Thistime, welcome.  I am sorry - you are correct, it is overwhelmingly likely that willpower will do not the job.  Do you have a meeting to go to?  Nobody should go through this without support.  If there were a way to make the alcoholic understand the danger, someone would have found it by now.  I think the only thing you can do is to get plenty of support for yourself while whatever is going to happen happens.  Take good care of yourself.

Thistime, Glad you found MIP and hope you'll keep coming back to share and recover with us. It's very difficult to hear from doctors the kind of information that you've heard about your bf and to be told there's nothing you can do to help him. Sadly, most people here have experienced this feeling of powerlessness. 

I agree with all who have responded that keeping sober is up to him. If you want to help him, you can actually be of help to him by being a recovering person yourself. I say this because by attending meetings, we learn healthy responses that help us to maintain our own sanity whether the alcoholics in our lives are drinking or not drinking. Acting in this new healthier way rather than reacting to whatever the alcoholic is choosing to do is truly a way of offering loving support to the alcoholic. Such changes in ourselves can show the alcoholics in our lives that a new healthier way to live is possible for them as well if they choose it. It also can show the alcoholic that a new boundary is in place now.. we won't be coerced or guilted into continuing to be sick with them. 

AA seems to be the program of choice for most alcholics but the ultimately this is a journey of 2 - a higher power or god of that person's understanding and the person themself. Just as in the Alanon program, if one becomes desperate, frightened enough, sick to the point of feeling they have no other recourse; they will ask for help to be lifted up from that place of desperation. But a person truly has to not want to die, Thistime. All the love of family, all the love of people in recovery programs is not enough to fill the god sized hole in a person and keep it filled if inwardly a person doesn't feel life is worth living. No person can fill the emptiness another person carries but others through example can show that there's hope when one believes and has faith in a power greater than themself, a god of their understanding, a higher power. 

My dad got sober and stayed sober without AA. He became so physically ill from drinking that he simply couldn't stand it any longer. A spiritually awakening of sorts happened to him at that time. He rekindled his relationship with the god of his understanding and stayed sober the rest of his life. He didn't have friends but he had activities that kept him busy and a god. Listen, I know this isn't typical and I believe having friends who drank and are now sober and keeping sober has to be a positive thing. I just wanted to share what I know of my dad's journey because it a story of getting sober and staying sober without AA. My father also didn't live as a dry drunk. He put his god in front of him each day and changed for the better as a person toward his family and his self loathing lifted too. Simply put, he was ready to surrender himself and his alcoholism, let an unconditionally loving god love him and show him he deserved to love himself and others. 

I hope your bf has such an awakening. Whether it's at an AA meeting or anywhere else. They open those meeting with a reading that says that alcoholics realize they can't do it on their own but that god can if god is sought. "May you find him now," it says. The same can be said for those of us who are affected by another's drinking. 

Prayers for you and your bf for a lifetime of sobriety and serenity. (((hugs))) TT