Acceptance is the first principle of recovery. Recovery begins when an individual moves from denial to acceptance. It does not happen all at once, and it isn't something that another person can do for the individual suffering from an addiction. Still, each time you confront a person with reality you help bring him closer to accepting his situation and seeing the need to change.

Most people have lived in denial for years before they come for help. Often they have been surrounded by "co-conspirators" who have enabled their dysfunctional behavior to continue and who have reinforced their denial system. Together they have constructed a delusional world where the full extent of the problem is never acknowledged, let alone dealt with. The first job of treatment, then—and the first step toward recovery—is to bring someone to the point of acceptance.

Sometimes people ask if a person can be helped who does not want help. Usually what they are really asking is whether they should wait until the person asks for help, or whether there is something they can do to help the process along.

Ultimately, you cannot help someone who refuses to be helped. As the old saying goes, addiction is an inside job. It can only be cured from the inside, by the person himself or herself taking the necessary steps to recover. If a person had a purely physical problem, like the flu, it would be theoretically be possible to force medicine into their system against their will and thereby make them get better.

But for all its physiological components, addiction is also a psychological, emotional, and even spiritual condition. It requires the active complicity of the addict in order to continue, and it requires the active cooperation of the addict in order to move toward recovery.

But there is something you can do for addicts who don’t want help. You can stop being an enabler and start being someone who aggressively confronts with reality, and forces him or her to confront it as well. We can lovingly but persistently hold up the mirror of reality and make them see themselves as they really are, driving away the illusions and deceptions in which they try to take refuge.