To your first question, yes, there are traits in people, children and adults who were raised by alcoholics, even though they may not drink, are similar to those of regular alcoholics. There are tons of books on the subject, the premier one being Adult Children of Alcoholics . Click on the links on this page to see descriptions.
ACOA is a national organization devoted to the support of those adult who were raised in alcoholic familes.
Can you develope alcoholism? Some people have more of a propensity than others.
I quit drinking in April 1987. In South Carolina you can get a cold beer/beers at any gas station. Every time I walk past a beer cooler I sense the cool feeling of a beer going down and the warm feeling you get when it gets to my stomach. Consumption of alcohol ruined my life and destroyed my family. The memory of how much I like alcohol scares the shit out of me. I want it every day. I’ve seen addicts get clean, many more fail. I’ve seen many of them die trying to find a definition of addiction that suits them. They die because they have bullshit themselves.
I am really surprised by your story. I realize that different AA groups are different, but this is pretty much the polar opposite of my experience. I went to an AA meeting not sure of whether I was an alcoholic or not, and told the other members so. I told them how much and when and why and how, and despite my clear admission of being a problem drinker, none of them tried to label me an alcoholic. On the contrary, they encouraged me to keep coming and find out on my own. If I weren’t an alcoholic, that was great, and if I were, it was great that I sought help while I was still young and my life wasn’t yet wrecked. There was absolutely no pressure of any kind, and certainly nothing like what you describe.
Been to thousands of DIFFERENT AA, NA, CA, OA, SA meetings all over the country. NEVER ran into a group that acted like that to a driver for a person attending an meeting. Has to be ONE someplace and it seems to have been found. I do not let the actions of one cop decide for me my attitude and impressions for all cops in the country. YMMV
Those that want to tell recovering alcoholics they are NORMAL and can drink like normal people are cool with me … as long as they accept the responsibility of all that comes from that advice. They will feed and house my family when I die from drinking. … right… ??? They have the correct answer and should go out into the world and straighten all those poor people out who are living useful lives staying sober the only way that seem to work for them. ::: sheesh ::: I have seen the results of family and friends convincing a person they were really not an addict or alcoholic and could use alcohol and pain medication ( or just use meth once in a while like a NORMAL person.
I had no family history for addiction and yet I am one. Go figure.
If a person is living a life style that is productive and good, why would someone ( Who has not walked on in those shoes. ) come along and say that they should stop it because they are using the wrong word for what they are doing?
If willpower, church, jail, court orders, family ultimatums, getting fired, being refused entry to any house of friend or family, being sick and tired of being sick and tired is not enough to get you to stop drinking, ( using any drug to excess ) if “Just say No.” Didn’t work, why listen to a person who has never had this problem tell you that these thousands of people who are living just fine doing it this other way, and who have had those problems, are not worth listening to and trying it their way?
I hope to answer some questions and not just stir the pot some more. Like Quadgop I have a long term of sobriety (a little longer than he actually, but one day is as good as the next) and have studied and worked in addiction medicine for a long time. Dictionary definitions and even definitions from some in medicine are not very useful in this discussion. Most of the medical does not have much knowledge of addiction.
First to all who have experienced the opposite, good fortune to you, but I am an addict; alcohol and other drugs, sober, in recovery, through AA and other 12 step help who could relapse at any time. Notice please the wording. I am sober, meaning not using for long enough for it to be out of my system; in recovery, meaning I work at staying sober, not as hard to do as it was 15 to 20 years ago but still difficult sometimes. I am and since first use was an addict. Not all heavy users are. I do have a disease and it is documented, replicable, and verified even today through testing. Any time I have surgery I require massive amounts of drugs to stay asleep (woke up on the table twice!). My liver has healed but other blood chemistry is still wacko. I have and will die with chronic pancreatitis. No generally prescribed pain medication will touch my pain after one or two doses (tolerance). A strong smell of alcohol will still trigger nausea (like in a bar or near the distilleries in KY) and some shaking.
