Continuing support group for those affected by someone else's drinking

[pointythings]

Our current thread is nearly full, and it's too valuable to lose in the mists of time, so this is thread 2. Come here if you are struggling with a loved one's drinking - partner, parent, child, friend, there's support for you here no matter which person in your life is struggling with the drink and having an adverse impact on you. The women on here have all been there or are still going through it. We support and advise each other, we don't judge, we listen.

Original thread here to refer back to: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/alcohol_support/4581221-support-group-for-those-affected-by-someone-elses-drinking

I second everything @CharlotteByrde has said. You can't control his drinking. You can't help him. The only people you can help are yourself and your children. It's good that they are older and able to see him for what he is.

The problem is that alcohol is legal and he can just buy it whenever he wants to. And you can drive yourself insane looking for bottles and emptying them out when you find them. You need to disengage from it all, take time to decide what you want to happen now and then work towards it.

Lastly, there are two things you need to know:

1. You don't have to stay and live with this.
2. When it comes to an alcoholic, putting yourself first is not selfish.

Thanks for the messages.

I am so glad I have found this thread. My parents are problem drinkers to different degrees.

• My Dad is long-term alcohol-dependent. I'm not affected in a day-to-day way any more but watching the decline is hard. He has lost a lot of teeth, lives on takeaways, doesn't keep his house clean. It is becoming hard to talk to him because he finds it more and more difficult to absorb information. We used to go out to eat or to see a film, but now he won't go anywhere where other people are because he has strange anxieties and thinks they are all whispering about him. It is pretty sad. I am also frustrated and short-tempered with him a lot which I feel bad about.

• My Mum has binging tendencies. She's a lot better and a lot more restrained than she used to be (thanks to work, driving, DP illness etc) - but still has no 'off' button when she starts drinking. She can also be very mean when drunk and say cruel things which I really struggle with.

• My stepdad is what I would call a "standard drinker" - drinks beyond safe limits but only by a fairly small margin, never drunk and doesn't have any obvious ill effects. He is my Mum's key enabler though and I think she would drink less if he could cut down so I wish that could happen.

As a result of this I have no interest in booze and no time for drunks or drunken behaviour in general. Whenever I go on a date, I always have half an eye on the guy's alcohol consumption and if he gets drunk or is throwing back the pints every weekend, I'm out. It's an absolute poison.

Hi @PurpleSky300. Glad you've found the thread. Can completely empathise with you on having no time for drunks. I can't bear to be around drunk people now as it brings back unpleasant memories and makes me really uncomfortable. And if I meet someone socially who I think might have a drink problem I'll actively avoid them going forward as I am afraid of being sucked back into the drama. Your dad sounds as if he is in a bad way -perhaps he has developed Korsakoff Syndrome, which is a form of dementia? Don't feel bad about being impatient with him. Alcoholics are infuriating, and we are not saints.

Hello, I am looking for a little bit of advice here from others who may have been through this before. My mum has always had a love of red wine and I know when I have spent evenings with her previously that she can drink quite a few glasses quite quickly.
I no longer live with her or spend much evenings with her as I have my own children now. But I have noticed when I visit late afternoon that she is drinking red wine most days at this time. So I don’t know how much she is drinking but I suspect quite a lot.
I noticed the other day when I visited her in the morning that her hands were shaking quite badly and she seemed generally anxious. Is this a really bad sign of a descent in to worse addiction problems? I don’t really know whether or not to speak to her about it. I think she has early stages of dementia so I have no idea how she would respond or if she would even be capable of giving up at this stage.

Hi @Yumyi it's very difficult to assess, but if your mum is day drinking and doing it every day, it is likely that her relationship with alcohol is not a healthy one. In addition, as you get older the amount you can reasonably drink reduces. If you think she has early stage dementia going on, your first port of call should be getting her seen by her GP for a memory assessment - everything else can flow from there. It's usually a longish wait, so the sooner you get that started the better. If she does have early stage dementia then it's going to be tough for her to have the insight and the ability to stop, so be prepared for that.

