Even though his liver is failing, he continues to drink. He is a great guy, and we are very close, but he doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Recently he was yellow with jaundice, and he stopped for a little while, but he is back at it. He has had trouble with DUI, has lost his driving privileges, is only allowed visitation with his kids for an hour a week, and all manner of other trouble, but he can’t seem to quit. He seems to want to at times, at other times he seems complacent with the idea of slow suicide. I just don’t know what I can say to him.
His mother plays a role, she is financing his drinking, knowingly (probably) or unknowingly. She gives him money. Maybe if she gave him groceries instead? One of the problems is he thinks he can’t stop. Any former heavy heavy drinkers out there? How long before the cravings become manageable? How long for the insomnia to abate? Maybe if I could give him a time frame, a goal to shoot for.
I was never as heavy a drinker, and when I cut it out, it didn’t take that long to feel normal without alcohol, but he puts away the better part of a 750mL on a daily basis. That’s like 20 shots!
Anyway, I just don’t know what to say to the guy. He lives on the other side of the country, so all I can do is speak with him. If he was close by, I would try to intervene, but that is not a possibility.
Your cousin knows exactly what he is doing, and what effect the alcohol is having on him. Your advice and/or intervention would be worthless, and quite seriously, it’s really none of your business.
My daughter lost a good friend to alcoholism last December. She was only 38 and left behind two teenage sons. She was found dead in her bathroom after a weekend of bingeing. Another good friend of my daughter* is often passed out by 9 a.m. and drinks straight vodka from a thermos that he takes everywhere with him. He’s 43. There might be some hope for him though. He can’t do inpatient treatment (no money, no openings where he lives) but he says he’s checking into a home treatment program. In some cities, medical staff will make home visits to monitor alcoholics while they’re in withdrawal. I don’t know how well it works, but it might be worth suggesting it to your cousin.
(She does have some friends who don’t drink, but not many.)
This is such BS.
If Alcoholism is an illness (which is a common belief), then helping someone get treatment is definitely “your business,” especially if the illness is impairing their judgement.
And it certainly is impairing his judgement. When he is drunk, he says things that he later realizes are wrong when he sobers up. After I spoke with him last night, he says he threw the rest of his bottle down the drain. I have no way of knowing. He had visitation with his kids today, and presumably he was sober for that, but now that the visitation is over, he is free to drink again. I am about to give him a call.
So I should just let him carry on and not say anything? Bullshit. I will cajole and encourage, as at this distance it is about all I can do. Like my other thread about how people can get so fat, I just don’t understand. How in the hell can you walk into a liquor store when you know that it is going to kill you? All this makes me want to get drunk myself, which I may do, as I still do on occasion. But I am a different case. I can get drunk a few times a month and not sink back into the daily drinking that I used to do. I don’t think I am an alcoholic, whatever that means, just someone who enjoys gettting drunk, if that makes any sense. He is different. Any booze at all and he is back to daily drinking.
Maybe. What you certainly shouldn’t do is enable or let him take you down with him. You can certainly talk to him and ask him to stop, but your description makes it sound like you’ve had that conversation. Until he decides to change, there is little you can do.
Tough to watch. Watched my sister do it. She did get sober, but she lost everything and almost died before SHE decided to get sober. And previously, we dumped tens of thousands into treatment, plane tickets, help, and invested a ton of emotion into it.
Stan, not all alcoholics get drunk on a daily basis. If you are getting pissed several times a month, I would be looking at your own drinking habits too.
Yes, but my behavior isn’t killing me, like it is my cousin. Sorry, I don’t subscribe to the idea that getting drunk on occasion makes you an alcoholic. I used to drink a lot, and gave it up. I can still drink on occasion without becoming a daily drunk again. That is a major difference between me and my cousin.
But you can’t save someone without their participation, and I don’t know that you can force, cajole, or talk someone into participating in something as all encompassingly difficult as overcoming alcoholism.
