Posts Tagged ‘alcoholic’
The Banana Man
I have seen Cirrhosis up close and it’s not pretty. One of my lifelong friends and my former business partner is an alcoholic. His name is John and he promised to stay on the wagon to entice me to work with him, and it proved to be the biggest mistake of my life. He lives in San Francisco and I in Chicago, so he was out of my sight doing his thing most of the time.His wife had passed away recently after a brief illness and John wasn’t handling it very well. I suspected he was drinking again. Those fears were confirmed when I received a phone call four or five months after his wife’s passing from a mutual friend who said John had been taken to the hospital after a binge.He said John might not make it.
I hopped on the next plane and got to California and took a cab to the hospital. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My friend was the color of a fresh banana–sort of like the Incredible Hulk but the color of French’s mustard. He was babbling incomprehensible phrases. He recognized me but quickly forgot I was there. A group of our Bay Area friends met at the hospital. The doctors said he was very ill. One pulled me aside and said my friend had Cirrohisis, which wasn’t a surprise from his appearance.His liver had shut down–liver failure, and as I learned over the next few days, when your liver goes, so does everything else in your body, The liver controls most of your major organs, at least in a dependant way. His kidneys were failing and he had to go on dialysis treatments three times a day.
Bedside Vigil
Most of the next week he really didn’t know where he was. The doctors said the next few days were critical but that he probaby wouldn’t make it six months even if he survived this immediate crisis. I literally spent thirty minutes talking to him one morning trying to get him to give me the details on how to retrieve his phone messages back at his apartment. He couldn’t remember the password. And this entire time his body was still 100% pure banana colored. It was an awful experience for everybody.
Kidney Dialysis 3 Times A Day
A week passes and he starts to get better. Gradually. He’s still on dialysis three times a day, but at least he can talk fairly cogently. And slowly he regains his personality–starts kidding with all the nurses and telling stories. After three weeks he was discharged but had to go to a half-way house that could take care of his dialysis and other medical needs. He would get transported three times a day in a van to a clinic where the dialysis was done. I flew home as I had been there a month and had a lot of business matters to attend to and see my wife, who was very supportive during this period.
A month goes by and my friend’s best friend in SF calls and says John is going home–he’s getting out of the half-way house after six weeks, but still requires dialysis daily, but now just once a day. I flew back to San Francisco and we all (there were about six of us) go out to celebrate John’s birthday. As dinner ended and we were having a cognac (not John!), our mutual friend says he wants to make an announcement. He makes a toast and says that today is a special day. It’s John’s birthday, and he’s pleased to announce that the doctors have decided he no longer needs dialysis! There was a hurrah that filled the restaurant!
It was truly a remarkable experience. But I was reflecting on the plane back to Chicago how 30 years earlier John and the rest of us Irish Catholic boys would spend our evenings in the bars of Georgetown, getting drunk and chasing women. We had a lot of laughs, something we repeated many times together over the years. It was really part of our culture.
But this is where it led. And there were no laughs and jokes being told. If it weren’t so personally tragic, I wish we could have fast-forwarded into the future from those early care-free days to see what drinking and alcoholism is all about and where it leads.
Luck Of The Irish (At Least Some Of Them)
John was lucky, and his liver bounced back and healed. But the doctors told him that he could never drink alcohol again–that it would poison him, like drinking a glass of cyanide. And you know what? John hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since. He still goes to bars and shoots the bull with his friends. But he drinks diet soda instead of the ever-present beer. And he’s enjoying his life just as much as before. Lucky for him. He got a second chance.
Alcohol Is A Killer
If you or someone you know is a heavy drinker and has looked a little jaundiced of late, it’s probably a sign that the liver is damaged. Before it gets to the point my friend faced there are some natural homeopathic remedies to detox your liver and get you back on the right track. Of course, once you go through this process, you need to be committed to a life of alcohol abstinance if you want to live a longer life. Not lecturing here, but those are just the facts.
