There is no dignity in alcoholism

[Emerald0897]

And I'm fucking tired of the selfishness of it. AIBU?

Old guy on the tube today, totally reeking of alcohol, staggering everywhere and then actually exposing himself in order to piss all around the place, so everyone nearby had to scarper because it was actually in danger of soaking people. Utterly disgusting. He then fell out of the doors onto the platform at the next station.

It's been reported to TFL staff and the British Transport Police.

I've had two other alcoholics in my extended family, both of whom have caused massive disruption.

I know we are supposed to have pity for people's mental health issues but honestly, the impact on others is just awful. It's so antisocial.

I don't feel pity for the guy today. I feel utter disgust that he showed everyone his penis, and thankful my kids weren't with me.

AIBU?

This isn’t idealistic, it’s the opposite. It describes real life

your example about theft perfectly illustrates this. Is it right that people steal from you? No. Is it kind? No. Do they hurt you? Yes.

can anyone stop theft in society? NO. Massive massive no.

so the end result is, you have to go into shopkeeping expecting theft, and accepting it as the cost of doing business. Because there is no other option.

Absolutely spot on. Society is in meltdown, and I despair.

Wow! When did you get your empathy bypass OP?

"Nothing can be done to stop people becoming addicted to alcohol"

This just isn't true. No-one becomes dependent on alcohol overnight. It's a slow process, as a person's tolerance builds up over time and they come to lean more and more heavily on drink. Until eventually they reach a state where they are near permanently intoxicated, and that's how they make it through the day.

A person doesn't take their first drink and bam, instant addiction. This is a story addicts like to tell because it minimises their level of personal responsibility. If you think they were swept away by an overpowering chemical reaction in their brain, then they have no control over that and you feel sorry for them. When the truth is, it's more like, they enjoyed it. The way many people enjoy being intoxicated. They thought "this is great, this works for me" and then they went back and did it again and again until they took it too far. At that stage, sure, their body has become dangerously dependent and they are no longer ever clear-headed enough to think about the harm they're doing.

But let's be very, very clear. A person does not get to that level of addiction overnight. By the time they do, they will have ignored more red flags and "wake up call" moments than you can count. They will have seen the damage they're doing to themselves and those around them, and chosen to look away and continue down this path. Because it feels good, and they are choosing to put that feeling first.

In these earlier stages of addiction, maybe they lost their job, hit their partner, couldn't afford to feed their kids. Lost friendships, shat the bed, stole from family, frightened total strangers. And still they made the decision to keep going. Keep drinking, justify it all somehow. I think people like you view this phase as "the disease" in control. You infantilise the alcoholic by acting like they're not making the active choice to keep drinking. But they are. The ugly truth is that every alcoholic who isn't hooked up to an ethanol drip in hospital is making the choice to keep drinking.

I'm sure you, and all the "be kind" people on the rest of the thread, think I'm being unfair. You'd prefer to be believe alcoholics have no control over their actions.

Some questions, then.

If the alcoholic isn't choosing to be an alcoholic, then why is the narrative of recovery that "only you can make the decision to seek help"?

An alcoholic will often say they needed to "hit rock bottom" to admit there was a problem. Think about that. Think about what I said further up. How many red flags do you think they ignored before "rock bottom"? If they can admit it when they're all alone and have nothing left, why couldn't they admit it before, when the people they hurt were begging them to change? What does that tell you about their priorities?

If the alcoholic isn't choosing, every day, to continue drinking, then why does AA celebrate every day they choose not to drink? Why is the mantra of recovery to "take it one day at a time"? Why do we have 30 day sober chips to celebrate the alcoholic's willpower and remind them to stay strong?

If the alcoholic wasn't being selfish and choosing to continue drinking, despite the harm it was causing to those around them, then why is a key focus of AA making amends to the people you've hurt?

