Newbie needs help!! - Al-Anon Family Group

mugwump · Newbie

Newbie needs help!!

el-cee · ~*Service Worker*~

Alanon meetings are held in most towns and cities. There you will get support for you and your husband and you can learn about alcoholism and the best way to deal with it and not let it drive you crazy.

Debilyn · ~*Service Worker*~

Welcome.

It's a hard truth, but we must allow them to fall down to learn how to get up. We can do nothing for them. This is a disease she needs to fight on her own, when she is ready.

She may need to be homeless and cold to figure out the problem, face it and get help from AA.

You and yours are best to go to Al Anon to learn the truths about addiction.

We learn to stay out of their disease, as we only make it worse.

She is following the path of most A's. So we learn to take care of us.Just loving them, and allowing them to find their own way. Most times it is not pretty.

hugs, please keep coming

pinkchip · ~*Service Worker*~

Mugwump, I think Alanon will help you and your husband tremendously though it will not appear evident why until you continue with it for a while. Yes, you are powerless over her disease and her choices and it is sad.

I can see that there is a need to say or do something and I support that. You can stage some sort of intervention or really break it down for your MIL with some honest straight-talk, but again - she probably will not hear it or really take it in - if and until she is ready.

I see both good and bad going on here believe it or not. The bad is obvious - The good is that she will have nothing else to blame her drinking soon and also no place to really engage in it comfortably, so you may have a bit of leverage (not control or power) over her getting help.

I do think she is prime candidate for a good 3 months of rehab (at least 1 month). It doesn't sound like she can function and the disease is pretty far progressed. So yeah, I could see trying to make arrangements for her to go to rehab and then the whole family will have to agree that it's either rehab or you all bow out of her life and don't take part in her disease until she gets into treatment.

Even then, you guys will need Alanon almost as much as she will need ongoing AA because this is a powerful disease. You may watch her sober up, function better, start to get her life on track, and then throw it away again on booze. Maddening how a person can repeatedly do that and you have no control over it.

So, I guess what I am saying here is that if she has insurance or can afford it, rehab would be a good option at this point. You cannot make her go or stay sober, but you and your husband and the rest of the family can stop dancing around the disease and speak your truth and set up some serious boundaries.

grateful2be · ~*Service Worker*~

I support the others' suggestions and want to welcome you to MIP. I have known some older folks who drank consistently and then stopped for different reasons. None of those reasons really had to do with family or friends intervening as much as it had to do with them recognizing how much they were losing with their continued practice of drinking or because of health issues that forced them into at least a dry state if not a sober state. Your MIL will do what she will do and Al-Anon will help you take good care of you no matter what she does. The active A can draw us deeply into their drama. Al-Anon helps us focus on ourselves and stay out of their affairs.

mugwump · Newbie

Many thanks for your advice so far!
Just to clarify, I am the *husband* although not married! lol

Your comments about the fact that there is fundamentally nothing we can do has helped my partner. She is feeling upset and guilty that we aren't *doing* anything, because we don't know what we can do.
In the last 24 hours, the MIL has stated that she will go to the doctors. Although this has been said in the past, so we are hot holding our breaths.
There is one GP who we think she would actually talk to honestly, however, the way the system works here, you don't really get a choice in who you see.

My partner has said she will go with her, partly for support, and also to make sure she actually goes, however, this offer has been turned down so far.
The MIL is being spoken to by lots of people, including her son and daughter, sisters etc, and we are hoping this gets the message home that we all know there is a major problem, and that we want to help her through it. Although as you have all said, she may not be paying any attention to it at all.

It is just such a shame, as it means she is not seeing her grandchildren growing up, and is loosing everything she had, including family, car, home, friends, job etc....

We spoke to my partners dad yesterday, and he has said there has always been an underlying problem, which on occasion has become an issue, although I don't think he understands the extent to which it has gone to this time. My partner is planning to speak to him, for support for herself and her brother as much as anything else, but we didn't want to ruin his Christmas by doing that over the last couple of days.

The MIL's father also had a drink issue in later life, which they later believed was to either mask the effects, or caused by the fact he had a brain tumour.
So I am guessing that if it is in the genetic makeup, it isn't going to be an easy thing to fix...

Also concerned as there are signs of it affecting her physically too. She has lost a dramatic amount of weight over the last couple of months, and seems to be constantly covered in bruises, which apparently appear very easily according to people around her. This alongside the fact she suffers from MS is going to have some health problems soon I think. :(

It's just very hard knowing what to say or do for my partner, who is upset, angry and guilty all at the same time. Just feel a little helpless really.
I did mention the Al-Anon meetings to her, and am hoping she will think about it.
=)

hotrod · ~*Service Worker*~

Welcome mupwump I too would like to stress that we are powerless over alcoholism as well as alcoholic . We who interact with the disease develop negative coping tools that do not work. We keep on repeating those tools and become irritable and unreasonable without knowing it .

We, as well as the alcoholic need a program of recovery . Alanon is that program. It is here that I learned to take the focus off the person over which I was powerless (the alcoholic) place my attention on myself, learn new tools to live by and receive the support I so desperately needed.

Breaking the isolation caused by living with the insanity is a huge step to recovery and to restoring my ability to look for alternate solutions to help myself.

Please search out meetings and attend.

Keep coming back here as well her is hope.

The material presented here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method to exchange information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal level.