I don’t want to drink/use every day or even every week. I do frequently think it would help me feel “normal” when I am not or “better” when I am.I do think and act on my disease/recovery everyday.
I used to specialize in treating people that relapsed after long periods of abstinence/recovery. Invariably they fell into two groups. One group thought they had overcome the addiction and could use socially and found they only could for a short (one day to one year) time. The others were those who “just wound up with the drink in my hand at the airport, party, office,” etc. They scare me the most. They were the hardest clients to treat because they had not only heard it all before but lived it, sponsored others, attended meetings and all.
Vietnam Veterans taught us a great deal about addiction. Many who had used daily, heroin and alcohol and other drugs for a year or more stepped off the plane in the US and never used again or never as a problem. Others, about 12%, showed sever addiction symptoms. That is roughly the same as total addiction in the general US population. The thought and study results indicate that the disease of addiction will effect a certain percentage of the population, that habituation and withdrawal, while indicators of compulsion and physical dependence they are not good indicators of long term addiction. Yes some heavy users will never be addicted. Later studies did show that longer term use could “make” some not disposed to addiction into addicts. I have old cites for all this but not close now.
I am off to a party with my wife’s very actively addicted family (one other in recovery, about 20 active) and look forward to a very boring evening. Mostly with the 20 year ridicule of “want A drink? Oh, I forgot, you can’t.” And “do you think (very slurred) I am an alcoholic? Huh, Huh”
It can happen to anyone though some people are more prone to additction than others.
About being an alcoholic/addict. Here is the point I think you are missing. I am a recovering alcoholic. I have a year and 5 months today(Yea Me!). When recovering addicts/alcoholics return to using they pick up right where they left off. The symptoms (the craving for always one more drink/drug) return immediately. There is no reset button.
If I were to drink today I can tell you what would happen. I’d get blasted drunk. I’d start missing work. I’d lose my job, probably within 2 weeks. I would go straight back to the point where I left off. How do I know this? Easy, this is my third time around. The other two times I stopped drinking I thought, hey, one beer won’t hurt. As soon as I drank I was off to the races. I’ve seen this countless times. Recently one guy I know in AA, who had 12 years, started drinkng again. He’s now drunk all the time, lost his job, and last I heard about to lose his house. This is the pattern that has happened countless times. It will continue to happen. The only way to not repeat the pattern is to not drink or drug.
There may be alcoholics/addicts out there who stopped using for a while and now can use in moderation. I have never met one. I don’t know anyone who has met one. Every addict/alcoholic I have ever met who used again either got back into the program and got sober or is still out there using with disaterous results. I have never met an alcoholic who is started drinking again and kept some sort of reasonable life going on. Niether has my sponser who has 20 some odd years sobriety.
[QUOTE=sleestakThere may be alcoholics/addicts out there who stopped using for a while and now can use in moderation. I have never met one. I don’t know anyone who has met one. Every addict/alcoholic I have ever met who used again either got back into the program and got sober or is still out there using with disaterous results. I have never met an alcoholic who is started drinking again and kept some sort of reasonable life going on. Niether has my sponser who has 20 some odd years sobriety.
Slee[/QUOTE]
Hi, my name is RavenousLady. I used to be an alcoholic and I have no doubt I can drink again and I would never be an alcoholic. I drank at work functions for 2 years and never became an alcoholic. I’ve had drinks at holiday parties and on new years eve many years and never turned back into a drunk. I never went through a 12 step program. Around age 23, I just decided to quit and did.
I do believe that people are like the way you describe, but please, do not think everyone is like that. Your sponsor probably hasn’t met someone like me because sponsors tend to have tons of alcholic friends.
My old landlords were AA people, they called me their only “normie”. They had met hundreds of alcoholics and I am the exception to the rule. But jeez people.
In RavenousLady’s earlier post, she said she drank a real lot, then tapered down to social drinking, then chose to stop altogether because she’s no longer interested in the buzz.
