Point Of No Return: My Mom And Her Alcoholism

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

THE DRINKING HUSBAND IS A CLASSICAL IMAGE: scary, sad, but quite ordinary. The drinking woman is still perceived as nonsense. In her best periods, my mother was wonderful. She was incredibly vital - and vulnerable. Very open to everything - sometimes this openness became painful, turned into attempts to force other people to open up too, even if they did not want to.

She was actually my grandmother. My own mother went abroad and I was raised by my grandparents. By some miracle, we passed the problem of lack of money in the nineties, so if you do not concentrate on family ties, my family could well be called prosperous. All the time that I can remember myself, I called my grandmother mom. As a child, I adored her. Most of all, I enjoyed sitting with her in the kitchen, doing her homework while she cooked dinner and watched "Fashionable Sentence" or "The Court Is Coming." A dog was always spinning under her feet, and in the summer my mother opened the balcony, and the warm wind touched the thin cream curtains. This picture for me is a symbol of all the best that was in my childhood. Every hour I had to hug or kiss her, as if to check if everything was all right, if she was with me, if something had changed in this universe. Every night before going to bed, I did not need to talk to her for long. I was always worried about her, but I did not know why.

In my youth, it was hard with my mother. She expected from me the same closeness as before, but I wanted to go into the world, I wanted to change it, to look for people who are ready to do this with me. Like all teenagers, I was carried away by myself and my feelings and did not notice how my mother was getting worse. She stopped going to yoga, talked less and less with her friends. It seems to me that I was for her something like a window into another reality, not connected with washing and cleaning. Mom was a housewife in our rather patriarchal (or rather just a typical Soviet) family, where at twenty-one - the first child, and at forty-five - grandchildren, jellied meat and husband. The latter needs dinner and emotional support after work. Mom, who rode a motorcycle in her youth, flew gliders and lost her eardrum, because she did not want to give up the parachute jump because of some cold, was very cramped.

“I would like to be a psychologist. I wish I could go to study! " - she dreamed in bright moments. Or: “I want to paint pictures. I haven't been to the theater for a hundred years. " “I was sick of this cooking, this house. I am here as a servant for everyone, "- in difficult times. I missed the moment when, instead of the usual detective stories and knitting magazines, books like "How to deal with depression" and "Five steps to balance" began to appear in the house. Maybe I was just afraid to notice these signs as requests for help. Everything was approaching the point of no return, and when I turned eighteen, my mother had a binge.

Her alcohol addiction came as a shock to me. From all sides, details began to pour in: even before my appearance, my mother wanted to leave her husband for another, but my grandfather threatened to take the children away, and she stayed. I started drinking.

One day she left the house drunk and was raped. I was in the hospital. Then I tried to encode - the first time it didn't work. I went to some strange esoteric conversations. She was able to stop drinking only when I appeared at home. This can hardly be called my merit, rather I was just a child who was left alone, was looking for love and wanted someone to always be there. She wanted the same.

At eighteen I was not ready for this, for another mother, about whom I knew nothing. My family spoke of her as something shameful, and it hurt and frightened me. Old grudges and a lot of heavy words fell on me. In general, at some point I decided that I couldn't take it anymore, took a dog, a few things and left to live in a dacha.

The booze lasted three months. Mom ran away from home twice, once stole money. For days she lay on the bed, facing the wall. Destroyed the apartment at night. Her grandfather sent her to a drug dispensary, but it only got worse. He tried to "educate" her, took away her passport, forbade her to leave the house. It is important to say here that I do not consider my grandfather to be guilty of this story. He was a man of his time, a child of the thirties, a pilot in a military factory. He grew up in a society with very repressive ideas about how a man "should" act - decisively, without hesitation. It seems to me that the grandfather simply did not know what to do in this situation, and this ignorance pissed him off. After all, he is used to being solid in the most extreme circumstances: a falling plane, a burning engine, an overload of 15G. These situations were different from what he had to face. There was no correct solution. Mom committed suicide.

Everything can be different Experts distinguish several stages of alcohol addiction. Often people exceed the norm, but do not have dependence on alcohol and are able to stop drinking on their own. Addiction is just beginning to form: a person gradually needs more and more to feel drunk, and he drinks more and more often. At the first stage of alcohol addiction, a person ceases to control the amount of alcohol consumed, because he cannot stop. At the second stage of addiction, a person develops a hangover syndrome: most people who have drunk too much do not want to drink anymore in the morning (as with any other poisoning, we do not want to use what makes us so bad), but a person with addiction alcohol on the contrary, it makes you feel better.

In the last twenty years, the difference between the number of women and men suffering from alcohol dependence has greatly decreased in the world. In Russia, you can see similar processes: in the late eighties, the ratio of women and men with alcohol dependence was about 1:10, by the beginning of the two thousandth it was already 1: 6. At the same time, the Russian situation may be associated not only with global trends, but also with economic crises. The data of the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population (RLMS) in 2005 show that in Russia the volume of alcohol consumption directly depends on the quality of life in a particular region.

In our country, there is still a stereotype about a special "female" alcohol addiction: it is believed that women are in a special risk group, and their addiction is incurable.

Physicians and psychologists often say that women are more susceptible to alcohol because of their body characteristics and because they are more emotional.

