You're not an Alcoholic!

[dogsaremybusiness]

I watched a documentary last night, and this woman was saying that alcoholism ran in their family (she was one), and she kind of blamed her Dad because he was an alcoholic too.

It transpired though, that her Dad enjoyed a drink between the ages of 21 and 29, and then he never touched another drop, for the following FIFTY years until his death.

However, he made money touring around and giving pep talks to alcoholics and recovering alcoholics.

AIBU to think that if you drank in your 20's (which most of us do) and then you are Tee total in your 30's, 40's, 50's 60's and 70's that you are NOT a fucking alcoholic, and maybe you just enjoyed making money by claiming that you were?

Really got my back up, as I am the DD of an alcoholic, and do really struggle to keep my own drinking under control.

I was dependent on alcohol from 15-26. To an outsider I probably looked like a rebellious teen/young adult, with the drinking culture in the UK no one thought twice about the binge drinking I did.
The truth, I had alcohol in my school locker, I would regularly drink 0.5L of vodka a night, I stole alcohol from my parents and my friends parents until I started working and then I was probably still over the limit most mornings going to work. I used it to self medicate because of mental health issues. I dont drink now, why?, because I would easily slip back into self medicating and dependency habits, thats what makes me an alcoholic albeit one that so far has been successful in recovery.

I’ve found that alcoholics are masters at rationalising their choices.

I mean 8 years seems like quite a long time to be in active addiction to me...would you say "only 8 years" to a gambling addict who lost thousands in that time, or a drug addict? I just don't see how you can tell he's not a recovering alcoholic based on the fact he quit fairly soon (according to you) especially when his daughter is one so it's quite likely a genetic predisposition?

YABU - it’s not for you to decide what age ranges someone can/can’t be an alcoholic. I class muself as an alcoholic because my drinking was out of control from 24-29 years old. In your eyes I wouldn’t be an alcoholic. I have an issue where I drink to blacking out and I would think about drinking every single day.
It was hard going cold turkey and I have relapsed many times over the years. But yes, I class myself as an alcoholic despite the short period of alcohol consump in my life.

Does it matter if he makes money / profits from this if he helps just one person to no longer be an alcoholic? 🤔

I wonder if either you are being cynical or it may have hit too close to home but you don’t want to use the same terminology for yourself.

How many years should he have sacrificed to alcohol to meet your definition of being a recovering alcoholic?

If you are going to hear about how to keep clean do you want to hear it from someone who manages to stay on the wagon or from someone who keeps falling off it?

Many people binge drink on the weekends in their 20s but struggling to go a day or two without alcohol is a sign that you are an alcoholic no matter what your age.

I don't understand if your dad was an alcoholic, why this sounds odd to you? Alcoholism is caused by many things but can certainly appear in your twenties. Maybe that guy didn't do AA meetings to 'prove' he was being t-total because of alcoholism but that doesn't mean he didn't struggle against it everyday. I haven't seen the documentary so I can't really say if you've seen something that suggested otherwise but my husbands dad was a secret alcoholic his whole life until his sixties when his mum finally realised (crazy, I know...but they're just one of those families who have a lot of mental health issues that no one talks about!). My own husband is the same and suffers from severe depression and used hidden drinking to cope in his twenties and early thirties until he actually got help. Neither of them will go to a meeting and are just going teetotal without support so they are absolutely alcoholics and struggling through it but couldn't point to anything documented to say they're alcoholics. Perhaps for this guy, doing the talks as his job was his way of staying teetotal. Talking about the methods and struggle every day could have kept him on that path.

But if he mentally has to struggle every day for the next fifty years, of course he's still an alcoholic. I'm diabetic but use insulin to keep my blood sugar in range like a normal person...just because I'm controlling it doesn't mean I'm not longer diabetic! If you think you just fix alcoholism then maybe that's part of your struggle. My husband is an alcoholic (he won't admit it but has gone teetotal) and I know how much he struggles to stay sober - he tells me so whenever he's stressed or struggling socially how strong that pull to a drink is and how much mental will it's taking not to - and he's lapsed many times drinking in secret.

What was the name of the documentary please?

Op said

For those asking it's called Murder on Middle Beach. Fascinating documentary and it's not about the alcoholism at all, it's about a woman who is murdered and her son grows up and does his own investigation and films it.

