So there's a serious alcoholic in my life, actually it's my brother. He's 22 and since he started drinking in high school, has fallen so hard into the addiction it terrifies my family and I. Yesterday, while visiting my father in florida, he got belligerently drunk ALONE on the beach, and eventually the police were called. They were kind enough to have my dad send him a cab to get him home. He proceeded to pass out until my dad got home from work, at which time an argument began, and my brother stormed out. Since we live in a large community down there, my dad was worried he would get lost (trust me, drunk, it is very possible) and either pass out somewhere or worse... well there's a ton of wild gators around. My dad got in a car to search, as my brothers phone was off. He eventually found him drinking at the bar (how he was served is still a mystery) where I worked all winter. My dad went in, and between my employment there, and the fact that it's the place to go in our complex, pretty much all of the employees love my dad and are on a very personal basis with him. M dad quietly tried to get my brother to get in the car with him. This lead to my brother causing quite a scene, but eventually agreeing to walk home, refusing to ride with my dad because of the argument. Heres the punch line, my brother, as he left the bar, dropped his drawers in front of the 70 seat establishment with all glass windows at the entrance, and proceeded to pee into the landscaping out front. And he didnt just whip it out, my dad compared it to a little kid just completely dropping his pants at a urinal, like down to the ankles. He got home, passed out and pissed the bed in my dads condo. Basically, he turned what could have been a relaxing weekend vacation with my dad into a headache for both of my parents and myself, even my naive 17 year old sister. The shame of it is, this doesnt even place in the top three worst alcohol related incidents. I'm a big partier. I do all kinds of drugs, and drink heavily myself but I have that switch the people like him never got. He's my brother AND my best friend, and we have been working every second of our freetime together because we have been planning a business. Now, he won;t even talk about the incident to me or my parents. He shrugged it off saying he had too much to drink. I told him I can't go into business with him until he gets his act together, he lost his shit and tried putting me down. I hung up, and I cried. I really don't cry, my emotions typically go from happy, to a little bummed but still optimistic. I'm afraid this could be the end between us. I can;t afford to lose him. I stayed up almost all night with an 11 hour workday ahead of me, and for the first time since high school, I took a knife to my own flesh. I wanted to talk to someone so badly, but my best friend is at boot camp, and the only other person I would normally reach out to to vent and for support is my brother. What can I do, he's so stubborn. On top of this he also has dealt with gambling issues since sophmore year of highschool. I love poker just as much as he does, but he will take his entire savings account to AC, while I sit down with a small fraction of what I made that week. I just need help, I need him to be safe, it;s not long before he kills someone else or himself. The same reason i wanted to start a business with him is what makes him so hard to reach on this topic. He can really turn on the charm, and when sober can win arguements when both sides know hes wrong. Sorry if some of my thoughts are misguided, and I'm sure this is riddled with typos. I had a long day at work with more than ever on my mind and I'm a little lifted. Any help would be appreciated, I am so grateful for you to take the time and read to here. Please, help me keep my brother alive, and one of my greatest friends from leaving me behind over a poison.
Alas, I went through the same problems with my mother. Alcoholics are hard to deal with, the only way my family could help was to cut her off completely. Closed her bank account, cut her credit cards, talked to her friends and told them to stop buying her booze, and always had someone home keeping an eye on her. Now my soloution is a little extreme and probobly isn't possible with your brother. So the best advice I can give is to honestly talk to him, tell him what you just told us. The best way to change a persons mind I've found is with guilt and mental torture and anxiety. It sounds mean, but what he did wasn't right either
thanks to everyone except dried orange, who in 7 posts or less has managed to make a fool of himself on the internet. weed isn't going to help. he, like me is already a heavy daily smoker. between the two of us we consume anywhere from a quarter to an ounce a week. Big Funka, my parents pretty much are cutting him off. Unfortunately the co-signed his new lease for an apartment just two weeks ago, but other than that they are shutting him down. Purple Blaze- He is incredibly stubborn. We have discussed an intervention before, and have actually sat him down with us. It makes him so angry, he is in such a state of denial that it becomes unbearably frustarating to even talk lightly about the issue with him. The guilt trip isn't effective on him. Tried it many times but like I said, he's such a charmer, and is so flawless in verbal tactics that he can turn the tables in one or two points and make you feel bad for even bringing it up. My mom said to me tonight, "Im afraid the only person that can help J, is J." The scariest thing is, when I tell him about guys I know or work with who have problems that are often not as severe as his, he is able to recognize their addictions and say "hey that guy needs help" but he thinks what he does is just normal behavior for a 22 year old. By the way, dried orange, your shocking insensitivity, earned you a neg rep from me, and i wouldn't be surprised if anyone else did the same.
