Alcoholics : No victims, only volunteers

With David Ogot, winner of the Kenya Union of Journalists 2003 Drugs Reporter of the Year Award.

“My life is in a mess, I would really have gone so far if it were not for their drinking, we have tried everything and they still drink so we have left it all in God’s hands – all we can do now is pray.”
This is the common refrain I hear from the families I counsel over and over again. A martyr-like resignation to their “fate”. A state of helplessness that is hard to comprehend until one understands the disease of alcoholism, for yes contrary to popular prejudice, it is a disease.
A baffling disease all too often confused with drunkenness, which should be noted, is willful. Though, symptoms of alcoholism and drunkenness are similar- misuse of money, broken promises, anti-social behavior, missing work and family disharmony- that and the fact that they both require one to consume alcohol for the symptoms to manifest is where all similarity ends. The difference between these two states is that, ‘alcoholics would stop if they could, while drunkards could stop if they would.’
Stigma surrounding drunkenness from centuries of loathing mainly from society as reinforced by the church and mosque further discourage any family member, friend or employer of an alcoholic from looking at the truth which is always there staring them bang in the face. Alcoholism.
But this shame-creating loathing gives birth to a denial so strong as to become an almost unshakeable belief. Families and friends clutch at any straw that can be remotely considered as an alternative to the unacceptable option - accepting alcoholism.
By doing this they readily swallow hook, line and sinker the rationalisations and denial continually spewed-out by the alcoholic- reasons which change by the week, day or hour.
Every alcoholic will tell you, he drinks ‘because of…’ and then proceed to feed you the flavour of the week. “My spouse is a nag can’t go home without having a few” or “my boss is a tribalist”, “my parents favour my siblings over me,” and the all encompassing “everyone is against me.”
Significant others desperately believe these reasons, with spouses bending over backwards to accommodate the drinking person who is merely projecting his bad feelings over themselves and the consequences of their compulsive drinking onto their loved ones.
“Your cooking is terrible”, “you have become too fat,” “you dress like an old grandmother” has wives feeling bad about themselves and beginning to believe these projections. As a result they try to rectify their ‘mistakes’ so that their spouses can stop drinking. By this time they firmly believe that they are the cause the wild drinking.
You are now a co-dependent or the co-alcoholic with a now unhealthy reaction to alcohol in the form of the alcoholics drinking, be it spouse or child or any significant other in intimate contact with you.
All the while as you chase ‘ghosts’ the alcoholic has his reason for drinking which he firmly believes in, for their denial is a defence mechanism which allows them to cope with their intense feelings of guilt over their drinking – guilt which would otherwise overwhelm them. For the alcoholic, denial is not a form of cheating or lying, but a very real defence mechanism.
Thus the circle is complete. The alcoholic has succeeded in distracting every one from the real problem, their drinking while every one else enable him to continue drinking as they try to set up the ideal situation he constantly demands. In other words they try to remove the “because” in his ‘“I drink because…” rationalisations.
Every alcoholic is capable of being sober for at least a day, and tens of thousands do this for weeks or even months in a row, with the result that every body exclaims how so and so has changed. This in turn fortifies their belief that the person must have really been going through a bad patch. They begin to believe the “because.” They are relieved. Problem over. Wrong. Suddenly the fellow is drinking again and the same old pain cycle of fighting, pleading threatening and finally resignation restarts. Many at this point believe the person is drinking this way intentionally to hurt them. For if this were not the case how then would one explain the fact that they had not touched a drop for three months? Indeed had been going about their business very diligently? So they couldn’t be alcoholic. An alcoholic cannot last even half a day without alcohol.
So logically it follows that this behavior after stopping for so long, must be willful. And so we have set up the classic scenario of alcoholism and alcoholic behavior which the support and recovery group Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) so aptly captured in their three word description of alcoholism - “cunning, baffling, powerful.”
The families give-up in despair believing that if the drinker is not a victim of witchcraft, or a mental disease all they can do is pray, and hope that one day the person will change.
Herein lies another paradox. The person cannot change being an alcoholic while at the same time he must change his alcoholic lifestyle. Certain factors including genetic make-up predispose individuals, roughly 10 per cent of the population to alcoholism. You can therefor say one is born an alcoholic except that the disease’s onset is triggered by the consumption of alcohol where progression will not be hampered by the amount consumed or duration (years) of consumption, but the mere fact of continued consumption.
To halt this progression, one must stop consumption. The alcoholic must abstain. There can be no tapering off, or gradually reducing the amount for with an alcoholic, his misery does not start at his fifth, eighth, 10th beer, nor the first crate, but the first drink.
It is the first drink, which triggers the craving that in turn sets up the bouts of compulsive, uncontrollable drinking. This explains the Mr. Jekyl and Dr. Hyde personality exhibited from one day or week to the next. The character exhibited when they have not consumed alcohol and behave normally, and their other character after consuming alcohol, which also behaves normally – for an alcoholic!
In just over three years I have gone from toasting fellow alcoholics with dirty glasses of chang’aa (fiery bootleg Kenyan hooch) in grimy, dangerous dens to toasting receipt of national journalism awards (three last year), while sipping my favourite soft-drink Stony Tangawizi seated in the five-star ‘The Stanley’ Hotel, one of the most prestigious in the country.
In 2002 I produced a highly acclaimed 40 minute documentary on alcoholism entitled ‘Nobody Kicks A Dead Dog’ which apart from airing on Citizen T.V (2002 and 2003) has been widely distributed all over the country to individuals and institutions as is a useful audiovisual tool during workshops. As a Director of goinghomedotcom at non-profit company I set up and run with my wife Eileen I go all over the country holding awareness workshops for public and schools.
The Organisation also put up andruns awebsite www.goinghomedotcom.org the first and probably the only one of its kind in East and Central Africa if not the whole continent, with information on alcoholism and other drug addiction as well as an online library. This service is provided to families, researchers, journalists, youth and church groups or any interested party – absolutely free of charge.
If you come our of denial, stop enabling the alcoholic, detach and stop mopping up after them the consequences of their drinking, you might succeed in waking them up to the fact that they need help.