addiction

Facing Fear Sober

I used to hoover cocaine and drown myself in alcohol. Plus, I was so ruled by terror I couldn’t even admit I was scared. Sobriety has changed most of that.

The reason I got sober isn’t that I thought sobriety sounded like a great idea. It was actually something I thought that only a complete loser would embrace. It was the act, I was certain, of a person with absolutely no other options.

RehabThe problem was that I was that person with no other options. And I was so depressed by my cocaine-cigarette-vodka-Ambien diet—and the cycle of trying to quit it and not being able to—that I figured anything, even sobriety, had to be better. So one morning I called my mom and told her that I was a coke addict and that I was in serious trouble. I don’t know what was different about that morning. Maybe nothing was different but I just had a moment where I wasn’t able to talk myself into continuing on the path I was on. My mom knew that something was wrong with me but something had been wrong with me for a long time. Still, the previous year, when we’d been on vacation, she happened to see how many Ambien I shook from the pill bottle into my open palm and so she tried to talk to me—in that terrified Mom voice—about what I was doing. I’d told her to stop overreacting and changed the subject.

Now, my mom is one of those mothers who would love to get both of her children back into her womb, if possible. But barring that, she’ll settle for living back in the house we grew up in. Barring that, she’ll take living in Northern California. I was living in LA. So that morning I called her, she said, “LA’s been terrible for you. Go get in your car and drive home.”

I rarely think the sentence, “I’m scared” because I internalized long ago that only weak people thought like that.

I drove there, completely despondent. If there was anything that sounded more depressing than being sober in LA, it was being sober in my hometown. But like I said, I didn’t have any options. I ended up talking to my parents and my step-dad and a therapist about what I’d been doing—telling them the whole story and not just the edited version I’d been giving them for years. I admitted that I spent entire weeks doing cocaine alone, that I didn’t have any friends anymore, that I sometimes took so much Ambien after getting wired that I worried one morning I just wouldn’t wake up. They were rightfully alarmed and agreed to help pay for rehab. Somehow I talked them into helping to pay for a rehab in LA and not in Northern California. And somehow I talked that rehab, an inpatient program, into letting me do outpatient since I didn’t want to have to quit the job I was barely hanging onto.

But this rehab, and sobriety, turned out to be nothing like I expected. The people there weren’t shuffling around in grey sweaters, lamenting their lives. They were vibrant and hilarious and very much engaged in life in a way that none of the drug addicts I’d been around had been. And they were talking about things I not only related to but had long felt and never said out loud because I’d assumed no one would understand. They talked about their negative thinking—about how they’d wake up and think life was so dismal that they couldn’t do anything but try to escape their thoughts through drugs. They talked about desperately trying to quit—about wanting to stop with everything in them—and not being able to, that decision to pick up again happening so quickly that they never even realized it was a decision. And they talked about ways of improving how they felt that had never occurred to me: about how trying to help other people gave them relief, about how it was their chronic self obsession that kept them feeling so bad. They talked about how even though they thought obsessively about themselves, they also never felt like they were enough; I learned the expression that had summarized the previous three decades of my life: “I’m the piece of crap in the center of the universe.”

If they’d been sober a while, they talked about finding happiness—and not through getting “cash and prizes,” like the job or relationship they wanted, which is what I’d always called happiness. They talked instead about not needing to get the job or relationship they wanted in order to feel good. And my ears really perked up when they talked about resentments; I had a long list of people that had wronged me and I was always eager to extract vengeance somehow. But again they said surprising things: they talked about how it was in seeing the large part they’d played in their problems with other people that they were able to forgive those other people. I did what they suggested and, really quickly, realized the strangest thing of all: I didn’t want to drink anymore. I didn’t even want to do cocaine. By just doing what these people suggested I do—which happened to radically alter my perception of every aspect of my life—it was like the part of me that craved alcohol and drugs, that had to leave town in order to escape the lure of cocaine and even then scrounged up coke wherever I was, had been removed in the same way that my tonsils had. And it was a good thing, too, because I had essentially been sleepwalking through my life—walking and talking but emotionally and spiritually and intellectually frozen in time—so I had a lot of catching up to do. Finally I could actually figure out how to live.

The first element to learning how to live, I quickly learned, was facing my fears.

As far as I understand things now, I’ve struggled with three main fears my whole life—the fear that I’m stupid, the fear that I’m doing everything wrong and the fear that I’ll lose everything I have and fail to get everything I want. But I didn’t always know that.

When I first got sober, I was told by people who’d been sober longer that I lived with “a hundred forms of fear.” I was told that fear ruled my every thought, feeling and action. I thought these people were a little dramatic; sure, I felt scared sometimes but not all that much. In many ways, I protested, I was fearless.

