I withheld BLUNTLY telling him OVER and OVER again how worried I was about his health!!!.
the HEALTH talk doesn't work. not with alcoholics/addicts. I was IN the hospital room when the doctor told my mother (age 57) that if she drank again, even ONE drink, it would KILL her. he didn't mince words. he was blunt.
so what do you suppose she did? drank again. by the time she got home, my husband and I had gone thru her house and cleared out every last bottle - and boy howdy were there a lot of them. we filled the bed of his pickup truck. while this isn't recommended, it did mean that if she wanted a drink she'd have to go buy booze and maybe that would give her enough pause....to think about it.
I was also 5 years sober at the time,
so she had a DOCTOR give her the health talk, while she was IN the hospital for alcohol related problems.
her home had been eradicated of alcohol.
her daughter (me) was sober in AA and i'd made my case to her about getting sober - in reply she told me to get my "fat ass out of her house".
still she made a bee line to the liquor store, drank again, and was back in the hospital in 3 days, was later transferred to a convalescent center (the kind where NO ONE ever convalesces) and died 5 weeks later.
the alcoholic who wants to quit, who wants to live a sober life, can and will find a way. there are almost as many treatment centers as Starbucks. as of Jan 2014, according to the General Service Office of AA, there were an estimated
59, 565 groups in the US.
http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-53_en.pdf you could dang near find a meeting blindfolded.