Make it easy...

Sometimes we who are relatives makes it more complicate than it is. We put a lot of energy and mental challenges on trying to understand the sickness, trying to find logical explanations for what our relatives do under the influence of their illness, alcohol or drug dependency. It could be a waste of time and effort...

Perhaps we also think a lot about what we as a family can do to help the alcoholic or drug addict to make a change. "If we just do this or that ... then maybe he/she will change." We adopt a large responsibility for a problem that is not ours, and that we don’t have power over.

Sometimes the easiest way is to listen to sober alcoholics and drug addicts, and to understand their way of looking at it. A friend of mine explains it like this:

"The alcoholic is the only one who can control their addiction. What we alcoholics must realize, that we have to really realize and understand, is that we are allergic to alcohol. We can not drink it, not yesterday, not today and not tomorrow. As long as we don’t understand that, we drink. If we have begun to suspect that we are alcoholics, but don’t realize what it means, we have a belief, perhaps a desire, that we can drink after all. "It's just a temporary dip." "If I don’t drink in a couple of days, then I will make it." Much in that way, we try until the penny has dropped for real. But before it does, we are greater than the disease and then we drink because we are only almost alcoholics. There are no shortcuts that I know of, for the only road to sobriety is that you realize that me and alcohol don’t get together. You have to bend your neck and surrender to that fact. Until you do so, I think anyway, you will take relapses to alcohol to try and and see if you have not, after all, recovered."

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