Good luck!
Published By Rehab Help Online
If you or someone you know needs alcoholism help then you might want to consider taking action. So what is the ideal action to take? In my opinion the ideal siutation is for the struggling alcoholic to find a rehab center that has a professional detox area and get checked in. This is the best course of action for a number of reasons:
1) Safety – it is actually very dangerous to stop drinking alcohol and in fact the withdrawal from alcohol can kill a person. This might sound crazy but it is safer to drink than it is to just stop suddenly without any medical support. Therefore the best thing you can do is to get to a medical facility where you can come off the alcohol in a safe environment.
2) Support – there is a ton of support to be had in a residential treatment center and this will come from the other people who are there trying to accomplish the same feat as you are. Having peer support in recovery is huge because we help each other to stay sober through sharing our experience and strength with each other.
3) Aftercare – most drug rehab centers don’t just let you go without some sort of follow up plan in place. This plan might include long term treatment, counseling, or meeting attendance. Either way you’re bound to receive some extra help and knowledge about how to overcome alcoholism when you check out of treatment.
And what if an alcoholic is not ready to attend rehab? If this is true then there’s not much to be done about it. In some countries or states there is the possibility of committing an alcoholic to rehab but this can create ill feelings and might actually backfire in the end. The better option in this is case is normally to offer treatment to someone and let them know that the option is available when they are ready to change.
The best way to help an alcoholic is through modifying your own behavior, not attempting to control theirs. This means that you do not try to control or manipulate them. Do not try to beg them to stop drinking. Do not threaten them or shame them or engage with angry arguments with them. None of these concepts help much. At best these ploys will create false hope before they fail to work. At worst they make the drinker dive deeper into addiction and isolation. If you’ve made it to this breaking point then you’ll want to know how can I help an alcoholic?
The first idea for you to grasp in attempting to help the alcoholic is that they are eventually going to make a decision to change for themselves, or they will not change at all. What you must understand is that the choice has to be theirs. You and others cannot take this crucial step for them. Not you, not a jail cell, not their parents, nobody.
The second thing that you need to come to grips with is that change for the typical alcoholic is generally prompted by pain and misery. Unfortunately this is the way it has to be. The alcoholic will eventually see that they’ve had enough chaos and despair on their journey and make a choice to do something different. This is the only driving force that makes real change. You could promise them a life of paradise if they quit drinking and this will do nothing to motivate them. The motivation has to come from pain and fear and misery.
Given these two ideas, you should be able to see where this is going. The most critical concept in working with a struggling alcoholic is that you should not attempt to deprive them of their misery. The struggling alcoholic is caught in a cycle of both good times and bad times with their drinking episodes, and you should do your best to get out of the way and allow them to face their own consequences. For example, if an alcoholic gets loaded on the weekends and can’t make it to work on Monday morning, they might lose their job. Let them lose it. Do not attempt to cover for them or help them to keep their life held together. This is part of their pain and you should not deny them of it. Doing so will keep them trapped in the cycle of alcoholism. Let them lose it experience their misery and they just might find recovery in the future. This is probably the best way to really help an alcoholic.
For the true alcoholic, the idea that they can just stop drinking is no light matter. Given that there are a number of different methods to stop, which are most effective in most cases?
1) Willpower – This is essentially the same as not using any technique at all, but only relying on one’s own willpower to avoid picking up another drink. Of course this has been attempted by numerous drunks over the years and time and time again we prove to ourselves that we cannot quit successfully without serious help. Ever.
2) AVRT – this stands for “Addictive Voice Recognition Technique,” so this is essentially an example of a cognitive therapy for quitting drinking. The trick is to realize when your “addictive voice” kicks in and realize that it is only your addiction talking to you and not your true self. The you can deny the addictive voice once you are aware of it and can actively respond to it.
There are other therapies out there that are similar to this, each with the concept that we can change up our thinking in order to change our behavior. These types of therapies probably do work for some people, but for the vast majority of alcoholics, cognitive therapies are insufficient to solve their problem.