Addiction is a choice. That's the ugly truth. The addict is choosing to numb themselves at the expense of everything else in their life. You can feel sorry for them, you can understand why they might want to blot out certain things, and you can acknowledge that prolonged use creates a chemical dependence that makes it harder for them to stop. But you can't take away their agency in the whole thing. They had a choice, and they're continuing to choose. Every day. Every sip.

It's a double sided coin. They're choosing to hurt themselves and others. They're choosing to be selfish. But they could also choose recovery. They could choose to walk into an AA meeting and choose day after day not to drink. Many do.

A person can be pitiable and also selfish. A person can be hurt and hurt others. A person can be "addicted to alcohol" and also choose every day to abuse it. Acting as if addiction is some outside force that takes a person over and can't be stopped, makes them less accountable for their actions, and takes away the one thing they need to be reminded of to get better - their power to choose.

@SnoopyPajamas it's not as straightforward as all that. There are chemical, physiological and psychological factors involved in how people become addicted to alcohol. Read Alcohol Explained by William Porter to learn about this in detail. If I had read that book before ever drinking, I would have avoided alcohol like the plague.

I'm also not personally invested in how we define what alcoholism is. I quit drinking before it had any of the negative effects on my life that you describe. Whether we call it an illness or a disease or what. But I do think the above information is very important when understanding alcoholism.

This chimes with my experience with addicts as well. Not that I have a lot of experience thankfully or any professional qualifications so happy to accept any research based evidence that this broad premise is incorrect.

It rings very true for me though.

I know two alcoholics and neither has had a traumatic life or horrific incidents. They may be ill but they wreak havoc on every one they know.

Gosh THIS

10 TIMES OVER!!!!

I have no idea what this massively long post which I’ve tried to read 3 times taking SEVEN MINUTES has to do with the fact YOU can not stop people becoming addicted to alcohol in society.
Neither you, nor any doctor, any medical health professional or government can stop the fact that people commonly become addicted to an addictive substance.

Whether it takes them 5 years or 15 years makes no difference- people have been addicted to alcohol for thousands of years and will continue to be as long as alcohol continues to hold the position it does in our society.

If I see someone walk into my shop and steal something then of course I'm going to take it back off them, why wouldn't I? No, I can't stop theft in wider society, but I can control what is happening right in front of me, that's real life. If in the OP's scenario, the man had pissed on someone and they had got angry and attacked him back, then I would say that's the natural consequences of behaving in an aggressive way towards someone. My first thought wouldn't be 'that poor guy he must have a rough life, better look the other way and not do anything'. I'd be reporting it to the transport Police to take whatever action they felt was needed and so their staff could be aware of a potentially aggressive person.

I agree with you @SnoopyPajamas

I’ve known 2 alcoholics in my life, unfortunately I was a child at the time and forced to put up with their behaviour. They both followed a long road towards alcoholism. It didn’t happen overnight but over many years. That’s many years of making selfish decisions to get pissed over & over again not because they had to but because they wanted to. They very much chose their path in life and neither came from a traumatic background. You know, some people just love drinking to excess and do it only because it feels good.

Sorry to have taken up a whole seven minutes of your life. Gosh.

If you had read my comment, you'd know the point I was making was that no-one - not ME (😂) or "society" - can stop someone becoming addicted to alcohol. It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. Only the alcoholic can choose to stop drinking.

You may have alcoholic family members, but you clearly have no real understanding of how addiction works.

To preface, what he did wasn't ok. Your original post is clearly venting about a situation that upset you, and rightfully so.

However, I think that your point "No one forced them to start" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how addiction generally manifests and progresses.

No one picks up a drink thinking "God, I can't wait to lose my job, my house, my dignity and my loved ones a few years from now." It's a death by a thousand cuts, and by the time an addict realises they're addicted, addiction has already sneakily cut the emergency brakes.

It's different for everyone, of course, but imagine. That one glass of wine at dinner might turn into two, into three, into a bottle, etc. Those nights at the pub with your mates, those bottomless "oooh mimosas!" brunches...of course no one's forcing you to become an alcoholic, but we live in a society where socializing and alcohol are heavily intertwined. For 9 out of 10 people that's never going to become a problem, but would you know you were the 1 in 10 until it was too late?

