convincing relative to seek treatment?
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: ...
Posts: 1
convincing relative to seek treatment?
Apologies in advance for the novel (and its inevitable incoherence, seeing as it happens to be 3 am and all). I’m hoping somebody here might be able to point me in some sort of direction with this.
My aunt is an alcoholic who used to live out of state, but recently moved out here to live with us. She desperately needs to go into rehab, but can’t afford it and won’t follow through with any of the state-funded programs. She lies about going to AA meetings, and pretty much has no intention of actually doing anything to fix the problem. The police found her passed out (drunk) in her car in front of a liquor store, and took her to the emergency room.. she refused to speak with any doctors and left.
The drinking is taking a serious toll on her body. She looks incredibly unhealthy, is always sick, and I find evidence that she’s been throwing up on a regular basis. And there’s this smell, even when she’s perfectly clean, that, I don’t know what it is, but it *can’t* be good.
And then, there was the house she rented from my parents. (disclaimer: this paragraph gets pretty graphic and disgusting.) Let me preface this by saying that I am NO Martha Stewart. I am the absolute antithesis of the neat freak.. but this was the most horrific thing I have ever seen. The floors, walls and pretty much everything in the house were covered in an assortment of trash, egg, dog excrement, blood, and moldy human vomit- the place was such a mess even the *hardwood furniture* was rotting. There were pills and empty bottles all over the floor, and dead mice in the microwave- she’d evidently been so plastered, she hadn’t even noticed they were in there and kept using it. She had been eating cold soup straight out of the can for weeks because she’d run out of clean plates and had broken the (brand new) stove. The *entire kitchen* was covered in a layer of ancient raw egg and old vodka. (Apparently this paled in comparison to her last place.. my other aunt had to rent a full-size construction dumpster when she helped her move out, mice had eaten the insides out of all the appliances, and she hadn’t taken the trash out in over a year.) It was so awful, we had to hire somebody to gut the place afterwards. It made me physically sick to see how she had been living, and I begged my parents to have her committed, in hopes that somebody at the hospital might somehow be able to convince her to get back into rehab (or, at the very least, maybe she’d be forced to continue seeing someone afterwards.) No such luck.. they refused, insisting it would ‘just make things worse’. I don’t think that’s humanly possible.
She is in total denial about the situation- I am renting the (completely renovated) house now, and when one of my cats (a formerly feral kitten I am rehabilitating) scratched up a tiny patch of the (new) carpet next to a doorframe, she commented on how now my parents would see that she wasn’t such an awful tenant.. that they were lucky to have her, and now that there was “somebody worse� living there, they couldn’t complain about her anymore. She continues to attempt to make friends with the guys who got stuck gutting the house (they clean my grandmother’s place, where she lives now), and insists that ‘they don’t think anything of it’ because they’re men, and they ‘like [her] because it was good money’. She steals my grandmother’s money to buy booze (and has pawned her stuff in the past), and just yesterday, I caught her attempting to break into my parents’ house! (She didn’t know I was home, and after ringing the bell several times, she walked around the house, peeked in the windows, and tested the back doors until she found one that would open.. then she walked right in and started looking around. We are fairly positive that she has stolen money belonging to my little brother before. My new neighbors know that I’m related to her and avoid me like the plague.. I go outside and wave, they scowl and go inside.
Living with her is killing my grandmother, but my grandmother refuses to give her the boot because she doesn’t want to see her daughter living on the street. (My aunt is too proud to use any form of public assistance- she flat out refuses.) When she’s drunk, she’s cruel and frightening, and she takes it all out on my grandmother because she knows she won’t do anything. Every time it gets bad, my grandmother winds up in the hospital. She (the aunt) isolates her and monitors her conversations with us to keep her from admitting what’s really going on.
My aunt is unemployed. There are state-funded rehab programs here, but the waiting lists are awful.. which makes it pretty easy for her to shirk going. She says she’ll do it, calls them once, they tell her she’ll have to wait, and she never calls them back.. makes excuses about how horrible the programs here are, and how knows they won’t work, how she saw a liquor store across the street from one of them, etc. I don’t think she actually has any intentions of going.
