MY alcoholic sister (mother of 2) - WHAT CAN I DO?
Hi,
This is my first ever post relating to my Sister’s alcoholism.
I feel completely lost and don’t have anyone I can talk to about this.
My Sister’s alcoholism is an emotional subject for everyone in my family and it has become a ‘touchy subject’- Mum will end up in tears, my brother will shut down and my Dad has never been good at talking – full stop.
What follows in this email may sound quite critical, it’s not, but I’m just trying to cut a long story short. I LOVE my sister dearly and her alcoholism plagues me daily. I’ve even contemplated seeking therapy for myself to help me deal with the emotional stress that my sister’s alcoholism creates.
She is in complete denial, my parents help her A LOT to protect her two young sons from the consequences of her drinking (including recently helping her to finance a new home), which is understandable. She divorced from her abusive/controlling husband 2 years ago at which point the extent of her drinking problems became visible. She has told us that she has been drinking for over 10 years (she is only 30). Although she says her drinking is not as heavy as it used to be, who knows?
At the moment, her drinking is limited to evenings once her boys are in bed (probably about 2 bottles of wine a night). I’m not sure if this is a lot or not based on averages? But I’m concerned that once the boys, who are 11 and 7, eventually leave home, she’ll have not reason to restrict her drinking times and things will get much worse very quickly.
Myself and the members of my family have tried numerous times talking to my sister, she has admitted she’s an alcoholic (usually when she’s drunk) and we even managed to get her to the point of accepting to got to AA and see a therapist. It had taken 6 months hard work to get her to this point, with some harsh words spoken in the process, but after the first AA meeting she said it wasn’t for her and all communication broke down, completely. Now my parents give her support so that she keeps her head above water and everyone just tries to maintain ‘normality’, my sister always disappearing around 6pm to get her drinks at home. Things blow up once every few months when my sister does something outside of the normal drinking routine like being found semi-unconscious in her bed when she should have picked the boys up 3 hours previous, or the house is in a total wreck and the boys don’t have a single item of clean clothing.
She really is not interested in getting any help and I read everywhere that nobody can do anything unless the person wants to help themselves, but I really don’t like the idea of just sitting back and watching my Sister’s alcoholism get worse until she has a crunch moment like having her kids taken away, or setting fire to the house when she ‘falls asleep’ in bed with a cigarette in her hand…
What makes this even more complicated is that I’m the only person in the family to know about a traumatic thing that happened to my sister when she was fourteen. Looking back, this was the point at which her life started to go off the rails. I’m the only one in the family to know what happened and she didn’t tell me until 14 years later and made me vow not to tell anyone. She was always convinced that my Mum would ‘do something stupid’ if she knew the truth. When we were young my Mum had said that if anyone ever hurt us she would rather spend the rest of her life in prison than leave the perpetrator alive. I torture myself with questions as to whether I should have told my parents, or whether getting my sister to tell them now would be the key to her starting to recover, or whether this would just ‘break’ my parents and make everything worse?
I go through spells of trying to play an active role in getting my Sister to take a step towards recovery, to trying to block it all out of my head when I feel it simply like bashing my head against a brick wall. My family all live in the same town, but I live on the other side of the world at the moment and I just feel so powerless.
I have currently resigned myself to the fact that the only thing I can do is start saving money so that the day my sister WANTS to recover, I can be there and pay for her rehab. Is that realistic, or am I just dreaming?
But on the other hand, I’m thinking there must be stuff I can learn and share with my parents and my brother that could help them do the right things and guide my sister in to wanting to stop drinking, rather than just sit around and wait for it to get worse. I understand my parents concern about not giving their total support, because they do not want my sister’s boys to suffer. This I do understand. But it’s a total catch 22 as this support allows her to carry on drinking very easily. Maybe we just have to wait for the boys to turn 18, leave home and then leave it to all fall to pieces? Surely that can’t be the right solution?
I know there is never going to be a quick fix but at the moment I feel lost and powerless. I just wish I could be DOING something to help???
I can’t wait to here from you.
Kind regards,
The lost Sister