ALCOHOLISM & FAMILY

Although alcoholism is an incredibly tenacious disease, the non-drinking members of an alcoholic family are not helpless to do anything about it.

Alcoholism affects all members of the alcoholic family in hurtful ways.
An alcoholic family is a troubled, pain-ridden family with constricted communication and suppressed emotional expression, but they have all learned to deny that pain and not to express their feelings.

If the family members are to recover from the effects of alcoholism and paradoxically provide the best chance to help the alcoholic quit drinking, all of this must be reversed.
They must learn about the disease nature of alcoholism and its effects on them. They must acknowledge the pain they have suppressed for years and begin to express it.

Instead of focusing their attention on his drinking, they must shift it away from him and refocus it on themselves.

They must refuse to take any more responsibility for the alcoholic's behavior and no longer attempt to make him stop drinking or protect him from the painful consequences of his drinking.

1. No more pleading or nagging.
2. No more lectures or futile threats, which aren't backed up with inevitable consequences.
3. No more making excuses for the alcoholic's drinking. No more calling in sick for her when she is hung over.
4. No more keeping dinner warm or cleaning up vomit.

All of this may sound selfish for the family members to do - and perhaps it is - but paradoxically it creates the best chance they have to bring the alcoholic to sobriety.

Without a co-dependent family enabling his drinking, he may decide to seek treatment. There are no guarantees this will happen, but certainly what the family members have been doing for years hasn't worked.