If it were just her she was affecting, I wouldn’t mind so much, but living with her is killing my grandmother and tearing my family apart.. and I can’t sit back and watch that happen. My parents’ marriage and house are falling apart, my younger brother (14) is constantly attempting to spend nights, holidays, and weekends at my place because he can’t stand to be around it.. even my *cat* can’t stand to be at my parents’ house anymore.. we can’t keep living like this.
How can I convince my aunt to find a reputable program and stick with it? I don’t know anything about any of this, and I’m at a total loss.. *sigh* Blargh.
My aunt is an alcoholic who used to live out of state, but recently moved out here to live with us. She desperately needs to go into rehab, but can’t afford it and won’t follow through with any of the state-funded programs. She lies about going to AA meetings, and pretty much has no intention of actually doing anything to fix the problem. The police found her passed out (drunk) in her car in front of a liquor store, and took her to the emergency room.. she refused to speak with any doctors and left.
The drinking is taking a serious toll on her body. She looks incredibly unhealthy, is always sick, and I find evidence that she’s been throwing up on a regular basis. And there’s this smell, even when she’s perfectly clean, that, I don’t know what it is, but it *can’t* be good.
And then, there was the house she rented from my parents. (disclaimer: this paragraph gets pretty graphic and disgusting.) Let me preface this by saying that I am NO Martha Stewart. I am the absolute antithesis of the neat freak.. but this was the most horrific thing I have ever seen. The floors, walls and pretty much everything in the house were covered in an assortment of trash, egg, dog excrement, blood, and moldy human vomit- the place was such a mess even the *hardwood furniture* was rotting. There were pills and empty bottles all over the floor, and dead mice in the microwave- she’d evidently been so plastered, she hadn’t even noticed they were in there and kept using it. She had been eating cold soup straight out of the can for weeks because she’d run out of clean plates and had broken the (brand new) stove. The *entire kitchen* was covered in a layer of ancient raw egg and old vodka. (Apparently this paled in comparison to her last place.. my other aunt had to rent a full-size construction dumpster when she helped her move out, mice had eaten the insides out of all the appliances, and she hadn’t taken the trash out in over a year.) It was so awful, we had to hire somebody to gut the place afterwards. It made me physically sick to see how she had been living, and I begged my parents to have her committed, in hopes that somebody at the hospital might somehow be able to convince her to get back into rehab (or, at the very least, maybe she’d be forced to continue seeing someone afterwards.) No such luck.. they refused, insisting it would ‘just make things worse’. I don’t think that’s humanly possible.
She is in total denial about the situation- I am renting the (completely renovated) house now, and when one of my cats (a formerly feral kitten I am rehabilitating) scratched up a tiny patch of the (new) carpet next to a doorframe, she commented on how now my parents would see that she wasn’t such an awful tenant.. that they were lucky to have her, and now that there was “somebody worse� living there, they couldn’t complain about her anymore. She continues to attempt to make friends with the guys who got stuck gutting the house (they clean my grandmother’s place, where she lives now), and insists that ‘they don’t think anything of it’ because they’re men, and they ‘like [her] because it was good money’. She steals my grandmother’s money to buy booze (and has pawned her stuff in the past), and just yesterday, I caught her attempting to break into my parents’ house! (She didn’t know I was home, and after ringing the bell several times, she walked around the house, peeked in the windows, and tested the back doors until she found one that would open.. then she walked right in and started looking around. We are fairly positive that she has stolen money belonging to my little brother before. My new neighbors know that I’m related to her and avoid me like the plague.. I go outside and wave, they scowl and go inside.
Living with her is killing my grandmother, but my grandmother refuses to give her the boot because she doesn’t want to see her daughter living on the street. (My aunt is too proud to use any form of public assistance- she flat out refuses.) When she’s drunk, she’s cruel and frightening, and she takes it all out on my grandmother because she knows she won’t do anything. Every time it gets bad, my grandmother winds up in the hospital. She (the aunt) isolates her and monitors her conversations with us to keep her from admitting what’s really going on.
My aunt is unemployed. There are state-funded rehab programs here, but the waiting lists are awful.. which makes it pretty easy for her to shirk going. She says she’ll do it, calls them once, they tell her she’ll have to wait, and she never calls them back.. makes excuses about how horrible the programs here are, and how knows they won’t work, how she saw a liquor store across the street from one of them, etc. I don’t think she actually has any intentions of going.
