.

3) Do not rescue the alcoholic when they suffer consequences due to their drinking.

4) Do not bail them out of jail.

5) Do not call in sick to work for them.

6) Do not apologize for them if they are drunk and rude to others.

7) Set limits and boundaries for what is acceptable behavior from them and communicate this clearly. For example: "If you come home belligerently drunk again, I will go stay at a hotel for the night." Or "If I know you are drunk driving again, I will call the police and report it."

8) Never make idle threats that you do not intend to keep. Only set limits and boundaries that you are 100 percent sure you will follow through on. Do not play games. Merely state your terms and follow through with them.

What if the alcoholic says that they want to change?

If the alcoholic in your life states that they want to change and quit drinking, then you must be very careful with this. It is not unheard of for an alcoholic to cry wolf in this respect and end up drinking again, as you can well imagine. So how can you know when an alcoholic is truly ready to stop drinking?

Many times an alcoholic will say that they want to stop drinking but it is just more manipulation on their part. They are playing a game and trying to win your favor or get money or whatever, but they might not be truly ready to surrender fully and change their life. In many cases the alcoholic will not even know themselves if they are serious or not about wanting to stop drinking.

The way to know when they are ready for real change is when they are willing to do it on YOUR TERMS. This is very simple actually and is the strongest predictor of short term success in sobriety. If someone wants to quit drinking, and they want to do it their own way, then they are almost certain to fail. However, if they say that they want to quit drinking, and they literally will do anything that you tell them to do (such as go to rehab, go to counseling, etc.) then their chances of staying sober are greatly increased.

So if someone states that they want to quit drinking, but then they are shutting you down at every suggestion you make for how they should go about getting help, then that person is not ready to stop. They are still manipulating things and they are not ready for real change.

This is why they call it surrender. The alcoholic has to have some degree of surrender in order to be ready to change their life. If they are still struggling and fighting and trying to control their life, then they are not ready for recovery. They have to surrender completely to whatever solution YOU suggest to them. If they do not surrender completely to your suggestions for help then you are wasting your time with them.

It can become a bit of a game for some alcoholics. If you are putting in more effort into trying to help them get sober then they are putting in to it, then you need to stop right there and back off. They are not ready to change and you are wasting time and mental energy on them. It is not worth it at this point.

The point that it is worth it is when they say "I give up. Tell me what to do. Show me how to live." That is the level of surrender that an alcoholic needs to be at in order for you to invest either time or money into helping them. If they are at that point then get them to a treatment center or get them to an AA meeting. In fact, it doesn't really matter where you take them at that point because they are finally ready for real change in their life. Almost anything you do would help them to start recovering at this point.

So if you want to know how to help an alcoholic then start using some of these ideas here in order to make better use of your time and energy. Most of the things we try to do in order to manipulate an alcoholic into getting help is just wasted effort. The key is in knowing how to behave around the alcoholic so as not to enable them, and also in knowing exactly when they are trying to manipulate you versus when they are genuinely ready to seek help for their problem. If you believe that they have finally surrendered then that is the time to make an effort to assist them. If they are still holding on to some level of control in their life then you should step away from the situation and let them find their own path. It is only when they let go of all need for control that you can help guide them in a meaningful way.