Topic: Alcoholic Defenses

They believe that by demonstrating you can’t make them do anything against their will, they’ll convince you that confrontation is useless.

Repeated problems related to drinking or drug use force even the person in denial to acknowledge something is wrong–eventually.

Eventually, the fantasy bubble gets popped, and the addict realizes they’ve wasted a lot of time when they could have been making progress.

Eventually, things get so bad that even the minimizer gets frightened.

Eventually, through painful experience, the externalizer recognizes that the secret of recovery is focusing on changing yourself, not others.

Eventually, the rationalizer (through painful experience) realizes that instead of serving as a remedy, drugs and alcohol are actually making problems worse

Eventually, things get so bad that the details become irrelevant and the objections seem unimportant.

Even if such arguments have stymied you for decades, it’s quite possible, with a little coaching, to deal with them effectively in future.