I may be grasping at straws here, but maybe he doesn’t want to save himself because he feels that he’s made so many mistakes that he’s not worth it? Or a combination of low-self esteem (I’m not worth saving. Look at all I’ve done.) and feeling like it’s too late (I’ll never dig myself out of this hole. I’ve simply screwed up so badly.)?
Maybe you can remind him of what he does have, and what good qualities about himself make him worth the effort. It’s a long shot though. I’ve learned the hard way that you just can’t make someone care about themselves. I think it’s worth it for you to encourage him though. Maybe it will make the difference.
What if the two of you made a commitment to one another to completely cut alcohol? It might help him to have someone else in the fight with him and while it wouldn’t necessarily be fun, saving a life is definitely a worthy reason to refrain from drinking.
Plus, it would show a serious commitment and concern for his welfare, being able to “fight the good fight” with him. Being alone in fighting addiction makes it seem overwhelming. I know that I owe a lot of my small overeating victories to members of OA and close friends who are battling (and winning against) similar demons.
Which only works when the intended subject has some vested interest in stopping. Aside from a transitory recognition of his plight (dumping the bottle down the drain) he appears to have no real interest or willingness to stop except to appease concerned parties (taking the o.p.'s description at face value). If the person in question is to the point of nascent liver failure and isn’t actively seeking treatment for alcoholism, I doubt any amount of cajoling, appealing, or inveigling is going to cause him to change his habits, and at this point, he may just want the escape that suicide by bottle offers.
I think kambucta is being somewhat artless in his wording, but I also think he is on point; if the o.p.'s cousin desires to drink himself to death, there is little the o.p. can do short of breaking into his home and chaining him to the bed to enforce sobriety, to change this course.
I know a lot about this subject if you are interested. Just PM me if you want to know some practical details and advise. It is a very severe and likely fatal problem but not all that rare either and there are systems in place that can help and I am not referring just to interventions or counseling sessions. Once you get to that level of alcoholism, it is a true medical problem that has to be dealt with.
I missed the edit window. Here is my extended post:
I know a lot about this subject if you are interested. Just PM me if you want to know some practical details and advise. It is a very severe and likely fatal problem but not all that rare either and there are systems in place that can help and I am not referring just to interventions or counseling sessions. Once you get to that level of alcoholism, it is a true medical problem that has to be dealt with. Most people that don’t have direct experience with this give good general advise but it won’t work for someone who has gotten severely addicted and screwed up their body badly in the process. It is recoverable and the person in question has to want to do it but the process is long and requires lots of different types of professionals including doctors and nurses along with a support network. He already knows something has gone horribly wrong but you can’t just stop immediately on your own once you get to that level of alcoholism. That can literally kill you alone. There are also going to be some pretty severe malnutrition issues as well. Once you use alcohol as a hard drug, it screws up your entire body and mind.
If you’re affected by someone’s drinking, Al-anon is a good place to go. They are not there to help you help the alcoholic, but to help you deal with having an active alcoholic in your life.
Otherwise, sounds like your cousin needs a medical detox to get him off alcohol without the withdrawal killing him. This is usually a less expensive affair than a full-blown rehab treatment, and usually takes 1 to 3 days. Most metropolitan counties have public detox facilities.
But, just putting the cork in the bottle won’t cure this, especially if your cousin doesn’t want help. After detox, some form of alcohol rehab is needed if there is to be a chance of ongoing sobriety. And for an alcoholic such as you describe, absolute sobriety is really the only solution. Folks with alcoholic liver disease don’t have the option to drink moderately.
Shagnasty can fill you in on rehab options, which range from free (AA, Rational Recovery, Secular Organization for Sobriety, other mutual help groups) to pretty pricey ones.
I have known a woman for pushing 15 years who is getting to the same state as the OP mentions. She is unfortunately also married to another alcoholic who is in worse shape than she is. It is sad to watch them destroy themselves.
Well, to begin with, acceptance of his addiction as a part of who he is might could help you. As Qadgop has suggested, Al-Anon is a good place for you to start. One of the things I got out of it was to accept the alcoholic, warts and all.