Thank you. Yes that’s what I worry about. Accepting you have an alcohol problem and giving up surely takes a considerable amount of effort and good general cognition. I have no idea how to broach the subject with her. I have a feeling she may not agree to the gp appointment 🙁

The first thing you learn when you are the relative or loved one of an alcoholic is that you are powerless. Once you have accepted that, life gets easier - you can still love that person and care for them, but you cannot live their life for them, you cannot rescue them and you cannot help them. Acceptance is a very hard lesson to learn, but it is a vital one. If your mum has the mental capacity to make unwise decisions like drinking to excess and not seeing her GP, you cannot make her do so.

I was in the same boat as you with my own mum, except with her the alcohol came first (in the wake of my Dad's Parkinsons diagnosis, disease and death) and the dementia in her case was alcohol induced. My Dsis and I could do absolutely nothing, because she had mental capacity up until about 6 months before her death and so she had the legal right to make all those bad decisions and scare the crap out of us on the daily.

Even in those last 6 months, it took us a lot of time and hard work to get the powers that be moving (she was in the Netherlands, we are Dutch but the laws are very similar) to have her assessed and ultimately she died from a fall down the stairs in her own house 4 days before the assessment where she would undoubtedly have been sectioned, detoxed and placed in a nursing home against her will. And yes, she died because she was going downstairs to get more drink - even then she couldn't take a bottle up with her because that would have meant admitting she was an alcoholic.

I only coped because I had already been through it once with my husband.

Thank you for your kind reply. I have read up a bit on this and hovered around these boards. Which is why I haven’t decided to speak to her about it. I feel like I will only create bad feeling. But I am now feeling torn , once I saw her with “the shakes” I felt maybe really I had a duty to help her. it’s exhausting thinking about it all. But she does have the mental capacity to know she is drinking half a bottle or a bottle a day ( I don’t know the amount but expect it’s close to a bottle). So she is consciously making that decision. I think she thinks it’s fine. She grew up on the belief that wine drinking is what middle class people do and a small glass is good for your heart. thankfully she isn’t mean when drinking, she is still herself, just tipsy.

Thank you. My Dad is in a bad way but he doesn't care about it / hasn't got the motivation to change so I just try not to think about it. He has just lost his job due to alcohol-related frailty, falls, peripheral neuropathy, sickness. I met him in a 'family pub' to try and discuss some paperwork about that over lunch but he just complained about the cost, the food, the general presence of other humans, how he'd rather have got a takeaway etc. And then after an hour he left. I'm not willing to deal with that level of antisocial self-absorption anymore - he might as well concrete himself in the house and carry on until he's buried under 6ft of empty bottles and kebab trays.

I think you are showing a healthy level of detachment here. Well done, that isn't easy to do.

I struggle with it.... I think we all do. I was reading a thread on Reddit the other day about signs of alcoholism and someone said they have a colleague who acted like 'their brain just switched off when anything complex was discussed'. That's what my Dad is like. I don't think it's Korsakoff syndrome necessarily - more likely to be just a product of never being fully sober. And weed. I attribute a lot of his cognitive decline to weed.

Between excessive alcohol and weed it's very likely that he will have significant cognitive decline. But those things are all down to his choices. The important thing is that you are seeing him for who he is. Your description of your last meeting says as much. He isn't a victim, you don't owe him anything.

The self-absorption is nauseating isn’t it? I took our DS to visit my DH in hospital once (I was feeling sorry for him being ill and alone and thought it might be ok as he was presumably sober). All my DH did during the entire visit was complain about the nursing staff. Didn’t even stop moaning long enough to acknowledge our child’s presence. I realised then that I had to stop trying and that the man I’d married had gone forever. Alcoholism had turned him into a horrible, self-centred wreck who could bring nothing positive to my children’s lives and I had to leave him to it or risk him causing them further damage.

It is, and I've wondered about it a lot.

I think that when alcohol starts to take over, a person's world gets smaller and smaller and nobody has any expectations of you anymore. Maybe when you've lived like that for a long time, you lose sight of what 'normal' is for most people. My Dad will walk into a pub or restaurant and say "Oh my God, it's packed, I can't stay here" when it's just a normal Saturday lunchtime. Or "the price is too much" because it isn't what it was in 2004 or whatever.

