I have a friend who has severe problems with alcoholism. (As in, she’s had to go to rehab more than once, specifically over alcholism.)
Unable as yet to completely quit, she has over the past year or so come to adopt a kind of “planned drunkenness” approach. She decides, “tonight is a night I’m going to get drunk,” and she makes sure she’s taken care of everything she needs to take care of for the day, and grabs a giant thing of vodka or whatever, and drinks far too much, and spends the night extremely drunk.
She has these nights (by my estimate) approximately once a week (sometimes less, never more that I have ever known of).
To be honest, from my point of view, I believe this has actually been part of a general improvement of her life. Alcoholic binges no longer threaten to destroy her life (it seems) because now she does them on purpose. Plans them out. Takes care of things first. Etc. Goes in aware, rather than letting it “happen” kind of “on accident”.
What I’m wondering is, is this a thing? Is this an approach some alcoholics take? Is it thought of as a viable strategy in the community of practitioners who try to help people with alcoholism and related issues?
Some people can handle drinking that way. I think it’s a long shot to avoid falling all the way into the bottle again some day. Someone who is used to getting plastered every weekend while staying sober during the week may have an alcohol problem but it’s not the typical behavior of the hard core alcohol addict. If your friend has been in rehab more than once for alcohol problems she’s just walking a tightrope and will probably fall some day. OTOH, if she’s staving off daily drunkenness with this approach and she’s can’t afford long term rehab to keep from drinking at all then maybe this will help her live a little longer.
Try to convince her to simply add in a requirement that with each scheduled binge, there must also be a slight reduction in booze intake, one drink less, perhaps.
All the methods mentioned above are classic strategies tried by alcoholics to self-manage and limit their drinking. They fail about 96% of the time for alcoholics, as the disease progresses.
Or, being in rehab twice gave her the tools necessary to craft a workaround that seems to be working for her. It may be a false front and collapse the first time she runs into something her rehab didn’t give her the tools to handle, but if it’s working for now, then the important thing is, it’s working.
A lot of people drink this way. They plan out a time period where they don’t have to drive, go to work, watch kids, or have any other responsibility. They just drink all day. Its way better than getting drunk and then trying to do responsible things (work, driving, child care, etc).
It sounds vastly superior to the other way of drinking she had.
On the other side, I have a family of hard core drinkers. Some are lushes, some just drink. None that I know of have ever quit on purpose. They generally die first. I have one cousin who, like me, tea-totals.
I have a uncle who is particularly bad.
I ask him one morning, when he was sober, when was he gonna quit drinking? He looked me and said “I quit last night around 2 a.m.” and “I am on the wagon ( looks at his watch) for 2 more hours.”
Planned drunkedness is still drunkedness.
I had a friend who tried this and it didn’t work. I would imagine that someone who has never had problems with alcohol might have better success with that sort of strategy, but if the friend has had enough problems that they have been in rehab twice, it’s risky.
While binge drinking one day a week is better than binge drinking seven days a week, alcohol still isn’t doing your body any good. Sure, the drinker may stay functional, hold down a job, and never drive while intoxicated. But their liver doesn’t know what day of the week it is. They’re just postponing their alcohol-related death by five years.
Most people would still describe that as alcoholism - or at least, heavy/problem drinking. Even if she maintains at that level, it is likely to have negative health and social implications over time. And, I would expect that a huge majority of folk with a track record of excess would either slip up occasionally or progressively increase their frequency. But if that is how she wants to style her life, more power to her.
I recall reading a horrendous description of Spencer Tracy. As I recall, he made periodic cross-country train trips, during which he would essentially drink/pass out/piss and shit himself - until he reached his destination. And he didn’t manage to live to a ripe old age…
Well, their liver certainly knows it’s getting alcohol only once a week instead of every day. That is certainly a vast improvement. The issue, as stated, is if such a person can stick with this.
Alcoholics, by definition, are not in control over drinking alcohol. While it may be possible for her to plan when she will take the first drink, if she’s an alcoholic, she will be unable to plan when to take the last one. She will drink until she passes out, and as her body adjusts to the ritual she will eventually find herself still drinking the following afternoon.
Another control mechanism is to limit the amount of available booze, she’ll plan to give up and go to bed when the fifth is gone. But you’d be amazed at how many people, once drunk, begin to panic when the bottle gets low and pick up their car keys to go get more. It seldom works out well for them.
In some ways, binge drinkers have it over daily drinkers. It takes them longer to lose their jobs, and their friends and family seldom see them drunk. But they tend to get more miserable, faster. Daily drinkers are still maintaining a social life, whereas binge drinkers end up spending their down time completely plastered. And daily drinkers need to maintain their enablers, which requires keeping other humans in their lives. Binge drinkers tend to end up completely isolated outside of work. And daily drinkers usually have other ways to relax - watching football, playing checkers, going fishing, whatever they do while they’re drinking. Binge drinkers sit down in an armchair to get drunk,and that’s all they are doing, rushing to oblivion as quickly as possible and staying there as long as they can get away with it.
And the obsession is no less than with daily drinkers. They are still planning and thinking about their next drunk every spare second of every day in between. If she’s an alcoholic, then the value of a drunk minute is greater to her than the value of her health, her job, her relationships, even her life. Eventually all will be consumed, it’s just a matter of how far her resources will take her. It sounds like she’s headed for a very low bottom.
Unless that moment of clarity hits them on one of their sober days, in my experience binge drinkers end up mentally and socially much sicker by the time the shit hits the fan.
It was my understanding that most binge drinkers aren’t alcoholics. Alcoholics are so physically and psychologically addicted that it causes a mess of problems for them. Binge drinkers enjoy abusing alcohol but do not damage the rest of their lives by doing so.
Most binge drinkers I know are responsible people. They don’t drive drunk, take care of kids drunk, go to work drunk, etc. However the woman in the OP probably isn’t a binge drinker, she probably has an underlying physical or psychological addiction.
Right, so the people you are describing are not alcoholics. My comments above are in relation to alcoholic binge drinkers, who do exist, and do lose/destroy their lives with drinking.
You can go in circles for weeks about what the word “alcoholic” means. That article wants to use the clinical definition of addiction, which means if you can stop for a few days in between, you’re just a problem drinker. But in real life a person who lives for their Saturday binges, and gets “restless, irritable, and discontent” between drinks, and who says “no, I won’t” but then does it again anyway, is an alcoholic.
If you can’t NOT do it, you’re an alcoholic. Outside of a medical diagnosis, only the alcoholic can truly say “Yes, I really want to quit, and I’ve really tried, and I really can’t do it on my own; I’m an alcoholic.”
I’m far from an expert. Used to be what I considered to be a heavy drinker - have been sober 10-15 years. I was/am not aware that there is a single, universally accepted definition of alcoholism. For that reason, I consider the term pretty meaningless.
When I was drinking, my impression was that various sources would have considered the amount and frequency of my drinking to indicate alcoholism. As I never lost a job, got divorced, or arrested related to ETOH, I might have been described as a “functional alcoholic.” I never perceived any difficulty deciding/controlling whether I imbibed on any given day. But once I started drinking, I pretty consistently got drunk.
Like I said, I considered myself a heavy drinker. But po-tay-to/po-tah-to. I never bought into the “helpless to control” theory either. Of course, some folk might say the fact that I was able to quit cold turkey on my own says something about whether or not I was an alcoholic.