Q: I am not sure what is going on with my brother. We grew up in the same household. We watched together the same alcoholic dad get drunk and disorderly. We hid together in the same closet when both of our parents got drunk and started fighting with each other. We sat together in the same old beat-up jalopy when our mother was running for fear of her life away from our father. And together we sat on Sunday afternoons for short and supervised visiting hours in the same penitentiary where our father was incarcerated.
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So why is it, after going through all of that together, am I watching my brother starting to drink too much and heading down the same road our father followed? You would think that he would know better.
A: The short answer to your question is that there is no logic to addictions. Let me change that a bit. There is no logic to what is going on with your brother.
You are right. He is drinking too much. You would think that after seeing so much violence and hurt and anguish as a child that he would look the other way when offered a drink. But he doesn’t, and most likely he is using the abuse he saw as a child as an excuse for his own irrational behaviour. Addicts are really good at squeezing excuses from their personal experiences to justify their irrational commitments to drugs and alcohol.
What they often forget is that most everyone has a story to tell. All of us have had tragedies we have had to endure. All of us have had hurts and disappointments and anguish. Maybe some of our experiences were not as devastating as those you and your brother endured but they were there nonetheless, and not all of us have turned to addictions to resolve them.
You are a perfect example. You have the same life story as your brother, but you are obviously not into addictions.
People in programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous like to refer to addictions as diseases. That is their way of saying that addictions defy logic and you cannot justify them. But like diseases, they have to be treated in some form and those caught up in them need all the help and support they can get.
My guess is that you would do almost anything to help your brother overcome his addictions. I hope that you realize that you likely cannot do much on your own to give him the help he needs. I would suggest that you try to forget about all of those horrible experiences you and your brother had as children and try to build supportive and encouraging relationships with your local addictions counsellors, with your community’s chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and with whomever you know who subscribes to Alanon, a support program for the families of addicts.
If all of you can work toward sobriety together, your brother might be successful. But don’t forget, he has to want it to, and if he is not ready to accept the help, you might have to wait until he is more desperate than he is at the moment.
