Alcoholism is often referred to as The Elephant in the Living Room. When one family member has a problem with alcohol, other family members tiptoe around it. There is this giant Problem in the house, but everyone tries to pretend that it is not there. They make excuses for the alcoholic. They help them to hide their problem. In various ways they enable the alcoholic to keep up the pretense that nothing is wrong.

 

The alcoholic is in denial, and everyone else goes along with it. Alcoholics are dishonest and manipulative. They don’t want to admit that they have a problem, so they will do anything within their power to coerce their loved ones into going along with the fiction that all is well. Some alcoholics do it with physical threats, some make a joke of their behaviour, while others make empty promises that they won’t get drunk again, or that they will seek treatment. When someone calls them on their behaviour, they are quick to get angry or to tell lies. But they won’t act to make changes. Alcoholics specialize in creating dramas to draw attention away from the root causes of their dysfunction.

 

Reading this, you may have formed the opinion that I am being judgmental. I have made some blunt statements. Dealing with The Elephant in the Living Room requires truthfulness without judgment. It is a fact that alcoholics are deceitful. Recovering alcoholics are the first to admit it. It does not make them bad people, just people with a problem. Tiptoeing around the problem does not help. It is not judgmental to state facts.

 

Alcoholism is often generational. The alcoholic often has an alcoholic parent, and will be more likely to produce alcoholic children. It is hard to say whether this is genetic or learned behaviour. Possibly it is both. Whatever the cause, dealing with it becomes most urgent when children are involved, to reduce their chances of becoming alcoholics themselves.

 

If there is an alcoholic in your family, the best place to start is to go to an AlAnon meeting. AlAnon is an offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) – the single most effective method of dealing with alcoholism. What you will learn there is that you can’t change the alcoholic. They will only change when they are ready to. But you can change the ways you deal with them. Don’t be afraid that you will be encouraged to leave your alcoholic spouse or to abandon an alcoholic child. AlAnon is about supporting families, not tearing them apart. The most important thing is to make a start, as it is not something that will fix itself.

 

With thanks for the blog suggestion to K – I hope it this helps …