The Effects of Alcoholism

Treatment, addiction, and death

Oct 20, 2024

A few days ago, I took a train down the scenic coast to a state park in the rainforest near where my father had spent the final three decades of his life – a place to which he had no natural connection, no family ties. It was simply a place he ended up by happenstance, got stuck in, and never left.

There, my mother and her sister along with some of my siblings and their families gathered from near and far to spread my father’s ashes. We were the ones who had spent the most time with our father when he wasn’t actively dismantling his life, piece by piece. We stood watching as my brother tipped the ashes out of the bag into the water, noting he had no idea what to say. None of us had had much contact with our father in a very long time. He had no friends, no acquaintances who attended.

Later, as we sat around looking at old photos, another brother pulled out a manila folder unearthed from my father’s possessions. It contained a series of sordid e-mail printouts documenting the interactions leading up to him being forced into early retirement by his employer, a major investment bank. In one e-mail, ironically titled “Reality” in the subject line and clearly written while high as a kite, my father condescendingly invoked the Vietnam War and the battle against those who value “form over function” in a rambling exhortation to his boss.

Another e-mail, dripping in contempt and threatening a face-to-face encounter, was sent to a client who had essentially caught my father stealing from him. It takes an impressive degree of delusion to confidently talk down to and threaten both clients and bosses, but this was the sort of delusion he had long marinated in.

The third was a follow-up e-mail to an in-person meeting, wherein his employer listed my father’s excuses for his behaviour. My father wouldn’t go to casinos with clients, he had said, if cigarettes weren’t cheaper there. The IRS owed him money that would fill in the gaps on his accounts. He was bored and there was nothing to do here. His employer suggested he get a hobby and showed great concern for his physical and mental health.

The e-mails were presented as a sort of final record of the epic heights of the insanity that had unfolded across a decade: a look behind the formerly closed doors of his workplace. Relatively recently, my father himself reported to a sibling that his life had “gone to shit” in the global financial crisis of 2008 and stayed that way for good.

As always, we responded to the situation with our finely honed survival skills of sarcasm and dark humour. Dad was not a man of either hobbies or self-care; the thought of him taking up either was ludicrous. Yet as I listened to the conversation unfold around me, I thought about how none of us have ever really understood the wide-ranging impacts of addiction. In recent months, especially, I’ve gained a little knowledge from my own experiences with it – a tiny amount compared to anyone with a real education in the subject. Still, it’s been enough to throw my father’s self-destruction into a different light.

At the suggestion of my then-fiance, I began attending Al-Anon several months ago. The more I learned about the program, the more I was amused by how much it had in common with religion. Probably all 12-step programs do. There’s a point of conversion, a time when the scales of denial fall away and the individual experiences a moment of truth (Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable). There’s a process of purification led not by a powerless self, but by a higher power. There’s the hope of transformation. There’s literature. There’s community and communion of sorts. There’s the promise of serenity.

I could suddenly see why religion had appealed to my parents in their 20s. Both were converts to an Anabaptist-style Christianity; neither had been raised in it. And for the first time, I realized that both of my parents were also the adult children of alcoholics. They were effectively untreated Al-Anon who turned to religion for help. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” says the Bible and Al-Anon, in one way or another.

What does simply living around an alcoholic do to a person? I only became aware of the effects of alcoholism relatively recently, despite experiencing some for a lifetime. Those were undoubtedly passed on by my parents while others I know from first-hand experience. Here are just a few, loosely paraphrased from How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics:

a feeling of chronic underlying stress. Life with an alcoholic is volatile by nature of the disease. Whether due to active drinking or dry drunk syndrome, the alcoholic’s behaviour is often unpredictable or irrational. Waiting for the other shoe to drop at any given moment, those who live with alcoholics experience chronic stress, confusion, and eventually a sort of hopelessness that things can change.
alienation of the self. The alcoholic is often defensive about their behaviour, placing blame on others. Their defence centres on how they feel or why what they did was acceptable. As we are drawn in by their confidence or certainty, we become less confident in our responses to their drinking. Perhaps they’re right, we think. Maybe I’m the one who caused this, or maybe this situation really is difficult for them. We suppress our shock or dismay or distress, potentially to the point where we stop acknowledging our emotional needs at all.
denial. Conversely, we might be well aware that an alcoholic’s behaviour is unacceptable. But because we may also have positive experiences or strong emotional connections with the alcoholic, we avoid acknowledging that reality. Instead, we choose to look at only the positive portion of our lives, explaining away the unacceptable or negatives as exceptions, mistakes, or one-time occurrences.
struggling with reality. As the way we have chosen to look at our lives proves increasingly false, we begin to question our perceptions. A lack of faith in our ability to evaluate a situation can lead to an inability to see choices or make decisions at all. We feel paralyzed and unable to help ourselves.

