Sounds like denial to me.
Fifteen years and roughly two weeks ago, we did an "intervention" on a buddy of mine who was losing his life to drugs and alcohol. (To nearly everyone's surprise, it took and he's now clean and sober for fifteen years, married with a beautiful daughter, owns a home in a nice neighborhood and and is active in the PTA, which makes me laugh just to think about it.) I promised him at the time that I'd make myself available at least once a week to take him to AA meetings (he'd had sense enough to stop driving a couple of years before and no longer had a driver's license.)
I went to seventy five or eighty meetings with him that first year. They can be inspiring and are often hilarious, but the thing I remember most about them was the absolute conviction of a great number of the folks I met that I wasn't there to help John, but because I needed to be there, but was still in denial. If I said I wasn't having problems with drinking that served only to confirm my denial.
