borischelski

My 50 year old sister's husband's drinking has progressively worsened over recent years to the extend he has become an obvious alcoholic.

He ruins all family occasions & by the end of the evening becomes a noisy embarassing mess.

My sister has two teenage daughters and his behaivour is driving a wedge between them and their father.

Whilst never actually vioent his behaivour is developing an increasingly aggressive tone.

To make matters worse for the past 2 years he has been taking taking strong prescription pain killers & morphine for a back problem. Combined with the alcohol ( & snuff tobacco) the cocktail is enough to knock out a rhino.

Over the past year he has also had major open heart surgery & is taking all sorts of additional drugs including blood thinners & warfrin.

Over recent years My sister has been adopting a softly softly approach and to some extent has stuck her head in the sand hoping it will go away.

However following incidents over Christmas she now recognises she needs to act - but has said she has no idea exactly what to do.

Needless to say he is in denial that he even has a problem never mind contemplating any self help groups.

Positively, their mortgage will be paid off within a year so she would always have a roof over. Negatively, he is entirely self employed & all income would immediately dry up if he fell off the rails.

Things are coming to a head as it is clearly starting to impact her marriage as well as family life.

Whilst I could NEVER suggest to my sister , IMO the only way to get him to start taking his problem seriously would be for him to move out.

I would like to provide my sister with some ideas to help her to start thinking about how to address the problem, not only to try to help him recover but also to help her and her family.Also so she can start thinking of her own legal rights should the worst come to the worst.

My sister lives in UK.

The purpose of this note us to ask if anyone could advise me of any self help, councilling or advisory centres, to help her start thinking about how to start adressung the various elements of her growing problem ?

Sorry for the long email & any guidance would be greatly appreciated.