Could somebody please explain alcoholism to me

[coffeestainss]

I am trying to understand how alcoholism occurs.
I know a person who enjoyed a drink now and again , rarely went out to bars or restaurants socialising and was first to leave a social occasion when the night went on unexpectedly.
Then on a weekend night she started to drink an extra glass or two and then a new bottle was opened. Gradually a couple of spirits and mixers were added to the occasion. The weekend night turned into two nights, then three.
All through this, she was actively working , raising a fantastic family and driving throughout the day, she was also drinking. Nobody knew.
Im struggling to understand that in the space of one year, the woman went from little or no alcohol to a bottle of spirits per day, working, driving yet her family didn’t know.
Im struggling to understand when it is said that there wasn’t any trauma that year and that she and her family were happy.
She went to a rehabilitation centre for three months and refused her partner and adult children visiting and involvement in the family therapy sessions. She never felt like she had a problem with alcohol and she is now dying. She is my cousin and we were very close. I am so sad for her and her family. I cannot understand this and do not know how to help and she is starting to avoid contact with me and my family. I am so worried. I don’t understand what happened . Like a light switch .

basically alcohol makes you relax and “rewards” you pleasure centres. It makes your happy bell go DINGDINGDING! But over time you become reliant on that feeling to get you through and you have to consume more alcohol to get the same effect. Some people are much more susceptible to addiction. There are legal drugs available that reduce your reward centre reaction and so reduce the pleasure/buzz you get both you have to use it consistently. These drugs create pharmacological extinction. The drug is called naltrexone and studies show that alcohol works on the exact same reward pathway as opiate based drugs. For some people, they can’t just “stop” without help.

there is a thread on here “ is anybody starting a naltrexone journey” if you want to find out more

Thanks. So if you take that tablet and drink you don’t get the same happy feeling?

She may have been drinking at home long before that weekend,you'll never know. People use alcohol to relax, to,sleep, to de-stress, youmay never really know what's going on in someone else's life and thoughts. You need more and more to feel the same effect and before you know it it's too late for some people and their bodies cannot cope any more. I'm sorry to hear she's dying, it's a terrible,illness and her family must feelvery confused and distraught. If she doesn't want to see you or any family there's nothing you can do, that's her choice, just be there for her if she does reach out and support each other.

It's a tablet or long term injection, it blocks the feeling of euphoria so reduces the craving but it has risks and cannot be taken by some people with certain medical,problems.

You already explained perfectly how it happens. It's an addictive substance, take it regularly and in sufficient quantities and you become addicted.

It alters your brain chemistry so you get all the pleasure chemicals firing in your brain when you use it, then your brain goes back to below baseline so you feel shitter than before you hadn't used it.

Then because you feel shitter, you use it again and it makes you feel better again, but you need more of it to get that feeling and then without it your brain reverts back to feeling worse and worse without it.

Alcohol use and trauma are correlated but it's dangerous IMO when people disregard the fact it is ADDICTIVE and you don't have to be traumatised, mentally ill, neurodivergent to become addicted.

And what often happens is people who become addicted have a variety of MH symptoms like low mood, poor concentration, anxiety, rumination, irritability and so on which they then erroneously attribute to being the reason they drink when in fact, the symptoms are caused by the drinking.

Thank you

Some good replies from PP. Just wanted to add that there is no such thing as a typical person or standard formula when it comes to alcoholism. It can happen to anyone and can be driven by any number of things - boredom can be just as bad as stress - and there is a strong genetic component in many cases, so it happens even if there’s no big underlying “trauma.”

For your cousin, who knows. Maybe she’s been drinking in secret a long time, maybe she struggled before and was trying hard to be sober for a while but then relapsed, maybe there was some kind of event or trauma you’re not aware of. Or maybe it just happened slowly and then all at once - for a while it was a glass of wine here and there and then all of a sudden it was out of control.

