How To Help Someone With Alcohol Addiction

Step 1: Your Approach

If you decide to talk to a friend who your worried about their drinking one of the most important thing, or the first thing to do, is not to be judgmental, not to say you did this that and the other, a really bad person, and not to confront them about it.

Step 2: Listen to what they tell you

When you're talking with your friend, a very good technique is to try to listen and get them to talk about their own concerns, to point out the good times you had when they weren't drinking, so to get some very positive memories about things, and in some ways to break down any resistance they might have to talking about their own alcohol problem.

Step 3: Reconcile their perceptions with reality

Often when people are drinking they perceive things to have happened in a certain way, and if your sober and alongside them you might see something quite different; they see themselves as the life and soul of the party, everyone likes them, remarks or sarcasm they displayed to others was well received, it can be useful to talk to them and say do you realise it didn't quite seem like that from mine or someone else's point-of-view. Asking them to reflect a bit on how the situation really was, that can be very difficult and cause people to be very defensive, but is a useful thing to do. Often helping people to recognise that reality might be a bit different to how they've perceived things can help them to change.

Step 4: Getting professional help

You might talk to your friend about getting some help, you may have looked yourself at what is available locally, and talking to them about going along with them for support. It helps for them to recognise that they won't be by themselves, lots of other people go there. The reason these services are set up is because quite a lot of people have problems with drinking, their not there for one or two people, their there because a lot of people in society who do struggle with drinking too much.
Alcohol Concern is the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse, and acts as an umbrella body for over 500 local agencies that tackle alcohol misuse. Check their website at www.alcoholconcern.org.uk for more information on services available in your area.

Step 5: Don't push too hard

You can't push someone, you may get some information for them about alcohol or the effects of alcohol, or the amounts they should be drinking, but you need to be very careful not to push too hard as this can cause people to go the other way. Perhaps feeling so bad about themselves, their self-esteem and confidence gets lowered and this leads them back to drinking heavily again.

Step 6: Helping them through relapses

When people manage to stop drinking often they feel very strongly about it, and may be able to continue like this for a while. But having an alcohol problem is a relapsing condition, and very often people will start to drink again.