What are the Basics of Helping 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. What you want to do is act in a truly healthy manner and to do this you must not enable them in any way. 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 genuine addiction help versus what is enabling them. For example, if a struggling addict has children and they come over and beg for money so that they can provide for their children - do you give it to them? Most people would argue that it is compassion to give people money, especially if it is for children, but understand that doing so enables the addict and will only hurt the kids more in the long run. Because they are actively using drugs and alcohol, the money you give them is actually supporting their habit, even if indirectly. Just because they played the "kids" angle on you does not mean that they are not still wasting money on dope.

So there are usually codependency issues involved when it comes to a struggling addict and the best thing for the people involved is to get healthy and set some boundaries. Make it very clear what your boundaries are by telling the addict what you will not allow in your life and also tell them what you will do if these requests are ignored. If you are confused about how to go about setting boundaries then you should start by going to an Al-anon group. The people there will assist you in your struggle with the addict in your life and they can tell you how to act in a positive way so you are no longer enabling anyone.

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.