People with addictions usually believe there are in control of their drug or alcohol use, that there’s no problem at all.  They may come up with smooth explanations and distracting words, but you can often notice their world falling down around them.  If you know someone like this, they may very well have drug and alcohol treatment in their future.

Family Functioning Goes Downhill With Drug and Alcohol Addiction

Unless you keep completely to yourself and have no living relatives that speak to you, you are likely to have some family around.  People with an addiction usually falter when it comes to parenting responsibilities, marital or dating relationships, and connections with extended family.  They defend their addiction behavior and brush off what others want and need.  This hurts families terribly, especially children who don’t understand. 

Keep in mind that if you had a difficult family upbringing, that foundation may be part of your drinking or drugging problem.  Covering up the emotions from painful memories or thoughts can certainly be fuel for an addiction.  Take a look before you try to forget.  Did someone in your family have a drinking or drugging problem?  Is it still going on today?

Addiction Causes Career Problems

Imagine doing a long shift at work on your toughest day (or night).  Now imagine doing this after a serious hangover or while still high.  Yeah, not so good.  Focus would go out the window, conversation skills would be impaired, and productivity would be lousy.  For the employer, this is a really bad deal all around.  There may be many missed days or days where their worker is present but hardly working. 

Going to happy hour once in a while is one thing.  Letting it bleed into the wee morning hours and having regular hangovers at work is something entirely different.  You may think that drinking after work or with the boss is helping you.  But if it gets out of control or turns into a place where you hide from your family and from work responsibilities, then you may be headed for alcohol rehab some day.  How long can that really continue before things fall apart?

Social Connections Suffer With Worsening Addiction

Good friendships can survive a lot of ups and downs.  And for many people, family will be there for you in your darkest hour.  Unfortunately, addiction really changes people for the worse.  It often makes them rude, impulsive, irresponsible, and self-absorbed.  None of these qualities work well in relationships.

Since an addiction presents itself differently from something like cancer, it may be more difficult for family and friends to rally around.  The addicted person might reject offers of help, accuse others of attacking them, and basically burn bridges left and right.  An addicted person really needs drug treatment.  Unfortunately, they might not have many people still around to help them get there. 

Drug Rehab Offers Hope For Dismal Life Direction

Drug and alcohol rehab can be a scary thought.  Being with strangers, talking about life and problems, maybe even staying away from family and friends.  But what’s worse, being a little uncomfortable for a while or allowing a dangerous addiction to get worse and worse?  Drug treatment isn’t a perfect cure, but it can help restore work dependability, family relationships, and supportive social connections.  When someone’s life suffers in those areas from addiction, drug and alcohol treatment can change your life for the better.

If you expect that going into recovery means you’ll have a perfect record of sobriety, you have a lot more to learn about recovery.  The reality is that “relapse happens”, even to people with several years of sobriety and drug rehab under their belt.  The circumstance of life change as time goes on, new triggers arise, upsetting events happen out of nowhere, the list goes on.  Here’s a breakdown of some common relapse risk factors that can cause you to backtrack on your sobriety. 

High Risk Situations With Old Crowd

You know you shouldn’t take your walk down by the bar a few blocks from your house.  You also know that calling your old high school friend Julie (current drug user) would be a mistake.  You’ve been there before and know exactly what will happen.  There is hardly two ways about it for this choice.  Being in the presence of people who are not going to uphold your sobriety and who won’t have a safe environment for you don’t have a place in your.  Run into them in the grocery store and say “Hi”?  Maybe, but don’t go home with them.

Prolonged States of Negative Emotion

There are some things in life you cannot change or sometimes expect.  Death, tragedy, illness, economic problems, all of these can be a part of your life without a lot of warning.  The after-effects can also last quite a while.  If you find that you are having long stretches of continuous anxiety, depression, or irritability, you may be ripe for a relapse.  You may or may not be able to change the circumstances causing your upset feelings, but you can probably get some help dealing with your emotions in a better way. 

After a long time trying to fight off symptoms, you might find it easier to drown it in alcohol or cloud it over with drugs.  A counselor, AA sponsor, or a close friend that’s aware of your addiction can help you through your rough time and help you stay in check with your recovery.

Thinking You Are Better And Skipping Meetings Or Drug Treatment

Well, you may sometimes do better with your recovery than other times.  But you are never really “better”, like you are cured.  It’s an ongoing process, not a final destination.  You should consider yourself at risk in some way throughout your whole life to best prevent relapse.

Keeping Drug Relapse A Secret

You have already had a relapse moment (or two) and you never told anyone.  It might seem like you are keeping your image together, that you just “took care of it”, or it won’t hurt anybody not to know.  But think about this - remember the feeling of shame you had when you were realizing you needed alcohol treatment?  When you knew that things were completely out of control?  Well, you probably just wanted to hide from everyone then, make it all go away. 