I also feel compelled to address your second point in particular: "No one is forcing them to drink."

Of course not. No one is sitting an alcoholic down and funelling vodka into their mouths, but I don't think you understand how the overwhelming compulsion and obsession that drives an addict.

There comes a point in addiction where, sure, no external force is influencing you to drink, but the vice grip it has on your mind is so strong that it genuinely feels as if you've lost control of your own autonomy. The physical actions involved in acquiring and consuming that next drink may as well have been executed by a puppet master.

As an alcoholic in recovery (now 2 years sober), I raise my eyebrow when I hear non-addicts talking about the "choice to stop", because, to me, it trivializes the hell that any recovered addict has to go through to save themselves (and yes, you do have to save yourself. External support is invaluable but you can't help someone who can't, or won't, help themselves).

So I don't think it's "a choice". It's a brutal, humiliating, series of rock bottoms, failures and picking yourself up again. It's reaching the point where leaving the one thing that has become your entire world is less painful than continuing - and addiction is a terrifying cuckoo. It's very, very good at pushing everything and everyone out of the metaphorical nest to make room for itself.

Many people will never hit that point, and they'll end up like this guy, or dead in a gutter somewhere as just another tragic statistic for us to tut at in the news and move on.

And finally, ARBD may also not be dementia per se, but the neurological symptoms it causes are very similar, so it's more of a shorthand to compare it to a disease that the casual observer would understand and relate to.

Agreed, although I'll be the first person to admit that addiction made me selfish, unreliable and a liability. It's a disgusting illness, and it brings you down to its level. I wish that people who harp on about "it's a choice" could spend just one day fighting it. They would change their tune awfully quickly.

Does the world look prettier from all the way up on that high horse eh?

Most people don’t think alcoholics have a choice once they are fully alcoholic.

The argument is more that they had a choice to become heavy drinkers in the first place. There will have been many occasions along the road to alcoholism where they chose to start drinking heavily or continue drinking heavily at the expense of people around them like partners or children. At that point they did have a choice as becoming an alcoholic doesn’t happen overnight.

but the alcoholic doesn’t exist in isolation. They exist in a society that uses alcohol for every celebration commiseration or just a Tuesday night. It is pervasive. It’s fine until it’s not.
Identifying that line between social drinking and addiction is hard and some people can’t do it successfully. That is life.

OP and your posts are about how the man on the tube shouldn’t be an alcoholic, how he’s choosing it and how unacceptable that is.

others are choosing a more nuanced conversation about how and why people get to end stage AuD and how the disgust is pointless because alcoholics don’t need to behave in a way that pleases you, much as you’d like them to.

"others are choosing a more nuanced conversation"

This, from the person who reacted like a toddler when asked to read a reply more than two paragraphs long? Because it was MASSIVELY LONG and you TRIED SEVEN TIMES and you COULDN'T UNDERSTAND IT? Come off it.

You don't want nuance. You just want people to agree with your take that a person in active addiction has no control over their actions. I wasted a lot of time and effort explaining that actually, I don't think this attitude empowers an alcoholic to recover. The ability to make a different choice isn't easy, but it's always there within someone, and when it boils right down to it, it really is as simple as saying no instead of yes. You put down the bottle you picked up. You walk away. You say no. You keep doing this every day, no matter how hard it gets.

That's what recovery is. It's not sitting about pontificating over neurological studies and constructing elaborate metaphors for how drinking made you feel. It's getting up every day and making the choice not to drink. Even when it's humdrum and thankless and no-one notices. Even when it feels like it's killing you not to.

You can feel offended and think it belittles someone's struggle to call that a choice, but I don't view it that way. No-one is saying it's easy. Just that a hard choice is still a choice, and an alcoholic is capable of making that choice.

Understand me or don't. I'm done here.

Because if he had of been violent, no doubt you would of said that in your post as well