This was before I realized that I had a voice ruling everything I did and told me terrible things. I’m not crazy, I don’t hear voices, I just heard one and its running commentary was a brutal combination of every negative thing anyone had ever said to me my whole life. It would tell me that I was stupid, that I was doing everything wrong, that everyone who mattered to me would leave me and that I didn’t deserve what I had. It was only when I’d been sober at least five years that I even realized I was ruled by this voice—that I’d actually taken my fears and, too fearful to admit that I was scared, turned them against me. Rather than comforting myself through what scared me, I was taunting myself with these fears as if they were real and therefore not even giving myself a fighting chance.

So I started to think about the things I told myself and then present myself with this scenario: if I had a small, precious child I was caring for, would I tell her that she was an idiot and that no one would ever love her? Of course not! And if I wouldn’t do that to a fictional child, why would I do it to myself? I began to write down the incredibly cruel things I told myself and learned to differentiate between what was a real thought and what was one of my fears turned against me. The process sucked; it took years to undo. But at a certain point, that horrible voice—the voice of my fears—disappeared. It still comes back sometimes. Something will scare me—usually information that another person has something I think I should have—and the voice will turn on. But I’ve learned to recognize it and know it’s not real. I’ve also learned that my fear can take all sorts of other forms. I rarely think the sentence, “I’m scared” because I internalized long ago that only weak people thought like that. So my psyche devised an entirely counter-productive system that makes fear register as all sorts of other feelings: tired, for example. Or nauseous. Indifferent. “I just don’t feel like doing that” may, from me, mean “I’m scared to do that.”

The fact that I now know this about myself, and can therefore move through it, has changed everything for me. I feel these days like I get to walk around with someone else’s brain—the brain of someone who really, genuinely likes herself. And while I’m grateful to be rid of the obsessions I used to have to drink and do cocaine, I think I’m even happier to have shut the fear voice down.

Why You Don’t Really Hate AA

I’ve seen too many people attack the program that saved my life. But their problem isn’t AA itself; it’s some of AA’s members.

I got sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous. I believe with every pore in my body that had it not been for the program, I wouldn’t have been able to put down drugs and alcohol over 12 years ago and wouldn’t be able to live the life I do today.

For a long time, out of what I then considered respect for the 11th tradition, I didn’t publicly identify as a member. In my first novel, Party Girl (which was so autobiographical, I didn’t even bother to act coy about it), I actually switched various AA-related words to protect the program: I used “guidelines” for “steps,” and “apologies” for “amends.” And when I went on TV to promote that book or to talk about the addictions of various celebrities, I always explained ahead of time that if the story they wanted to focus on involved AA, I couldn’t go on, because AA was an anonymous program.

I said the same thing in late 2010.

And then, slowly, my perspective changed. As my years of sobriety—and talking and writing about addiction—continued, I began to realize that my desire to not mention AA had less to do with respecting the 11th tradition than with protecting AA from any more of the judgment was being heaped upon it.

From what I hear, AA is a harsh, religious, recriminating cult.

Before I came to AA, I considered it a cult for Jesus-worshipping freaks, who had nothing better to do with their time and needed something—anything—to cling to. Whatever I heard about the program (they hold hands! They pray! In unison!) I used to fuel that preconception. And that preconception kept me buying books about how AA didn’t work, while I slowly annihilated myself with years of drinking and cocaine.

There seem to be as many ways to interpret the 11th tradition as there are people in AA. Some swear that it means we should never give our last names when we talk about being sober; others say it means we’re allowed to say we’re in AA, so long as we’re not doing it in the press, or on the radio or in films. Still others preach that it means not outing someone else as a member. And there are those who insist that it means never telling anyone anywhere that we’re sober. AA-history obsessives will often tell us how necessary the 11th tradition was, back when alcoholism and addiction were considered horribly shameful; some insist that we still need to honor this tradition, while others say we should scream about our disease from the rooftops, to eradicate any left-over shame.

My own feeling is this: AA’s founders couldn’t have predicted the Internet or the world we live in now, where everything is everyone’s business. Bill and Bob didn’t know that one day anonymous online commenters would attack their program. When the traditions were written, AA was small, young and fragile. Today, it isn’t. And while many have tried to ignore, defame and destroy it since then, the fact is, they haven’t had much success.

But still, because AA doesn’t have a spokesperson, it can’t fight back or respond to the criticisms that are constantly hurled at it. So at a certain point, it seemed like it was okay—in fact, better than okay—to start being open about the program on this site, and allowing those who felt their lives improved by it to share that.

