My uncle has a a friend named John who’s been a good friend since highschool. About 20 years ago, John’s parents were brutally murdered two days before Christmas in their own home. John found the bodies when he came home from school.
John, understandably, developed a serious drinking problem as a result of this. He got some counselling and rehabilitation a decade or so back, got married, had kids. But that only lasted a few years before he fell back into the grip of alcohol again. Every year around Christmas, John’s drinking gets really bad. He’s trying to suppress the memories, and obviously he can’t. I mean, holy shit, what a thing to have gone through.
Long story short, his wife kicked him out and he is now staying with my uncle because he has nowhere else to go. My uncle is really worried about John because besides being severely depressed, he’s also physically sick - years of alcohol abuse have really taken a toll on him.
My uncle is pretty distraught and doesn’t know what to do. John insists he’s fine and he’ll be all right, and refuses to go get some kind of help. I fully believe that he is NOT fine, and he needs serious counseling, rehab, and medication. I think he’s terrified of getting help because it means he’ll have to fully face the memories of his parents’ death.
Is there anything that anyone else can do for John? I feel really bad for him and my uncle.
Until an alcoholic is sick and tired of being sick and tired there’s not a thing that anyone can do to make him stop.
Since time immemorial, folks have tried. And tried. And tried.
An intervention may cause a temporary change in behavior. Detox and rehab are very helpful as long as there’s continuous follow-up counseling.
But until you admit you are helpless and seek help from a higher power, you’ll eventually return to drinking.
I’ve been there. I know. Six years, 6 months, 15 days sober and I still sometime need help not having a drink today…
My heart goes out to your uncle. I know from experience how much it sucks to watch someone you care about slowly but surely destroy themselves, all the while assuring you that they’re “fine”.
The best your uncle can do is support his friend and try to (gently) steer him towards going into counselling, but this is as far as he’s going to get. Intervention techniques and tough love might get some short-term results by addressing his self-medicating, but in the long term John is just going to relapse again. Like you said, the real problem with John is the memories of his parents’ death, not his drinking.
At this point, all your uncle can really do for his friend is try to cushion the blow of hitting rock bottom. Hopefully this is what it will take for John to realise he needs to deal with those unresolved issues and pull himself together.
You can’t force someone to get help until they admit they need it. Sad but true.
The hard thing to realize is the answer may be, Probably not. Some people decide to check out slooowly, maybe with the option of changing their mind later. he might be one, but I’m sure a lot of folks will be by to tell you “He” has to want to change, this is true. The real question is; Is there something you can do to help him want to change? Talk, support, talk, tough love, therapy, let him hit bottom and hope it isn’t too low to recover from.
Hitting rock bottom is a blessing in disguise! It’s what finally prompts many alcoholics to seek help (It did me.). Cushioning it seems counter-intuitive to the recovering alcoholic.
No, the real problem with John is his drinking – he uses his parents’ death as an excuse for that. If he weren’t using that for an excuse, he’d use something else.
As my recovering brethren have said, 'tain’t nothing you can do for John until he decides he wants to do something for himself.
twicks, who has had some seriously shitty things happen in her life but who has been sober for 21 years and 361 days.
Amazon, my brother-in-law hit bottom when he was hospitalized with liver failure and the docs thought he was going to die. Instead, he went through kidney failure, pneumonia, and a stroke, and then his liver and kidneys slowly started coming back again. Months of physical rehab later, he finally left the hospital. As far as we can tell, he’s been sober for a few years now.
I’d probably have to disagree with that. According to my uncle, John was totally straight-edge up until the murders - never smoked, drank, or did drugs, excellent student. If that tragedy hadn’t have happened, he didn’t think John would have started drinking at all. He was looking for a way, any way, to escape it, even if temporarily. I can’t think of many people who wouldn’t become addicted to something after an event as horrible as that.
At any rate, there’s more than alcoholism going on here. I think he’s severely depressed and has PTSD on top of that - even if he does get totally sick of the drink at some point, is his mind well enough to look for help for himself? That’s basically why I want to find out if there’s some kind of help others can give him without his consent - I think he’s too mentally sick to give consent even if he wanted to. Legally, could we at least call a psychiatric hospital on him or something?
