Helping an Alcoholic to Recover

How can we help alcoholics recover? 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 alcoholics.

Part of the issue here is that most treatment paths do not really tailor to the individual - they are set up to treat anyone and everyone. 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 someone needs help with addiction or alcoholism, we typically send them to a traditional recovery program such as AA or NA. When that fails to produce decent results, instead of blaming the program we always blame the individual, saying that “they just didn’t want it enough,” or that “they just did not get into the spiritual side of the program.” 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 important because early recovery is so incredibly difficult; it can be a struggle just to string together a few days sober on “the outside.” In a controlled environment it is much safer and easier to get started on sobriety.

2) Push alcoholics to create a new life for themselves. This is crucial because simply drying out from alcohol is not the answer. 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) Encourage alcoholics to make holistic growth a priority in their life. If you can convince someone to make progress in one area of their life, this is decent. 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).