If it were just her she was affecting, I wouldn’t mind so much, but living with her is killing my grandmother and tearing my family apart.. and I can’t sit back and watch that happen. My parents’ marriage and house are falling apart, my younger brother (14) is constantly attempting to spend nights, holidays, and weekends at my place because he can’t stand to be around it.. even my *cat* can’t stand to be at my parents’ house anymore.. we can’t keep living like this.
How can I convince my aunt to find a reputable program and stick with it? I don’t know anything about any of this, and I’m at a total loss.. *sigh* Blargh.
Supply Manager
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: Cleaverville
Posts: 2,898
Welcome!
What a tough situation for your family. It is hard to watch these things happen without wanting to fix them. Unfortunately some things are not ours to fix. For me..if there is something I CAN do I do it...but then I have to let the rest go. Even something small like taking your grandmother out of there more often or watching over her more closely. Your Aunt does not want to get sober. I know you want was is best for her but unless she wants the same thing it is unlikely it is going to happen.
Hugs,
JT
What a tough situation for your family. It is hard to watch these things happen without wanting to fix them. Unfortunately some things are not ours to fix. For me..if there is something I CAN do I do it...but then I have to let the rest go. Even something small like taking your grandmother out of there more often or watching over her more closely. Your Aunt does not want to get sober. I know you want was is best for her but unless she wants the same thing it is unlikely it is going to happen.
Hugs,
JT
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: New Castle Pa
Posts: 67
I am so sorry to hear of your situation, I know how hard it is to want to fix it. I know from experiance my AH went into rehab and found every reason to sign himself out. He was not ready... He continues to do things the hard way detoxing here at home over and over why anyone would want to put themselves through detox more than once is beside me but I can not explain it. I am learning to detatch and thats what you need to do it will make you sick to try to fix something you can't. Good luck ((((HUGS)))))
stay around and talk all you want
stay around and talk all you want
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Phoenix,AZ
Posts: 6
Hi there. It is such a difficult situation, isn't it? Watching the people we care about hurt themselves and everyone around them with alcohol.
Gosh it is amazing how your story sounds a lot like mine, only the alcoholic is my mom, although my aunt runs a fair close (mom's sister).
My mother too lives in filth and disgust. I couldn't say that it is quite as bad as living with dead rats, but there is excrement from her bird that she allows to fly free all over the house. Her dog is not potty trained, and her house is infested with termites and ants. She neglects almost everything in her life. Every night is the same routine of drowning things out in a bottle. The hardest part for me is that she has a young daughter that is 14. My other sisters all went through it when we were kids, but as we are all now grown it is hard for us to see our little sister going through it alone. My sister and I have given our adult lives trying to "fix" her (as well as our childhood lives). We have tried to get her counseling, I have set appointments for her, I have called alcohol hotlines, suicide hotlines, I have gone to counseling for myself to try to get her in. We have given her literature, tried interventions, spent hours giving advice and energy in the hopes of fixing a mom that we love, but is horribly sick. We have used tactics of guilt, threats and anger. We have cried and begged. The only thing it has done is taken from my life. Mom is still an alcoholic. I am finally realizing as much as I love her and my sister, it is not my problem and I have to start living my own life. I will never "fix" that situation. This journey has been very hard, but I think I am finally starting to understand and let go.The most important thing we can do is take care of ourselves. Thanks for listening.
Mysti...
Gosh it is amazing how your story sounds a lot like mine, only the alcoholic is my mom, although my aunt runs a fair close (mom's sister).
