The decision

Whether to do anything at all.

Most relatives arrive asking what to do. Underneath it are three separate questions with three different answers.

The money question Talk it through

Three questions before the decision

Most relatives arrive asking what to do. Underneath it there are usually three separate questions being asked at once, and they have different answers.

  • Is anybody in danger? If somebody in that house is being hurt or frightened, if a child is not safe, if an older relative is being neglected or having money taken, or if he is physically ill from drinking, then this is not a decision to weigh. The safety page names the routes, and you need neither proof nor his permission.
  • What am I actually being asked for? Money, a bed, a lie to somebody else, a lift, silence, or just to keep answering the phone. Name it precisely. Families agree to things in a fog that they would refuse in a sentence.
  • Whose peace am I buying? Some of what relatives do is for the drinker and some of it is to stop their own week being unbearable. Both are legitimate. Muddling them is what produces the decisions people regret.

What acting actually means

The word intervention has been sold to families as an event: everybody in a room, letters read out, a car waiting outside. Done by a trained person it is a real method. Done by a family on the advice of a website it frequently costs them the contact they still had, which was the only thing they had.

The versions that do not depend on a professional are smaller and duller. One honest conversation at a sober hour. One clear offer with a clear shape — this, for this long, on this condition — rather than an open-ended rescue. One consequence you are actually willing to carry out. That is most of it.

The word you will be handed

Somebody will tell you that you are enabling him. It is usually said by a person who has no obligation to him, and it flattens a real question — what does my help actually change — into an accusation about your character.

The useful version is specific. Does this particular thing, done this particular time, make the drinking easier to continue, or does it keep somebody housed, fed, out of court, or alive? Sometimes the answer is the first. Often it is the second, and the second is not a moral failure.

The opposite slogan is just as unhelpful. Tough love, used as a plan rather than a description, is how families end up with a relative who is both still drinking and no longer speaking to them.

Waiting is a decision too

You are allowed to do nothing for a while. Not as a strategy, not as leverage, and not as a lesson — simply because you do not know enough yet, or because you have nothing left this month.

Nobody can tell you where the moment is. Anybody who claims to know that he has to hit rock bottom first is repeating folklore; people get better from all sorts of positions and some die at the bottom. What is true is that an offer he can actually take is worth more than an offer made in the middle of an argument.

When the decision is not yours

If he is an adult, you cannot make him get treatment, and no service can admit him without his agreement except in narrow legal circumstances that a doctor, not a family, judges. That is not a failure of will on your part. It is the law in most places, and on any other day you would want it to be.

This site does not give legal advice. Mental-health law, capacity, guardianship, safeguarding an older relative and anything involving the courts need a professional where you are.