Forgotten victims of alcohol

Alcoholism obviously has a terrible impact on the life of the alcoholic but healthcare professionals are also increasingly recognising it as a “family illness” – the partners, parents, spouses and children of someone with an alcohol problem are exposed to behaviour which is erratic, confusing, irrational, and often physically violent.

Most people would be familiar with the work of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) but not so many would be aware of an organisation called Al-Anon which offers support for those people affected by someone else’s problem drinking. The fact that most people have never heard of Al-Anon is perhaps symbolic of the fact that the families of alcoholics are the forgotten victims of alcohol abuse.

Al-Anon makes use of the same 12 Steps employed by AA and is similarly anonymous, non-professional, self-supporting and non-religious. There are 24,000 Al-Anon groups worldwide including about 200 meetings in Ireland each week.

“I wanted them to tell me how to get him to stop drinking,” says Anne, a middle-aged Irish woman whose husband is an alcoholic.

This sentiment is common among people who approach Al-Anon – they go to their first meeting expecting to get information on how to help the alcoholic in their lives and are surprised to find that the help is instead directed at them.

Anne describes herself as a typical working-class married woman. She had “no notion” that her husband was an alcoholic when they married.

“He didn’t drink for a long time after our wedding. It just sort of crept up slowly. It started as social drinking and then some line was stepped over. But all the while he was very cunning, charismatic and persuasive. Through all of his drinking he managed to keep his job.

“He would never, ever drink at home or in our locality. He wasn’t a drunk who would come singing up the road at the end of the night. He would disappear off for three days and nights.”

As is often the case with the spouse of an alcoholic, Anne busied herself trying to pick up the pieces. “I kept taking on more and more responsibilities. In my mind, I was a good wife, mother and homemaker. I was capable and in control. I didn’t realise that actually what I was doing was trying to fix the disease, trying to prop things up.”

She characterises a relationship with an alcoholic as one of perpetual expectation and subsequent let down. Her husband, she says, had two personalities – he would promise her the sun, moon and stars but the disease was all the time gnawing away at him.

“When he came home it was battle stations. He was never violent, thank God – it was actually me causing the ructions. I had huge anger and resentment towards him. There was part of me that just wished he would never come home again.”

Her mother told her about Al-Anon. “I remember sitting in the car reading the information they sent me. There was a questionnaire which was headed ‘Are you troubled by someone else’s drinking?’ [see panel]. I was reading down through the questions and I was answering yes to every one of them. I was horrified when I realised I was living with an alcoholic.”

She was suspicious at first, she says, that the focus of the meetings was on her, rather than her husband’s drinking. Over time, however, she came to realise that she could only have control over her own behaviour – not her husband’s.

“I didn’t cause his alcoholism and I couldn’t control or cure it. That sounds defeatist but it’s not when you are dealing with a disease. At one meeting someone suggested to me that I try walking away instead of reacting. He told me later that the day I started acting differently it kicked the crutch out from under him. Up to then he always knew that I would be there for him arranging everything, propping him up.”

Al-Anon plays a vital role in helping family members take responsibility for their own lives, according to Austin Prior, who is head of treatment services at the Rutland Centre in Dublin.

“When you are living with an alcoholic, you adopt behaviours which are not healthy. With addiction the more someone dances around it and enables it, the more the addict is able to carry on with their behaviour. It creates a dynamic where change just can not happen. Al-Anon’s approach is to stop doing that and start thinking about yourself.”

Similar to Anne’s story, Bill (59) approached Al-Anon seven years ago thinking that it would help him to help his wife who is an alcoholic.

“I couldn’t believe that everyone was there talking about themselves. It was only after maybe 10 or 12 meetings that I realised that no matter what I did, there was nothing I could do to stop her drinking. I thought alcoholics were bad people, I really did. I didn’t understand that it was a disease.”

Talking to Bill, you get a tangible sense of the utter devastation which an alcoholic can visit on a family. “She spent time in mental institutions and tried to commit suicide on a number of occasions. It wasn’t so bad when she got enough drink because then she would be out cold. It was the nights that she didn’t get enough that were problems. We had nights where I was out driving her around at four or five in the morning just so she wouldn’t be at home creating havoc.”

It wasn’t always thus – for the first 10 years of their marriage, his wife didn’t drink at all. “It was about six or seven years after that, that I remember realising our friends were different to us. We would go to a wedding and I could give it a lash but it would always come to a point where I would want to go home eventually and our friends were the same. But she never wanted to go home.”

He tells me that he spent his life acting as his wife’s carer, watching and worrying 24 hours a day. In return she was abusive towards him – mentally, emotionally and physically. He was willing to put up with it because years of trying to cope with alcoholism had left him with a legacy of fear and low self-esteem. He was angry and resentful towards her and had suicidal thoughts himself.

“You lose sight of the fact that you are not living your own life,” he says.

The anonymity of Al-Anon was vital, he says. “It took me ages to build up trust in the people in that room. It’s that guarantee that you won’t hear any of the stories back that was important to me. The motto goes ‘what you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here when you leave here’.”

Recently, Bill made the difficult decision to split from his wife and they no longer live together. “I was working towards it for years but, of course, there was still huge guilt and pain there before the strings were finally cut.

“I was terribly worried about where she would end up but I have got to the point now where I have stopped blaming myself. I have no feelings for her at all now. There is no love there, but there is no anger or resentment either. I hope that she finds sobriety. I could be her friend again, but not her husband. I have peace and serenity in my life now and I know that I deserve the best that life can give me.”

While AA and Al-Anon are non-denominational, there is much mention of God in the 12 Steps. The origins of AA can be traced back through founder Bill Wilson to an early 20th century Christian organisation called the Oxford Group which practised self-improvement by performing self-inventory, admitting wrongs, making amends, and practising prayer and meditation.

Both Anne and Bill insist however that the group is not prescriptive about what form that God should take. “We talk about a power ‘greater than ourselves’,” says Anne.

“If people are uncomfortable with the notion of God, then the power greater than themselves can be other members of the group or someone who has more experience or knowledge than they do. I think that the approach is spiritual rather than religious.”

Anne’s husband has found sobriety, she says (“At the moment I do not live with active alcoholism, but you never know when this disease will hit you again”) and she encourages those in the same position as she was to get in contact with Al-Anon.

“It gives you back hope. It gives you an hour a week where you can sit in a room and listen and learn from other people and realise that you’re not alone. All you have to do is give your first name.”

Source: Michael Kelly, The Irish Times, 27/01/2009