I tried to find it. Think was on hmo? But it’s a channel I don’t have so haven’t seen it yet

Drinking is often defined as alcoholism if it has a negative effect on your life. Eg if it caused you to underperform at work, lose your job, go into debt, argue with family, lose your spouse. Do we know what that man was doing in his 20s? Maybe he completely derailed his life because of drinking, managed to quit it and hasn't touched a drop ever since because he knew what the consequences would be. AA says you're an alcoholic forever, even if you've been sober for 40 years. It's still in you and one drink might make you start drinking heavily again after all this time. Some people have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and that man might've understood it early on.

He’s in recovery and follows the one day at a time rule. Well done him on tackling what is a devastating illness

Exactly.

Yes, but this bloke wasn't "plenty of people", was he.

He was, I assume, an alcoholic. His life was, and probably still is, absorbed by thoughts of his next drink.

Yes, you can be a heavy drinker and not an alcoholic. But you can also be an alcoholic who's been dry for 50 years.

Only he and maybe his family know if he was an alcoholic or not. It is socially constructed anyway. Great if he is helping people but a bit disingenuous if he was never an alcoholic and making money from saying he was.

If you were dependent on alcohol, unable to control the amount you drank, perhaps exhibited behaviours that were out of character when drinking then you do stop, you are a recovering alcoholic for life, if you relapse you will be back to square one. If you are not dependent on alcohol then this won’t make sense to you because you can just have one, choose a soft drink and crucially have alcohol in the house and not touch it, it’s no big deal (i have an open bottle of wine in the fridge even).

I think with smoking the person might say they have an addiction to nicotine but are an ex-smoker. Though I’m not sure that smoking carries the same long term cravings. You don’t hear of people ‘falling off the wagon’ after many years as much.

So for alcohol they are an alcoholic (addicted alcohol physically or psychologically) but an ex-drinker.

Of course he can be. We don't know the strength of addiction and amount of alcohol he consumed that affected him in his 20s. I think it's wrong to assume 'your 20s'. Should be filled with alcohol and that's ok. Some of our friends who did this are now dead and I was thinking what the binge after binge after binge that was acceptable then must have played a part and what a shame that is.

I'm pretty sure the guy would rather have had a healthy relationship with alcohol than sitting there having experienced issues with drinking at all. Yes he made money from sharing his experience and how he managed to stay off the drink enough to help others for so long but surely he'd have rather not gone through it at all. You say his daughter blames him for her alcohol problems but it kind of looks like you also blame your own dad for your struggle with alcoholism too. I have a child myself who grew up watching her own father struggle with alcoholism and he died from it too, now she's an adult and she isn't an alcoholic herself, if anything I think seeing her dad drink himself literally to death taught her to be responsible herself. You can't rant on here diagnosing a complete stranger as some kind of a fraud when you don't know their story

What a random take?? If you drank in your 20’s, it still could’ve significantly impacted your life. It may have impacted your relationship's beyond repair, left you in debt, affected your housing, affected you physically or caused injury. It could have been very devastating and the fact that you abstained and never touched a drink again probably is a good indicator you ARE an alcoholic because you know you can’t touch a drop without the same happening. I know people who gave up alcohol in their 20’s and still go to AA in their 40’s.

I guess if his tours and talks actually helped people tackle their alcoholism or problem drinking, then he was entitled to make a living from it. I could understand feeling peeved if he was giving out bad advice but if his approach to treatment was sound then it’s fair that he earned money from it. I think the background of whether he does or doesn’t qualify as an alcoholic is less relevant.

At any rate, some alcoholics do find out very young that they are alcoholics. A friend’s nephew was already deep into it and hospitalised at 22. He’d been drinking problematically since he was about 14.

Someone else I knew from school and my hometown had an obvious problem by the age of about 25. It took him another ten years or so from that point to realise and to attempt treatment, but the problem was already there in his 20s; he just delayed tackling it. And yes, the rest of us- his peers- drank a fair bit too, but it was just different with him, you could see it. The obsession; the insatiable appetite for more and more and more and more; never wanting the night to end; downing a pint on his own in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed… just one more. The rest of us sobered up, grew up, moved out of town and got on with our lives, but he remained there, drinking. Happily I believe he is now sober and has been for at least a couple of decades.

You don’t stop being an alcoholic when you stop drinking. It just means you’re in recovery. If he hasn’t drank for two years or fifty years, he is still a recovering alcoholic and probably still struggles with it.

I watched it a while back I think it was on sky at the time.

My lovely dad, an alcoholic, was sober from 43 to his death at 82. Almost forty years sober, always an alcoholic. He died from liver cancer. Every day of those 39 years, I knew he wanted to drink and found the strength not to. So no op, I don’t agree.

I think it’s pretty much always the case of once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. It doesn’t matter how long ago you had your last drink!