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.

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.

You’ve had a bad stomach for a lot of years, but you’ve never gotten to the bottom of it.  You used to enjoy hot taco sauce with no problems as a kid.  Now you have trouble with most things you eat.  You’ve always just thought it was your age catching up to you, making things more sensitive.  But what about the four very stiff drinks you have every day?  Can drinking really make long term problems in your digestive system?

Digestive System Takes Hits With Alcoholism

You know, nearly everybody takes their body for granted a lot of the time.  You just go about your business each day, and it takes care of itself without a whole lot of input from you.  It has built in systems for cleaning, feeding, repairing, restoring, and growing itself.  Overall, the human body is pretty resilient.  However, treating your body poorly can really catch up quickly. 

It may seem like an obvious statement when you think about it, but alcoholics are at a clear risk for chronic digestive problems.  Alcoholism involves ingesting abnormally large quantities of alcoholic beverages.  Vomiting and diarrhea are well-known symptoms of intoxication.  But the more chronic damage and diseases may be misdiagnosed or brushed off in an alcoholic.

Tissue Inflamation With Heavy Drinking Causes Much Damage

Tissue inflamation is a fairly common side effect of heavy drinking.  Many tissues in the body are susceptible to this including the digestive system.  Unfortunately, tissue damage as a result of chronic inflammation can either result in a slow recovery or a permenant condition. 

Pancreatitis is the inflamation of the pancreas, usually seen in people who’ve been drinking heavily and steadily for at least five to seven years.  By the time the person gets medical attention for the problem, it has most often become a chronic condition. 

Inflamation of the stomach lining can lead to a host of uncomfortable problems.  Vomiting, indigestion, peptic ulcers, and even bleeding in chronic cases of inflamation.  A person with even one of these problems could experience frequent pain after eating, weight loss, and nutritional depravation. 

Chronic Problems and Family History Need Your Attention With Alcoholism

A person with a family or person history of digestive problems will need to pay close attention to the effects alcohol has on their body.  If you have digestive problems and consume a lot of alcohol, you may be making an already bad problem worse.  Or, you may think your symptoms are just related to something you ate or your hangover last night.  It could instead be the sign of chronic problem that is much bigger than you realize.

Serious chronic tissue damage is a sign that your drinking has to stop.  You are slowly killing your body each day.  Some conditions can be reversed if caught early and treated properly.  However, there comes a point of no return with some things (like the liver and pancreas).  The most important thing is to find a way to stop drinking now.

Get Your Health In Better Shape With Alcohol Rehab

If you need to stop drinking now, you know things are out of control.  An alcohol rehab center offers real hope for you.  It’s not enough to just stop being drunk all the time.  Going to alcohol rehab can help your body heal from the damage its endured.  Alcohol treatment may sound like it’s just about the drinking itself.  But well-trained alcohol treatment professionals know that nearly every part of the body has taken some damage along the way.  An alcohol rehab center can not only help you quit drinking, it can help you restore your health.

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.