After working in the alcohol and drug counselling field for 15 years, I am still surprised when people tell me they can’t be an alcoholic because they have a job / own a business / are a responsible parent or some other marker to remove them from their image of what a ‘real alcoholic’ looks like. The alcoholic stereotype, apparently, is someone like a dribbling old bag lady drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag on a park bench. I can tell you if that was the case, I might be out of a job.
Stereotypes don’t help anyone
*Cathy grew up in Australia in the ‘70s and ‘80s in a typical working-class-turned-middle-class family. They had a good life with a tennis-playing mum at home looking after the kids and Dad owning a successful finance business. Living in a smart family home with a swimming pool and Golden Retriever in the backyard, the kids went to private schools and they all went on holidays twice a year. Their lives were very social – BBQs and visits to family beer gardens every weekend and booze – usually a lot – every night. Everyone seemed to have a similar lifestyle, Cathy recalls. ‘It would be un-Australian if you didn’t.’
Now nearing 50, Cathy is five years sober after battling with alcoholism for her entire adult life. Looking back at her upbringing, she now realises that the heavy daily drinking sessions were a signpost of alcoholism in her family.
‘My father couldn’t sleep unless he had alcohol. Once he went four nights without a wink of sleep because he was trying to stop drinking. When he was hungover, which was all day, every day, we couldn’t wait for him to have a drink at night so he would stop being angry and irritable.’
Her Mum, too, had a treacherous relationship with alcohol. ‘She was always trying to get Dad to drink less because he sometimes got aggro and would drive us around drunk and do other stupid things. But she was just as bad. I remember I could get anything I wanted if I made sure I asked her after 6 o’clock at night when she’d had a few drinks.’
Although it looked good on the outside, the constant fighting, abuse and ‘a sense that the ground was always shifting under me’ ensured a tumultuous childhood. ‘I didn’t have any ways to deal with my problems, except drinking. That’s what my parents did to get through everything in their lives, and so I did that too.’
Now fully aware of what alcoholism looks like – ‘I just open up my family album, and there it is, in generation after generation’ – Cathy laughs at her old ideas about the disease. ‘Dad used to say the yobbos on the dole were alchies, or maybe the old boys at RSA. He certainly wasn’t like them, but I now know he was an alcoholic.
‘Mum too, would never dream of calling herself an alcoholic but I know for a fact she wouldn’t miss her drinks for anything. Every single night, she would be up to her armpits in scotch and Cokes and was barely coherent by our bedtime. But every day, she’d get up, get us ready for school, put on her lipstick and played the part, although she must have felt awful.’
Now a mother of two, Cathy is a tertiary-educated, professional woman who owns her own home and business. You’d be hard-pressed to guess that she’s spent most of her adult life as a ‘party girl’ fighting a fierce internal struggle deciding if she would drink or not. ‘Alcohol was like a bad boyfriend – it promised so much but delivered nothing but misery. It prevented me from reaching my potential earlier in life and severely eroded my relationships, and my mental and physical health. People don’t realise that when they look at me, as I just look like someone’s Mum and certainly not someone who was on the vinos every night. But I know that I’m an alcoholic because when I start drinking, I can’t stop, or more importantly, I don’t want to stop. When I am in my untreated disease, I am secretly obsessed with where the next drink is coming from, and then admonish myself for wanting to drink when I know I shouldn’t. Alcohol – whether I’m drinking it or not – takes up my every waking thought.’
Alcoholism doesn’t discriminate
Problematic drinking, or alcoholism, can affect anyone from any walk of life, at any part of their journey. So, how do you know if you have a problem? Ask yourself these questions:
If someone feels they have to control their drinking, do they have a problem?
Do you often drink more than you intend to and then regret it? Are you ashamed of your behaviour while you’re drinking?
Do you hide how much you are drinking?
Do you think about drinking all the time?
Need help with a drinking problem or drug problem? Not sure? Thinkstraight can help. Call Simone on 027 444 5798 for a confidential chat.
*Cathy is not her real name.