Breakingthecycles.com – Changing the Conversations

By Lisa Frederiksen

Ah. If you’ve ever been in a relationship with a person who abuses alcohol or is addicted to it (an alcoholic), you know exactly what this post is about.

You: Have you been drinking? (The real question, “Are your drunk?”)
Your Loved One: I had a couple of glasses of wine, what’s the big deal? (The truth is they’ve had 4, 12 ounce glasses — the equivalent of 9.5 drinks — so yes, they’re likely drunk.)

You: I thought you were only going to have one glass of wine. (The real statement, “You seem like you’ve had a lot more than that.”
Your Loved One: I only had one glass of wine. (The truth is they’ve snuck many, many straight vodka slugs from the bottle they’ve hidden in the closet –  they don’t even know the count — but, hey! your accusation was about one glass of wine.)

And because there may be a shred of truth” in your loved one’s response or you are on the defensive by the end of the “discussion” or you can’t prove for sure they are lying, you continue the denial that drinking really is a problem and go along with the slicing, dicing and mincing of words.

So, it’s helpful for family members (and society in general) to understand why an alcoholic lies or tries to minimize the amount they drink. They cannot help it. They have a chronic, relapsing brain disease. Their abuse of alcohol has hijacked many of the “normal” functions in their brain to the extent that once addicted (alcoholic), they are driven to consume alcohol at all costs. They cannot help it as long as they continue to drink or think they can drink– it’s part of their disease.

This is why it’s so important for family members, and society as a whole, to understand the disease of addiction (in the case of alcoholism – the disease of an addiction to alcohol). This website — www.hbo.com/addiction — provides a wealth of information that can help and is produced by HBO, The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) and NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse).

Understanding the disease helps family members stop the denial about what’s really going on — an action that can speed the alcoholic’s decision to seek treatment for his or her disease and help family members enjoy a much happier life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Help for Families. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.