Concerned About a Family Member or Friend’s Drinking?

Most surveys put the U.S. alcoholism rate, the percentage of the population that is alcoholic or abusing alcohol, at around 7%(1). This means there are at least 20,000,000 alcoholics in the U.S. alone. Reports are that our friends in Europe have even worse statistics.

In addition to the troubled drinker, alcoholism typically adversely affects three to four people closely related to the alcoholic. Normally, these are the immediate family, parents, spouses and children. Close friends may also be emotionally affected.

So what can a concerned person, family or friend do about it?

For one thing, you can tell the alcoholic how you feel. I drank alcoholically for the last 10-15 years of my total drinking span of 35 years. No one, no one, ever mentioned anything about my drinking, not even my wife, who went to Al-Anon for the last two years of my march to drunkdom without telling me.
Would I have listened to anyone if they had challenged me? Probably not; alcoholics are most likely not to listen to those closest to them about how their drinking has become a problem. But it might have set me to thinking about my problem earlier had those around me had the courage to mention it.

I thought of myself as an enthusiastic social drinker. I was very social and very enthusiastic about my drinking. I believed alcohol made everything in my life better. I couldn’t see how it affected my thinking and made everything in life more complex than I could deal with, more complex than is was in reality. But, had someone told me I drank too much, I’m certain it would have set the wheels of recovery in motion earlier for me (at least I’d like to think that).

We’ve all heard about tough love. It sure sounds good to someone not close to the alcoholic but, in practice, it’s a very difficult thing to do. We love that rummy with the problem and we want to help anyway we can. Often this clouds our thinking and judgment. What we could dispassionately tell a stranger, we find much more difficult to tell a brother, sister, father or mother. Some of us continue helping the drunk, picking up the messes, for a much longer time than we should. In recovery lingo, we call this enabling.

That’s why Al-Anon was invented by Lois Wilson, the wife of one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. She realized she had been affected by her husband’s disease in different ways than he had. She had become as dependent on the disease in her own way and without ever having taken a drink herself. She ended up needing the care-giver relationship she had with her husband to establish her self-worth. When the drinking disappeared she found her life had changed and her self-worth declined. The disease had very definitely and negatively affected her mental state.

The intention of Al-Anon is not to show you how to manage the drunk. The program is designed to help the non-alcoholic to take care of themselves first. Al-Anon today is as widespread as Alcoholics Anonymous. You can find telephone numbers in most local directories or call the local AA hotline; they’ll know where to send you.

Some folks use third party interventions to get the message across to the alcoholic. There is a whole industry that solicits your business for this kind of activity. They often quote 90 to 95% success rates. What they mean by this, I believe, is that a very large number of those intervened upon actually end up going to a rehab of some sort.

This “success rate” is not a guarantee of recovery, but it may be a start for some alcoholics. In my view, whatever gets the alcoholic to see and accept his or her alcoholism is a valid course of action, with the possible exception of water-boarding.

If you decide on an intervention, it’s probably best to get an experienced professional to help you. You can find them all over the internet. Just don’t look at this technique as a cure; it’s simply a start.

I’d like to suggest one more course of action that can work, if you have a mindset to follow it. Prayer. I suspect my wife prayed for years that I’d get the message. I can remember the shocked look on her face the morning I finally told her I might (always hedging my bet) have a problem with alcohol. Her eyes widened and she was dumbfounded, a condition that did not come naturally to her.

But here again, don’t harbor unrealistic expectations. Each alcoholic must find his or her own route to sobriety and that route may not involve you. When I got sober, my wife and I discovered how different I had become, so different, we needed to separate for each of us to become whole again. She became my ex-wife. I’m sure that was not in her prayer request or her expectation, nor was it in mine.

I’ve now been a member of AA for over 17 years and recently wrote a story of my experience under the pen name used for this article. It’s a 200 page novel, primarily based on my personal story, but enhanced with many of the peculiarities found in AA meetings. There is a humorous vein to this book that I hope all will enjoy, alcoholic and non-alcoholic alike.

I’m not promoting AA, just trying to demystify it.

There are at elast 20 million alcoholics in the U.S. Another 3-4 people close to the alcoholic are directly and badly affected by his or her disease. Direct confrontation usally does not work on the alcoholic but it can jar them enough to beging the process of recovery. Professional intervention is another option which, though not a cure, gets them to a rehab where they can learn about the disease. If you believe in it, prayer also works.

Ian Asotte is a middle class professional, father of three who entered Alcoholics Anonymous in 1990 and hasn’t had a drink since. Author of “S.O.B.E.R. – How the Irritating Acronyms of Alcoholics Anonymous Got One Drunk Sober”. Email: ian@esober.com. Website: http://www.esober.com.

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