How do you deal with a father’s alcohol-inspired abusive behavior during the Holidays?
Dr. Peele:
Why does one and how does one stop feeling sorry for an alcoholic? My father is an alcoholic and can be verbally abusive to my mother. In anger I will lash out at him but the next day will continue to act ‘normally’. He takes it very badly if I, his daughter, am cross with him. Sometimes I feel I should kind of put my foot down to this unacceptable behaviour, but she can take it in a way and he can’t – he gets very morose and starts talking about how soon he is going to die and he knows we all hate him, etc. I know it is emotional blackmail, etc. but I still feel he is in the grip of something he can’t control – it’s a bit like demanding a deaf man hear because you ‘talk’ to him in braille and so he MUST understand. Sometimes I think the hurt and pain that he is suffering, even if only a little and only in lucid moments, is more than we can feel hurt in ‘real’ life, even though his may be self-inflicted, etc… it doesn’t matter because he is still hurting and he can’t deal with that hurt. And that hurt may be all topsy turvy but it had some kind of root or cause that ‘by the grace of God there go I,’ he hasn’t learnt something in life to help him to deal with it, or perhaps it’s part of what he needs to learn him life. It seems cruel to punish him more by withdrawing what love and understanding, any love and understanding, one can give him. And everything has its cost. Perhaps that is, in this case, my mother’s greater strength.
Kathy
Dear Kathy:
Your letter is almost a philosophical treatise — laying out the nature of abusive behavior by a family member whom you love but resent and its impact on other family members, and particularly yourself. People having been dealing with this forever — not only around alcoholism (there are movies and plays about such things — e.g., Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe). Here is my modest little list of ways to respond:
- protect yourself – make sure you are not hurt and that you don’t implicate yourself in the abuse (by going along with it); remove yourself from the situation when the behavior reaches a level that you feel is intolerable; I assume you don’t have children yourself, because this is often a crystallizing experience that makes people become more insistent on staying way from this abuse;
- offer support for those most directly affected (i.e., your mother) to remove herself, temporarily or permanently, but if she chooses not to, lay back and accept her choice, because you can do nothing else about it; stop viewing her as a victim but see her as a willing participant, however much this improves or depreciates your view of her;
- make clear to your father (and mother) that you love them, but that for your own mental health there are certain things you will not put up with or participate in; offer always to support and talk with either of them provided they come to you with "clean hands" (not when they are trying to score points against one another, or to get you to excuse them from previous misbehavior). I hope this is of some help.
And thank you for being a loving daughter.
Stanton
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For his entire adult life, my father has been drawn to high-risk, relatively low-investment get-rich-quick schemes. It does not satisfy many definitions of addiction, because it has not become steadily or increasingly worse, and he has always managed to keep his losses less than devastating, so he does have a certain amount of control over it. But he has consistently lost money, adding up to a considerable lifetime total. And although he is in many ways a very intelligent and competent person, when it comes to these investments, he loses all perspective and reason: he once invested in a perpetual motion machine; in a gold mine in Peru operated by a couple of American teenagers; etc. He also consistently hooks up with other investors who have admittedly lost money on the venture in question, but convince him they are going to turn things around any day now and start raking in the bucks.
ago, he made one of these investments that cost him (and my mother) virtually all of their retirement savings and put them in a very difficult situation. My husband and I helped them out somewhat, and things were bad enough that he promised to cool it (even though he immediately proceeded with ridiculous plans to finance another project, but none of his own money was actually spent on it). But a couple of weeks ago he wrote a letter addressed to only my husband, asking my husband not to let me or my mother know, urging my husband to help him with an investment plan for trading on-line. That was the last straw for me and I want to stop just trying to keep out of his way, and I want to try to do something to stop him. Not to mention, to help my mother from living any more of her life just above the edge of poverty.
You don’t need to do an intervention that makes your father own up to his misguided life — which, it sounds as though you agree, is going to be a tough sell. If you wished to take a radical step, you could have him declared incompetent with you as guardian, so that you make his major financial decisions and he can’t sign agreements on his own. You could hire a lawyer or find a form book to make this application, then file on your own at your county court house. Remember, competence determinations are not global; they apply to specific areas, so that your father could be declared incompetent in financial matters but retain his autonomy in the other areas of his life.
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No one intends to become a drug addict or alcoholic. Our experiences show that the drug addict or alcoholic was usually an intelligent and often creative person with much hope for the future.
The more a person uses drugs or excessive alcohol, the worse the problem becomes. So they continue the “solution” for their problems, more drugs. Soon new problems are created by drug use. The person feels the need to use consistently, and will do anything to get high.
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In medical terminology, an addiction is a chronic neurobiologic disorder that has genetic, psychosocial, and environmental dimensions and is characterized by one of the following: the continued use of a substance despite its detrimental effects, impaired control over the use of a drug (compulsive behavior), and preocupation with a drug’s use for non-therapeutic purposes (i.e. craving the drug). Addiction is often accompanied the presence of deviant behaviors (for instance stealing money and forging prescriptions) that are used to obtain a drug.
maintain its desired effects. For instance, individuals with severe chronic pain taking opiate medications (like morphine) will need to continually increase the dose in order to maintain the drug’s analgesic (pain-relieving) effects. Physical dependence is also a pharmacologic property and means that if a certain drug is abruptly discontinued, an individual will experience certain characteristic withdrawal signs and symptoms. Many drugs used for therapeutic purposes produce withdrawal symptoms when abruptly stopped, for instance oral steroids, certain antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and opiates.