It can be very painful to watch an adult child struggle with alcohol. This can become especially difficult when it becomes clear that they need medical detox. You cannot force your child into a treatment program but there are several things that you can do when you are dealing with adult children and alcohol detox issues.
Keep Providing Emotional Support
The first thing to do is to keep providing emotional support for your child. You do want to remain detached – manipulation is a way of life in addiction, and you have to protect yourself first even though severing ties can be harmful to the alcoholic. You want to remain supportive in a general way and listen to your child.
Do Not Enable the Drinking
Although it might be hard, you should not enable the drinking in any way. You want to allow your child to make mistakes and face the consequences of any actions. This is very important and is sometimes the only way to get an alcoholic to admit that there is a problem.
Provide Neutral Information about Alcoholism
Something that might work is to present neutral information to your child about alcoholism and the physical harm that drinking does. You can do this by printing out medical information about the symptoms and risks of alcohol withdrawal. Give the information to your adult child casually without talking about it and without applying pressure to enter into treatment right away.
Offer To Take Your Child to Treatment
A final thing that you can do is to offer to take your adult child to a treatment center. You simply offer to take them there without making any other statements. You can do this when your child seems to be having doubts about drinking. This can be very effective if your child starts to realize that alcohol is causing physical problems that will not go away.
You need to have a plan in place if you are struggling with your adult children and alcohol detox. You can contact our Addiction Hotline in order to get advice about how to deal with a child that needs medical detox.
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