Addiction and the Demon Drink (Part 4)

By Steve Ashley, Registered Psychotherapist.

In Part 3 of this series, we looked at how an addiction can often be seen as a problem in its own right, while I suggested that the underlying causes of the addiction must be understood if the person, who is lost inside the addict somewhere, is to regain control of their life.  This is not to deny the very real impact of a serious addiction on partners, friends and most significantly, the children of such a household, especially when we remember that in the many cases of physical and sexual abuse of partners and children, problematic use of alcohol is to be found.

So how can someone in such a desperate situation find their way back?  This is a very complex problem to resolve and, clichéd as it might be, it really has to start with some spark of a wish to end the situation from the person at the centre of it.  Even when this is present there are many barriers to success. 

Current informed thinking suggests that an improved chance of success can be found in a combination approach, where medical, psychological and social responses combine to support the addict through what will be a very difficult journey back.  The medical model can support in a variety of ways, through anti-depressants to help ease the loss of the pain-numbing effect of alcohol or the temporary and rapidly less satisfying high from narcotics. Other drugs are available that can help underpin willpower by causing the most unpleasant physical reactions should the patient decide to take alcohol while consuming them. Of course in the most difficult situations, medical supervision and sometimes in-patient care is necessary to safely wean a person from alcohol dependence, especially where there has been physical damage through chronic addiction. This can be even more complex than it might seem as it is not unknown for people to have multiple addictions, maybe to both alcohol and other drugs, prescribed or not, and these require similar but different approaches.

A second plank in a strategy to help someone move forward from addiction is therapy and counselling. From a therapeutic perspective, psychotherapy can help an individual manage many aspects of the addiction.  I talked earlier about gaining access to and understanding the reasons beneath the addiction. This is imperative if the illness is to be resolved and many “successful” treatments see a return to the addiction if these fundamental issues are not addressed. Furthermore, in some cases of successful treatment of addiction to alcohol, a new addiction often becomes apparent some months later, maybe gambling or dangerous sexual practices. For me, this is evidence that you have to get at the root of the problem. For many people there is much work to do as people start to understand the internal, psychic pain that drove them towards addiction, and this is often accompanied by intense guilt when they finally take responsibility for their addiction and the harm it has done to themselves and their family.

But where does this leave the rest of the family?  Where they have been living with the impact of the alcoholic’s behaviour, there may well be work needed to allow them to adjust to the new situation and deal with anger and hurt they have endured.  Here to counselling can provide a mechanism and tools for dealing with this in a positive and least threatening way – in many ways we will be working to help the family relationships be re-established, although never in the way they were before the illness set-in. Furthermore, children of alcoholics or of addicts of any kind, run a much greater risk of turning to addictive behaviours as a method of regulating their feelings towards their world and their place in it.  There is research evidence that demonstrates that even in less extreme situations it requires responsible use of alcohol by parents, and the regarding of it as a serious issue, for a child to employ sensible use of alcohol as a teenager and an adult.  I will look more at trans-generational issues around addiction in the next article in this series.

The third plank in resolving addiction is social support.  Here friends and family can be invaluable, assuming they still feel able to support the individual. However other forms of support are available and many readers will be aware of the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, which operates confidentially along the Costas. If you feel their support might help you, you can find a local meeting at  www.aa-europe.net as well as in many local papers, including Euro Weekly News.

I hope you have found this series of articles informative and useful – you can find the complete set at www.onthecouchwithsteve.com  I would like to acknowledge those readers who have taken the time to E-mail and detail their experiences - sharing knowledge really is the way forward for all of us. Until next time!