To say its not a disease its a habit which started with choice. Alcoholism

[TreeFu]

My mother is a prolific binge drinker much to the detriment of myself and others around her, she has accepted she has a problem with drink but cannot be bothered to do anything to change her habits.

She can and does go for periods of time without touching one drop of alcohol, this is when she has no money to access it. During those periods she is just fine without it but as soon as she has access to money, she will binge until it runs out.

AIBU to believe this has nothing to do with disease and is down to her being weak willed, selfish and enjoying booze more than she cares about the wellbeing of those around her.

Addiction IS a disease, and it affects different people differently, so I think your attitude is rather unreasonable, I’m afraid.

I think some people are predisposed towards becoming addicts, so where most of us can enjoy drink regularly without becoming addicted, some people can’t, and they have no way of knowing this in advance. And if someone doesn’t know that they are predisposed toward addiction, they can’t avoid the normal social behaviours that most of us can undertake with no problems - by the time they know, it’s too late.

And once you have a problem with addiction, there can be lots of other complicating factors that will affect how well or how badly you can tackle your addiction. For example, when I was a child, both my parents smoked - and had done so all their adult lives. When my mum had a bout of pleurisy and bronchitis, she was to,d she needed to give up, if she didn’t want to suffer the same thing over and over again, so they both decided to quit. My dad stuck to it, and my mum didn’t - she is still a committed smoker. They were both intelligent, motivated people, and had the same level of support from each other and from dsis and me, and mum was the stronger character of the two, but she still didn’t manage to beat her addiction, whereas dad did - which goes to show that different people will deal differently with the battle against addiction.

Is alcoholism different to other addictions such as drugs, then?

A very long time ago when I was 16-18 I was a habitual cannabis user which turned into something of an addiction as I'd use it daily, when others around me took it upon themselves to intervene and say "Tree, we think you have a problem" I was horrified that anybody else would be impacted/ashamed by something I "enjoyed doing" and I made the choice to stop, admittedly it wasn't easy but I did it, and without ruining anybody else's lives in the process.

At no point would I have ever considered my habit to be a disease.

Very different however I've watched documentaries about heroin addicts who have struggled immensely to stop, and understandably so because of the significant impact withdrawals have on their body, but they've done it because they cared enough to.

I don't resent all alcoholics by the way, I have no bad feeling to any single one of them bar my mother. I know, jaded.

I don't know if you're being unreasonable or not, but I'm so sorry you've had to live with the effects of your mother's drinking. I find it really hard to know how much people can help their behaviour. But it's bloody hard being expected to suck up the damage caused by somebody else's decision to drink, over and over again, and then be bollocked for not being sympathetic. I'm afraid I do think that if your mother can manage for long stretches without drinking, she probably does have quite a measure of control over it.

I think you're going to get roasted here for saying that but as a fellow child of an alcoholic mother, I agree.

My mother was physically and mentally addicted - even after undergoing rehabs that removed the physical addiction, as well as treatments for her mental illness - she would still choose to drink. She chose it over everything else in her life, to the detriment of everyone in her life. And it was an active choice, one she made repeatedly. And when she drank she lied, she was emotionally and physically violent and she knew it would happen and she didn't care and she rarely apologised - she certainly never acknowledged it, she was the queen of gaslighting.

I think people who have lived with someone with an addiction will see them making those choices and really, really struggle to see it as an illness like depression or cancer that people randomly get. Even with a smoker getting lung cancer they are only harming themselves. It's rare an alcoholic only harms themself.

I think I have a problem with alcohol in that once I start I don't stop, so am one of those embarrassing people who gets messy at a party (unless I drive so I can't drink, which I usually do nowadays)..

However, I go for long periods without a drink and never, ever drink on a work night or when I'm driving.

Does that make me an alcoholic or a binge drinker? Genuinely don't know.

Ain't no one choosing to be an alcoholic.

I think people massively over estimate the control they have over their own brains. Look at the amount of people who become addicted to their prescription medicine, is it their choice?

self medicating mental illness is a huge part of addiction

This.

My mum was an alcoholic because she was self-medicating for terrible depression and, I think, PTSD.

It killed her eventually.

Whether it's addiction to alcohol, drugs, eating, starving yourself; the root cause is always the same - trauma and mental illness.

It is a genetic weakness but there is choice involved. You also have a choice. You can choose not to be involved with her if she chooses to keep drinking. It’s so hard. I do sympathise. But you can’t change her. Alcohol causes twisted thinking. And so she’s affected by that too.

If you ever see someone withdrawing from alcohol, you wouldn't say it was a choice.
It may start as a choice, but it certainly doesn't end as one.

I've come across as very unsympathetic here and admittedly I now am, this is after years of being sympathetic and supportive and holding her hand, taking her to hospitals after the latest fall and having to drag my newborn DS with me because nobody could have him, buying her shopping, dealing with her admin, listening to her verbally abuse me and emotionally abandon me for virtually all of my life.

I was neglected terribly as a child, long before her drinking habits took off, despite that I've stuck around and made sure she's OK.

I've supported this woman immensely. I've set up doctors appointments, railroaded her to AA meetings, cried begged and screamed, issued ultimatums. Everything I could have possibly done, I have done.

Nobody can say I haven't been sympathetic but my sympathy has ran out.

This is a woman who will sit with a smirk on her face and Laugh about how much she enjoys a drink, whilst I sit opposite her with tears in my eyes in complete despair about the fact she has yet another bump or bruise on her face which has already aged ten years in the past three.