I don't think he realises that he's complaining. It's like he's genuinely overwhelmed by the world now, because he has been lost in a booze bubble for so long. You can just tell he doesn't go out much, has lost all social graces, isn't used to how things work... it's isolation. That's how I explain it to myself.

Alcohol becomes their whole world and getting their next drink all that matters to them. It is utterly tragic and while I felt pity I was also absolutely furious with him at the time.

Exactly. And on some level, they know that. We read all this stuff about "rock bottom", they've got to hit rock bottom and then they'll magically change... but some people just never do. There is no rock bottom for people who have lost sight of normal life because they have nothing to compare their situation to or to aspire to, nothing to get better for. And you have to walk away then and let them get on with it.

Hello, someone kindly sent me the link to this thread.
A friend told me that my (now separated) husband, who's been staying comfortably far aware with a relative, is planning to return to temporary accommodation in easy travelling distance from where I live with our child. I don't want him suddenly turning up or the risk of bumping into him locally and not sure how to handle this.

@PurpleSky300 @CharlotteByrde Ah, it took me years to figure this out. I used to be baffled as to why my dad had chosen to be with my mum. He's kind, interested in people, generous. For a long time – and I think this is because I too was in denial – I wondered what was wrong with him to have chosen to be with someone so self-absorbed, rude, unpleasant and uninterested in everyone and everything. I assumed she must have always been like that.

No, she wasn't always like that. It was the long-term effects of alcohol. Duh, that's obvious, right? Not to me. I somehow didn't make the link. Alcoholism sends everyone around the alcoholic mad, you lose all perspective.

I think it's due to a mix of self-imposed isolation, the all-encompassing obsession with drinking and the effects of alcohol on the brain.

I was more socially clumsy and oblivious than your average teenager/twentysomething, I think because I didn't learn from her how to behave (and we became isolated from the wider family). I lost friendships, embarrassed myself etc and it still stings.

As always, this thread is a warm hug of reassurance and clarity. Love to you all, I hope for calm, gentle Christmasses for you all.

@RainbowLife welcome! I’m sorry to hear that. Unless there’s an injunction/bail order of some kind, there’s not much you can do about him moving accommodation although obviously if he turns up at your door drunk and abusive, call the police. Is there an access agreement in place?

The realisation that the person you loved has changed because of their alcohol use is a real eye-opener, isn't it? It took me years to realise that I wasn't 'at fault' for not seeing that this might happen when I married my husband. The fact is that the addiction and the alcohol itself changes who people are; they are de facto not the same person any more. I also recognise the constant complaining and the absolute inability to find contentment in anything (except fleetingly in a drink).

@RainbowLife forewarned is forearmed - you can't stop your ex from seeking you and your DC out, but at least now you know that it might happen. Don't hesitate to involve the police if he does anything that crosses a line. Unfortunately the laws in this country don't allow for prevention.

The comments today about how alcohol changes someone really rings true for me, and it something I’ve been struggling with over the last weeks. I am mourning, but also feeling a sense of relief coming over me that I never have to walk those eggshells again. Yesterday was a year since a spectacularly bad night when he flipped on me because I wouldn’t get him a whiskey and lemon for his cold, and we went from Christmas jollity to the worst fight ever, and then the second worst Christmas (the worst was the year before when I remember posting here on Xmas day in tears). But it is good to hear it reinforced that it is OK to have loved the person who was there underneath it all.

And to add to the comments about involving the police, they will take it seriously. My husband turned up drunk and aggressive, and broke a window to get into the house (I was locked in), he was arrested and bailed to have no contact. That was the foundation to me getting the protection orders in place.

I cannot believe how much has changed in the last year for me. I am very much still processing it.

Hope everyone on here has a peaceful Christmas. Thinking of you all xx

I'd like to echo what @CharlotteByrde just said. Whether it's a difficult or peaceful time, I hope it's OK for you.

A peaceful Christmas to all on these threads from me too.