If someone that you know and love is in the throws of active addiction, you may be wondering how to help an alcoholic or drug addict. There is nothing unreasonable about wanting to help someone that you love and there are a few things that you can do to help. But, as a recovering addict and alcoholic, I am qualified to tell you that there is not too much that you will be able to do to help an alcoholic when they are in active addiction.

Here’s the truth about the matter. Part of the disease of alcoholism has to do with self-centeredness. The alcoholic or addict cares about getting high or drunk and not much else. In the moment they don’t care about you or their responsibilites or something they said they were going to do last week. They just don’t care about those things. They care about themselves and getting their high. Usually, this type of pattern can last anywhere from days to years where the alcoholic or addict is simply doing what they need to do to enjoy the high. To the outside person however it looks like they are destroying their livers. Many simple duties like personal hygiene do not get taken care of and the addict begins to slip further into misery. So, you may have a loved one who is going on about their problems or getting into more severe problems be it legal or financial or what have you and you can barely sit by and watch this addict or alcoholic destroy themselves. Naturally the question comes up, if you are watching someone do this to themselves: You ask yourself how to help an alcoholic? It is an entirely reasonable question because you genuinely want to help. And I can tell you you are not going to like the answer, but remember it is coming from a drug addict and alcoholic myself so I know this is the right answer. Here it is:

If you want to help an alcoholic you need to speed up his or her suffering. You need to do whatever you can to expedite their process of hitting rock bottom so that they will then look for help because the suffering has gotten so bad that they, in all their self-centeredness, want to stop the thing (finally) that is causing the pain. So, wait, what exactly am I saying? I will say it again:

Here is the answer to your question how to help an alcoholic and, like I said you might not like the answer but that doesn’t change it. You help an alcoholic by increasing the rate of their decline into misery. OK, hopefully you are starting to see where I am coming from. But you may not like that answer. Well, you had better start accepting it, my friend. Alcoholism and drug addiction is a tough disease and until you start to take desperate measures to confront it then you are doing nothing but helping the problem. Remember, the alcoholic (through no fault of their own) is a self-centered creature. He wants to increase his pleasure and limit his suffering and in the process he will create tremendous wreckage in the lives of the people that he is close to. So, as soon as his life gets to the point that the suffering is worse than the pleasure is pleasurable he will begin to be open about getting help for his addiction. And I will discuss what to do at that point in a moment. For the time being you need to get it through your skull that the only way to help an alcoholic is to let them reach their bottom so that then they are willing to accept help, enter drug rehab and begin to effect some real changes in their life. So, let’s look at an example.

Your husband Jack drinks every night, misses work, beats you and steals money from you. Okay. In this situation the only way to help Jack is to stand up for yourself. Remove yourself from the situation. Stop calling into to his work and making excuses for him. Call the police and get him arrested file charges on him. Do what it takes to make his life miserable. Once he is homeless and has lost his job he might begin to see how unhappy he really is. Then, and only then, once his life is beginning to manifest the signs of hopelessness congruent to the level of misery and self pity that he is feeling, then you should begin to make offerings about going to drug rehab and beginning work in a 12 step program. Remember, that the only way to help an alcoholic is to make them accountable. The longer that you enable their drinking by providing money and assistance the longer it will take them to come to the realization that they are destroying themselves. Let’s look at another example.

Your son is an alcoholic. He lives at your house rent free, you give him money for booze and he doesn’t have a job. Well, the alcoholic is going to continue to exploit this situation for potentially years while you are wondering how to help an alcoholic the whole time. The longer you enable him to sustain his present form of living, even though it is killing you, the longer that he will suffer because circumstances will not allow him to face his alcoholism on its own terms. This is simply a mistake. You can not help an alcoholic by enabling him. You need to kick him out of the house, stop giving him money and let him fail on his own. Then let him know that if at any point he decides that he wants to check into drug rehab and do something about his alcoholism that you will help him. He simply will not want to go into treatment on his own if he hasn’t suffered enough yet. That much is clear as day to me. He needs to get to point in his life that he has hit a bottom and wants to make a change. So, I hope I have been clear about this. I know you want to help the alcoholic or drug addict in your life. And, I can assure you, that person wants help to, however they are not going to be ready to accept help until they are ready to make a change at which point I think it is imperative that you get them into a good drug rehab and let the healing process begin.

