Holidays are tough for recovering alcoholics

What better way to usher in the New Year than with friends, a table full of snacks and round after round of drinks?

It’s all well and good unless you happen to be a recovering alcoholic.

With parties and family gatherings abounding throughout the holiday season, the stress of trying to maintain sobriety can be overwhelming.

Just ask 55-year-old “Joe” (not his real name). An alcoholic since he was a teenager, Joe didn’t need much excuse to get drunk.

“I started around hunting season and never let up through Christmas and New Years,” Joe said. “There were excuses to drink all though that period of time...just another reason to celebrate and get drunk.”

A father and grandfather, he began drinking when he was 18 years old.

“It was in my senior year in high school and right after graduation and it was pretty much the thing to do,” he said. “I really never had much interest in it before then. But it wasn’t long before I made up for lost time. I did a lot of social drinking with my family and I wanted to be ‘one of the guys,’ a ‘Cool Joe.’ I’d call all my friends over when my parents weren’t home and set up a keg in the middle of my kitchen floor. Drinking was good enough for us. We weren’t interested in creating havoc. We just wanted to have fun.”

Although Joe’s addiction was mainly to beer, he did occasionally drink hard liquor and mixed drinks.

Married at 23, Joe’s drinking continued, generally without his wife’s involvement.

“My wife was always a moderate drinker,” he said. “That’s the key word nowadays...moderate. My drinking was never moderate and that was the problem. I was a regular church goer and was a totally different man when I wasn’t drinking. Even when I drank, I was really a happy-go-lucky drunk outside, but when I got home, I was verbally abusive to my wife and my family. I really had a mouth on me. My wife was a saint for putting up with all the B.S. that I put her through.”

Joe admits that he frequently went to work drunk.

“I had a co-worker who was a friend of mine who drank too,” he said. “We were drinking buddies and we were like brothers. If one of us showed up at work drunk, the other would help the other one out on the job. Both of us would get together early in the day and say we weren’t going to go out that night, but by 3 o’clock, we were were both planning where to go. That’s what we lived for.”

Erratic driving while drunk led to numerous brushes with the law for Joe, but he never suffered any consequences for his actions.

“I’d gotten stopped several times and even hauled out of the car, but I never got a ticket,” he said. “I think it was the sign of the times back then when I was drinking. People didn’t really take it too seriously and even the police didn’t take it too seriously unless there was an injury or something like that. It wasn’t at all like it is now. I ran stop signs. I ran stop lights. Can you imagine doing that now-a-days? There were never any consequences to my drinking. How I never killed anybody is nothing but a miracle. Never, to my knowledge, did I ever hurt anyone, but I sure went through a lot of vehicles. How I ever made it through those 20 years intact, I don’t know.”

The turning point in Joe’s life was the night he was brought home, dead drunk, by a female acquaintance.

“That killed my pride,” he said.

Although he has been sober for 17 years, he attempted to “go it alone” for the first five before eventually joining Alcoholics Anonymous. He is a regular member of the Delta Alano Club in Gladstone.

Joe admits that his drinking was problematic, but he said it was the character flaws that came along with the drinking that were particularly difficult to deal with.

“It really used to bother me when I looked back at the chaos that I caused, not only in my own life, but in the lives of my wife and children,” he said. “Surprisingly my children turned out real well, but my two youngest children were too young to remember when I drank. My oldest one was home when I last got drunk. My wife handles it way different than I do.”

Joe’s wife attended Alanon meetings for spouses of recovering alcoholics for a time after he began attending meetings. But she no longer feels the need to.

“She learned a lot and that’s why she came here...to get educated,” said Joe.

Many long-time friendships dissolved after Joe started on the road to sobriety.

“I had one ‘so-called friend’ that I was in partnership with, but I think our friendship was focused solely on drinking,” he said. “We had it made. We had a checkbook and had a payroll. Once I became sober, we no longer had anything in common and he lost interest in me. He dissolved our partnership.”

Although every day of the year can be problematic for the alcoholic, the Christmas and New Year’s holidays are particularly difficult because so much of the socializing that takes place involves alcohol. At first Joe would tell his wife to go to the gathering and he chose to say away. In time, he came to the place where he could attend family functions and come away sober.

“I used to struggle with family and being at family gatherings,” he said. “When I was first sober, one family member even poured me drinks and egged me on. It was quite a while before I could say ‘He’s the problem. It’s not my problem.’ But now I’ve gotten to the point where they respect me and I respect them. I no longer have the urge to drink. People can be drunk all around me and it really doesn’t bother me.”

Now that he’s sober, Joe said he is able to put the holidays into perspective.

“The key word in ‘Christmas party’ isn’t ‘party,’” said Joe. “The emphasis is on the wrong word. It’s ‘Christmas.’ That’s what the holiday is all about and that’s what works for me. If other people want to ‘party,’ than it’s them that are doing it and I don’t have to. I call that acceptance. I used to think I was having fun but the truth of the matter is that I was usually passed out by midnight. It’s so much more fun to celebrate the holidays now, but it’s a different kind of fun. Every day I thank God for His help.”

The Daily Press