Helping a Loved One With An Alcohol or Drug Problem

How can you help a friend or family member overcome a drug or drinking habit? It’s not easy. In fact, it’s difficult even under the best of circumstances, and it’s impossible if your alcohol- or drug-abusing father, mother, brother, child, lover, friend or colleague doesn’t really want to recover. If they don’t want to “face life on life’s terms,” as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, no one else can make them do it.  

Much of our frustration in trying to help addicts and alcoholics comes from our failure to fully grasp the idea of addiction as a disease. Many people pay lip service to the idea but don’t really understand what it means. And without a sense of what the disease is, we tend to think of the problem as behavior--what the addict is doing, and not as the result of something they have--a disease.

Put simply, addictions are disorders of automaticity. What started out as doing something many people do–drinking, smoking, using a drug here or there–for an addict, has developed a life of its own, and, in the end, “does itself.”  Automaticity itself isn’t abnormal. But when it becomes linked to using alcohol or drugs, and is accompanied by obsession and compulsion, then it has become a disease. Alcoholics and addicts themselves experience this automaticity as the loss of control–what in AA is called “powerlessness.” It isn’t that they can’t stop. It’s that if, once stopped, they begin again, then the addiction takes over and begins to run the whole show.  

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