To me it’s clear you’re coming from a place of curiosity rather than judgment, but I would just be hyper-aware of the language you use around her. People are very fragile in early sobriety and are told to avoid any “people, places, or things” that might trigger them - even if it’s an innocent and well-intended comment from a relative, it could be tapping into something (a memory, a hidden insecurity, etc.) that makes them want to drink.

I’m guessing this is the reason she wants to avoid family; so she can feel fully recovered and strong enough to interact in a way that doesn’t put her sobriety at risk, even if you’ve done nothing wrong as such.

That said, in rehab there is also a lot of therapy, exploring your family dynamics and past, learning about setting boundaries, etc. etc. While this is really useful and necessary for addicts, it’s sometimes easy to take it too far and to be a bit too harsh on people - especially those close to you - and set up boundaries that aren’t necessarily reflective of your relationship but made from a place of vulnerability + over-therapising.

All the same, it’s probably also not a bad idea to reflect on your relationship with her prior to this and whether you might have said/done something or acted in a way that didn’t make her feel good about herself. Maybe her parents always compared you to her a bit too favourably (through no fault of your own but it still makes her feel a certain way). Maybe you’ve been a bit too judgmental about some aspects of her life in a way you thought was helpful and she perceived as criticism. Only you will know.

Either way, I’d give her some space - maybe just send a supportive message and say you’re there and ready to talk and support her when she needs you (or not talk about it at all and just have some quality time together), and then leave it until she reaches out. The pulling away is probably not permanent, and if it is, there’s probably something underlying it that’s not actually drinking-related, and you’ll have to figure that out in time.

all the best OP x

Leaving social occasions early may also be because she wanted to drink on her own, a perfect excuse. Alcoholism is progressive, manipulative and takes over your whole thinking and being. Once it gets hold of you, it's very difficult to ask for help as as you say, no one outside knows the real extent of the drinking. It's a very manipulative disease

Others have explained really well. Everyone has this stereotype of what an 'alcoholic' looks like (usually an older male, drinking to cope with some specific event or trauma, visibly shambolic etc) but the truth is alcohol addiction can affect anyone and there isn't a simple cause and effect of 'xyz tragedy happened and so they turned to drink'. Alcoholism does sometimes run in families (sadly it runs in mine) but no-one has as yet definitively untangled whether there's some genetic predisposition and/or whether it's some other inherited trait that makes it more likely people will (over)use alcohol (I'm pretty sure the alcoholics in my family are undiagnosed ND as well but whether that's correlation or causation who knows), or whether it's simply having been brought up by an alcoholic makes it more normalised or teaches you poor coping mechanisms or simply is a traumatic thing in itself, who knows. Likely IMO it's a combination of all of the above.

Also, whoever said she may not be as functioning as you think is also spot on. Alcohol is such an odd one in that unlike other (more illegal) addictive substances it is socially permitted, encouraged and expected even that you will partake, even to excess on occasions - and yet there's a very deep stigma around transgressing what's considered normal. So a lot of alcoholics slip secretly from the upper end of accepted usage into addiction/not functioning subtly and secretly, managing to conceal it from people around them and even themselves for a surprisingly long time, e.g. drinking more often and more heavily than average socially transitions over time to also drinking alone, from there to drinking at inappropriate times and occasions e.g. the mornings or at work, but continuing on the surface at least to function - it rarely is the case to go from light social drinker to full addiction quickly but that's how it can appear to a bystander.

Also and I'm aware this is a long post, alcohol amongst the addictive substances is particularly nasty in terms of the after-affects, so it's a vicious circle of the more you drink the more you need to drink, most people have experienced a hangover, not just the physical symptoms but the anxiety/depression/shame and embarrassment - for an addict those feelings are many times more intense and the only thing that eases them is drinking more - someone who is properly addicted needs to withdraw under medical supervision and taper off rather than going cold turkey as it's physically dangerous, literally life threatening - I've had family members end up in ICU with DTs before. So it's really not as simple even as stopping something like smoking, willpower alone is rarely enough.

This animation explains it very well I think. My FIL was similar, nobody would have ever known as he hid it really well until it became impossible to hide