I lived with an alcoholic for a decade without realising it. This was because he held down a 9-5 office job and “only” drank on Saturday nights. Like many, I had a completely clichéd and inaccurate image of an alcoholic. I thought they were people who sat on street corners with bottles in paper bags. I thought they were unemployed, smelly and homeless. Only after 10 years did I finally start to educate myself with the facts – rather than the myths – of alcoholism.
It is estimated that 3% of the population are alcoholics. In Australia that amounts to 750,000. The vast majority of that number have families. That means more than a million Australians are living with alcoholism.
In many ways, families are the real victims of the disease, the ones who suffer most, who are on the receiving end of the verbal and physical abuse, who feel the social embarrassment and shoulder the financial hardship.
Families feel the consequences more because the alcoholic has found a way of avoiding feelings altogether: by getting drunk. As the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor observed about his countrymen: “We drink to forget, and the amount we drink corresponds roughly to the amount we have to forget”.
When people are drunk they forget what they’ve said, how they’ve driven, at whom they have lashed out. But the families don’t. The families observe, absorb, clean up afterwards, rearrange social events, make excuses, pay overdue fines, and find a million ways to cover up. They also remember, often for years afterwards, particularly the children.
For the hundreds of thousands of families across Australia who live with alcoholism, the holiday season is a particularly difficult time of the year. Do we invite him? What will we do when he inevitably gets drunk? Even harder is the decision about inviting the family member who has finally found sobriety. How is she going to cope when everyone else is drinking? What happens if the occasion causes a relapse? It will be all our fault!
In rehab circles, finding sobriety is also referred to as finding recovery. But admitting to being “in recovery”, according to my friend with 30 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, is particularly difficult in Australia.
“To say you are a recovering alcoholic is arguably more socially damaging than just being a drunk bloke who’s ‘having a hard time’”, he says.
The relatives of alcoholics spend much of their time dreaming of the day their loved one will find sobriety and practising solutions as simple (and as pointless) as hiding the six-packs and pouring the vodka down the sink. But what families often don’t understand is that they too are equally in need of recovery.
Living with an alcoholism often leads to serious mental and physical deterioration in spouses, sisters, brothers and children. But the carers of alcoholics don’t have time to attend to their own ill-health because the drinker’s problems are so much more urgent. He is the one winding up in the hospital emergency department on a regular basis or being admitted for surgery to mend the alcohol-related damage wreaked on his organs and intestines. Then when the doctor warns him that the alcohol is going to lead to an early death and he attempts to give up the bottle, it is the family who tiptoes around him in the hope that the sobriety will last – hyper-conscious of their every comment, their every action, constantly on edge and in fear of upsetting him and therefore “causing” a relapse.
When I was living with an alcoholic I failed to acknowledge the symptoms in myself that I now find so recognisable in others living with alcoholism: over-responsibility, self-isolation, confusing pity with love, prioritising the health of the alcoholic over one’s own, making excuses for the drinker, continually anticipating the next problem and then, when it arises, trying to force a solution (which inevitably fails).
I have watched the father of an alcoholic daughter drive himself into such a frenzy of hypertension that he had a heart attack. I’ve seen others mortgage their houses in the hope that the next $2,000-a-day rehab would work the miracle. I have seen perfectly good marriages ruined in the attempt to fix, cure and control.
In essence, because alcoholism is so uncontrollable, the families of alcoholics become control freaks. My freedom from this mad merry-go-round only arrived when I finally understood the three C’s: “Didn’t cause it, can’t control it, can’t cure it.”
There are things that families can do to help but, paradoxically, it usually doesn’t involve helping. Although it runs against the grain – and especially against the motherly instinct – often the best help is in the form of getting out of the way. It necessitates a seemingly contradictory and almost impossible task: continuing to love them without trying to fix them. It means not covering up their mistakes or misdeeds. It means not doing for them what they can do for themselves. It means not allowing ourselves to be used by our loved one in the interest of their sobriety. Even though their sobriety is what we want most in the world.
In my experience, drinkers rarely find sobriety without the support of their families. On the other hand, out of a desperate desire to “help”, there are many behaviours that can develop within the family of an alcoholic that make the situation worse. When it comes to alcoholism, the problem does not belong to the drinker alone; it is the entire family who needs recovery. Until medical, health and social services realise this, thousands of families will continue to struggle.
• Support services for families of alcoholics or those suffering from alcohol dependence: Catholic Care Family Recovery Services; Al-Anon Family Groups Australia; Family Drug Support
• Further facts: The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has analysed the impact of alcohol disorder in terms of “burden”, finding that it contributed to 40% of the burden due to liver cancer, 28% of the burden due to chronic liver disease, 22% of the burden due to road traffic injuries involving motor vehicle occupants and 14% of the burden due to suicide and self-inflicted injuries. But there are no statistics on the burden in relation to the physical and mental health impact on families