There are lots of people like her out there. The reason many of the people here haven’t met them is because they’ve quit on their own…without 12-step meetings.
Ah. Missed that earlier post; this thread has grown fast since I last checked it. It’s possible that she’s not an alcoholic, though–my husband was what the Big Book describes as a “problem drinker;” he drank frequently and sometimes to excess, but was able to stop on his own with no difficulty at all and no withdrawal symptoms. This indicates that his body wasn’t addicted to alcohol. A lot of people get tripped up by this, since there’s no lab test or anything to quantitatively say, yes, this person is an alcoholic; it’s self-diagnosed, mostly by behavioral clues, but my general rule of thumb is as I said, that if you have withdrawal symptoms, then your body has become dependent on the substance. If that’s not present, then addiction isn’t either.
I guess RavenousLady would have to tell us whether she had withdrawal symptoms. I know what they are in advanced cases, but most drunks who get off the sauce aren’t in the DTs.
My husband’s uncle (the one who, if you’ve been following the root rot of our family tree, is shacked up with my sister-in-law) has been pissing blood for over a year, is nearly blind, and has a red blood cell count of 7.
He asked my brother-in-law to do some shopping for him, as he’s too weak to get out of bed. At the top of the list was seven half-gallons of vodka and a couple cases of beer…to get him through the week. I’m thinking he might be looking at a bit of a problem.
Re the thesis that people exist who are not permanently chemically wired to crave (even on a low level) drugs or alcohol after they have given up using and abusing them, I don’t think that’s a particulary radical concept. My experience in my family is that about 1/4th of my family are chemically dependent alcoholics who will never be cured and another 1/4th (seriously) abused alcohol in their youth, but essentially (with some effort) walked away from it, and some (not all) still occasionally drink in moderation and not to excess.
Having said this the ones who are not “craving” alcohol still consider themselves to be at risk “alcoholics”, and readily define themselves as such, not because they are strongly chemically dependent on it, but because they realize they can easily re-acquire the habit of drinking to excess and (again) become situational and social abusers of alcohol if they don’t watch their step quite carefully.
If it’s an issue of semantics and you want to make a bright line distinction between social/situational non-chemically dependent alcohol abusers, and chemically wired alcohol abusers then go ahead if you feel that you are dodging some unneeded stigma by doing so, but the social alcoholics (in my circle) still consider themselves to be “alcoholics”, present tense not past.
Anecdotally, I tend to disagree. Some people just do not have addictive personalities or traits leading them to alcoholism. Everyone in my family drinks, fairly often and in not-insignificant quantities. However, no one gets drunk, and no one is unable to stop if necessary - both my mother and my father were required (for health reasons completely unrelated to alcohol) to stop drinking for approximately a year each. It was annoying not to have wine with dinner as was their druthers, but not more than that.
When I drank, I drank 5 - 7 double shots of Segram 7 with coke every night of the week. I weighed about 97 pounds. It was around 1986 and I took the “alcholic test question” thing. The only question I answered no was, “do you hide your drinking”.
I think of “smoker” as more equivilant to “drinker”: it’s a social label used to define people so that arrangements can be made. I’m a drinker/not a drinker so do/don’t invite me to a wine tasting. I’m a smoker/not a smoker, so I do/don’t need to sit in the smoking section. Active alcoholicsn and people who drink responsibly are both drinkers: recovering alcoholics and teotalers are both non-drinkers.
I haven’t had a cigarette in 7 years, but if I were to buy one today, I’d go ahead and buy a carton. I still consider myself addicted.
Did you suffer from withdrawal symptoms when you stopped drinking? Just drinking too much doesn’t make you an alcoholic, and the “Seven Questions” test doesn’t guarantee anything. I’m not saying that it’s impossible that you’re the exception to the rule, just that the way you describe your drinking after you quit the first time doesn’t fit anything at all that I know about alcoholism and leads me to think that you may not have been physically addicted to alcohol.
How did you decide that you’re an alcoholic? You describe totally normal drinking, which means by definition that you’re not an alcoholic.