Kallistia

At the doctor earlier, he told me most of his patients were women who described their alcoholism as something they suddenly woke up with, like it was a hop, skip, and a jump from having an occasional drink to full blown alcoholism.

EndGameNYC

There's a very good and recent documentary on this topic, Lipstick & Liquor.

Verte

Kallistia - Thanks! Thought provoking.

EndGameNYC - I just looked at the movie trailer and the website for that documentary...what a great resource for starting a conversation on the subject.

Thanks very much

adee

A good book that talks about this phenomenon is Ann Dowsett Johnson's Drink: The Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol.

This wasn't my experience (I think I drank alcoholically about 10 seconds after my first drink) but I've heard a lot of stories that start with "I never had a problem with alcohol until a few years ago".

Kitkat331

Interesting. I feel like I came into it very gradually--hanging out with people who drank regularly and it creeped up on me over many years. I'd be hard pressed to identify even an exact year when I became an alcoholic. I went from almost totally not drinking in college to now over 17 years.

EndGameNYC

My mom only developed a problem with alcohol when she was about forty years old. And that was following an automobile accident from which she suffered what was then referred to as "whiplash," accompanied by debilitating migraine headaches. She's told me that she believes she was an alcoholic before the accident, and that it simply precipitated her heavy drinking. One of her siblings died from this affliction, and three others got sober in AA late in life.

She had a ridiculously successful career -- before, during and after her active alcoholism -- raised five kids, and suffered through a virtually loveless marriage that took a turn for the worse a couple of years before she started drinking. They made the divorce official at around the time she started going to AA.

She's been sober for thirty four years, and will be eighty four in December. She made it very easy for me to reach out to AA when I first got sober in 1983.

caboblanco

I made a decision to go on a beer vacation for a while...I knew exactly what i was doing and what i was getting into...i wasn't caught of guard..I mean i really pushed the envelope...i was like how much can i drink and for how long until i have to pay the piper

I didn't wake up and say...hey alcohol..you tricked me

but I'm a dude

83mama0f2

It creeped up on me but got progressively worse after the birth of my high needs son and my own post partum decline... I began day drinking... That's when I really knew I was in trouble . I had had some risky behavior earlier though.

hardhearts

My issues show definite progression, not a jump from one end of the spectrum to another overnight by any means. But there were a few definite triggers that made it worse, and the progression was rapid over just a handful of years (from 18-21). I became a very different person. To some people a drastic change like that in a smaller time frame might seem like it's "overnight" I guess. Looking back it was honestly a gradual change from being a happy, social drinker with a few heavier nights to a constant binge drinking, suicidal drunk. Little things along the way that I didn't notice until I was so mentally sick I couldn't take it anymore. I think everyone's experience is different, though.

GwenCummings

I drank alcoholically from my first real drinking moment aged just 16. Both parents were alcoholic and I didn't know any other way to do it. I still don't 35 years later but I have risked my life by spending all those years trying to control my drinking. I have a successful life compared to many, I am indeed high functioning but I can't count the number of times I nearly died from poisoning myself or from accidents or near misses. I have worried of late that my high functioning is at risk because of anxiety, weariness and despair. I have done something about that though and I am here and I am damned proud of that.

Interesting topic. Thank you.

GwenCummings

Hardhearts... I LOVE this!

"People who aren’t alcoholics don't lie in bed at two-thirty in the morning wondering if they’re alcoholics.”

That is so true. It is terribly sad but it also made me laugh out loud! I spent the last few months of my drinking reading sober recovery, watching when a man loves a woman and weeping and wondering if I was an alcoholic. Um YES you are lady! :-)

Gakx

I kinda wish that my experience had been sudden. Maybe I would have recognized the problem sooner...maybe.

My alcoholism was a very slow progression to the full-blown, black-out, ugly drunk. I 'd say I drank in moderation for about 10 years before the intake increased over a period of a year or two.

Wonder what the switch is in a woman's brain to cause sudden alcoholism. Hormones eskew?

ReadyAtLast

This wasn't my experience. Looking back I always had a different relationship with alcohol than my friends did. I drank to block out emotions and be more confident when I first discovered alcohol.