My mother too lives in filth and disgust. I couldn't say that it is quite as bad as living with dead rats, but there is excrement from her bird that she allows to fly free all over the house. Her dog is not potty trained, and her house is infested with termites and ants. She neglects almost everything in her life. Every night is the same routine of drowning things out in a bottle. The hardest part for me is that she has a young daughter that is 14. My other sisters all went through it when we were kids, but as we are all now grown it is hard for us to see our little sister going through it alone. My sister and I have given our adult lives trying to "fix" her (as well as our childhood lives). We have tried to get her counseling, I have set appointments for her, I have called alcohol hotlines, suicide hotlines, I have gone to counseling for myself to try to get her in. We have given her literature, tried interventions, spent hours giving advice and energy in the hopes of fixing a mom that we love, but is horribly sick. We have used tactics of guilt, threats and anger. We have cried and begged. The only thing it has done is taken from my life. Mom is still an alcoholic. I am finally realizing as much as I love her and my sister, it is not my problem and I have to start living my own life. I will never "fix" that situation. This journey has been very hard, but I think I am finally starting to understand and let go.The most important thing we can do is take care of ourselves. Thanks for listening.
Mysti...
Member
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Arizona
Posts: 29
a suggestion to mystimead
Ok, this is only my opinion here, but if you are worried about the 14 yo daughter, it seems to me that this would be something for CPS to handle. Have you thought about that, I hope I am not offending, but she cannot be living in those conditions (the filth I mean) and be healthy.
Again, this is only my opinion. I am not in your situation.
Again, this is only my opinion. I am not in your situation.
Member
Join Date: May 2004
Location: In Search of Finding ME!
Posts: 1,246
Forgive me if I sound cruel, but I'm going to be honest with my opinion.
You cannot fix this. Your aunt will continue to drink as long as she wants too. There is no way that you or anyone in your family can do to make her stop drinking.
NO ONE can make her stop except her. And then she has to really be committed to stopping and doing the work to learn to live a sober life.
And while I do not mean to offend you, again, I'm only being honest. Do you know what an enabler is? There are things that people do that is well meaning and with the best of intentions, only it makes the alcoholic's life and choice to drink even easier. Meaning that as long as someone is there to clean up the mess that she has made, she has no responsibility for it and she can continue to do as she pleases with no accountability.
The road to recovery is not an easy one. Not for the person that is using/addicted - but also not easy for those that have been affected by the using person. Do you or your family ever attend Alanon meetings? I would recommend that you try it.
You can only do for you. Each person can only do for themselves. I think that you and your family really need to come up with some personal boundaries as well fitting consequences to enforce when/if your aunt should cross those boundaries.
This life is about YOU! And your aunt's life is about HER! We cannot control another person, even when we only want what is best for them.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh with you. That is not my intent. I'm only trying to be blunt and to the point as I know how much confusion and heartbreak that I lived in for years. I wish that someone could have clearly spelled it out for me a long time ago, taken my pain and frustration away, fixed the problem, etc. Only I realize now that no one can do that.
I wish you well. keep coming back here. Read through the posts. You'll be amazed to find that so many people know how you feel and will support you through this. There are a lot of wise people on this board as well that will give you wonderful insight and help you along the path.
Hang in there! It's not easy.
You cannot fix this. Your aunt will continue to drink as long as she wants too. There is no way that you or anyone in your family can do to make her stop drinking.
NO ONE can make her stop except her. And then she has to really be committed to stopping and doing the work to learn to live a sober life.
And while I do not mean to offend you, again, I'm only being honest. Do you know what an enabler is? There are things that people do that is well meaning and with the best of intentions, only it makes the alcoholic's life and choice to drink even easier. Meaning that as long as someone is there to clean up the mess that she has made, she has no responsibility for it and she can continue to do as she pleases with no accountability.
The road to recovery is not an easy one. Not for the person that is using/addicted - but also not easy for those that have been affected by the using person. Do you or your family ever attend Alanon meetings? I would recommend that you try it.
You can only do for you. Each person can only do for themselves. I think that you and your family really need to come up with some personal boundaries as well fitting consequences to enforce when/if your aunt should cross those boundaries.
This life is about YOU! And your aunt's life is about HER! We cannot control another person, even when we only want what is best for them.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh with you. That is not my intent. I'm only trying to be blunt and to the point as I know how much confusion and heartbreak that I lived in for years. I wish that someone could have clearly spelled it out for me a long time ago, taken my pain and frustration away, fixed the problem, etc. Only I realize now that no one can do that.
I wish you well. keep coming back here. Read through the posts. You'll be amazed to find that so many people know how you feel and will support you through this. There are a lot of wise people on this board as well that will give you wonderful insight and help you along the path.
Hang in there! It's not easy.
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