When an alcoholic has a prescription pill addiction it can seem like you are interacting with five different people. The wonderful person that you once knew may be completely lost somewhere within the narcotics that are overtaking their blood stream.
How do we cope with the dual addicted spouse, friend or child? How can we get them to understand that they are destroying their lives? How do all of the mood swings of the alcoholic effect our personality?
Recently I heard a wife offer a few tips during an Al-anon meeting on how she deals with her husband who is addicted to pain pills. She said that there was a time when she made a decision to love the alcoholic without conditions.
I understood the wife to mean that her mood and attitudes were hardly impacted by the various personalities that she would encounter on a daily basis because she had made a disciplined choice to stay with her husband. One of my favorite sayings is: “change your attitude or change your address.”
I think that’s the key to living with an alcoholic, we must make up our minds that we will make the very best of every situation, no matter what. Somehow we must get to the place where we have a constant steady flow of compassion and love for them. When the insane mood swings of the addict are in full force, we don’t allow our mood to attach to theirs.
How do we protect ourselves from the various personalities of the alcoholic/addict that could be very damaging to our well-being? There’s a very long list of ways on how to cope with an alcoholic. This process of learning takes time, practice and compassion for one’s self.
Here are a few guidelines:
- Choose Your Battles: Every time the troublesome person wants to engage in a heated discussion, you have a choice to either join in or walk away. You should never argue with a drunk. Check out this article called How To Not Argue With An Alcoholic for some great pointers on this subject.
- Learn How To Control Your Verbal Reactions: There is an acronym that can be very useful, it’s called the three s’s and is used when communicating with an alcoholic.
The first S stands for “step back.”
The next thing you do is “shut up.”
Lastly, all you do is “smile.” - Picture A Word On The Alcoholic’s Forehead-If you are having trouble smiling once you step back a little, envision the word “SICK” on the addict’s forehead. That will help you maintain your self-control a little better.
These kinds of responses to a comment or action from the prescription pill addict will give you time to think for a moment how to handle the situation you are presented with.
The mood swings of an alcoholic can come at any moment. It’s important to realize that nothing you do is going to change that fact. Avoid finding yourself walking on eggshells all of the time by keeping your mood on an even keel. In order to do this you must learn methods of detaching from an alcoholic.
When they are on prescription pills one moment they can be speeding their brains out and talking a thousand words per minute and the next moment be someone who just wants to embrace you for a while. In another space in time you may observe that the addict is so calm that nothing could rattle their cage. Then in an instant you may need to know how to deal with an alcoholic filled with rage. It takes a lot of energy to handle all of the various personalities of a prescription pill addict.
The few things I’ve mentioned in this article are only small drops in the bucket compared to all of the methods I reveal in the course designed to help people cope with alcoholics. You can learn how to interact with them and maintain a consistent level of peace and serenity once you start applying the methods that we teach in the course.
The thing you must realize is that nothing is going to cause them to quit abusing the controlled substances they are on until they hit their own bottom. In the meantime you can learn how to not be an enabler and how to detach with love.
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