Hiding things about your recovery process reintroduces shame into the process.  Shame makes you want to hide.  So what about those two times you got drunk with your old friend from high school who doesn’t know you are an alcoholic?  If they don’t know you shouldn’t be drinking, they may put you in danger in the future without realizing it.  Being honest upfront can help you avoid this pitfall.

Drug Treatment Can Help After Relapse

You may have already had a drug or alcohol relapse by now.  If you have, what’s done is done.  The most important thing is to step back onto the path of recovery with baby steps.  Talk to your AA sponsor, your counselor, a trusted family member, someone.  Be honest with them and yourself to take the shame out of it.  If you cannot maintain your sobriety right now, get started in alcohol or drug treatment. 

You may or may not need a lengthy drug rehab stay depending on how severe your relapse was.  However, it’s most important to understand what was involved with your relapse, the risk factors.  That can help you stay on the recovery path longer next time.

There’s a somewhat hidden population of drug and alcohol addicts.  They hide from the public, from doctors, and maybe even themselves.   Older women have a much greater risk for developing addiction and a greater need for drug treatment services than most people would suspect.

Health Risks From Addiction in Older Women

Aging women don’t tell their doctors about symptoms of addiction, doctors admit they have a hard time seeing the problem themselves.  Instead, they excuse they symptoms as other more normal sounding issues such as side affects of another drug they are taking or just “getting old”.  Just like with younger people, there is much shame tangled up in admitting an addiction to drugs.  It can be so tough to both realize and accept that what was once helpful is now an unstoppable drug addiction. 

Not only do doctors have a hard time helping an older woman identify and manage an addiction, they may see her more often for other problems.  Older women are more vulnerable to the main effects of prescription drugs - a sedated feeling and the inability to think clearly.  This can translate into falls, taking the wrong dose of medications, unsafe driving, injury around the house, depression, suicide, and many other issues.

Elderly Women With Addiction Often Don’t Get Treatment

The public perception about elderly people seems to imply that they are usually beyond reach for drug treatment, that they have very little useful time alive left, and that drug treatment would be a waste of time and resources.  Some family members are willing to excuse excess drug or alcohol use as something the older woman “needs”.  It’s easier to just let her do what makes her feel better, and family members take pity or fear pushing for drug treament. 

According to one addiction expert, an astounding half of all alcohol addiction in women starts at age 60.  This is twice the reported rate for men of the same age.  Some aspects of aging may play into the vulnerability at this age for women.  Women often outlive men, so many women may have become widows by this time.  Adult children may live far away or be busy in their own lives, unable to visit much.  The affects of physical aging are undeniable at this stage.  Also, many women age 60 or older have also finished careers and may not have become engaged in other interests.

Most Common Addictive Substance For Older Women Not Alcohol

Although alcohol problems can certainly start after age 60, the worst addiction problem for older women is not alcohol but prescription medications.  Opiate pain killers were reported to be overused or misused for one out of every ten women over the age of 50.  Part of the problem is that women are more likely to be prescribed prescription pain medication or opiate-based. 

You can also imagine that some women who misuse prescription drugs may also misuse alcohol.  No matter what your age, this can be a problematic if not deadly combination.  Both types of drugs are sedatives that depress the functioning all over the body.   Accidental death or suicide becomes a stronger reality when these two are put together. 

Women of All Ages Need Drug Treatment For Addiction

Despite the public opinion, older women need drug or alcohol treatment just as much as a younger person does.  If it was your mother, your sister, your aunt, your grandma - would that make a difference?  Wouldn’t you want them to have the longest fulfilling life possible?  Drug treatment is available, and hopefully anyone who has concerns about an older woman misusing drugs or alcohol will take a second thought and get help.

When you are the only one doing something, it can feel like you are wrong.  Alcoholism is full of shame and self doubt, making it something not many people want to admit.  But what if you are the lone sober person in a family of alcoholics?  You aren’t wrong, but the people around you act like it.  Alcohol treatment has helped you out of a living hell, but you are worried you might fall back in.  It’s a sad truth for some people forging their path of sobriety.

Holidays and Gatherings With Alcoholics In Denial

How about receiving a gift of wine and wine glasses in the family gift exchange at Christmas.  Or, better yet, how about having a gift exchange entirely of alcohol?  When you are in the alcoholic mode, this sounds like a great idea with built-in fun.  For you as a person maintaining sobriety, it’s appalling.  What are you to do? 

You can simply go and opt out of the gift exhange.  Or, you could bring a nice neutral small gift that anyone might enjoy to show a different example (or if there is one person who is a minor or doesn’t drink).  Perhaps there is a special person you always enjoy seeing, and you can focus your attention on them that day. 

