Alcoholic in the family – Support group for broken-spirited family members

It’s Friday and the whole city is buzzing. Everyone is rushing somewhere – from work to home, shopping, cooking dinner, turning on the TV, relaxing and kicking back. The tram is packed, a faceless mass. I scrutinize the people, conceitedly supposing that I can read from their eyes what their concerns are.  

There are at least 800,000 alcoholics living in the country, so statistically speaking there is a significant chance that the person sitting opposite me on the No. 4-6 tram is a drinker, or at least one of his/her relations is alcohol dependent.

I arrive just before six. A steep flight of steps leads downwards. It can’t be easy going in, to ourselves, either. We greet each other with smiles, a few are chatting quietly, a new arrival gets a massive hug. Chairs are in a circle, there are a few flowers on the table, a candle, brochures and literature in the cabinet. ‘This is how you should love an alcoholic’ I read on a leaflet pressed into my hand. I’ve come to a meeting of Al-Anon Family Group. Here it doesn’t matter, and nobody asks, who you are in the big city that has been left outside. If somebody speaks, they use only a Christian name and say that they are a family member of an alcoholic.

Anonymity is only one of the rules. The other is no judgement, no advice, no comments, no likes. Just sharing and listening.

About 20 of us are sitting in a circle, the majority women. There are young and old alike. Some just listen, staring straight ahead – this is OK as well. Others talk. “When I am able to express what is wrong with me, it goes away…” says one young woman, who is pregnant with her partner’s child. The man is an alcoholic but has not touched drink in a while. “When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t know what to tell the others. I hid myself under baggy sweaters. Then that week I went shopping. I bought myself a red top, and red is not even my colour! I realized that I wanted to show myself. And the baby, too….” – Several smile and a few congratulate her.

Then silence. Then another story. About somebody who says that they don’t have any childhood memories. The father and the grandfather drank. “I was never to blame for what I got. There was nobody there to protect me.”

If the world works in a way that the big and strong do not take care of the small and weak, then we have nothing left but forgetting. Which is dangerous, because the past never truly disappears, it is always there.

One member of the group has fought hard with these memories that constantly keep bursting to the surface. A drunken, aggressive father and a mother who couldn’t protect the child. Frames of a film without a happy end, nobody would buy tickets for this feature, yet they are played over and over again for this individual. If they were walking towards me in the street, I would never suspect anything – of course, I don’t know anything. I have no idea what it is like growing up with an alcoholic in the family. Checking through the pantry for hidden bottles and then emptying the contents down the sink. Putting up with the shame. Quarrelling, tolerating the aggression, or just shutting up as your partner, blind drunk, snores in the bedroom. Hoping. Believing. Bringing up children with someone whose life is organized not around the family but the bottle. Loving the parent who ruined my childhood. The reason I never invited friends across. The reason the police regularly visited the house. Forgiving the parent who did not save me from all this. Accepting that this is all that can be done.

Anybody who goes to Al-Anon meetings week after week is working on loving life despite all this. “It is a good thing that I can come here, this group has helped a lot, I used to be totally broken,” says somebody. Alongside this person is a young man sitting in frozen silence. This is his first time.

This evening’s topic is shame. An elderly woman, whose adult son is an alcoholic, says that she has never felt shame, after all, she is not the one drinking but her child. Somebody else says that she is ashamed that her mother would drink herself into oblivion, she locked the family out of the flat so that they had to call the police and ambulance, and in the end she was angry as well because she wanted to know why her mother did all this to them. Somebody else had rid themselves of this sense of shame, even though her father, husband and two of her four siblings were drinkers.

Everyone is at a different stage on this journey and helping each other by sharing where they stand at a particular moment. They give hope to somebody sitting there, a person who is more vulnerable and desperate.

“Is it possible to love somebody unconditionally even though I cannot bear one of his habits?” one woman asks in connection with her husband’s boozing. It transpires from her story that this is her dilemma not of today but of the past several decades.

Time’s up. Ninety minutes on each occasion. They stand up, hold each other’s hands and form a circle. “Lord, please give me peace of mind to accept what I cannot change. Courage to change what I can, and wisdom to recognize the difference.” Such is the closing prayer, each according to his or her own faith.

The meeting is officially over. However, quite a few hang back for a while. They chat, encouraging each other. Then we slowly pack up and in the meantime I glance around. There are many troubled faces but on a few one can see a measure of relief. Coats are put on and then a few minutes later it is off into the crowd. Hurrying home, just like the others in the street.