In short, I didn’t want to give people out there who were like me—that is, judgmental and alcoholic—any more reason to judge AA than they already had. Maybe, I thought, if we publicly shared how the program had saved us, we’d help open people’s minds. Whether that mission has been successful, I have absolutely no idea.

Trust me—my positive reaction to AA shocked the hell out of me at first. I honestly couldn’t believe that I didn’t encounter a bunch of glassy-eyed cultists, or tie-dyed followers of some New Age guru forcing newcomers to hand out flowers at the airport.

Well, let me clarify. I did encounter some people who lived up to my preconceptions—or were even worse—but they were not the majority. No, the overwhelming majority were the sort of people I’d been seeking my whole life: funny people, smart people, self-aware people—people who suffered from the same problems I did, but who knew how to talk about and deal with them in ways I hadn’t yet learned.

The last person I ever thought I’d be was Susie AA—the girl sitting in the front row of the meeting, or at a coffee shop highlighting her favorite passages in the Big Book. But that’s who I became. Turns out, I’d always been waiting for someone to give me rules for living beyond those my family had presented—which were mainly about going to an Ivy League school, making six figures at your first job and suing people before they sued you. Though I didn’t know it consciously at the time, I’d been seeking out information about how it was my self-obsession—well, self-obsession plus stimulants and depressants—that was making me so miserable.

I’m well aware that this is apparently not most people’s experience when they come to AA. From what I hear—mostly from anonymous commenters on The Fix—AA is not the welcoming, loving, non-judgmental solution to a miserable life that I discovered. Instead, it’s a harsh, religious, recriminating cult, filled with controlling assholes who are determined to believe that their way is the only way.

In some ways, I understand. After all, I have met, in AA, horrible, judgmental people, who are determined to believe that their way is the only way. And I’ve met, as you’d expect, people who are mentally ill.

I have been told, by a woman who was sponsoring me, that I wasn’t “really sober” because I was on anti-depressants, and asked to immediately get out of her car.

I have been ruthlessly shamed by another sponsor, because she put me on “dating restriction” for a year (not my first year of sobriety, by the way) and, nine months into it, I kissed a guy. She told me I hadn’t surrendered and “fired” me outside a meeting as I sobbed.

I have listened to women preach from podiums about how determined they are to help everyone they can—then had them not return my calls after they’ve agreed to sponsor me.

I have shared deeply personal things in meetings and had people approach me days or weeks later to give me unsolicited, offensive feedback about what I was doing that had caused me to feel the way I did.

The program is what you find in the Big Book—not the people who make up the fellowship.

I have been pulled aside by old ladies after I’ve shared and told that I was sharing “wrong.” And I’ve heard about even worse things: AA icons sleeping with newcomers, sponsors giving sponsees drugs—you name it.

But not one of these things has caused me to hate AA.

Maybe that’s because I was lucky enough to meet some genuinely, ridiculously amazing people when I first came in. Maybe it’s because I got sober in LA, where there is, arguably, less shame and more cheer about sobriety than anywhere else, so that the overall joy made it easier to overlook the sicker folk. Maybe it’s because I was so desperate when I got to AA that I couldn’t afford to think any differently.

Yes, there are assholes in AA. But you find them everywhere. And while AA, by the very nature of what brings people to the rooms, may have a higher percentage than some other places, that doesn’t make AA the asshole. If those people weren’t in AA, they would just be somewhere else, doing their best to give that somewhere else a bad name. The program is what you find in the Big Book—not the people who make up the fellowship.

Hey, you can still hate AA. But if you go there, and encounter someone who tells you that you have to get sober his way, or shames you for not doing exactly what she says, I just ask that you consider going to another meeting or reaching out to another person—to consider that this individual might be the problem. The people in AA whose lives seem to be working are, from what I can tell, those who remember that good AA’s don’t tell anyone how to do anything; who reinforce the fact that the steps are merely suggestions; who don’t say you must believe in some almighty God, but just ask you to consider that perhaps you’re not the one in charge of everything.

All of which is to say that maybe, just maybe, your hatred is misdirected. At the very least, now you can direct it toward me instead of the program. After all, I’m the one telling you that you don’t feel the way you say you do.

Making Amends Was Everything I Least Expected

I thought I knew exactly how my Ninth Step in AA would unfold. Instead, over a decade later, I’m still trying to make sense of people’s unpredictable reactions.

I heard about how sober people made amends long before I got sober. Somehow, the idea that alcoholics and addicts went around apologizing for their past misdeeds lodged itself in my psyche at a time when I had yet to say the Serenity Prayer.

