Booze was a fucking nightmare and she has had years of counsellors etc encouraging her to blame everyone but herself,
Small observation here in defence of counsellors.
I often hear "my counsellor told me...", and I never used to think all that much of it until I became one. We actually very rarely "tell people to do..." (unless you're with a CBT therapist, but even then the directive stuff tends to be more about how to think than great life choices).
And it's interesting how often these alleged directive statements tend to come from people with - and I don't mean this in a particularly diminishing way - responsibility/reality avoidance behaviours (and addictions are a big part of that), it is uncomfortable to accept responsibility for a decision...so what better solution than to "give" it to others. You'll hear quotes like "Well, you told me to...", or "I was just doing what I was told..", and that's only one step to "my counsellor told me...". In practice, just to take your example of a counsellor apparently telling someone to blame it all on others - I know exactly where that will have come from: the client will have talked to the counsellor about her issues with alcohol, and described the major influences in her life, which perhaps are predominantly bad. The counsellor is going to hear that very much as how the client feels about them, even if they're a very inaccurate or biased representation of the facts. But a client might well be - and I think often is - tempted to assume from the counsellor's failure to criticise the inaccuracies that the counsellor approves of the viewpoint they're taking.
It happens two ways.
First, I'll say something to a client which prompts them to think of a solution, or something to try. What I often get back a week or two later is "Oh, I tried that thing you told me to try...". Now, I frequently have to rack my brains, because - although I do very occasionally offer a bit of advice - it's rare that I tell someone to go away and do X, for some quite specific and definite value of X. It just doesn't fit with our ethos: we're supposed to be empowering the client, not cutting his/her legs out from under her, and that's what "Why don't you do...?" is a no-no in the majority of situations.
Second, the client can have heard some thing completely different from what I've said. This probably isn't a venue for the intricacies of projective identification or Melanie Klein, but there are all kinds of reasons why we can sometimes hear what we want to hear, rather than what was said. Sometimes it can be interestingly productive: some clients tell themselves what they need to hear, then protect themselves from the consequences by having been told it by Uncle Bob/a man in the pub/the counsellor. It can be a bit tricky disentangling oneself from one of those if the client's convinced that you told them to do something that went spectacularly wrong - I usually do a bit of a pre-emptive strike if a client's a bit prone to that, and emphasise the we-don't-advise line.
And sometimes, I guess people know full well that their counsellor didn't tell them X, but that it's a convenient truth to justify (to themselves as much as any) what they're doing anyway.
There will be counsellors, especially newly-trained and still a bit evangelical ones who do slip up and give advice. That's unfortunate, and it is to be hoped that they'll learn. It's self-limiting, anyway: we quickly learn to make it really clear to clients that we're not in the business of telling them what to do. You can usually spot the signs long before it becomes a problem...if you're looking out for it, so I'd be very surprised if someone with addiction issues was reporting the situation entirely accurately in this case.