3) AA – Twelve step programs are probably the most widespread solution for alcoholism, and because of this, they offer the most amount of hope and the most realistic solution for most people in most situations. Of course there are some pitfalls and downsides to Alcoholics Anonymous as well. For one thing–while it is difficult to find accurate data regarding this–the success rate in AA is probably somewhere in the range of 3 to 10 percent. To be fair, though, no other treatment method seems to offer substantially better numbers than this, and AA certainly has helped a lot of those who wanted to know how to stop drinking.
The problem is not that AA doesn’t work for people, but only that it does not work for the majority and if it does then it usually requires a supplemental strategy. The best solution for sobriety is an integrated strategy that considers every aspect and dimension of the alcoholic person. This is what we might call the creative theory of recovery in action. Finding your way to this solution requires a holistic approach if you want to stop drinking.
If you or someone you know needs help with alcoholism then you might want to consider taking action. So what is the most effective approach? In my opinion the ideal siutation is for the struggling alcoholic to find a rehab center that has a professional detox area and get checked in. This is the best course of action for a number of reasons:
1) Safety – it is actually very dangerous to stop drinking alcohol and in fact the withdrawal from alcohol can kill a person. This might sound counter-intuitive but it is actually safer to continue drinking alcohol than it is to go through detox unsupervised. So the best course of action is to find a full medical detox in a treatment center where they can safely bring you down off the alcohol and prevent any seizures.
2) Support – there is tremendous benefit to the peer networking that occurs in a rehab center and this is derived from being in there with others who are all trying to do what you are. Having peers in early recovery who are on the same path as you are is very important because you can learn so much from each other.
3) Aftercare – most drug rehab centers don’t just let you go without some sort of follow up plan in place. This plan could consist of going to a long term treatment center, using one on one therapy sessions, or simply going to AA meetings. Either way you are going to get some additional guidance and help in how to stay sober after you leave the facility.
What if someone is not willing to go to treatment? If this is the case then there is not much you can generally do. In some countries or states there is the possibility of committing an alcoholic to rehab but this can create ill feelings and might actually backfire in the end. The better option in this is case is normally to offer treatment to someone and let them know that the option is available when they are ready to change.
How can a person really help a struggling alcoholic to get well? Traditional recovery programs have tried to answer this question for decades now, and typically without much success. You might have tried to get someone to sober up that you knew but had a hard time with it. If you are at this point then you are probably want to know how best to help alcoholics.
Part of the problem is that existing recovery programs lack customization. They are one size fits all and that ends up not really helping anyone as much as they could if they were tailored to individuals. For example, the twelve step fellowships that are so common these days have essentially remained the same for years and years.
When a person needs to sober up or get clean from drugs, our usual answer is to have them attend group therapy or 12 step meetings. When that fails to produce decent results, instead of blaming the program we always blame the individual, saying that “they just didn’t want it enough,” or that “they just did not get into the spiritual side of the program.” These types of excuses point to a failing in our quest for better recovery and we can do better then just blaming the failed alcoholic. I would suggest:
1) Push alcoholics to use treatment for early recovery. This is critical because early recovery is very trying and it can be hard for the alcoholic to get even a small amount of clean time in some cases.” In a safe setting such as rehab it is much smoother when trying to get a hold on early recovery.
2) Try to push the newcomer into taking action and making a better life for themselves. This is important because it is not enough to merely quit drinking. When an alcoholic drinks they do it with passion and it becomes a huge part of their life. In their recovery journey, an alcoholic must find new meaning and depth in their life or they risk sliding back into a relapse of destruction and despair.
3) Push alcoholics to grow holistically. If you can convince someone to make progress in one area of their life, this is decent. But if you can encourage an alcoholic to make progress in multiple areas of their life, then this is really good. Holistic growth is indicating that the person is treating their disease as a whole, not simply as a spiritual problem (as some treatments deal with it).