6 Things You Can Do Now When Someone You Love is Struggling with Alcohol

1. Educate yourself
2. Monitor anxiety
3. Identify areas of control
4. Identify boundaries
5. Get connected to informed support
6. Practice honesty

It may come as a surprise the steps don’t include, “help person get into a treatment program” or “help person drink less”. I imagine these are options you have already tried. I believe it to be more helpful to work through areas within your control.

Educate

Alcohol use varies a lot. Many drink regularly with no negative consequences or harm associated with use. Some drink and have found themselves in a pattern of negative behaviors and consequences that hurt themselves and/or people they love.

For today, our efforts will apply to relationships when a pattern of harm is associated with use.

A lack of education for those surrounding the one struggling can contribute to conflict around substance issues. Hear me clearly, I did not say responsible for use. Never are we responsible for another adult’s decision to drink or not.

Rather, with education we can address common pitfalls and dynamics that often come alongside alcohol use in relationships.

Also, education can provide empathy and understanding.

Alcohol use and recovery can be quite complex, especially if psychological or physical dependence is involved. Education can help us see the person we love may really be taking on an individual battle that is outside of us.

Education may help us re-think the way we support someone struggling. It can help us identify appropriate ways to support and be in relationship with someone who is struggling.

Here are a few places to begin:

Cognition + Alcohol + Recovery

The Brain and Alcohol

Patterns & Harm Associated with Drinking

Substance Use Disorder Information

The best book I have found to support navigating a relationship when substance use is involved: https://melodybeattie.com/books/codependent-no-stop-controlling-others-start-caring/

Blog: https://melodybeattie.com/category/addiction/

Monitor Anxiety

Predictability of behavior becomes a focus when alcohol use results in a pattern of harm. If one can’t predict behavior, anxiety often results. Quite reasonably those around someone struggling with alcohol may have experienced negative consequences, everything from minor conflict to broken trust or abusive behavior.

Anxiety is a natural and reasonable response to a pattern of unmanageable alcohol use.

For some, anxiety tends to manifest itself in controlling behaviors. For the anxious, the inner thought might be, “how do I make my environment safe and predictable”.

All efforts are put towards decreasing anxiety, constantly surveying the area to seek assurances the environment is safe. Sometimes, anxiety attempts to manipulate predictability through control. This results in a power dynamic in relationships. The person struggling will feel this tension. In partnership, the relationship may then resemble more of a parent-child dynamic than an intimate one. One way we move away from this dynamic is to manage our anxiety despite the behavior and use of the person struggling.

Setting up healthy expectations: You may successfully manage your anxiety, and the people you love may still drink and harm may still result. The goal is not that we help someone else manage their alcohol, the goal is that we make our lives manageable with the areas we can control. We are not constantly at the mercy of decisions outside of us. We can experience some peace through managing anxiety.

For more specifics on managing anxiety, take a look at my anxiety series here.

Identify what’s in control.

This one is tactical. Get out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side of the line write down what you cannot control and on the other write down what you can. I added a few examples, please personalize to your circumstances.

I encourage you to actually write these out. When someone around us is struggling, we can begin to fog the lines between what we can control and what we can’t. We need to understand this logically and emotionally: there’s a lot that is simply out of our control when another grown adult is making their own adult decisions.

We practice honesty with ourselves when we do this type of exercise.

Write out:

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Identify Boundaries

Control slides us into a conversation about boundaries. Take a look at that same piece of paper and write down what you are okay with and what you are not, your boundaries.

Writing down your personal boundaries may not immediately invoke action. That’s okay. Even if we practice deciding what is okay and not okay with us, we make building blocks for a way forward.

A tendency when alcohol is negatively apart of relationships is to base boundaries upon the one struggling and not your own, we need to get clear about what’s actually okay with us. Through this reflection we identify what sort of relationship we can have with the one struggling.

Again, we practice honesty with ourselves.

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Setting up healthy expectations: We can’t assume people will know our boundaries and/or have healthy boundaries. It will be our job to communicate and follow through with our boundaries. Also, anytime we setup new boundaries, it takes time and failure to learn, give yourself that space.

Get connected to someone who understands

While getting support from friends and family might be really helpful, it may be counterproductive if they aren’t informed about alcohol use dynamics and specific issues associated. Find a group or a person who is informed.

Al-Anon is a support group you can join to learn about being in relationship with someone who is struggling with alcohol. Learn about al-anon basics here. Through al-anon you can find a sponsor, someone who will help you navigate healthy boundaries and stay on track with your personal recovery. Get an alcohol informed counselor, a counselor who is trained specifically in issues of substance use. The credentials vary by state, but the credentials behind a counselor’s name can be identified with a quick google search. In North Carolina, “LCAS” (Licensed Clinical Addiction Specialist) is a common credential. This means their education and training addressed substance use specific issues.

Practice honesty

Lastly, do anything you can to practice honesty with yourself.

A common dynamic resulting from being in relationship with someone struggling with alcohol is hiding, minimizing, and feelings of shame. This can result in discounting our experiences and excusing unreasonable things.

So that means, if someone you love treats you poorly, we talk about it with trusted people. We don’t excuse it and we don’t minimize how it felt with, “but they were drinking”. We practice honesty and hear ourselves speak out loud.

When we practice honesty, we teach ourselves we matter and we have worth. When we practice honesty it helps us increase clarity on a healthy way forward.

This is where we start.

We gain back control of our lives by educating ourselves, managing anxiety, identifying margins of control and boundaries, connecting with informed support, and being honest with ourselves.

Setting up healthy expectations: We may do all of these successfully and the people we love may still drink and still experience harm from use. There is much to be grieved in this place, but not a lot we can control. Today, we rest in the space that we have shown up and dealt with what is in our control.

Peace.

Photo credit: Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash