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If he's going to AA then he should be reading the AA Big Book. Living Sober is another AA book and has some good stuff. There are plenty of other addiction related self help books but AA is most effective when the alcoholic is really involved in the program so I think AA literature would be best.

You are doing your best to help him and I admire that. Often our first instinct when we see someone struggling is to provide them with helpful resources. This is definitely beneficial, but only to a certain extent. If you house a homeless alcoholic and drive them to AA, they might benefit greatly. If an alcoholic has a home, is attending AA or a treatment program, and is "not doing a good job," the vast majority of the time it is not due to a lack of resources. It is a lack of willingness or commitment to which ever program he or she is in.

If he's talking to a sponsor daily, actively working through the 12 steps, sharing at meetings, and he still is not making progress, it's possible a book could give him something he's lacking. But it doesn't sound like he's doing those things.

I think the most helpful thing you can possibly do is go to an Al-Anon meeting. Good luck.

I'm very sorry to hear this sad story.

For him: he has to stop drinking entirely. He can't control it, he can't be a weekend drinker. The sooner he can accept this, the sooner he can turn his life around. It would be great if he can get into a rehab program of some kind. They can be very helpful for those who want to get better. If that isn't possible, then it would be a good idea to try a support group again. AA, Agnostic AA, SMART, there are others. (See the sidebar for links.) It is wise to "shop around" by trying different meetings, then returning to one's favorites. Even within traditional AA, the personality, format, level of religiousness can vary widely. I'm a big fan of Agnostic AA meetings, and I've found that gay-friendly meetings and meetings in non-religious spaces tend to be less religiously focused.

For you: (and your daughter, indirectly) It is a common pattern for the child of an alcoholic to end up with an alcoholic spouse. We tend to find these codependent relationships somehow familiar. You might appreciate the book Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Woititz. It was a real eye-opener for me.

You may also find some help and support at AlAnon. It is a support group for family and loved ones of alcoholics. (Not to be confused with AA, which is for alcoholics themselves.) They can help you protect your sanity while you deal with the chaos of someone else's addiction. www.alanon.org /r/AlAnon

FWIW, I think it is wise not to allow him to live with you while he is still drinking. His parents giving him a deadline/ultimatim may actually help him get sober. By refusing to continue enabling him, he may hit his rock bottom sooner, and make a lasting change. It's pretty much a textbook definition of "tough love".

I hope all my thoughts are some help. I'm wishing you the best.

If you want to change your life, find an AA meeting or a Narcotics Anonymous meeting near you and GO.
Get phone numbers of people in the meeting whom you can call ANYTIME. Call those people before you start drinking.

This is a great book for people in recovery. I love it so much and recommend it highly.

Check out the reddit /r/stopdinking/, read and comment and post questions there too.

If you have a primary care physician, go to see him/her and tell them that you are struggling with your drinking. See if he/she can recommend or refer you to an inpatient or outpatient treatment program.

Tell a trusted friend or family member (who will help and support you) that you want to quit drinking and keep that person updated.

Admitting your problem and asking for help are great starts! Keep your chin up and the bottle down, and you can do it!

SMART Recovery Family & Friends is an alternative to Alanon and Johnson-style intervention.

It's based on CRAFT (Community Reinforcement And Family Training) which was developed by Dr. Bob Meyers.

CRAFT was one of the methods featured on the HBO series 'Addiction'.

There are online meetings available, a discussion board, and face to face meetings have started in some locations.

Most of the material centers around a book "Get Your Loved One Sober", which was co-authored by Bob Meyers, but there are other materials used as well.

The groups put a lot of focus on what you can do for yourself, first... and then how you can reinforce your loved one's good behavior while detaching yourself from their addictive behavior.

I've been a volunteer meeting facilitator for SMART Recovery for over 10 years, and I've heard a lot of positive feedback from the people using Family & Friends.

That sounds like a binger, BellaPop. Have him take a look at this and check it yourself, it helps to have the folks close to you on board:

http://patient.info/health/sinclair-method-for-alcohol-use-disorder

This method basically uses the booze against itself and he can use it while he's drinking, he'll gradually drink less and less and less.

Check out Claudia Christian's talk at TEDx too. Look for the first movie that shows CTRL ALT DEL on the screen and run it out to 2:51.
http://livestream.com/TEDx/events/5288559/videos/121386805

It'll give you a better idea of what he's up against, as Claudia was fairly buried in it herself. Tried just about everything to break the spell.

If that appeals to him, it can't hurt to check out Moderation Management or SMARTRecovery to take a look at the tools they use. The Sinclair Method will handle the cravings and the CBT / mindfulness tools will help manage the habitual part of drinking and make the process go more smoothly.

This has about an 80% success rate and it's what I use myself.

If you have Amazon Prime, there's also a video called One Little Pill, you can watch it for free:

http://www.amazon.com/One-Little-Pill-Claudia-Christian/dp/B01F5U8O5M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Let me know if you have any questions, I'll be happy to get you pointed to the right resources.

One of the most progressive minds focused specifically on addiction that I've discovered belongs to Dr. Gabor Mate, and there are numerous, profoundly insightful and amazing lectures of his available to watch online.

Alternately, his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is in my (addicted) opinion one of the most important books on addiction ever written.

Hope this was helpful. My heart goes out to you and your friend.

> God, he's not lose. God is in us. In you.

Yes, that is a Buddhist notion. A great book that discusses that is The Zen of Recovery

My problem is finding a sponsor who is as open minded as he expects me to be, and is willing to accept that I need to work the principles in a way that will work for me.

I would love to PM back and forth with you and possibly share phone numbers.

You couldn't be more right. I never realized the "kick" alcohol has. Telling myself each morning "I will not drink tonight" only to find myself at the store by 5pm refueling for the night. It didn't matter how much I was hungover, or how much I wanted to quit. I would ultimately be pouring a drink by 5pm on a weekday, and 11am on weekends. Alcohol is a poison, and it will catch up to you at some point. For me, rock bottom was the hospital with severe abdominal pain due to a swollen pancreas.

78 days sober and counting, I never realized how much I valued life. Life is beautiful when you don't drink. Drinking clouds your surroundings and everything beautiful in it. I thought alcohol made the moments great. It didn't. And it's not necessary. You'll see.

You recognize you have a problem. Run with it. You can do it. Listen to the audio book by Allen Carr. It will help more than you can imagine. It did for me. Very eye opening to a problem crushing society.

Good luck friend. Better days ahead.

Ok. So I know this is going to sound like bullshit but the Allen Carr book worked for me. I read the book and followed the instructions. I also stopped smoking using his book on stopping smoking.

They even do day courses pretty much wherever you are.

Also, a good psychologist is helpful. I live in Europe so mine is in my health care package. Almost every alcoholic I know has gotten to the point of why does it fucking bother.

I mean to be honest if I did not have my wife and my dog I would probably be dead already.

That is about all I can say really. Hold tight.

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate, absolutely brilliant man and excellent writer. Helped a lot of things click for me. He also has talks on youtube if you would like to check him out there.

My mother is still abusing alcohol. My loved one is trying to control her drinking. One thing is for certain: Until your mother decides she needs to stop, she is going to keep drinking. If you are attempting to see her change, then you must be willing to change aspects of yourself to allow change to occur around you. This includes how you respond, how you react, and how you manage your time and priorities.

Get Your Loved One Sober has plenty of suggestions for how to interact with a person abusing alcohol and to take care of yourself. It is so important to keep taking care of you because it is so easy to get sucked into their world and let it slowly destroy your world. This book goes through aspects of the Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT) program. A place that you could share what is happening is through the SMART Family and Friends meetings.

The pain is temporary. You are strong and you will get through this. I believe in you! ❤️

Hey,

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Welcome! You have come to the right place. You are not alone. Read "This Nake Mind" by Annie Grace. It will set you free.

https://www.amazon.com/This-Naked-Mind-Discover-Happiness/dp/0525537236/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1556289466&sr=8-1

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Audioable has free trial promo. Sign up and start listening to the book now! Will change your life.

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You got this. It's not you. Alcohol is ADDICTIVE period but you have to change your beliefs around this popular drug.

I have exactly the same problem.

I bought a small kitchen timed lock box.

When I know I'm going to have heavy temptations I'll put my cards and cash in it and set the lock timer for 12 hours, 24 hours, heck, I've locked them for 3 days knowing I won't really need them.
Also removed my card info from my phone so no ordering that way.


I know this isn't for everyone but it's helped me get through some tough humps. I've easily saved what it cost me in a couple of weeks.

This is FREE today.
Recovered: The Cure for Alcoholism https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BYSQGK4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Bjr2BbNM0JZCS

Something I do is lock my cash and cards away in a timed lock box when I really want to have a stretch where I simply can't drink. Could be for an evening, a day, weekend, a week even.

It's helped me get through some rough patches where I needed a break.

This one.

AA has no monopoly on recovery.

Consider the documented alternatives

I found Alcoholics Anonymous to be helpful in my case, but I had run out of ideas and was willing to do anything.

If they would have told me to stand in the bathroom I would have.

Here is the mobile version of your link

This one?

Here is the mobile version of your link

> I do not think that abuse of something is a disease. I think it's a symptom.

That would put you in a pretty extreme minority of scientists who have researched substance abuse models for their whole career. It is of course possible to have multiple conditions going on but to tell a hardcore alcoholic to just get some therapy and see if the drinking gets better is needlessly reckless. Most psychs and DR's are woefully ignorant on the latest research and most true alcoholics can go through lots of therapy lying to themselves and the therapist about the consequences of their drinking (I did that for years).

>The reason why AA has such a low success rate (under 10 percent) is not because the people that fail are born a certain way, it's because AA encourages shame.

I'd love to see where that figure comes from (orange papers, maybe)? AA does not track abstinence success though there was some effort at one point to track continual attendance. It's no doubt true that some people get sober without AA. It's also true that some use AA to do it. I'm just not sure it's a complete Venn where you can say "if 10% can do it without and only 10% in AA achieve lifetime sobriety then it doesn't work". Maybe the AA 10% were those that could never have achieved it on their own. Maybe that would mean 20% can now get sober because AA is around. I'm not a clinician so I won't speculate any more but if you're not one either please don't give life or death advice on something you're not qualified to do so.

As for AA encouraging shame, I've seen more shame based, depressed, depraved individuals get their confidence and life back in AA than I have anywhere else. People that are ashamed they no longer drink and go to AA to support that decision haven't really gotten it yet, in my opinion. The good news is that as long as they don't drink and go to meetings they probably will "get it" at some point. I've been on both sides of the coin.

If you'd like to educate yourself a bit on alcoholism, either to better understand it yourself or to help your shameful friends, just read the first few chapters of Beyond the Influence (it's non-AA ;-).

I'm not a doctor and I'm not a shrink, but I'm a guy who got his second DUI after rationalizing my drinking that led to my first DUI in terms of external factors: my divorce, financial problems, having a bad boss, etc. Except that by the time of my second DUI, I didn't really have any of those problems--new boss, over a decade since I'd separated from my wife, money problems taken care of, and so on. I wish I'd scanned one of my favorite John Callahan cartoons; Callahan was a recovering alcoholic who had been paralyzed after being in a drunk-driving accident, and some of his work deals with his addiction and recovery. (I'm pretty sure that it was in Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot, his autobiography, which is an excellent read, although he has some weird issues with lesbians.) In it, he's in a meeting, listening to others' excuses: "I drank because my childhood nickname was 'Corky'!" "I drank because my shoes were too tight!" "I drank because there's a machine strapped to my back that forces me to drink!" The real joke being, of course, that Callahan is a quadriplegic, which would be an excuse to drink if there was one, except that he'd been an alcoholic before the accident, and was sober for most of the time after it, until his death not too long ago.

I completely get social anxiety, and it was my excuse for a while, until after I sobered up and realized that I drank in no small part to avoid socializing; even though I drank in social situations, I also went to bars with a book to avoid having to talk to people. (It really wasn't just to read, although I rationalized it as such, because I couldn't remember big chunks of what I'd read; it was a big revelation to revisit some of those books and see how they made so much more sense.)

tl;dr--there's nothing wrong with talking to a counselor about social anxiety, but here's a little experiment that you can try at the same time: don't drink for a month. At all. Nothing with meals, nothing with family, with friends, alone, period. If you're just drinking it for the taste, then it shouldn't be a problem. (I like Indian food, but I haven't had any in a while, and I don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering if there are any Indian restaurants open.)

I have been drinking now for close to 7 years and the last five years have been awful. I hide my wine and pretend that I didn't drink but end up mostly very drunk at night and acting weird in front of my husband and sometimes kids. I joined this group three days ago, and I feel I have found the first time people whom I understand. I read other stories that remind me so much of what I have done, and all this is a big struggle. This life can be a complete mess and full of irresponsible actions. Also, I know that people who never had an addiction to alcohol or other things like drugs than they may not fully understand what's going on.

I am now trying to understand why I have been drinking and if there is a way to stop it. Someone here in Reddit gave me a book and couple of video recommendations which I found it very interesting.

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Book: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts - (https://www.amazon.com/Realm-Hungry-Ghosts-Encounters-Addiction/dp/155643880X)

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5sOh4gKPIg&t=3s

Crazywise (https://crazywisefilm.com/) & In Utero (https://www.inuterofilm.com/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs

I would recommend you speak to your mother about stopping alcohol when she hasn't had a drink. Good luck and hope she finds her way out

It is possible to do alone. I've been to (court mandated) AA and NA and I simply cannot stand it. One sob story or wild tale of drunken adventure after another, the same stories week after week...everyone with tears in their eyes, a good 40% of people in there saying they are sober when the reality is that they have just switched up to something else (weed or pills generally). All the God and Jesus bullshit. I hate everything about it, even the camaraderie/people pretending to care about you

I wanted to become sober and I have. books like these X † X help me put things into perspective and realize that there is much more that I want to do in life than get home and get wasted and then feel shitty the entire next day.

I was a monster...I'd do any drug under the sun, I'd drink a fifth of vodka every night and I was able to stop with my own willpower eventually