If family interactions are truly detrimental to you, or the presence of so much alcohol would be too tempting, then you need to decline altogether.  There is nothing to gain from putting yourself in harm’s way.  Whatever “points” you might lose by not being there would pale in comparison to a relapse or emotional abuse.

Family Interactions With Alcoholics In Denial

Now that you’re sober, you don’t feel so great about interactions with other family members who still drink a lot.  Plus, they finger-point because you got a DUI or probation or something like that.  Is it fair?  No.  In their minds, the only thing you did wrong was get caught.  You are the one with the problem because you have legal and financial consequences.  Not them, not ever them.

Finger pointing may make you feel like you are under a microscope.  However, blaming and scapegoating are classic forms of denial.  You are the bad person because you embody what they are bothered by the most.  Who wants to believe they are doing something pretty bad to themselves, anyway?  You are simply a lightening rod for the attention, which allows them to keep the focus off themselves and their own life difficulties.

Head For Alcohol Treatment Instead of Relapse

All this can make it seem like your sobriety is something kind of extreme.  Like maybe it really would be OK to drink sometimes, if it would make family gatherings easier or make them leave you alone.  If you are thinking this about your sobriety, consider attending more AA meetings and maybe even alcohol treatment.  It is no shame to voluntarily seek alcohol treatment, even if you haven’t relapsed yet. 

If you think your resolve is crumbling and your sobriety plans feel weak, alcohol rehab would be a better option than finding yourself in relapse again.  Relapse is for learning, learning about the blind spots in your life.  If you can sense you are nearing relapse, head it off at the pass by getting alcohol treatment now.  Don’t let any off-track thing your family says or does shame you out of your sobriety either.  You have been on the right path, and you still are.

Alcoholism has some fairly clear health risks - intoxicating the liver beyond its abilities, stomach problems, brain functioning, and doing anything dangerous while impaired like driving.  However, not as many people think of Type 2 Diabetes as a potential side effect.  How could diabetes and alcoholism be connected? 

Watch For The Extra Calories in Alcohol

Nearly everything you eat and drink has calories, unless it’s water or something sugar and fat free.  If you drink a small amount of alcohol now and then, these extra calories are not hard to balance in a moderately healthy diet.  It would be like making sure you didn’t have too many desserts each week.  Alcoholic drinks are all distilled from ingredients like grain, berries, grapes, and some are even sweetened and flavored. 

Here’s a breakdown of the calories in some common alcoholic drinks per serving.  Remember that a serving size of beer is 12 ounces, distilled liquor is only 1 ounce shot, and other drinks are somewhere in between.  Did you realize you were adding this many calories to your diet? 

Regular beer  149
Light beer 110
Red Wine 80
Dry White Wine 75
Sweet White Wine 105
Cocktails (manhattan, margarita, whiskey sour, etc) - between 122 and 168
Distilled liquor (whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, tequila) - 60

Imagine that you are an alcoholic, drinking a 12 pack a day.  One 12 pack of beer has 1788 calories in it.  1788 extra calories in one day, 12516 extra calories per week.  If you are still eating some regular meals in there, 1788 extra calories a day could make a straight path to a beer belly or an extra 25 pounds somewhere else on your body.

Type Two Diabetes and Being Overweight

Type 2 Diabetes is a disease where your pancreas can not balance out you blood sugar properly.  Two risk factors for Type 2 Diabetes are directly related to an alcoholic lifestyle - a lack of exercise and being overweight. 

Here’s the nuts and bolts of how being overweight puts a person at risk for Type 2 Diabetes.  Fat cells don’t have as many insulin receptors as muscle cells.  Also, fatty acids (released by fat cells) interfere with the body’s ability to process blood sugars.  So when insulin gets pumped through the body, it can’t get into the cells as easily to control the effects of the sugar.  Also, the fatty acids make it tough to process all the extra blood sugars.  The extra sugar is stored as more fat, and the cycle goes on and on. 

By definition, an alcoholic spends a great deal of time and energy acquiring and consuming their alcohol.  It’s highly unlikely that an actively drinking alcoholic is getting the proper amount of exercise.  The high caloric count of excessive drinking can clearly make a person overweight.  If a person has a hereditary risk for diabetes, is older than 65, high blood pressure, or a bad cholesterol profile, the risk is higher.

Alcohol Rehab Can Help Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 Diabates is less severe than Type 1 Diabetes and can often be treated with exercise and diet.  This is certainly good news for an alcoholic who realizes their health is on a decline.  Another solid bet is going to alcohol rehab.  A quality alcohol rehab center can provide not only alcohol treatment with trained counselors, but also nutritional services and exercise programs. 

When you stop drinking alcohol, begin eating a healthy diet, and establish a simple exercise habit, you can leave alcohol rehab ready to manage your Type 2 Diabetes risk.  You can’t change some risk factors like age, race, and heredity.  But alcohol rehab will help you better understand how alcohol contributes to diabetes and other heath problems.