Alcohol Abuse Advice

Family members wishing to be supportive of a loved one’s abstinence are often faced with a difficult task because they are not usually in the best position to provide objective advice or recommendations due to their close relationship with the individual who is struggling. The fact that you have longstanding feelings for someone and have developed an existing relationship with them will make it very hard for you to see the wood from the trees – however good your intentions.

So, if you are involved with someone at whatever level with an alcohol problem, the message is that someone outside ‘the system’ who doesn’t know you needs to be involved. Until that happens family members or work colleagues are torturing and driving themselves insane inside ‘the system’.

The third party can act as an invaluable sounding board. Every family or situation is unique and it is important that the counsellor or practitioner advising works through the particular circumstances, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of particular approaches. Addiction counsellors and even GPs can do this and, even if they cannot actually make final decisions on your behalf, you may benefit simply from the assurance of knowing they are not alone in facing these dilemmas.

If you are trying to help someone with a drink problem we can’t stress strongly enough the importance of involving a third party. This could be your GP, a therapist or counsellor or someone involved in social care. Ideally they should have relevant professional experience so that they can bring valuable expertise to the recovery process but, even if they don’t have, they will at least be able to provide the drinker with the reassurance that there is someone else to help, to take an objective viewpoint and to safeguard against denial by making sure that alcohol doesn’t continue to be the elephant in the room.

A third party is also likely to enjoy a consistently higher standard of communication with a drinker than a friend or loved one because the drinker is far less likely to take the advice they offer as a personal criticism. When someone takes criticism too personally from someone they know well they tend to answer back and pick out all their faults but with a third party, even if they wanted to answer back, they wouldn’t be able to do so in the same way because they won’t know their faults.

For this reason we have even come across cases of drinkers who have found that a family member that they aren’t very close too, such as a sister they didn’t see much of or really get on with when they were younger, could act as a useful objective third party.

As well as helping the drinker, the presence of such an objective third party can act as an invaluable sounding board for you to determine what course of action you should yourself take in your dealing with the drinker. Some of the decisions that you are faced with can be very finely balanced and should only be taken after the potential benefits and risks have been weighed up very carefully.

A classic example of the type of dilemma that you could find yourself in is when you become aware of the futility of continually giving the drinker money when they ask for it. Deep down you may be reasonably certain that the best course of action would be to stand your ground and refuse the request as it has now been made once too often. Quite apart from possibly not being able to afford to part with more money, you may have become aware that you are not acting in the drinker’s best interests by ‘enabling’ them – by giving them the cash with which to fund their addiction habit.

At the same time you are concerned that not handing over more money could result in you losing the love or friendship of the drinker. Perhaps even more worryingly still, you fear for what could happen to the drinker – who could, for example, try to take their own life or turn to crime in order to raise the funds they require.

Similarly, if a family member with a drink problem lives on their own and in a different part of the country to you, should you continue to drop everything and drive there every time the drinker falls off the wagon? If you continue to do so you will be aware that you are enabling the drinker in the sense that the drinker is far more likely to relapse if they are confident that they are going to be rescued.

If you are not on hand to drive the drinker to their GP to undergo a medical detox and to spend several days with them during the detox process then your loved one might die. They might, on the other hand, pull through against the odds and the near death experience may prove to be the “rock bottom” they needed to reach to manage a sustained recovery. But can you afford to take the risk?

“A Different Home” Help Association in Pozna? (Poland)

“A Different Home” Help Association in Poland is a group of young people, who with passion and love desire to help people. *** “We believe that we can have a real influence on the reality sorroundin us” – they said. – “We also desire to give hope and chances to those who are in particular need of them”. *** “A Different Home” reached to the children who are in the difficult life situation (with the special regard to the alcoholic families). In co-operation with City Family Help Center, opened the Socio-Therapeutic Youth Center “Nibylandia”, which took over the care of about 25 children. *** “The needs around us are quite more than we can expected… we reckon that we are not able to fulfill all our plans within our own strength. We need your help! Therefore, we turn to you for financial support, it can be through single or periodic payments to the Association’s account. *** direct address: Stowarzyszenie Pomocy “Inny Dom” w Poznaniu, ul. Ko???taja 47, 61-413 Pozna? POLAND *** BANK DETAILS: BANK BZ WBK SA, ACCOUNT NO: PL 31 1090 1463 0000 0001 0596 7026, BIC/SWIFT: WBKTPLXXX *** www.innydom.org

 

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