Road to RecoveryThat doesn’t mean I understood the concept. For instance, if you’d asked me then if apologizing and making amends were the same thing, I’d have sworn that they were. I had no experience, yet, of making things right with someone I’d wronged—let alone making things right in a way that might stop me repeating whatever it was I’d done in the first place.

By the time I got to my Ninth Step, I’d picked up a few things. Probably the most important one was that I didn’t have to play the victim anymore. My Fourth and Fifth steps had showed me that I had played a major part in all my resentments—a realization that I found liberating. Steps Six, Seven and Eight had gotten me ready to make my amends. And while I was certainly nervous about getting started on what I then thought of as my apology tour, I was also excited.

I was promised miracles and they came—but never how or when I expected them.

I figured I’d knock out the “easy” ones first: one to Lauren and another to Peter, both former party pals. In each case I’d done something gossipy and mean-spirited but not atrocious, so I figured these amends would be simple. These people weren’t, after all, family members who were likely to make the experience traumatizing, or exes whom I dreaded to contact at all. They were just people I’d once spent a lot of time around but didn’t really have anything in common with anymore. Easy, right?

I called Lauren first (this was in the days before Caller ID or the demise of landlines):

“Lauren? Hey, it’s Anna.”

Long pause.

“Hey, Anna.”

“So listen. I’m calling because—“

“Oh, God, don’t tell me this is one of those ‘amends’ type of calls. I just—”

“Please let me—”

“Look, I heard you’re sober and that’s great. But this just isn’t something I’m up for.”

Click.

I sat there listening to the dial tone. In all the amends scenarios I’d mentally concocted, having someone—let alone the first person I reached out to—not be willing to hear what I had to say had never occurred to me. I’d read in the Big Book that we had to be willing to go to people we feared might throw us out of their offices, but I’d never read anything about how to handle the people who wouldn’t even take the call to set up the meeting. Still, what could I do—call her back, tell her it was about something else and sneak an amends in? My sponsor told me to move on, so I did.

To Peter. Who, well, never called me back. I didn’t realize he wasn’t ever planning to call me back until a week or so after I’d left a voicemail, when our mutual friend told me. “He doesn’t like to revisit the past,” the friend explained. “He said you don’t need to apologize for anything.”

This wasn’t how I’d imagined it going. I’d heard other people share about how they’d suddenly find themselves running into the very person they’d been planning to make amends to that day. Why was the opposite happening to me?

But I moved on. I had to. And I continued to find the process nothing like I expected it to be.

In general, it seemed like the people I thought weren’t going to be amenable to even meeting up welcomed me warmly. Those I thought would forgive me right away, meanwhile, were dismissive or indifferent. But one thing remained predictable: The amends that I was so terrified to make that I shook with terror or sobs at the thought were always the most rewarding of all.

Take, for instance, the ex I’d never gotten over. I called him up one evening when I was about five years sober and told him how sorry I was for destroying our relationship, for every cruel thing I’d uttered and each horrible mistake I’d made when we were together. But rather than lay into me as I expected, he said he was glad to hear from me, that it helped him make sense of his past, that he was happy I was sober and doing well. But, he added, I was blaming myself too much; he’d played just as big a part in what had gone wrong between us as I had. The conversation was more honest, painful and beautiful than any we’d had the entire time we lived together. I hung up feeling about 20 pounds lighter. I was finally free of an idea I hadn’t even realized I’d been clinging to—that I’d been a monster, and he my innocent victim.

Then there was the time I met up with a friend I’d known since I was 12 but had fallen out with in my twenties. We went on a hike and I told her how sorry I was for the way I’d behaved the last time we’d spoken, five or so years earlier. It turned out she was in a 12-step program too—so she actually made amends to me right after I made them to her. By the time we got to the bottom of the canyon, we’d re-launched our friendship—on new, healthier terms. Over a decade later, we talk nearly every day.

I was promised miracles and they came—but never how or when I expected them.

Take my financial amends. The first debt that I owed was to my college roommate, for the time I’d borrowed her car in sophomore year and then acted surprised when I saw the dent. I explained to her that I’d actually crashed into something when drunk and lied to her, and that I wanted to reimburse her for the damages. But she wouldn’t hear of it.

For my next financial amends, I decided to just go ahead and send a check. It was to a girl I’d lived with when I first moved to New York after college, a girl who’d moved out of our crappy, railroad-style place without notice one Thanksgiving weekend when I was out of town. It was a shitty thing to do, of course. But it didn’t make it right for me to charge up the phone bill in her name as high as I could, and then not respond when she asked me to reimburse her. So I tracked down her address and mailed a check and a card, apologizing for the phone bill as well as for being—well, the kind of roommate who would inspire someone to move out over Thanksgiving weekend without notice.

