By observing your behavior, do you see changes that indicate that you have no control over your drinking so far?
On the lips of your relatives, the word “alcoholic” appears more and more often in relation to you? You are worried about the so-called holes in your memory, you miss deadlines at work, when you leave the house, you only think about how to get the bottle so that no one knows? Do you observe symptoms of depression, such as disquiet, anxiety and reluctance to fight, resignation, a tendency to cover up emotions with a bottle?
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Perhaps these feelings are related to the fact that it is often difficult for you to refuse to drink “one glass”, although you had promised your loved ones that you would not drink at all … . You drink longer and more often than you plan and actually want to. After a few days of such drinking, nausea, headaches, vomiting, maybe trembling hands or even the whole body, muscle aches, sweating, weakness, difficulty sleeping, anxiety appear.
This is how your body, when used to drinking, reacts to a lack of alcohol in your blood. Drinking another portion of the drink in the morning will eliminate unpleasant ailments for some time – so it is possible that more and more of your days start with such a routine portion.
Your drinking is likely to be causing more and more suffering to you, your family, and others around you. Perhaps you yourself are feeling increasingly misunderstood and lonely. Maybe you feel empty. What happened to your interests, what about everything that you once enjoyed and was of value to you? Do you notice that you have actually sacrificed all your time to drinking?
Maybe you explain to yourself that “it’s nothing”, “many people drink like that”, and you “if you want to stop”. Maybe you tell yourself that “it’s all because of the problems you face, difficult situations, your boss, wife …”. You surely put a lot of energy into proving to yourself and to others that you are not concerned about alcoholism. Perhaps you have set periods of abstinence for yourself, but sooner or later you would eventually return to drinking with redoubled strength, even when it started completely innocently – for example, with “non-alcoholic” beer.
The ICD-10 International Classification of Diseases and Health Problems defines what is happening to you as ALCOHOL DEPENDENCE SYNDROME.
What is alcoholism?
Alcoholism is a disease that, like other diseases, is diagnosable and treatable. If left untreated, it will certainly continue to develop, leading to increasingly painful health, emotional, social and spiritual consequences – often death. Treatment of alcoholism is a complex and lengthy process that, however, brings hope for a return to sobriety. It is worth taking up this challenge.
Alcoholism is said to be a control disease, the person suffering from losing control over their own drinking and behaviors associated with it. It is said about addiction that it is a thinking disease – addicted people are not able to fully perceive the consequences of their own drinking, they separate themselves from unpleasant signals about their drinking coming from the environment.
They defend themselves against calling their drinking a habit because admitting a problem would mean having to make a decision to part with alcohol, which they cannot imagine. Finally, it is said that alcoholism is a disease of emotions – addicted people cannot cope with their own feelings without drinking. By trying to drown them out with alcohol, they escalate problems and tensions that they cannot bear. They reach for it again, falling into a trap with no way out, into the “death spiral”.
Perhaps this is why, as an alcohol addict, you need other people so badly to be able to start changing your life. People who are characterized by similar experiences, but who, thanks to working on themselves today, are sober, happy, live life to the full. This is why treatment of an alcoholic is largely done in the form of group activities.
