Addictions UK Help for the Carers of Addicts and Alcoholics

Addictions UK provides free help and assistance to the friends and families of our clients. We recognise the importance of providing help and daily support to the immediate friends of family members of clients who are seeking recovery. The unmanageable behaviour of the addict or alcoholics can cause havoc in families. Unhappiness, uncertainty and worry are well known feelings to those trying to care for their loved ones.

Sometimes families and friends gain comfort being reminded that "They did not cause the problems, they cannot cure the problems and they cannot control their loved one's addiction." The Addictions UK dedicated team of counsellors and therapy workers who work exclusively with our clients' carers support them through this issue and we find that this assistance helps to prevent the family getting in the way of the addicts recovery. It is also very comforting having 24/7 support at the end of the telephone.

Here is a reading used by Families Anonymous which many people have found very supportive. For more information on Families Anonymous telephone 0845 1200 660

"My role as helper is not to do things for the person I am trying to help, but to be things; not to try and control and change his actions but through understanding and awareness to change my reactions. I will change my negatives to positives; fear to faith; contempt for what he does to respect for the potential within him; hostility to understanding; the manipulation and over-protectiveness to release with love, not trying to make him fit a standard or image but giving him an opportunity to pursue his own destiny, regardless of what his choices may be."

"I will change my dominance to encouragement; Panic to serenity; the inertia of despair to the energy of my own personal growth; and self justification to self understanding."

"Self-pity blocks effective action. The more I indulge in it, the more I feel that the answer into my problems is a change in others and in society, not in myself. Thus I become a hopeless case."

"Exhaustion is the result when I use my energy in mulling over the past with regret, or in trying to figure ways to escape a future that has yet to arrive. Projecting an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it, for fear that it will or won't come true, uses all my energy and leaves me unable to live today. Yet living today is the only way to have a life."

"I will have no thoughts for the future actions of others, neither expecting them to be better or worse as time goes on, for in such expectations I am really trying to create. I will love and let be."

All people are always changing. If I try to judge them, I do so on what I think I know of them, failing to realise that there is much I do not know. I will give others credit for attempts at progress and for having had many victories which are unknown.
I, too, am always changing and I can make that change a constructive one, if I am willing. I can change myself. Others I can only love. send your comment »