She sent the check back, along with a note that said, essentially, that she was doing very well, that she had a husband, five kids and a thriving career as a chiropractor, and that if I felt so bad about my behavior, then I should donate the money to a good cause since she didn’t need my charity.

Glenn was a guy who’d lock my cats away when I was out and call the landlord when I had friends from AA over, saying that he was “scared for his life” because there were “homeless alcoholics” around.

Like I said, not what I expected. But even that one allowed me to live with a little more freedom.

Some amends haven’t involved contacting people at all. Glenn, a gay guy I’d lived with the second time I’d moved to New York, when I was about seven years sober, had started off cool as could be but slowly revealed himself to be crazy—a guy who’d lock my cats away when I was out and call the landlord when I had friends from AA over, saying that he was “scared for his life” because there were “homeless alcoholics” around. (To say I’ve had bad luck with New York roommates would be an understatement.)

Though I ended up moving out and getting away from him entirely, I found myself still resenting him months later. I had done plenty wrong in our relationship, but trying to make amends to him was something I couldn’t imagine—not when he’d done things to me that I couldn’t imagine getting over. I decided to make a “living amends” by trying to be kind and gracious in my life—the opposite of how I’d been toward him at the end. But that didn’t stop me from resenting him. So, at my sponsor’s suggestion, I committed to praying for him for 90 days—specifically for him to get everything he wanted and for me to have empathy for the fact that he’d been doing the best he could. I did it for those three months, never feeling any differently about him but staying committed to the process because my sponsor kept asking me about it. I thought it was silly: I never felt any differently about Glenn.

Until the day, months after I’d stopped praying for him, that I met a guy who asked me if I knew anyone great to set him up with and I found myself answering, without thinking, “Yes! I know this amazing guy named Glenn.”

Glenn! As in: the guy I hated. Had hated, apparently.

Those days and weeks and months of asking an entity I didn’t even understand to give Glenn what he wanted had apparently granted me the empathy to see that he only hurt like that because of the pain he was in himself. And this had relieved me of my resentment, without me even realizing. It was surreal. (And no, I didn’t set the two guys up—I had no interest in ever talking to Glenn again—but the space he’d been taking up my head was cleared.)

I still do things I need to make amends for. Sometimes I make them right away and sometimes not for a long time. But I’ve found that time works in surprising ways when it comes to these things. Consider, for instance, what happened with Peter—the guy who wouldn’t call me back when I first started making my amends. Years had passed—so many years that he’d forgotten I’d ever said or done anything hurtful to him—when I ran into him one evening outside the gym. He told me that he’d just gotten an offer to sell a book of poetry, then asked if I’d be willing to look over the contract the publisher was asking him to sign.

I said I’d be happy to, and we met up a few days later, when I looked over his contract and gave him the best advice I could. Then I told him how sorry I was about the hurtful thing I’d done so many years before. I still remember how shocked his bright blue eyes looked when they jumped from the contract pages to meet mine. Then they filled with tears. Turns out, this thing I’d done that was “just” gossipy and mean-spirited had actually been something I needed to make right. And the guy who didn’t like to “revisit the past,” who’d told a friend I didn’t have to apologize for anything, ended up accepting my apology lovingly, giving me one more opportunity to chip away at the guilt and shame I didn’t want to walk around with anymore. He just hadn’t been able to do it on my time schedule.

Lauren has never surfaced. But that’s not to say that she won’t.

Just How Addictive and Dangerous is Sugar?

Sugar Addiction?

Many surprising food products can contain high amounts of sugar. Cheese, salad dressings, soy milk, tomato sauce and canned soups are just a few examples. Most Americans have now heard the standard advice from nutritionists that excess sugar consumption can lead to obesity. But, what might not be clear is how to avoid sugar addiction. Sugar is a dangerously addictive substance and it is in almost everything we eat and drink.

Sugar addictionThe chemical makeup of sugar contains fructose. It’s a substance that actively interferes with our brain function and enables our addiction to sweet flavors. Sugar ingestion can activate the human brain’s “pleasure centers”. After the body digests a sugary food, these pleasure centers release large amounts of a chemical called “dopamine,” which is the same chemical responsible for sexual pleasure. However, the brain’s pleasure centers become desensitized with each use, so every time we consume sugar, the dopamine high decreases. This means that we have to consume more sugar in order achieve the same level of dopamine release and the feeling of happiness it triggers, which some refer to as a “sugar high.” This is the same neurological process that makes it difficult to quite using drugs like cocaine and heroine.

