Ask yourself these questions?
How important is alcohol to your partner?
How many drinks a day does your partner have?
Does your partner drink alone?
Does your partner drink in the mornings?
Is there less money left at the end of the week than there used to be?
The answers to these questions will help you to face up to the unpleasant fact that your husband or wife has an incurable disease.
You cannot do anything unless your partner also realizes that he or she is an alcohol addict.
Alcohol is addictive. You will find lots of people who will argue with this statement but alcohol fits all the definitions of a harmful and addictive drug;
1. You need to take more and more of it to get the same effect
2. Your body becomes physically dependent on alcohol.
3. People die from alcohol abuse
An alcoholic is someone who has become physically dependent on alcohol. Alcoholism is a permanent disease. It cannot be cured. An ex-alcoholic is simply one who has not had alcohol for a long time. If the ex-alcoholic has one drink they are hooked again and have to go through the whole drying out process again.
Treatment for alcoholism is available, but is expensive, because it means putting the alcoholic into an alcohol free residential treatment center. This will only work if the patient wants to be well again. Your partner will never be free of the addiction, he or she will always be an alcoholic. The treatment center will teach your husband or wife how to live without alcohol.
Alcoholism treatment centers allow the alcoholic to live in a supportive and alcohol free environment while giving up the drug. Psychological advice is available and group therapy sessions help many recovering alcoholics.
Alcoholics Anonymous are one group that holds support meetings for alcoholics. AA has groups in most towns and cities in most countries and many recovering alcoholics find the group sessions to be an essential part of STAYING a recovered alcoholic.
Given the toxic nature of alcohol, if the substance was discovered today, it would never be licensed as a drug or food. It is only the entrenched nature of the alcohol industry and the fact that so many jobs depend on it that make it politically unacceptable to ban alcohol. Does this sound similar to the excuses made by opium producing countries?
