The treatment discussion revs up between Thanksgiving Thursday and Cyber Monday
Real talk: If you put off the
substance use discussion until the New Year, you might not have a
chance to have the discussion. Addiction is a disease. People die.
And they only can dig themselves deeper into destruction during the
Holidays without help.
That's news as ice cold as Wausau,
Wisconsin or the turkey leftovers you stuffed into the back of the
freezer. By the way, you're never going to eat that. It tasted dry on
Thanksgiving... it won't get better by March by itself. Likewise, a
drug user won't get better by March (or Christmas) by himself.
Oh-Crap Sunday means more than you blew
through your entire holiday budget on Black Friday and Small Business
Saturday. It's more relevant than your favorite NCAA team getting
crushed on Rivalry Saturday, or your NFL team being worse than the
Bears on any given Sunday at the twilight of the calendar. Oh-Crap
Sunday is the pause at the start of the Holiday Gauntlet where you
have an a-ha moment after the first of the season's socializing,
realizing that a loved one is in over his or her head with alcohol or
other drugs. Oh. Crap.
Help starts at home
What does 'in over their head' mean?
Noticing someone's drug use – alcohol is a drug – means it is a
problem. You don't notice someone's consumption otherwise. The
nodding off is more than turkey's tryptophan. The slurred speech
telling the same joke loudly for the third time isn't just because
Uncle Dan is mixing the drinks. The fragrance in the bathroom isn't
potpourri. Wise up. Trust your instinct. You're probably right about
a drug use problem. If you're wrong, what does it cost you?
We've normalized drug use in the U.S.
as pointed out in Look What Dragged the Cat In. With
it being normalized, the tendency is to blow it off until it gets
obvious. Then it's time to get help.
In
looking for help, there is no substitute for intervention at home.
You can go to every slick
treatment website Google throws at you. Nobody's going for an
evaluation until the personal, charged conversation takes place at
home. Work with your M.D. or
a treatment professional to find the right path toward 'clean and
sober' after the Oh-Crap conversation. The first step is the
conversation.
Drugs alter the mind, talk to the heart
Consider
that all drugs of abuse licit and illicit alter the mind. An altered
mind isn't going to decide for itself that it needs help. People
don't take drugs to feel good, they take drugs to feel less bad. If
the brain's user is going to feel more bad, he or she is going to be
messaged by that brain that the drug isn't a
problem. A person first needs to hear from family and friends that
the drug use is concerning.
The talk is harder than you think. But
not harder than talking to a corpse. Alcohologist.com has resources
like videos (see the New Year, New You series opener here) that help ease into the
conversation. The three-question AUDIT is also an
ice-breaker/resolve-breaker.
Quick: What's the next holiday? Will
you spend it without him or her in your life?
Image by Roman Stetsyk, used with permission.
