Understanding and Loving a Person with Alcohol or Drug Addiction by Stephen Arterburn & David Stoop

Author:Stephen Arterburn & David Stoop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Understanding and loving someone with Alcohol Addiction;Understanding and loving someone with Drug Addiction;Alcohol addiction;Alcoholic;Married to alcoholic;Drug Addiction;Married to someone addicted to drugs;addiction;Help with addiction;understanding additction;Steve Arterburn;Loving someone with addiction;helping someone with addiction;Compassionate look at addiction;Family with addiction;Christian Approach to addiction;Christian view of addiction;Substance abuse;Chemical addiction
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2018-03-03T22:30:46+00:00

The Role of Denial

You’ve probably heard this scenario before: someone tells an alcoholic that he is an alcoholic, the accused person strongly denies it, and the accuser says, “See? That proves you’re an alcoholic. You’re in denial.” Of course, this is not a valid test. Sometimes what is called “denial” is really the truth. However, it is true that every addict or alcoholic is in denial about the extent of his problem.

I still remember when I first realized that the purpose of denial is not to fool others into thinking there is no problem; it’s for alcoholics/addicts to fool themselves into believing the myth that they don’t have a problem. They are not pretending—it is their strange “truth.” They may know subconsciously that there is a problem, but on the conscious level, they actually believe there is no problem.

Of course, within the family, denial takes several forms. The one that I see most often is the tendency to focus on a problem other than the addiction or alcoholism. We may say that our spouse is under a lot of pressure at work and can only handle it by drinking, or a young adult who is addicted to Adderall is suffering from ADHD or depression. Or perhaps we imagine that someone only drinks because his anxiety level is so high. We’d much rather focus on and deal with some other issue rather than face the reality of an addiction.

The principle to keep in mind when getting help for the addict or alcoholic is that the addiction must be dealt with first, not the ADHD, the depression, the anxiety, or whatever else we blame for the drinking or drug use. Picture it this way: The addiction is something that takes over a person the way an alien takes over a person in the movies. So whenever you talk with that person, you are not really talking with her, you are talking with her resident alien—her addiction. If you focus on the ADHD, the anxiety, or the depression, the alien resident—the addiction—can relax; it is not the focus of the conversation. The addiction is off the hook. That’s why you can’t work on any other problem effectively until the addiction or alcoholism is dealt with!

So now that we know that the addiction is the primary issue and that each family member is involved in some way, let’s look at what steps we can take to bring about restoration and recovery.

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