This seems to be where I would post to ask for advice, so here it goes…
I know someone who at this particular time, I do not really care for. I do not approve of what this person is doing with thier life and the choices they are making. To be more direct, this person has a problem with speed. It is affecting every aspect of thier life (work, personal relationships, family, etc…). Like I said I don’t particularly like this person right now, for the above mentioned reason, but I love this person and want to help them. I feel that this person has a tremendous ammount of patential and could be one hell of a good person. I know that he has a damn good heart but he is caught in the vicious cycle of methamphetamine abuse.
If you had someone that you thought was severely screwing up thier life and had so much to offer the world, and you loved this person and had a deeply vested interest in wanting/needing them to clean up, how would you approach the person? I don’t want to “confront” this person, but rather open a heartfelt dialog with them so that I can voice my concerns without scaring them off and putting them on the defensive.
I know from my own problems with speed in the past that if I was confontational then they would stop listening, shut me out, and not hear a thing I said.
Any sincere thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
I can certainly empathize with you, Greathouse. I am in almost the same exact situation with my sister-in-law. She is the type that grew up making the wrong choices and then realized she was screwing up her life and straightened out for awhile. She even had her own small business that was doing quite well.
Then she fell off the wagon.
We first started noticing things when she lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. Then the family noticed that her behavior was really hyper. Some of us thought it was stress due to the business or possibly her dead beat husband, but we eventually figured out that she was back on drugs.
This was after 12 years of being clean.
What we ended up doing after confronting her with it, dragging her to counseling, even yelling at her… none of which worked… was just telling her that we knew what was going on and that if she needed help, we would be there.
Currently we are not sure if she has stopped the drug use, but we do know she has not yet seen a counselor. We definately know that she still has a lot of things going on in her life that very easily could enable her to continue the drug habit. As a family, we are all tired of dealing with it. We have done what we could and now it is up to her now to take the help that was offered to her.
Dragwyr, I hope things work out for everyone concerned. Having been through this personally, I know it isn’t easy.
If my friend agrees that he has a problem, and wants to stop, does anyone have any suggestions about what steps he could take towards recovery. The thing is that it couldn’t interfere with his work schedule since he is already on shaky groud there. He also would want to keep this private, FROM EVERYONE.
I’ve done my share of time in 12 step programs, so I am well aware of what the second “A” stands for, but it was my experience that not everyone in the program respects the anonymous part.
I feel that he will listen to what I have to say and probably realizes himself that he needs help. I just am not to sure where to go from there. I can’t think of any advice or suggestions once he admits he needs help and would appreciate some input for how to proceed.
I hate break bad news but you can’t make anyone else sober. I liked to drink. Early in my teens, I started drinking. I started out drinking heavily, I was never a light or even moderate drinker. Many people pointed out the problems that drinking caused me, I paid them no attention.
I went to college and really started drinking after my first semester I came home for Holiday. My father drove me back to school the Saturday after New Years, I had been nineteen for two weeks. I met my new roommate and we went out and had a big time, we got drunk together and would have been good friends. The next morning, Sunday, around 8:00 someone was knocking on my door. It was a Florida Highway Patrolman, he needed for me to go to the morgue to identify my father. He was headed south in a north-bound lane on A1A and hit someone head on. One would think this would have sobered me up. It didn’t.
I continued to drink heavily. It was my father, not me, I am in control. For years I drank heavily. I lost jobs. I ruined opportunities. Everything I touched turned to shit. It was always someone elses fault, I’m in control. Freinds and family tried to get me to stop, I was wasting my life. I didn’t see it though, I was in control.
On April 4, 1987, I rear-ended a car-load of people when I was really drunk and going too fast. I totaled both vehicles and was taken to jail. I woke up the next morning and remembered enough. I knew I had done a lot of damage but no one was killed, no one was hurt. I was an atheist but I thanked God (I still have more hope than faith). I remembered visiting my father in the morgue and I came to believe that if I did not stop drinking I would die also. That was the last time I ever drank, 16 years ago. I was the only one able to stop my drinking. There are people ready to help. I help people stop drinking but they have to ask. It’s no use for someone to send someone to me. If it isn’t a sincere desire from the abusers heart it will not work. Sorry.