While it is true that addicts can become addicted to any number of different substances or behaviors, sugar is found throughout so many of our daily foods that it probably affects even those with borderline addictive personalities, people who have never used illegal substances but who have similar symptoms of withdrawal from a food such as ice cream that addicts have when they stop using opioids. However, sugar addiction may be even more difficult to cure because foods that contain it are cheap and readily available.

Sugar Addiction Problems

 If you’ve ever craved a sugary treat because you knew it would significantly alter your mood, or if you’ve ever eaten more of a dessert than you had planned, it’s possible that you could be addicted to sugar.

Sugar addiction can cause a number of problems in the lives of its consumers. It can cause wild mood swings, for one. It can also be one of many factors that worsens chances of developing diabetes. As any dentist will also tell you, it is also particularly damaging to teeth. The idea that occasional sugary treats can be an innocent part of our diets is changing now that we understand more about how sugar consumption mimics the substance abuse of opiates. 

Sugar goes by many different names. If you see the words “sucrose,” “lactose,” “glucose,” “dextrose,” “cane juice,” or various kinds of “syrups” (such as malt or brown rice), then you know that the food product contains a form of sugar. Even artificial sweeteners are not necessarily safe. Many studies now show that the use of such sugar substitutes actually increase one’s sugar addiction. There are many plans available to help people cut down on sugar consumption. The existence of so many different approaches to reducing sugar intake is a testament to its toxic and addictive nature. It’s an addiction that’s hidden in plain sight.

What are the Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism?

Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism

Given the increasing opioid epidemic that’s currently plaguing the millennial generation, it’s important to remember the negative consequences of alcoholism. While opioid use often manifests with visible physical symptoms even in its early stages, alcoholism is called the “silent killer” because its effects are less obvious right away. However, the health problems associated with excess alcohol consumption are nonetheless just as deadly as any other addiction.

One of the most widespread consequences of even moderate alcohol consumption is related to the body’s cardiovascular system. Even people who limit drinking to periods of celebration with friend and family suffer from something doctors call “holiday heart,” where increased alcohol intake triggers heart palpitations and tightness of breath, mimicking the signs of a heart attack. These episodes of holiday heart are not without risk: some types of abnormal heart rhythms can lead to stroke or heart failure, if not treated. In alcoholics who drink to excess regularly, the stress on the body’s cardiovascular system is even more damaging and can lead to early heart disease and other health problems related to a weakened cardiovascular system.

Health Consequences

Health ProblemsOf course, the health consequence most closely associated with alcoholism is cirrhosis of the liver. It is responsible with processing toxins in the blood stream. Any amount of alcohol consumed makes the liver work harder than normal. It creates conditions that often leave fatty deposits, cause liver inflammation, and create a build-up of scar tissue. So, liver becomes less capable of filtering out toxins in the blood, this failure can create stress on other organs.

The body breaks alcohol down into various components during the process of digestion. Some of those components, such as acetaldehyde, have been known to increase risks of cancer. Excessive drinking also leads an addict to use more tobacco products. The risks of cancer double to include those types of cancers inked to smoking, such as mouth and lung cancers.

The process of digesting alcohol can also cause issues in the stomach and intestinal tract. Alcoholics often avoid eating so that the high from drinking is more intense. But, drinking on an empty stomach can result in malnutrition and its many related health problems. Since alcohol dehydrates, drinkers often suffer from ulcers/hemorrhoids, which can be the source of internal bleeding, if left untreated.

Health Risks

One of the overlooked categories of health risks related to alcohol consumption are automobile accidents. Just one drink can dull a driver’s response time so that he or she is incapable of responding to changing traffic patterns in a timely fashion. Additional drinks can cause drivers to drive significantly over or under the speed limit and to swerve in his or her lane, increasing the chances for fatal accidents should they cross over into oncoming traffic. This is just one of the ways that drinking affects the brain negatively by interfering with motor coordination. Other ways is that it can cause sudden shifts in mood and behavior that damage interpersonal relationship, whether personally/professionally. Alcohol is a depressant and can exacerbate existing mental health issues.

Drinking temporarily affects motor coordination, but it can damage the alcoholic’s brain permanently. Heavy alcohol consumption causes memory loss and bring on other signs of dementia because it makes certain part brain atrophy.

While it’s true that the effects of alcohol on the body can vary due to a person’s weight, genetic makeup, gender, and level of fitness, the results of scientific findings are overwhelming in their consensus about the negative effects of alcohol on the body.

Is Alcoholism a Disability and Protected by Law?