Now, if you don’t think you have the stomach or the guts to make your alcoholic loved one face the reality of the situation of their drinking then we have a problem. I know that it will take them many more years of drinking and drug use before they enter rehab if you continue to coddle them and take care of their problems. If you don’t think you can take a stand and stop enabling then I don’t blame you, just don’t operate under the illusion that you are helping an alcoholic. You are not. You are hurting them by not letting them face the consequences of the behavior that they have chosen and as a result they could be in an alcoholic stupor for many more years. I will answer this question again, how to help an alcoholic? Help an alcoholic by stopping helping them.

A question that I have struggled with is how to quit drinking once and for all. In some ways the alcoholic inside of me doesn’t ever want to quit drinking regardless of the damage I do to myself. Even after I had stopped drinking, for a long time I fantasized about drinking again, drinking occasionally. I didn’t want to quit drinking.

Experience has taught me that this is a common thread among us alcoholics. If only I had a dollar every time I heard an addict say, “I wish I could just have one beer or a glass of wine with dinner.” It is a common lament. However, for me, I’ve never really fully identified with this form of fantasy. In my head I’ve never had the desire to have just one beer or one glass of wine. Heck, I’m an alcoholic. I HAVE wished that I could just get drunk once a week or once a month and function soberly the rest of the time.

Of course, this isn’t too different from a typical alcoholic fantasy. Heck, it may be the typical alcoholic fantasy. And it is because of this type of thinking, thinking that if I just got drunk once a week or once a month that I could functional normally the rest of the time, that requires that I do not drink alcohol anymore. For you this logic may be obvious but for me it was a long time coming.

I realized that as long as I wanted to get drunk at all I could never be free from this compulsion that is alcoholism. If I could (big if) successfully drink one night a week, how long would it be before I convinced myself to drink two nights a week. In time I would be drinking every night. Remember we alcoholics suffer from a progressive disease. Over time we always get worse, never better.

So, this formed the basis for me thinking that I needed to quit drinking. But the question still remained as to exactly how to quit drinking. And this would take some time and experimentation before I settled on an approach that worked for me.

One night I was out with friends. I had had a few too many drinks when I got in my car to head home for the night. I didn’t get very far. I got pulled over by a state trooper for a defective tail light and I suppose that in the course of talking with me this officer got the impression that I had been drinking. I never did make it home that night, instead I spent the night at the lovely county accomodations.

Because of this incident I was ordered by a judge to go to one meeting a week of alcoholics anonymous for twelve weeks. I can’t say I was pleased by this development. I never thought I was a good fit for A.A. It seemed cultish and weird and I just knew it was not for me. Never the less, with the nudge from the judge I had little choice to attend the meetings at least for a little while.

The first meeting was at a church. I was actually pretty nervous. I felt like I could use a drink. I wondered what are these alcoholics going to be like. What do they actually do at an A.A. meeting? I showed up mostly just to get my card signed. But, inside I was curious about the process for I already knew I was an alcoholic and needed to quit drinking once and for all.

After that twelve weeks of going to 12 step meetings, I congratulated myself on being finished and went back to drinking alcoholically. But the memory of what those AA’s had to say stayed with me. Nevertheless I drank for a couple of more years, my life slowly beginning to deteriorate as I missed many days of school and then work and made a drunken fool of myself countless times. It really had to get bad for me to admit I had a drinking problem.

When I realized that I needed to quit drinking I remembered my experience at those AA meetings two years before. I wondered just how do I get sober? Some people have said that in alcoholics anonymous that you often want the life that your sober alcoholics have achieved. This was true for me: The main thing I wanted was to learn how to quit drinking.

I started going to meetings but never got a sponsor. I was still, in my heart, too ashamed to ask for help even from someone who has been in my shoes. So I muddled through never really getting sober. At this point I realized that while meetings were good I might need something a little stiffer if I was really going to quit drinking. It was suggested that I go to an inpatient drug rehab. I resisted this at first, but eventually decided to go. And it made all the difference in the world.

When I got out, I continued to go to alcoholics anonymous meetings. I got an AA sponsor and began working the 12 steps. And I didn’t drink. I never really thought about it before but not drinking is not that complicated, in fact it is pretty simple. It’s just that it is not easy. Know what I mean?

I’ve been attending AA meetings for some time now and as long as I go to meetings I find myself not drinking. So what is the message in all of this, how do you quit drinking? It isn’t really that complicated so don’t complicate it. You need to go to 12 step meetings, you need to get a sponsor and you might need to go to a treatment center. It’s almost become a cliche really. But that is what works and what has worked for millions of people who are now clean and sober.

In the end that’s what kept me sober and I think that’s how to quit drinking.