Watching a partner struggle with an addiction can be heartbreaking and may strain your relationship. Naturally, we want the best for those we love, but when our partner struggles with drinking, it can feel like there’s nowhere to turn for help. The CDC estimates that almost 1 in 6 adults in the United States are habitual binge drinkers.

If this might describe someone you love, it’s important to realize that you are not alone and that help is available for them and for you. While you can’t beat your partner’s addiction for them, you can help them with coping mechanisms and potentially even help them realize that they may need assistance to overcome their addiction.

Strategies to Help Your Partner Persevere and Overcome

Before creating a plan to help your partner with their drinking problem, it’s important to understand what alcohol abuse problems can look like so that you can better understand what your partner is going through. More crucially, understanding what drinking problems are and are not can help you understand why your partner is going through a difficult time with alcohol.

Once you’re ready, these ideas can guide you to help your partner through this difficult time:

1. Stage an intervention

2. Don’t inadvertently enable their behavior

Intervene

Confrontation can be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to be negative, and it could be the driver your partner needs to seek outside professional help. Interventions can be a pivotal turning point in your partner’s journey to recovery.

Staging an intervention needs to be approached with care. Consider who else is important in your partner’s life; could their input be helpful towards a positive end result? The time and place for the intervention should be where your partner is likely to be relaxed. It will be a stressful experience for everyone involved, so choosing the best environment to stage the intervention will be helpful in not adding to the stress or distracting from the message.

Once you have chosen the time, place, and people who you’d like to be involved, you will need to know what you’d like to say. Consider using motivational interviewing techniques to guide the conversation. 

Motivational interviewing is meant to keep the framework of the conversation collaborative and positive by using empathy to disarm the innate defense mechanisms and get your partner to open up and discuss the issues honestly.

While conducting the motivational intervention, always steer away from confrontations, don’t unintentionally cause your partner to become defensive by using a lot of “you” statements, listen more than you speak, and most importantly, focus on the process of recovery. Don’t put so much emphasis on the ultimate outcome. Recovery is a journey and must be treated as such.

The Walker Center offers a full guide on how to stage a motivational intervention which can help guide you through this important step.

Don’t Enable

Enabling behavior takes many forms and can sometimes be difficult to understand. No one would willingly enable their partner’s behavior, but there may be ways that you are subtly enabling or reinforcing their behavior.

Some who suffer from negative experiences with alcohol aren’t transparent with the levels of their consumption or aren’t even aware that they might be consuming too much. Well-meaning family may sometimes play into the self-denial experienced by their partners. Openly and honestly addressing your concerns is the best approach, by not confronting the problem or allowing it to continue, it may subtly reinforce that there isn’t anything wrong in the first place.

While many people have a natural inclination to help their loved ones, or to be general problem solvers, if you are offering solutions (such as moving them into bed if they happen to fall asleep in a different location due to consumption) it takes the focus away from the problematic behavior and puts it onto what you have done to remedy the situation.

When you stop offering this kind of support, your partner will be left to face the consequences of the actions that caused the situation to occur to begin with. By allowing these consequences to happen, it may force your partner to come to terms with their situation and end the self-denial stages that sometimes characterize those suffering from a drinking problem.

Help is Available to Everyone

While recovering from a drinking problem can be a lifelong challenge, you and your partner will never have to face it alone. If you’d like to learn more about what support can be available to you and your partner, contact The Walker Center to get help now.