The Disability Discrimination Act states that alcoholism is not included under its list of protected disabilities, however, courts in the U.S. and Canada have ruled on a case-by-case basis that alcoholism is a disability that is protected by law. This means that alcoholics maintain certain rights and privileges. For example, it would be legally questionable to fire an alcoholic employee for behavior related to their alcoholism. The government provides assistance to people suffering from alcoholism in the form of food stamps and subsidized housing. Certainly, there are generous interpretations to the law and even loopholes. For instance, even if a judge were to rule against protecting alcoholism as a disability, the conditions that result from this disease, such as depression or cirrhosis, may qualify for protection. But the bottom line is that major organizations, such as the ACLU and American Medical Association, view alcoholism as a disability.

There are two competing sets of recommendations at odds in laws regarding the workplace. At the same time that the Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers are responsible for making sure that a professional environment is devoid of illegal substances and their use, this same law states that workers who are recovering from addiction are entitled to protection. However, the process of recovery is almost never a straight line, and is often fraught with relapse. At what point is someone “recovering” versus a “user”?

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

DisabilityEmployers who might be considering firing an employee because of his or her excessive drinking need to take a few things into consideration, given that courts have returned rulings that view it as a protected disability. First, equal treatment for all employees. If a number of employees have drinking problems, then one or two cannot be selected for termination. This is difficult grey area because employers should document the difference between moderate to heavy drinking and an actual addiction. It’s extremely challenging in certain employment sectors, such as the restaurant industry, where alcohol consumption tends to be quite widespread. Second, the excessive drinking has to interfere with the performance of employee’s job and lessen the quality of their work. This can also prove to be challenging to distinguish and document.

Drug use is a bit more problematic of a category than alcoholism because of the illegal nature of those substances. It is clearly stated in the law that illegal drug use is not considered a disability, however, it is legal in the U.S. for anyone over the age of 21 to consume alcohol, so alcoholism, in not involving with illegal substances, is more readily treated as a disability in the workplace than any other addiction. Testing for illegal drug use is not a violation of protection for disabilities.

Recovering alcoholics who are not currently drinking are the clearest category protected under the disability act. Employers must provide reasonable accommodation of alcoholism as a disability. This means to offer the employee a special schedule in order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The official disability awards is based functional limitation caused by alcoholism.

The Disability Discrimination Act states that alcoholism is not included under its list of protected disabilities, however, courts in the U.S. and Canada have ruled on a case-by-case basis that alcoholism is a disability that is protected by law. This means that alcoholics maintain certain rights and privileges. For example, it would be legally questionable to fire an alcoholic employee for behavior related to their alcoholism. The government provides assistance to people suffering from alcoholism in the form of food stamps and subsidized housing. Certainly, there are generous interpretations to the law and even loopholes. For instance, even if a judge were to rule against protecting alcoholism as a disability, the conditions that result from this disease, such as depression or cirrhosis, may qualify for protection. But the bottom line is that major organizations, such as the ACLU and American Medical Association, view alcoholism as a disability.

There are two competing sets of recommendations at odds in laws regarding the workplace. At the same time that the Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers are responsible for making sure that a professional environment is devoid of illegal substances and their use, this same law states that workers who are recovering from addiction are entitled to protection. However, the process of recovery is almost never a straight line, and is often fraught with relapse. At what point is someone “recovering” versus a “user”?

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

Disability

Employers who might be considering firing an employee because of his or her excessive drinking need to take a few things into consideration, given that courts have returned rulings that view it as a protected disability. First, equal treatment for all employees. If a number of employees have drinking problems, then one or two cannot be selected for termination. This is difficult grey area because employers should document the difference between moderate to heavy drinking and an actual addiction. It’s extremely challenging in certain employment sectors, such as the restaurant industry, where alcohol consumption tends to be quite widespread. Second, the excessive drinking has to interfere with the performance of employee’s job and lessen the quality of their work. This can also prove to be challenging to distinguish and document.

Drug use is a bit more problematic of a category than alcoholism because of the illegal nature of those substances. It is clearly stated in the law that illegal drug use is not considered a disability, however, it is legal in the U.S. for anyone over the age of 21 to consume alcohol, so alcoholism, in not involving with illegal substances, is more readily treated as a disability in the workplace than any other addiction. Testing for illegal drug use is not a violation of protection for disabilities.

Recovering alcoholics who are not currently drinking are the clearest category protected under the disability act. Employers must provide reasonable accommodation of alcoholism as a disability. This means to offer the employee a special schedule in order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The official disability awards is based functional limitation caused by alcoholism.

How Does Addiction Affect Families?

You don’t necessarily have to be an addict in order for your drug and alcohol use to annoy members of your family or have a negative impact on your family’s dynamics. However, an addiction often forms around dysfunctional family behavior that can be aggravated by the addictive behavior.

