I’ve been depressed since yesterday, when I innocently brought my parents dinner (before work, I stopped by in the morning) and found my father hunched over breakfast in terrible pain. Lower right quadrant of the belly, a 9 out of 10. For an old stoic like my dad, that’s bad.

So I cancel out a couple of patients and take him with my mother to the ER and wait for an evaluation. Can’t wait all day, so I leave my mom with her phone. Gotta’ go. Let me know what happens.

It’s a terrible feeling, leaving your 84 year old mother in…

Wikipedia defines duct tape as a strong,  multi-purpose pressure-sensitive adhesive tape. In America, we define duct tape as the multi-purpose, quick fix-it for all circumstances that need an immediate, temporary fix. This can range from taping the spine of a book together or holding a headlight in place until a repair can be done. Duct tape is the all-American fixer-upper.

My father used duct tape in an attempt to fix me. When I used to drink and black out—which was more often than I care to recall—I wasn’t always the best driver. I drank, and I drove, and I bounced off things…

Well, it’s been 6 days since my infamous decompensation on Main Street, when I found my active addict actively acting out  his addiction.  First of all, thanks to all of you who commented on my blog.  I am so grateful to you guys for the warm fuzzies.  So, as I said, I have been taking care of myself - really, Scout’s Honor - and life has been much more fluid the past couple of days.  I have been taken out to dinner (twice) and I didn’t have to pay - imagine that! All my doggies are, once again, sleeping with…

I know I wrote about it before, but there’s so much to say on this one. There’s nothing like the alcoholic family that happens to be fun. How often do you hear about that?

The Set Up

It’s not uncommon for a therapist to find couples marrying people from families very different from their own. I tend to like treating these couples, especially when one of the partners is an alcoholic who has married a sober person precisely because he or she knows that sober is better, that this sober person is “good” for him.

(We’ll use “he” – could just…

In one of the Alanon pamphlets on detachment, there are a series of bullets representing the things we learn in Alanon.  Two of them are the following:

In Alanon We Learn:

Not to create a crisis, and

Not to prevent a crisis if it is in the natural course of events.

I am in a quandary right now.  How does one know if they are “creating a crisis” or allowing a crisis to occur “in the natural course of events?”  This has been gnawing at me for the last several days, since I have found myself in situations where I really don’t know if …

Family therapists and addictions therapists tend to part ways when it comes to whether or not to cut off, in the name of not enabling, the “sick” member of the family, the one who steals the silverware to pay for the cocaine, the alcohol, the heroin.  Pick your substance, none of them are free.

Not that we’re naive.  We understand that an addict will do anything to get substances, and will exploit the family, in all kinds of ways, as a coping strategy under stress.  Object?  Get drugs.  Drug seeking. 

But family therapists like to keep the door cracked, the lines of…

We went to his parents’ house to have dinner tonight. It’s the first time I’ve been around them in a while. I didn’t deliberately decide to stop hanging out with his folks…it just kind of happened. I’ve been working like crazy since last May, which is around when I stopped spending as much time with them. Once it happened, however, I recognized that there was a significant drop in the drama factor in my life. His mother and father are both addicts, and so engaging with them is exhausting.

His mother and father have both made little remarks to let me…

At the meeting last night, we talked about how alcoholism sets up a Merry-Go-Round of blame and denial. There are three types of people who ride the Merry-Go-Round with the alcoholic.

One is the enabler who is impelled to rescue the alcoholic from the disease. The enabler by trying to save the alcoholic also is meeting a desperate need himself. What happens when the enabler steps in is that the alcoholic is denied the process of learning from mistakes. Instead, the alcoholic learns that someone will be there to come to the rescue.

The other individual on the Merry-Go-Round is the victim.…

I am thinking today about how much I enabled my qualifier over the years. Enabling to me means the things that I’ve done that might make it easier for the alcoholic to continue in the progression of the disease.

In many cases, enabling means that you cover for the person who is drunk by making up excuses or fixing things when they make a mess. My qualifier has always had a great job and has been functional. There wasn’t any binge drinking or staying out all night. It was more of an internal rage that resulted in the need to have several…