Tips For Helping Someone With Alcoholism

When a person is effected by alcoholism in their family they often want to find a way to help the alcoholic. There are some great tips for helping someone with alcoholism. Alcoholism effects everyone the alcoholic knows and for someone to offer the alcoholic help will benefit everyone in the end. It is important for people to understand, though, that alcoholism is hard to fight and it takes dedication, time and understanding to be successful.

The following is a list of tips for helping someone with alcoholism:

• Keep focused on the task at hand. It can be frustrating but when the person helping the alcoholic shows frustration or anger the goal is lost. An alcoholic is more likely to listen and work with someone who isn't judgmental or pushy.
• Maintain a normal environment. Trying to change everything about an alcoholics life will just cause them stress which triggers their alcoholism. It is important when helping that a person tries to keep things normal with the exception of eliminating alcohol.
• Find activities to replace the old alcohol-related ones. Since helping the alcoholic means taking alcohol out of their life it is important to eliminate activities where drinking is a part. For example, if the alcoholic went to the ball game every Saturday and drank while there, then that activity needs to be altered. It is often best to completely avoid the activity for a while until the alcoholic is further into recovery, so in the mean time the person helping could find a new Saturday past time.
• Don't make excuses for the alcoholic. Part of getting over alcoholism is learning to deal with the problems it caused. If the person helping is taking responsibility or making excuses for the behavior of the alcoholic then they will never be able to completely recover.

These four tips cover only the beginning of what a person can do to help someone with alcoholism. Alcoholism is a hard disease to fight, but with help alcoholics have a better chance of winning that fight.

Robert Thatcher is a freelance author based in Cupertino, California. He publishes articles and reports in various ezines and contributes on a regular basis to FreeNetPublishing.com

Living with an alcoholic is very taxing on the non-drinker because it is so all-consuming and stressful, and wears tremendously on your self esteem. Visit http://www.livingwithanalcoholic.org for some dos and don'ts