What is it?
Before you can attempt to help your friend or loved one, it is important that you seek to understand their drug or alcohol addiction. Your experience in handling a person’s addiction might be not enough to understand their problem. Researching the drug and its effects is one of the first think that you can do for an alcoholic or addict when you are trying to help them.
Establish Boundaries
Setting and establishing boundaries is perhaps the single hardest step for friends and family members of an addict to follow. It is so hard to want to help your loved one and have to turn them away. At the moment our guilt at hurting their feelings or making them feel bad might override our want to help them.
You have to understand that further enabling by choosing to bail them out of rough situations or not reprimanding them for being high or drunk when they are with you can be even more detrimental to them in the long run. If you continue to enable them there is no reason for them to want to get better and THEY WILL NOT STOP.
Confrontation
This does not necessarily mean organize a full-scale intervention. In fact, a lot of addicts and abusers will be completely put off by any attempt of an intervention, and they can detach altogether from those that are trying to help them. Timing is everything.
The first steps of confronting your addicted loved one is to simply talk about it with them. There doesn’t have to be a room full of people and, for some, you don’t even have to be in direct contact with them. Sometimes, an understanding demeanor or a friendly and supportive voice over the phone is enough to make a drug user begin thinking about addiction help. However, if they do not think that they need help or they are unwilling to consider rehab, then you might want to think about an intervention.
The important thing here is to never give up. That doesn’t mean that you yell at them every waking hour; no one would listen to you that way. You have to understand that it is their choice and you cannot make them change; you can be there for them and show them that they can.
Author: National Addiction Resources
America's Best Treatment Directory
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