First off, take care of yourself first. Stop self-mutilating, this isn't your fault and it should have no more than an emotional effect on you, don't harm yourself. Alcoholics and addicts of any kind need to realize they have a problem by themselves before any change can come. I think it best that you just stop interacting with him for a while, and make it clear that the sole reason for this is how immaturely and irresponsibly he acts when he's drinking. That's the most effective thing you can do to help him come to terms with himself. On a possibly inappropriate positive note, he sounds kind of like Tucker Max, who is the man.
I hate to tell you this, but the only way an alcoholic/addict will ever change is if they decide to, theres really nothing you can do to make him change, other than stuff like kick him outta the house, cut him off completely, so that maybe he see's how fucked up he is and he himself wants to get better, but YOU nor anyone else can make him change.
I as well neg repped driedorange. that was uncalled for. However I do sort of feel on this issue, but from the other side. I am 21 and been going off hard in the last year or 2 and my older brother I know cares for me, and he's tried talking to me but I refuse to listen because I like to do things my way.
Gass Jar, thanks for the serious, and comedic yet not innapropriate response. I know this is going to sound weird. But I'm slightly masochistic. I haven't self mutilated for years, and I'm not going to do it again, i'm actually disappointed in myself, my old scars were becoming almost invisible. But I still find a curious amount of pleasure in almost any kind of accidental pain. To the point where my body recognizes it as a high. or i guess i do. I think you might be right. I just realized how much of an enabler I can be. I drink with him, and since i'm underage often have him supply the party. If not withdrawing myself from him completely, I think at least seperating both of us from any kind of substance abuse in general might be the way to go. He no longer lives at home so I will see him less now anyways. But instead of staying up late with him when hes around and smoking, drinking, pills etc. I could see if he'd rather play some disc golf, and he keeps telling me he wants to learn to surf and kitesurf, maybe teaching him will change our relationship enough to turn his lifestyle in the right direction. he just sent me a text asking for somebody with pills down there. this is where the seperation starts. anyways. the tucker max thing, spot on. he's like him in alot of ways. were practically identical but he always gets the girl. he gets his way where ever he goes. When I transferred to the private school he went to in juinor year, Seniors, teahcers, lunch ladys, the guy who drove the bus to the train station treated me like some kind of legend in my own right. But even then he was starting to get bad. When I was a sophmore I woke up to the sound of him peeing on my wall after a party he threw. Right there in my bedroom, telling me he was in the bathroom and to go to bed.
I feel you. I guess most people would look at my life as a bit of a vice filled one i guess too. I drink and party, smoke quite a bit, pills, lately lots of roxys on one right now, sometimes its benzos. But I also regulate. For example, When my life allows it, i.e. no work stress, no personal matters to settle I do my drugs. I smoke weed at the same times every day on my workday though, but it's what keeps my body from aching from from some sixty plus hours a week cooking. Sometimes half a blue if it's slow. But I can shut it down. No pills or booze, even weed if i really need to, and I also know what's enough. Partying with him I've learned what's way more than enough from him and from my own experiences. And I've stopped going that far with no problems. He just keeeps going and convinces you it's all going to be grand one day. That's why bringing him into my business was, at first i thought, a good idea.