It isn’t easy watching someone you love slowly commit suicide. I lost a close friend two years ago to alcoholism. The last two years of his life were miserable, but there wasn’t anything that I could do for him without his participation. It came down to accepting that as his choice, whether I agreed to it or not. Alcoholism is a bitch of a disease that way.
I still miss him, but knowing that his personal demons are finally at rest eases some of the pain.
For an active alcoholic there is little you can do. Having been one (still an alkie but 5.5 years clean and sober) I know a little about this. As do some others on this board. For medical advice on detoxing, **Qadgop ** and Shagnasty are the go to guys. I lived through it, but only because the docs knew what to do.
The best advice I have is to #1 tell your cousin about your concerns, that you love him and tell him that you are willing to assist him with the problem* but you will not continue a relationship with him if he does not seek help and #2 get all the family on board for #1. You need to speak with his mother about this.
For an alcoholic to get clean and sober it requires the alcoholic to have the desire to stop drinking. The only way that I know of for an alcoholic to find this desire is by hitting bottom. Every alcoholic has a different bottom. Some hit bottom when they lose a job or marriage. Some hit bottom by doing a crime and going to jail (for example, killing someone in a DUI). Some, sadly, never find the bottom. You can usually find the last on the streets, jail or in a graveyard.
Enabling the alcoholic by giving him money, helping out with the problems that his alcoholism creates or anything that allows him to continue drinking is not going to help in anyway. All it will do is allow the alcoholic to avoid hitting his bottom.
For me to finally find my bottom it required my family telling me that they would no longer assist me in anyway and that if I did not enter a halfway house they would no longer deal with me in anyway. It was the most loving and courageous act on their part. I know that it caused them huge amounts of pain. My parents and family told me that if I did not seek help I was no longer going to be a part of their lives. It saved my life.
My family tried to help me for a long time. Being an alcoholic, I used their help to further my drinking. Their best attempts to help me only aided me by allowing me to avoid my bottom and the consequences of my actions.
You may also wish to pick up a copy of the A.A. Big Book and get it to him. I remember, back when I was still drinking, getting blasted drunk while reading the Big Book. While reading the Big Book at that time did not get me sober, it did give me the hope that it was *possible *that I could get sober. It gave me enough hope to stop me from killing myself. Reading the Big Book while getting drunk did not instantly save me, but I was able to borrow enough of the experience, strength and hope from the stories that I was able to hope. That hope, the hope that someday I could be sober, that I could live a decent and worthy life, kept me alive.
As Qadgop said, Al-Anon is a great resource. They can help a great deal.
The sad truth is that family and friends cannot fix an alcoholic. Only the alcoholic can fix the alcoholic.
Your cousin will have huge self-esteem issues to work through. He will have deep pain that he will need to go through to come out the other side. It is not an easy process. It is, in fact scary as hell.
One thing to remember, and this is something that non-alkies do not seem to get, is that for most alcoholics, drinking is your best friend. It takes away the pain. It is the one thing in life that you know you can count on. Drinking isn’t something to do for fun. It isn’t something to do socially. Drinking is something that the alcoholic has to do. Drinking is the thing they have come to rely upon most in life. Drinking is the center of their life and it eclipses everything else.
The fear of having to lose the one thing in life you know best, that you believe you must do, the thing that you rely on, is overwhelming.
It is possible that there is nothing you can do. You have to accept this. It takes a huge amount of courage and love to do what is necessary for the alcoholic. In many cases the only choice for the family is to walk away.
As always, the above is just my opinion on the problem you face. I strongly suggest you contact Al-Anon and speak with those folks. They have been where you are at and can offer better advice than I can.
Slee
Where to draw the line when assisting an alkie is hard. You do not want to do anything that will allow them to drink. That means no money. That means nothing they can use to get booze. How much you are willing to help is up to you. I highly suggest that if you are going to help, decide upon exactly what you are willing and not willing to do before hand. Stick to the decision. Us alkies are well known for being able to get those who are trying to help us to go above and beyond what they want to do so that we can continue drinking.