Families in which parents are addicts have their own particular dysfunction. Instances are they will not able to their own children. Because of what they’ve witnessed as models for adult behavior, these children are at an increased chance of becoming addicts. Sometimes, as they mature, children of addicts may attempt to distance themselves from their parents’ compulsion. Only to find later on that they have abuse a different substance. This might happen, for instance, when a parent is an alcoholic. Even though the adult children of this parent don’t drink, they might develop an addiction to sex. Or might run up high debt because they are shopaholics.

How Does Addiction Affect FamiliesFamilies in which children are addicts often have problems distinguishing the difference between helping versus enabling the addict. Addicted family members should be handled with tough love. Don’t give in to the temptation to try to make the situation better for the addict. Only he or she can make the decision to get clean. Families in this situation must first make the addict aware that their behavior is unacceptable and then they must seek to heal from the trauma that addiction has caused in their daily lives. Sometimes the financial devastation of addiction (if family members are stealing money from other family members or opening fraudulent credit in their name) can takes years to set straight. In cases of theft or violence, family members often have to make the tough decision whether to involve law enforcement.

Dealing with Addiction

Usually, these extreme steps might be the final push that an addict needs in order to seek help. Addiction causes damaged on the normal family bonding. An addicted family members cannot be trusted. They usually cannot hold onto a job and may often go missing over night or for multiple days. They inevitably betray people who love them and more prone to violence. Above all, they are not able to attend to small children.

In addition to the emotional impact, the cost of an addict’s attempts at recovery might ruin the family financially. While the cost of buying drugs or alcohol can be a drain on a family’s budget, which may dwindle due to job loss, recovery programs can often be very costly, too. Many families dealing with addiction have to consider whether they might be better off filing bankruptcy, which can lead to the loss of future opportunities, such as the purchase of a home or the ability of your children to attend college. An addiction doesn’t just affect the person suffering from it; it affects everyone around him or her.

It is normal for the dysfunction of addiction to trigger feelings of anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, and many others from those who love a person abusing drugs or alcohol. The bottom line is that families should be very careful when dealing with addiction. It can damage relationships for years.

How Does Addiction Start?

Many people think that addiction begins by use of a gateway drug. This is the notion that addictions are formed by first trying a seemingly innocuous recreational drug, like marijuana, which leads to seeking greater physical highs with harder substances. While that can often be true, what is perhaps a greater reality is that addictive personalities begin to form during the early phases of childhood development, within the emotional dynamic of a family.

Parents should let their children express their emotions properly and allow them to decide on their own. Otherwise, various issues may arise such as addictions to mood-altering substances. Whether children have home deprived of healthy emotions or one deprived of financial well-being, the outcome is often the same. The child will seek a placed to escape from the harsh realities of their existence. They often grow into impulsive adults who are comfortable taking risks. Who have high-pressure jobs whose stress seems to excuse their abuse of substances because they feel that they “deserve” it.

Moreover, an addiction doesn’t start only through early experimentation with drugs or because of family dysfunction. The genes often make a person becomes an addict. Science doesn’t quite yet understand this biological start to addiction. Not every child born to an addict becomes one. Yet, children raised by alcoholic parents have a much greater tendency toward substance abuse. Researchers have not yet quite worked out whether this is due to the example of behavior learned by the child in that environment or the biochemical makeup of a child born to an addict. Certainly, genetics is one factor that can trigger the start to an addiction.

Contributing Factors of Addiction

How Does Addiction StartBeyond these elements of “nature and nurture,” addictions have a tendency to start with peer pressure as teens experiment with drugs and alcohol. Most of the statistics on when addictive behavior starts will cite ages before 19-years-old. Your addictive personality might already determined before you’ve made out of your teens. Some historical and cultural shifts are responsible for that. Situations like bullying have only increased in recent years, with the increased access that social media gives users to each other’s lives. Bullying is just another word for negative peer pressure. When you’re a teen, this kind of influence from friends can push you to try to demonstrate a kind of maturity or coolness which might require the excessive use of drugs or alcohol.

The effects of one’s younger years live on to haunt us. It is the way we are raised that often impacts the lifestyle we have as adults. This is true of addictions, as well. If you come from a family where someone has an addiction, you are likely to imitate that behavior unconsciously. However, it does not need to be anything so transparent in your upbringing as being raised by an alcoholic. Parents should encourage children to develop positive social skills in order to avoid the risk of developing addictive behaviors. Strong social connections are important to avoid the tendency of developing addiction.

This is not an invitation to blame the parents, siblings, or extended family for the start of an addict’s downward spiral, but the most successful recovery programs explore the larger family dynamic if they wish the patient to successfully recover. We need to understand how psychologically conditioned we are. In that way, we can break out of destructive patterns.