How to Help a Recovering Alcoholic: A 5 Step Guide

If you know someone with substance abuse issues, you’ll want to educate yourself on how to support them. Read our guide on how to help a recovering alcoholic.

More than 14 million adults, or more than 5 percent of the U.S. population, have an alcohol-use disorder.

Dealing with an addiction to alcohol is incredibly difficult. But taking care of someone who is suffering from an addiction is challenging in its own way.

Keep reading to learn why it’s important to learn how to help a recovering alcoholic the right way.

1. Leave Your Judgements at the Door

Dealing with addiction is hard enough. If your loved one is trying to break their addiction, they already knows that they have a problem. The last thing they need is to be reminded and judged by their friends and loved ones.

If you’re welcoming an addict into your home or your life, leave your judgments behind and offer a supportive, loving environment instead.

2. Take Away the Temptation

Providing emotional support for addiction is important. But providing physical help can also go a long way towards helping to break the addiction.

Remove any alcohol from your home and avoid drinking around your loved one while you’re out.

While a part of an addict’s recovery is to learn to be around the substances they once struggled with, they can easily be tempted if they’re in the early stages of recovery.

3. Make Sure They Know You’re There to Listen

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest difference in providing drug addiction support.

Just letting a person know that you are there to listen to them can go a long way. Whether they want to talk about their recovery process or anything else going on in their lives, having someone who listens can make the process less lonely and isolating.

4. Start Some Healthy Habits

Another step in the recovery process is replacing unhealthy habits with healthy ones. These habits help with addiction because they provide healthy outlets for stress and anxiety, which could cause a person to turn back to the substances they once used.

A simple way to encourage this is to start some healthy habits of your own. Cook healthy meals or replace junk food in your pantry with healthy snacks. Start taking daily walks or jogs, and invite your loved one to come with you.

Having someone else make new habits makes the process easier and serves as a great reminder of what needs to be done to complete the recovery process.

It’s so important to prioritize self-care during addiction recovery. The addict lifestyle is often one in which there is little time for self-care or even time to do anything but focus on the next high. This can be extremely detrimental to your physical and mental health, which are both critical parts of addiction recovery.

So how can you find balance in your life during this time? The answer is simple: prioritize it! Make sure that you schedule time each day to take care of yourself.

5. Encourage Outside Help

When you care about someone, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your love is enough to help them heal.

But the reality is that addiction is very serious, and in most cases, victims require professional help to safely and effectively overcome it. Helping someone with an alcohol addiction is about more than just doing things yourself.

While you should provide a safe, caring environment for your loved one to come home to, they’ll need more help to overcome their addiction. Encouraging them to look into treatment programs is also a great way to provide support to an addict.

Learning How to Help a Recovering Alcoholic

Learning how to help a recovering alcoholic takes a lot of patience.

But showing your support without judgment, taking away temptation, and encouraging them to seek help can go a long way toward making their recovery successful.

For more tips to help you keep yourself and your family safe and healthy, check out the “Health” section of our site.