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, you couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel. You are a canker, an open wound. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You took your last vacation in the Islets of Langerhans. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. I take that back; you are a festering pustule on a weasel's rump. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. You are a technicolor yawn. And did I mention that you smell? You are a squeaking rat, a mistake of nature and a heavy-metal bagpipe player. You were not born. You were hatched into an unwilling world that rejects the likes of you. You didn't crawl out of a normal egg, either, but rather a mutant maggot egg rejected by an evil scientist as being below his low standards. Your alleged parents abandoned you at birth and then died of shame in recognition of what they had done to an unsuspecting world. They were a bit late. Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it ever so much more rapidly. If cluelessness were crude oil, your scalp would be crawling with caribou. You are a thick-headed trog. I have seen skeet with more sense than you have. You are a few bricks short of a full load, a few cards short of a full deck, a few bytes short of a full core dump, and a few chromosomes short of a full human. Worse than that, you top-post. God created houseflies, cockroaches, maggots, mosquitos, fleas, ticks, slugs, leeches, and intestinal parasites, then he lowered his standards and made you. I take it back; God didn't make you. You are Satan's spawn. You are Evil beyond comprehension, half-living in the slough of despair. You are the entropy which will claim us all. You are a green-nostriled, crossed eyed, hairy-livered inbred trout-defiler. You make Ebola look good. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are not ANSI compliant and your markup doesn't validate. You have a couple of address lines shorted together. You should be promoted to Engineering Manager. Do you really expect your delusional and incoherent ramblings to be read? Everyone plonked you long ago. Do you fantasize that your tantrums and conniption fits could possibly be worth the $0.000000001 worth of electricity used to send them? Your life is one big W.O.M.B.A.T. and your future doesn't look promising either. We need to trace your bloodline and terminate all siblings and cousins in order to cleanse humanity of your polluted genes. The good news is that no normal human would ever mate with you, so we won't have to go into the sewers in search of your git. You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a loathsome disease, a drooling inbred cross-eyed toesucker. You make Quakers shout and strike Pentecostals silent. You have a version 1.0 mind in a version 6.12 world. Your mother had to tie a pork chop around your neck just to get your dog to play with you. You believe that P.D.Q. Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived. You prefer L. Ron Hubbard to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Hee-Haw is too deep for you. You would watch test patterns all day if the other inmates would let you. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. Spammers look down on you. Phone sex operators hang up on you. Telemarketers refuse to be seen in public with you. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. May you choke on your own foolish opinions. You are a Pusillanimous galactophage and you wear your sister's training bra. Don't bother opening the door when you leave - you should be able to slime your way out underneath. I hope that when you get home your mother runs out from under the porch and bites you. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking half-twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You bloody churlish boil-brained clot pole ponce. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. May your spouse be blessed with many bastards. You are so clueless that if you dressed in a clue skin, doused yourself in clue musk, and did the clue dance in the middle of a field of horny clues at the height of clue mating season, you still would not have a clue. If you were a movie you would be a double feature; _Battlefield_Earth_ and _Moron_Movies_II_. You would be out of focus. You are a fiend and a sniveling coward, and you have bad breath. You are the unholy spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel. You wear strangely mismatched clothing with oddly placed stains. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just knowing that you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. You are jetsam who dreams of becoming flotsam. You won't make it. I beg for sweet death to come and remove me from a world which became unbearable when you crawled out of a harpy's lair. It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone that the other stones make fun of. So stupid that you have traveled far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into stuponium. Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot summer day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one minute than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot be possible that anything in our universe can really be this stupid. This is a primordial fragment from the original big stupid bang. A pure extract of stupid with absolute stupid purity. Stupid beyond the laws of nature. I must apologize. I can't go on. This is my epiphany of stupid. After this experience, you may not hear from me for a while. I don't think that I can summon the strength left to mock your moronic opinions and malformed comments about boring trivia or your other drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of your of what you wrote, because, well ... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things to be difficult. If I had known that this was true in your case then I would have never have exposed myself to what you wrote. It just wouldn't have been "right." Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, EDLINoid, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dyspeptic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, and Generally Not Good.
