What can we do to Help an Addict?

How can we give addiction help to a struggling drug addict or alcoholic?

To start with, one thing that can be helpful is for you to modify your behavior towards them in a healthy manner. The whole point is to be firm but fair and supportive without enabling, which of course can be a very fine line at times. This means that you will have to take a firm stance when it comes to “helping” the addict and be more careful about what is helping them versus what is enabling them. For instance, if you know a drug addict who has kids and the person comes to you and asks for some cash so that they can buy food for their kids - you should not give them the money? Some would think that giving money is sympathetic and good natured, but even helping the addict’s kids out is not healthy because it enables further drug use in many cases. Because they are still abusing drugs, any cash that you fork over is really supporting their use, even if you think it is paying for something else such as food. Just because they used their children as pawn in order to manipulate things does not mean that they’re not still wasting money on drugs.

Generally speaking, codependent people will be involved closely in the addicts life, and they will need to set boundaries in order to help the addict come to a decision. Make it clear to the addict what is not acceptable behavior and outline specific actions that you will follow in order to not enable them any more. If you need help with setting healthy boundaries then you might want to check out an Al-anon meeting. The people there can help you with dealing with a struggling addict and they can show you how to behave in a healthy manner so as not to enable them at all.

Helping an addict can be unnatural to some because in most cases we need to put our foot down and let them experience some pain in their life instead of rescuing them whenever they run into trouble.