It’s Alcohol Awareness Month: So What Does It Do to Your Insides to Live With an Alcoholic? [HuffingtonPost.com]

[Photo by Alberto Abouganem Stephens]

April is “Alcohol Awareness Month.” On the surface this appears to be about alcohol, its use and abuse, it implies that we need to learn more about why a person might drink alcoholically or, by extension use other substances to their detriment. But there is a much larger story here. It’s the story of all of those mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins who care about and are concerned about this person who is abusing alcohol. And even closer to the bone it is about the partners and children of alcoholics and the day-to-day suffering that becomes their life.

So what happens to them?

At least the alcoholic can put on those proverbial rose-colored glasses when the going gets rough. When something in their lives feels too painful to sit with, they don’t have to, they can get rid of their pain by numbing it out with alcohol. But the people who love and rely on them, who see them at the breakfast table, plan crisscrossing days, who want to count on them for a ride to school, a talk about their day or a steady pay check but can’t feel at ease doing it... these people are going through the experience cold sober. The pain they feel at watching the person they once thought they knew morph slowly into some confusing, unreachable version of their old self, these people are not using a substance to numb out their pain. They just feel like they are going slowly mad, like someone has turned the volume up on the noise factor in their heads. And they are stuck feeling it. Which is why their disease of co-addiction, codependency or trauma related stress mushrooms right along side the addicts disease of addiction. Which is why they deny, minimize, intellectualize, dissociate and at times act crazier than even the alcoholic.