When I said she manages fine when she hasn't got booze I meant physically. She can and does function perfectly fine. She can go over a week without a drink, be a happy and social person sober, then undo all the good she's done in that week by CHOOSING to go and buy shitty alcohol

@Bestseller - you sound like my dh - he would describe himself as a problem drinker, rather than an alcoholic. He hit rock bottom over a decade ago, and decided he had to quit, and he hasn’t touched a drop since then.

But why does she drink like that?
What is the problem with being sober? What does she want to mask by drinking?
People usually drink like this because they want the effect of the alcohol, because that is better than how they normally feel. What triggered her?

ivehitpeak a friend of the family is the most chronic alcoholic I’ve ever come across. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia (SCHIZOPHRENIA) in her 60s, after over 40 years of addiction. Of course it was too late, she’ll never recover.

OP the way you feel is totally understandable, it really is. It doesn’t mean that addiction isn’t a disease though

It sounds horrific tree. I'm so sorry. You're certainly not unreasonable to express your hurt at everything you've been through. I actually don't think you have come over as unsympathetic at all. People who haven't had to live with the secondary effects of this sort of behaviour, day-in, day-out of never, ever being put first and always having to pick up the pieces, have no idea.

I think science is learning more about the brain and chemical messengers and receptors that people have .
There are many conditions where people are predisposed to having problems like alcoholism, drug addiction , smoking, eating disorders etc
It is very difficult if you have family members that have any of these.
You also have the possibility of it turning up in future generations.
So for some it is not a choice.

My mother has also long had a bad relationship with alcohol. YANBU. She chose alcohol over us. And I Can speak from being in the same dependant position as her. She bit me as a 13 year old trying to put her in a taxi, laughing hysterically whislt she did it. Had sex in the same room as my brother and I , laughing when we asked her to stop and we had to go sleep in the hotel room's bathtub. Stole from me. Been verbally abusive for years. It goes on. She makes a conscious decision when she drinks. It is not cancer or brain tumours, like both my father and step father died of. They had no choice over that. I was also alcohol abusive - I chose not to drink when I was pregnant. She choses to drink every day. She lost her license and almost killed us because she would rather drink than keep us safe.

It is a choice. YANBU.

You can’t compare overcoming cannabis use to alcohol addiction.

You can’t compare overcoming cannabis use to alcohol addiction

Why not? I'm truly not meaning to be arsey - I'm genuinely interested. I've never had cannabis, so am curious about the differences, as so many people say it's safer than alcohol.

@TreeFu - I think, when someone has an addiction, as your mother clearly does, they are not making free choices - the addiction is driving their choices so whilst you are right that she decides to go and buy alcohol, alcoholism is driving her decision making process.

As the wife of a problem drinker, I can empathise with you, but sadly I know that your mum will not stop drinking or successfully beat her addiction until she hits rock bottom and makes the choice. Even then, she may well not succeed first time. Railroading her to AA won’t work, I’m afraid.

What you can do is look after yourself. You need to tell yourself that you aren’t responsible for making her recover, and it isn’t your fault when she drinks. You would be entirely within your rights to withdraw from her so that her behaviour hurts you less. You mention AA, but have you been to AlAnon - that is support for the families of alcoholics, and you would find people who really know what you are going through.

It’s so hard to watch your mum destroy herself, I can totally see why you feel like you do.
My mum ended up as a non functioning alcoholic and it was soul destroying to watch her choose alcohol again and again. As her daughter I feel the same as you, I’m very bitter about it.
But when I try and take my feelings of rejection and hopelessness out of it I can kind of see why she ended up like she did. Problems with abuse growing up, suspected personality disorder all comes in to it. She had everything, I’m sure she didn’t choose to lose it all really.

Some of the replies on here, particularly those calling the OP ‘ignorant’, are really fucking nasty. She’s living with an alcoholic parent, which is incredibly painful, frustrating and infuriating. On what planet is calling her ‘ignorant’ a helpful response?

You definitely aren’t BU to feel this way OP - I absolutely get it. And I don’t think you are ignorant. My DF was (and is) similar, although it wasn’t limited by money issues.

I know it’s very fashionable to call alcoholism a disease, and it partly is a disease in the sense that some people seem to be genetically more prone to it, but it’s not like cancer. It’s a disease that you, the sufferer, decide whether or not to kick. My DF won’t change because he doesn’t want to and he’s got no reason to. He won’t lose anything by drinking because my mum is such an enabler. But he’s absolutely capable of not drinking. If he thinks that he’ll lose something by drinking, he doesn’t do it. So he’s clearly got a degree of self-interested control over his actions.

I’ve read countless books about dealing with an alcoholic relative. One of the key pieces of professional advice on this topic is not to enable the addict. Don’t cover for them. Don’t make excuses for them. Don’t help them to feel better. Make it clear you find their behaviour unacceptable. Follow through on your threats. And why is that important? Because an alcoholic won’t choose to stop without a reason to stop. So clearly it follows that there’s an element of selfish choice to it. All the touchy-feely ‘it’s a disease’ nonsense (which my mum loooves to spout, btw) doesn’t help the addict.

I've had her stay at my house for 7 days straight, booze free, no sweating or shakes. It may sound unbelievable to people who've witnessed alcoholics in the grip of physical withdrawals but she didn't get these, she would be fine.

She has more control of her habit than some people would have and that's why I find it intolerable..

I would understand if she woke up shaking.

What I don't understand is how it can be called a disease when she's physically OK without it, but then chooses to go and have some later on.

Cannabis isn’t physically addictive, alcohol is one of the most addictive substances there is.

Cannabis addiction can ruin lives though