The promises proffered by religion can alleviate all of these effects. In the version of Christianity that my parents adopted, believers were forced to acknowledge that both reality and human nature were filled with evil and there was no hope for change in this world. My parents likely found it easy to relate to this claim, given their childhood experiences with alcoholism. But in a Christian framework, a single glaringly-obvious choice could alter their lives forever and secure eternal happiness after death. This extended an attractive sense of empowerment, even if the payoff didn’t occur until the afterlife.

At the same time, there was no need to trust themselves – they could instead trust an omnipotent higher power who would validate their emotions, replacing stress and anxiety with certainty and hope. They could let go and let God. Their version of Christianity thus appealed to these and many more of the untreated effects of alcoholism they had long experienced.

With growing awareness of the effects of alcoholism on me, I was newly able to imagine my parents feeling the same way. And by finding a point of connection between us, it became less difficult to find compassion for them. Where they had turned to religion for help, I’d turned to Al-Anon. I much prefer Al-Anon because it offers a higher power of one’s own making – a Power who isn’t punitive, who doesn’t overwhelm one’s life with rules or existential dread. But there’s no denying that our higher powers are useful in the same ways: both alleviate anxiety and offer hope.

I can now see that my father suffered from the effects of growing up with his own father’s alcoholism. It was clearly vicious; I know only that it had ended my paternal grandfather’s life at age 45, despite having been dry for years. My father had initially used drugs to escape the effects of my grandfather’s alcoholism, then turned to faith. Once his church cut ties with him, those now-untreated effects re-emerged with a vengeance along with the chaos they can lead to.

So my father lived in a familiar state of deep, chronic stress, creating conditions that unquestionably increased it. He acknowledged no emotional needs at all, pushing away everyone close to him. He denied the need for treatment or even help, explaining away absurd situations as exceptions or problems he shouldn’t have to bother with and insisting he was perfectly in control. His struggle to acknowledge the gravity of his situation grew over time, and he almost certainly felt powerless to help himself.

Maybe that’s why he had five Bibles in his apartment when he died, still seeking out that connection to a higher power he knew had judged him and found him wanting. Maybe he hoped against hope that God would forgive him and admit him into an afterlife that proved better than the one he’d made for himself on earth.

Having learned more about addiction, I find it much easier to not judge my parents for their behaviour. Unaware that I was also suffering from the effects of my parents’ untreated Al-Anon and later addictions, I, too, behaved in ways that were harmful to those around me. I had lived in a state of chronic low-key stress, unconsciously making choices that exacerbated the situation. Overwhelmed by these conditions, I had found it difficult to meet my child’s needs for attention and patience.

I had even hurt the alcoholic I lived with in an outburst of long-suppressed emotion that amounted to a moment of insanity. I had been effectively driven insane not by an alcoholic, but by my own inability to live with someone else’s alcoholism. My life had become unmanageable and I had been at a loss for what to do.

The truth is my father was an addict, through and through. As a child, he had suffered from the family illness of alcoholism and thoroughly lacked a sense of self-worth due to growing up with an alcoholic father. In an effort to treat this illness, he himself became an addict. He later got sober and found treatment in religion. And eventually, after thirty years, he relapsed hard into far more potent addictions. Because he did not much understand his own addiction, he never sought help and spent fifteen years living a life he openly hated.

With greater awareness and humility, I can shift the focus of my evaluation away from the impacts of my father’s behaviour on me or others and more clearly see the impacts of his behaviour on himself. I can see his character forming as a sweet-faced child, fully unaware of how alcoholism was shaping his sense of self. I can sense the volatile origins of the mood disorder he’d always refused to treat, which likely pushed him to seek out methamphetamines and crack. I can see how, trapped in a world of his own making and unable to piece together a way out, he slowly succumbed to the effects of alcoholism that had led him into his own addictions.

At the very least, he provided a definitive demonstration of the importance of cultivating a healthy relationship to one’s self: there is no one my father failed so much as himself. Although no tears were shed as we spread his ashes in a place to which he does not belong, far from where he was born and the gravesites of his family members, that is something to mourn.

For more reflections on my father, see: