How To Deal With An Alcoholic

When you watch a person you love go through addiction, it’s natural to want to help them in any way you can. Parents especially will want to offer their support, no matter the circumstance. However, whether their child is a teenager or older, that desire to help may have a negative impact on their recovery. They will want to empower the addict to succeed in life, but doing this by enabling their behavior is only contributing to their vicious cycle of dependency. The more enablement the addict has to help them continue their unhealthy behavior, the longer they will wait to change their life. They will also become used to always relying on their parent to pick up the fallen pieces. It’s important to watch out for the signs of enabling behavior and make changes to prevent worse consequences, ultimately resulting in prolonging someone’s addiction.

Signs of an Enabler

When it comes to helping an addict, there’s a fine line between providing them enough support and encouraging their behavior. Supporting them means helping them do things they can’t do alone. On the hand, if you’re enabling, you are regularly doing things that the other person could and should be doing by themselves to be self-sufficient.

Other signs of being an enabler include putting the person’s needs ahead of your own time, sanity, and schedule. This could range from going out of your way to miss important responsibilities or taking the blame when the addict gets into trouble. Other red flags are feeling resentful towards the addict since you’re taking on more responsibilities than you can handle, lying to yourself about how acceptable the addict’s behavior is, spending excessive energy focusing on solely their personal needs, and bailing them out when legal consequences eventually happen. Doing any of these behaviors only is contributing to the harmful environment that addict is living in every day. Over time, they will only start to believe that no matter how bad things get, you will always be there to mend the stitches and bring them back on their feet.

Breaking the Cycle

Since addiction affects everyone in the addict’s network, breaking your habit of enabling can make a huge impact on how well they can break their cycle of substance abuse. Any untreated or undiagnosed addict can wreak long term havoc on their families or spouse who is suffering as well. When a person is suffering from an addiction disorder, oftentimes they are in denial of their alcohlism and are unaware that the disorder exists. Rehab centers focusing on dual diagnosis have found that the link between dependency and alcohol addiction can be less weakened when the root cause is identified. In these types of situations, a person must be continually evaluated with a professional specialist to find which factors are contributing the most to their addiction specific symptoms. For example, when a person initially begins treatment, they may be experiencing a strong sense of paranoia which can recur even after staying sober for a few weeks. However, if the paranoid feeling do seem to lessen after a period of sobriety, then alcoholism can be determined as the cause. This process can make it easier to identify the true underlying disorder when any physical or psychological symptoms resulting from alcohol abuse are eliminated.

The Final Straw

Many people battling addiction find that turning to the aid of therapy and support groups provided by rehab centers can make a huge difference. Interventions especially provide unique benefits and challenges to addicts if the person is very resistant to getting help. During this process, friends, family members, and spouses need to unite as a unified force to confront the person and urge them into getting enough treatment. Interventions are often successful with the help of a professional counselor who can provide them enough advice to find the right treatment for their lifestyle, explain different alternative medicines, and other specialized rehab therapists in their area. Choose the right time and place to have this important conversation with your loved one where you can have enough alone time to process your thoughts and conversation. Make sure the person you’re having an intervention with is also sober, not busy, and focused enough to fully absorb the words that you are trying to communicate with them.

The bottom line is that helping your loved one doesn’t have to be as hard as it seems. As a family member, it’s much easier to turn a cheek towards your family, friends, or spouse who is using alcohol and other addictive substances to counteract the pressures from their life. However, make the choice to bravely stand up for their health. Don’t be afraid to call for help and be proactive when it comes to saving their lifestyle!

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply