If one is drinking and it is a problem, one needs to stop drinking; it's not a whole lot different from smoking cigarettes; yes they can cause cancer and other problems but they don't always; not everyone who smokes gets COPD, cancer, or other bad things happening.

It's not easy to decide you have a problem and work on it/stop drinking. But no one can do it for you and it's no one else's "fault" that you drink too much. As my stepmother was too fond of pointing out; no one holds a gun to your head and forces you to go to the liquor store and buy liquor. Whether it is genetic or something else or, as I think, a combination of many things (I don't know any major difficulty in our lives that has a single, simple "cause" or easy solution (yes, "don't drink" is the solution to alcoholism but that's not an easy solution which means the cause of drinking is not a simple cause; even if they could take out the genetic component to alcoholism, the person would probably turn to something else)) I think one's whole life/lifestyle has to be looked at by the person with the problem and addressed by them. I think most people in the intervention shows on TV, etc. relapse because the whole thing is not their doing. They may come to "agree" that "something" needs to be done but they still are not willing to take the responsibility to do it, for themselves, not the other people.

However, the original article was about why/how the family "protects" the alcoholic. As it points out, I believe too that it's an individual thing, why "I" protect a spouse/sibling/parent will be different from why another would but there's only so many "reasons"/things one can gain in one's own life by not rocking the boat or not wanting to be without that person/thinking they will leave/get angry, etc. I imagine the article was written to help those around alcoholics better see and get their own lives in order and take responsibility for themselves instead of deciding the "other" person has a problem and trying to take responsibility for them, instead of looking at self. We only have control over our own lives and actions and I think that is especially hard to learn when there is someone close to us whose life seems especially out of control.