Living With Addiction And Breaking The Alcoholic Family Rules

When I was a young girl, I had a couple of uncles that lived on skid row in Minneapolis. My family lived in South Minneapolis. My dad's uncles would come and visit. Their medicine was a bottle in a brown paper bag.

As kids, we would stand back and poke them with a stick when they would be passed out. They would come up punching. We didn't know then that they were expressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They had been in the armed services. We just thought it was funny!

When I got a little older, I thought that they were what alcoholism looked like. Old men, living on skid row, with a bottle of cheap alcohol in a brown paper bag. When I was ten years old, and my dad died, my mother would say that my dad was a weekend alcoholic. He would drink Friday and Saturday night and be in bed on Sundays with the Sunday paper much of the day.

After dad died, my grandpa moved in with us and she told the story of how grandpa used to be an alcoholic. He had jumped out of the upstairs in their house to get away to drink. Grandma had locked the door and wouldn't let him out to go drink after he came back from town with no money.

Grandpa got hurt jumping out of the second-story window and never drank again. I never saw him drink.

My mother's brothers would come and spend time with us and most of them drank. One uncle got into recovery when I was young and one uncle had epilepsy and didn't drink, but four other uncles did drink.

When I was an adult, one uncle was walking home drunk and was run down by a hit-and-run driver. He didn't drink after that. The only good thing about that was most of his kids stopped drinking then too.

One uncle would come and read Louis L'amour's books and drink 3.2 beer every day. He would go out occasionally and come back with a woman he would introduce to us as an auntie. My mom had an old shed that two of her brothers fixed up as a "sugar shack". That is what they called it. That is where those aunties would stay when visiting. Not too long though as mom tore down the shed!

My mother drank very little when I was growing up but she did take diet pills and other pills for various ailments. Vitamin V, or valium was one. When my children were young yet, mom told me that her psychiatrist told her, "No more pills, you get out there and walk!" She demonstrated by pointing and shaking her finger in the direction of the outdoors and made a scrunched-up face.

She started to drink alcohol more after that and I then had the talk with her about not coming over if she was drinking and how we would leave if we got there and she was drinking. I told her that when she drank she would get sarcastic and mean.

I was going to support groups for my addiction and husband and families addictions by this time.

She then told others that I said she was an alcoholic. It was okay as when she became diabetic she would tell others that she stopped drinking because of her diabetes.

The alcoholic family rules I broke with my children. They attended their support group and that helped them and me. One day my son said, "When dad gets home, I am going to keep him so busy that he can't drink!" My heart sank. Then his sister said, "Pat if you were listening in meetings, you would know that is step one."

The things the kids said were so helpful to me in my recovery!!

Somewhere along the line, I learned some alcoholic family rules that are meant to be broken in recovery. Breaking them helps to break the cycle of addiction, I was told. No guarantees but it will help! It was a job breaking the alcoholic family rules, but I knew it was important and had to be done.

Do not talk, is keeping the family secrets. A hole punched in the wall? Is a cousin being stabbed by his girlfriend? No, that never happened.

I knew this had worked when my daughter was asked at her 12th birthday party where her dad was and she said, "He is in jail as he had a driving while intoxicated!" Then they went on with the party. No big deal!

Do not feel, means that feelings aren't okay. If you are feeling happy, someone is going to get hurt. You can't be happy, sad, mad, glad, etc.

I knew this worked when my daughter told me that she hated me. I didn't like it but she didn't care. That was how she was feeling at the time. "Remember mom, feelings aren't good or bad, they just are," she said.

I then just needed to have more conversations about the consequences of feelings and actions that will happen. Like grounding. My children had a wide variety of feelings, unlike me. I would go to my head to figure out how I should feel in different circumstances.

Do not trust, is what you learn. Mom says, "Always tell the truth!" and the next minute, a phone call for her comes in and she whispers, "Tell them I am not here."

I broke this by being honest and not making promises that I could not or would not keep. That then was the expectation. If mom says something, you can trust that and that is what they came to expect and learned to do.

I love alcoholics and drug addicts. Always have, always will. No better people in this world in my mind! Now, having said that, I prefer recovering alcoholics/drug addicts! Then 'they' (experts) will tell you that you can't help a family member. Someone else has to do that. That is the hard part.

Even being married to a recovering alcoholic and having children in recovery, our grandchildren can still be affected and our great-grandchildren are still too young, but my husband thinks he knows who they are as they are 'his people' he will say.

I say, "Let's figure out how to intervene now! There has to be prevention activity we can help with."

He says, "They know about our recovery, they have been to meetings with us, they know where to go if they get into trouble with addiction. That is helping" I don't think he thinks there is any way to prevent it.

Breaking the alcoholic family rules is a way to make a difference. Let's try that!