The best way to help an alcoholic is indirectly. This means that you do not try to control or manipulate them. Don’t make feeble pleas with them to miraculously stop drinking. Do not threaten them or shame them or engage with angry arguments with them. None of these strategies really work at all. At best these ploys will create false hope before they fail to work. At worst they create more chaos and despair for the drunk in question. If you are at this point then you probably want to know how can I help an alcoholic?

The first thing you need to know is that an alcoholic who tries to change for other people is not going to make it in recovery. What you must understand is that the choice has to be theirs. You and other people in their life can’t make this choice for them. Not you, not a jail cell, not their parents, nobody.

The second idea for you to grasp is that this decision that will eventually be made by the alcoholic will be motivated by pain. Ultimately this is how it has to go. The alcoholic will finally decide that they have had enough pain and misery in their life and decide it is time for change. This is the only driving force that makes real change. You can promise them the whole world if they stop drinking but this will not produce any different results. The motivation has to come from pain and fear and misery.

Given both of these concepts, you can probably tell where this is headed. The most important thing for you to concentrate on in attempting to help an alcoholic is that you should never try to deny the alcoholic of their pain. The alcoholic is trapped in a cycle and experiencing pain and misery on a regular basis and your job is to step out of the way and let them endure that pain. For example, if an alcoholic gets loaded on the weekends and can’t make it to work on Monday morning, they might lose their job. Let them lose it. Do not attempt to cover for them or help them to keep their life held together. This is a part of their natural consequences and you should not deprive them of it. Doing so will keep them drinking. Let them experience their misery and they just might find recovery in the future. This is probably the best way to really help an alcoholic.

How can a person really help a struggling alcoholic to get well? Historically, recovery programs have attempted to answer this question but without a lot of success at it. Perhaps you have encouraged an alcoholic in your life to get sober without much success. If it has come to this point then perhaps you should consider the best way to help an alcoholic.

Part of the issue here is that most treatment paths do not really tailor to the individual – they are set up to treat anyone and everyone. They are basically a general program that is supposed to work for everyone but obviously this is not the case as many will fail to achieve success. For example, 12 step programs, which typically dominate the recovery scene, have remained unchanged for decades.

When a person needs to sober up or get clean from drugs, our usual answer is to have them attend group therapy or 12 step meetings. When that fails to produce decent results, instead of blaming the program we always blame the individual, saying that “they just didn’t want it enough,” or that “they just did not get into the spiritual side of the program.” These types of excuses point to a failing in our quest for better recovery and we can do better then just blaming the failed alcoholic. I would suggest:

1) Push alcoholics to use treatment for early recovery. This is critical because early recovery is very trying and it can be hard for the alcoholic to get even a small amount of clean time in some cases.” In a safe setting such as rehab it is much smoother when trying to get a hold on early recovery.

2) Encourage the struggling alcoholic to set goals and create a better life. This is important because it is not enough to merely quit drinking. When an alcoholic drinks they do it with passion and it becomes a huge part of their life. In their recovery journey, an alcoholic must find new meaning and depth in their life or they risk sliding back into a relapse of destruction and despair.

3) Encourage alcoholics to make holistic growth a priority in their life. If you can get someone to grow in one area of their life, that is good. But if you can convince them to grow in several areas of their life, this is even better. Holistic growth is indicating that the person is treating their disease as a whole, not simply as a spiritual problem (as some treatments deal with it).

Getting addiction help will involve contacting either professional services of some sort or a 12 step treatment program. That is what is available out there when it comes to getting help for addiction. These professional treatment services could include a stay at a drug rehab center with a medical detoxification unit as well. In addition to rehab, an addict could also seek help from meetings, therapy groups, or from professional counseling.

Many people might use these types of services after they leave treatment as a form of aftercare.

It can be quite a struggle to get someone else to take action and do something about their problem and ultimately you will find that we cannot really change anyone, only ourselves. However, we can affect their choices in the long run by being more careful about how we behave around them.

In particular, we need to stop enabling people if we play some role in their drug or alcohol use. This includes helping them out when they get into trouble or calling in sick for them if they miss work due to their drug use. We can make a big difference in the addict’s life by choosing not to enable their drinking or using.

Unfortunately this is what has to happen in order for some drug addicts to become open to the idea of change. If an addict does not experience misery in their life then they will not be likely to make a decision to do anything different. So we eventually realize in dealing with an addict that it is best not to deny them of their pain. This does not mean that we need to go out of our way to trip them up or be mean to them – instead we just have to get out of their way and let them endure the natural consequences of their actions.

Giving genuine help to an addict is sometimes difficult because many times when we think we are helping them we are actually enabling them. The key is to help them only when they agree to seek professional help for their addiction and not give in to other attempts that are merely manipulation on their part. We can always do things that affect the drug addict but it might not have an immediate result that we can see. Instead we have to do our part in the relationship as far as no longer rescuing them in any way.

Drug addiction can affect nearly anyone because it has so many different avenues of attack these days. You have got young people and college students who are smoking dope. There is alcohol everywhere in our society and the pressure to drink can be tremendous. Then there are painkillers, which have taken over the world and become the new gateway drug among young people. Opiates have overtaken pot and other drugs among youth today and it is becoming an epidemic of sorts.

So given that the problem is so widespread, what can we do to reach out and help others who are struggling? How can we offer addiction help to those who are caught up in this deadly cycle?

The first strategy is to confront the person. Sometimes this can be tricky because your offer for help might be taken instead as being bothersome or threatening so you might have to choose whether it is really worth pursuing. In some cases you might want to just maintain the peace but at other times if someone is truly out of control or a danger to themselves then you must set those fears aside and confront them anyway. The ultimate goal is to somehow motivate them to change instead of just letting them spin out even further.

There is no way of skirting the issue if you want to see change because there is no way to motivate them indirectly. If you want to see someone change then you must talk to them about it. Formal interventions can be useful in some cases but they rarely pan out as well as planned. At best they might be a step on the path towards recovery, but don’t expect to see instant success right away just because the whole family confronted someone together in a loving manner. They can be useful and they might actually help but don’t think that an intervention is a magic bullet – it’s not.