Some scientists believe that from a physiological point of view, alcohol actually affects women more and more quickly. Studies show that women on average weigh less than men and have less water in their bodies, which is why women are exposed to higher concentrations of toxic substances when drinking alcohol. In addition, alcohol affects the hormones of men and women in different ways.

Olga Isupova, a gender researcher and sociologist at the Higher School of Economics, looks at the problem of female alcohol addiction a little differently. In her article "YouMother: Inevitable Heroism and the Inescapable Guilt of Motherhood", she connects alcohol problems in women with gender stereotypes in society, social pressure from the family and others. Our current "conservative turn", according to Yusupova, turns out not to be the general happiness of "ideal" families, but to depression, addiction to alcohol and even violence against children. This idea is also important because alcohol dependence is a social problem, and stereotypes about femininity and masculinity play an important role here.

Studies have shown that women with alcohol dependence are much less likely to quit drinking, says Nancy Cross of Women for Sobriety Inc., the first non-profit organization in the United States to help women overcome alcohol dependence. WfS has been working for over forty years, and the organization is convinced that women need a different recovery program than men: if at the physiological level, recovery is about the same, then at the emotional level, women need other forms of support. There are no men among the WfS employees, the work is based on the mutual assistance of women - in groups, in closed forums and by telephone hotline. This allows women with alcohol addictions to discuss topics that are relevant to them: for example, breast cancer, the risk of which can increase if a woman drinks, or the experience of rape - painful issues that sometimes only get to talk about with someone who has experienced something similar.

Support, even from complete strangers, is important for those trying to recover from alcohol addiction. This is especially true of women stigmatized and rejected by society. This is not only about meeting in groups, but also about support on the Internet - here you can find many stories of those who quit drinking or are just on the way to it. There are also famous people who come out in a way, talking about alcohol problems. For some, recognition translates into a whole project, such as, for example, with the American ABC News journalist Elizabeth Vargas. In 2016, she published a book about her rehabilitation experience, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. This is a serious challenge to public opinion: it is believed that problems with alcohol are incompatible with "true" femininity, and the "shameful" issue of female alcohol addiction is practically not discussed.

Where to go? In the first stage of the disease, a person can stop drinking or reduce the amount of alcohol consumed on their own, following simple recommendations. For example, you can try to stretch your alcohol portions and drink more slowly, monitor the amount you drink, and pay attention to triggers - situations and people who urge you to drink more even if you don't feel like it.

With addiction at a later stage, things are more complicated. One of the most common solutions to a problem is to contact Alcoholics Anonymous. On the Internet, you can find a site with information about the work of such groups in different cities of Russia. In my hometown near Moscow, there are two AA groups, both of them, like many others, work on the basis of Orthodox churches. There is no separate women's group, although they exist in Moscow - one of them, for example, is called "Girls", its members also gather on the territory of an Orthodox church, in an outbuilding.

The Orthodox bias is characteristic of many A. A. groups in Russia. Even the programs of those operating on the basis of state drug dispensaries may include reading prayers, communicating with an Orthodox priest, and other similar events. A striking example is the group with the biblical name "Rehavit", the meetings of which are held in the Moscow drug dispensary number 9.

Another problem is that the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous groups is not clear. For example, a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Bancole Johnson, argues that completely avoiding alcohol is not the only possible way to cope with the problem.

A member of the group may feel intense shame and guilt, and abandon treatment attempts when they get lost. You don't have to give up alcohol for good - you can learn to stop on time.

This allows you to do the program "moderate drinking", that is, moderate consumption of alcohol. The participant sets a norm for himself, which should not be exceeded (an approximate one can be found, for example, here), and adheres to it. Some program participants keep diaries where they record when and how much they drink.

In situations where a person cannot immediately and completely stop drinking alcohol, experts may advise another approach: to minimize the harm from alcohol consumed, that is, to ensure that a person drinks alcohol less often and in smaller doses. For this, prescription drugs are used - opioid receptor blockers, thanks to which, even if a person drinks, he does not experience pleasure. In addition, psychotherapy often helps in the treatment of alcohol dependence: alcohol consumption often disguises other problems.

Back to top It is difficult to help someone who is not ready or unable to make an effort to recover. I understand those who break off relationships with alcohol addicts without regret, because there can be a lot of lies, fear, anger, emotional and physical abuse in them. Alcohol addiction, like any other, affects a person's personality, his habits.

Nevertheless, it is in our power to change the situation. The first step in solving a problem is to talk about it. The second is to abandon the stigmatization of people with alcohol dependence, and in particular women. The notion that only people without education or with a low level of income are faced with it is wrong: such problems can arise even in the most prosperous, at first glance, families - and the difference in the harm from drinking cheap and expensive alcohol is only in how the body is affected by the impurities of the drink.

Now neither mom nor grandfather is gone. I remember them with great gratitude and love, because they gave me a happy childhood. Five years after my mother's death - after years of talking with friends, psychologists and treatment - I have come to a balance, and I have many plans for the future. Among other things, I would like to change the attitude towards the problem of female alcohol addiction. I often think that things could have been different in my story. Less repressive family model, less pressure and more opportunities. More freedom of choice. More paths to recovery. I am sure that all this is necessary, including that there are fewer such stories.