Honestly man. the best way is just to let them learn themselves. I was an alcoholic for a few years, and the only thing that helped me was me realizing what I was doing to myself. Just try to talk to him, and let him know your concern for himself. Hopefully that can help him see what's really happening.
Also neg repped driedorange. Please get the hell of out of here and stop copying/pasting insults. It shows a true lack of real drive and creativity. So, this situation is very hard. But stop enabling him and do your best not to feel responsible for him in any way. If your family has a bit of money, try to stage an intervention or just send him to rehab. Perhaps start him on going to AA. Confront him about this behavior, be firm and honest. Don't lend him any money, ever. Don't feel guilty about doing so, either. He's not a trustworthy at this moment, period. That's all I can say. I've dealt with similar issues in my own ways. I have to repeat that point that you should not feel guilty.
something you have to understand, this situation is very hard. But stop enabling him and do your best not to feel responsible for him in any way. If your family has a bit of money, try to stage an intervention or just send him to rehab. Perhaps start him on going to AA. Confront him about this behavior, be firm and honest. Don't lend him any money, ever. Don't feel guilty about doing so, either. He's not a trustworthy at this moment, period. That's all I can say. I've dealt with similar issues in my own ways. I have to repeat that point that you should not feel guilty.
northernwidow, You are in a terrible situation, I had a similar experience, but thankfully not with someone so close as my own brother. I cannot even imagine the pain and the anguish that you must be going through. There are basically two paths you can choose, and having been there I would not presume to call either path the "better one". I personally believe that arguments about "enabling" are a pant-load. Love is love, be it tough or otherwise, and it does not matter how you show your love: only that you show it. The previous posters are correct, in that if you want him to immediately cease drinking, the fastest option is simply to hold an intervention, cut him off from all support, and even cut contact with him. This is tough-love, and there is no question in my mind that you must whole-hearted love a person to truly commit to this path. The other path, the one usually labeled "enabling" may still be open to you at this point. You stated that he is 22, and that he has only been able to start drinking very recently. Many addicts are able to turn their own lives around once they hit a "bottom". The trouble is, no one but the addict can decide what their own bottom is. For many of us, public urination most likely would have been some sort of a bottom, but clearly for your brother it was not. "Tough love" is basically the act of trying to force a bottom upon someone. The trouble is, cutting off contact and support may still not force the addict to hit bottom. And when they eventually do hit bottom, they'll do so alone. Another form of love might be to stick around and see if he bottoms out on his own. It's probably inadvisable to support him financially, but you may not need to cut off all contact either. Of course, not cutting off contact involves you suffering through his continued decline. As with cutting him off, leaving yourself available is also a tremendous act of love. The one thing I am sure of is that your brother is better off having someone like you, who obviously cares for him, than he would be otherwise. Hopefully that knowledge can help him see straight one day down the road.
driedorange, please leave or get banned already. You're trolling and you're not funny. A close friend of mine slowly descended into alcoholism a couple years ago. We went to high school together and I knew him since probably 7th grade. We used to some weed together, talk about life and music, go to concerts together. Then, right after graduation he got kicked out of his house and moved into an apartment and started drinking heavily. He started stealing alcohol from his work, not caring about his physical appearance, and trying all the drugs he could. I haven't seen him in at least a year and a half. The last I heard he was living with older junkies and crackheads in the ghetto. It really makes me sad to see a close friend fall apart like that. All I can really do is talk to him when he calls on occasions, ask how much he's been drinking lately and telling him he should cut back or stop. Even my friend has yet to hit rock bottom. I hope he wakes up before then. He's always been a nice and intelligent guy. It's sad to seem him sliding downwards like this. But talking to him or confronting him is the first step. He will probably try to call you a hypocrite because you used to drink with him. Be prepared for that. Then if the situation calls for it, start thinking about an intervention. Talk to your parents about rehab if possible. I feel for you, man. If you ever need someone to talk to about this, PM me.
No matter how much you guy hate 50 Cent, you gotta admit that guy is a fighter. Getting shot 9 times, couple in the face/head, and still coming back to rap and make millions. Guy may be whatever, but he is a warrior. (NO HOMO)