InShadows

Hello everybody,

I have an alcoholic sister. I am 23 and she is 22.


Quick life background: My sister suffers from anxiety attacks, and depression. She used to be on medication but is no longer on them due to my mom's insurance going out and I can't add her to mine as she is a sibling.

I don't know when she started drinking. When I turned 21, she was giving me drinks like it was old news for her, and she's the younger sister. Alcoholism runs high in our family, however all those that drink are either dead or not in our lives. I know that her boyfriend (she's still with him) did enable her drinking a lot.

Speaking of her boyfriend, last September he was arrested for hitting her when they were both drunk. He is on probation and required to go to anger management classes as well as random breathalyzers. After the court date, they promised each other, in order to save their relationship, that they wouldn't drink.

Fast forward: (I'm sorry this is so scattered. It's such a long story, so I'm going to provide tidbits).

My sister binge drinks every time her boyfriend is away. When she drinks, she is angry, hateful, and says very degrading stuff to me. Her and I live in an apartment, and her boyfriend stays with us (not my willing), but sometimes goes to his parents house. I find bottles everywhere!

She's a dangerous drunk as well. Several times, she's left the front door open and all our animals escaped. She's drowned in the bathtub three times now, one time she was rushed to a hospital. She was even raped once by an old high school friend (still unknown who to me) when I was not home, and she went to the hospital.

I've told her boyfriend that she had been drinking, but he ends up always coming back the next morning. A lot of times, he's under the impression that it is her anxiety making her act weird (how does he not SMELL it?).

She always drinks until she blacks out, as well. She never can casually drink. One time she ordered pizza, and I got a call from the driver while I was at work that the front door was wide open and she was laying naked in the living room.

I've asked my mom several times to help, since she had a drinking problem in her teens. However, she suffers from some mental illness of her own and ends up posting about my sister all over her facebook where my sister can see. My sister gets upset, drinks some more.

I've always been the mother of my family. The apartment is very expensive, and with our mom out of the house and unemployed, I'm the 'breadwinner' of the family. All my friends keep telling me that the only way to wake her up to her self destruction is to move. They can visibly see what it's doing to me. EVERY day when I go home, a part of me expects to find her dead because I wasn't there to save her from a drunken stupor. I check to see if she's breathing all the time. It's killing me, and my friends know me as one of the happiest, most patient person on the earth. But they see me cracking, and way too many of them had to come into the apartment with me after dropping me off because I was too scared to see what I would find.


I tried everything with her. I tried saying "not only are we sisters, we are roommates. You can do whatever you want, until it interferes with my living."

I've tried distance.

I've tried drinking WITH her.

I've yelled, screamed, cried, held interventions.

I've even kept some of her binges secret from her boyfriend as long as she opened up to me about the drinking and admitting she has a problem.

My friends want me to move. They visibly post all over my facebook their offers for me to come with them.

But I'm scared to move on. I'm scared of change. I think of everybody she's pushed out of her life, and how in the middle of the night she cries that she doesn't have any friends. I've always been her pillar, her one friend. I don't want to have to leave my home that I've known for 8 years to teach her a lesson, but I can't keep this going. What if I leave and she dies? But what if I leave and she LIVES?

I'm so sorry for this being so scattered. I've kept this inside so long. Please help? I'm running out of resources and it seems all I have left are tears.