The only thing that changed in 20 years was the amount I drank and the type of drink I drank.

LadyBlue0527

I'm not being snarky but I don't buy into this theory. It's the equivalent of walking into a room with a child standing there and a broken lamp on the floor. The child is the only other person in the house and they look at you and say "I don't know what happened".

I may not know the exact point where I passed from take it or leave it to need it as much as I can get it but I sure as heck saw all the signs and what was coming. There's a word for those who say that they never saw it coming. It's called denial.

charleesavedme

I too think I always drank alcoholically when I drank, but I kept it in check for a long time and didn't drink very much in college or even in my 20's. It was after my second child was born that I really fell into drinking more and more until it was at least a bottle of wine a day. My youngest is now 11 so that's a lot of time. I feel badly about that because I wanted to be a mom more than anything, but the responsibility of parenthood while also working full-time and still being expected to be a perfect wife, was crushing and drinking helped me deal with it. Or at least I thought it did. In reality, it made everything worse.

Aellyce

I believe this type of development of addiction is more in people who had a sudden, outstanding trigger that introduced some distinct change in their life either emotionally or physically. Probably many of these patients also already had addictive tendencies but more minor and/or they were unaware of them before the big trigger.

In my case I think it's very likely that I carry some genetic (or other kind of inherited) predisposition. No active alcoholism in my parents, but both of my grandfathers were severe alcoholics and both lineages of my family has a spectrum of different kinds of mental illnesses. From the relatives that I know, it seems to me that my father and I were the "luckiest"...

I have had addictive tendencies since my childhood, but alcoholism specifically started to be a problem in my early 30's and developed gradually, not even in a linear way. The worst part of it for me was during a ~2.5 year period after I moved across the Atlantic from Europe into an environment that was wrong for me in many ways (local environment, job, a relationship). It taught me one major lesson: I am not unbreakable (used to be very confident that I could handle everything before, in part because of my prior successes with challenges). I would never do that again to myself.

Yet it was that period when I felt I'd learned some of the profoundest lessons about myself and the human condition in general, though my own suffering and through trying to find ways to understand and then resolve it. In the end I took a few months to create and then implement a plan of escape... moved to my current place of residence (which, I believe, is ideal for me), changed my job, and many other things. Except the drinking!

Recovery (getting into recovery from drinking finally) has also been a very gradual process for me after that move and to me it demonstrates the importance of environment and personal satisfaction, but shows also that these alone are far from enough. I feel I've learned that all the ideas about recovery regimes that we read here on SR everyday are absolutely, painfully true. In my case it seems like it really takes changing just about everything, although I could and still can use many good lessons from my past.

Now how far will this go now? Who knows?

Kallistia

I have a friend, in our late teens (our being the group of people I associate with) that decided (after we discovered really cheap 99 proof liquor) that he was going to be drunk the entire weekend...because he was 19 or 20 and why not? So he started drinking...and nine years later he never really stopped.

As for the doctor - he explained the science behind it, and the it has to do with alcohol distributing through muscle mass and the differences between muscles mass between men and women.

It's interesting to see all the posts about drinking beginning after mother hood...because in hindsight, that's really when I began drinking heavily as well...

hardhearts

This was true for me. I come from a line of alcoholics and my whole life I have show indicators of an addictive personality... whether it was food, exercise, television shows, or some other compulsion. I believe that on some level a personal trauma triggered a change in my drinking habits, but I was always walking a thin line given my family history.

hardhearts

Thanks!! That girl lying in bed at 2:30 is still me some nights so I like that it keeps me in check. It's from Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, if you haven't read it. It's pretty fantastic.

anewpage

Although I didn't realize I was an alcoholic until a few years ago, I drank alcoholically since my very first real drink at 16. My friends and I would get bottles of wine and I would drink so fast they would complain that I took way more than my share and I would always be the one blacked out drunk at the end, while they would be only slightly tipsy.
Also, in college I would hide alcohol in the closet and sneak sips of it during the day. I never told anyone about it and didn't think it was a problem at the time.
So that habit was always there, even though I wasn't an "everyday" drunk until about 2 years ago.