Personal Growth Success

How can we give drug addiction help to addicts who are struggling with addiction?

The real secret to this lies in empowering the drug addict to take control of their own life. But how do we go about doing that? It can be a hard truth to accept, but we can’t really convince another person to change, no matter how much we desire for them to be clean. Addicts have a tendency to do that and it can be extremely difficult to help them when they are resistant to change.

The first issue concerning drug addiction help is in taking a look at your own actions regarding the situation. Are you enabling them to continue using drugs in any way? If so then you might want to take a look at what you’ve been doing to enable the person and seek to change those actions so that you’re not holding them back in any way. For example, if their drug use lands them in jail, and you automatically bail them out of jail, then you are probably enabling them. How? Because you are denying them the natural consequences of their using.

If you are “putting pillows under them” when they screw up, then you might actually be contributing to their ongoing use of drugs instead of helping them to make a decision for change. Another situation might be when they are at a party all night and get completely wasted and you end up covering their bases for them by calling off at their job. Doing these things might seem like the right thing to do, but in fact you might be damaging their chances at getting clean. If they are really going to make any sort of major change in their using behavior then they will have to go through some pain initially in order to motivate that change.

The moment of surrender is when the addict is willing to accept help on someone else’s terms. This is when you know that the drug addict is ready for change because they will no longer try to deceive you or trick you by asking for “help”. When they ask you for help in the form of guidance and direction about how to live, then you know they are ready for real change.

Pushing the addict to this point is difficult and there is not a whole lot a person can do to induce the state of surrender. The important part is that you no longer enable the addict and therefore allow them to hit bottom. The less you enable them the faster they will get there.