Help Alcoholics Recover from Alcoholism

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Monday, March 2nd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

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 you have reached this point then you might want to think about the best way to help an alcoholic.

Part of the problem is that existing recovery programs lack customization. They are one size fits all and that ends up not really helping anyone as much as they could if they were tailored to individuals. For instance, programs such as AA or NA, which make up the bulk of treatment options today, have basically not changed for a long time.

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 this does not give us great success rates, we often will fault the individual instead of the program itself, citing excuses such as “the person just did not want to get sober”.” These excuses are unacceptable and we should be pushing ourselves to come up with a better solution, instead of simply blaming the individual. 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 controlled environment it is much safer and easier to get started on sobriety.

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) Get struggling alcoholics to approach their recovery in a holistic way. If you can get someone to grow in one area of their life, that is good. But if you can encourage an alcoholic to make progress in multiple areas of their life, then this is really good. 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).

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