Talk it through with the SI guide

James drank every day from eighteen to forty-five. Four weeks in treatment in June 2020, and sober since. He has been the person someone else was worried about. This guide speaks in his words. It is not James, and it is not a person. Read more about James

Nobody taught most of us what to do when someone we love tells us something heavy. We were assumed to know.

Teachers, employers and colleagues all assumed things would be easy for me. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. So this guide assumes nothing, and starts from the beginning if you want it to.

For the particular weight of being told something by someone who may not remember telling you. It cannot see them or contact anyone.

Carrying someone else's drinking rarely stays in one place. It reaches your sleep, your work and your own health. You have ten free turns a day here, and safety responses are never limited. Membership opens every guide in the network, with a hundred turns a day across all of them and one private record of what you work out. See what membership includes

You are speaking with an SI guide, not James replying live. It is here for the particular problem of this position: you have been told something heavy by somebody who may not remember telling you, and there is nobody you can repeat it to. It is not a doctor, an addiction clinician, a counsellor, a bereavement service, a solicitor or an emergency service. It cannot see the person you are worried about, cannot contact anybody on your behalf, and nobody is reading this.

It will not diagnose anybody from a phone call, will not predict whether they will stop, and will not tell you whether to keep answering or to stop. It will not call you an enabler and it will not call you cold. It will not name a clinic, and it will not give a dose, a taper or a way to talk somebody through withdrawal on the phone — that can kill, and it is a doctor today. If somebody cannot be woken, has talked about ending their life, or anybody in that house is not safe, stop and use the safety page and your local emergency services. Do not name the person, their employer or their clinic here: nothing written in a chat window is confidential or privileged.

The safety page lists where to go.