Oh-Crap Sunday: Addiction, Family, and the Holidays

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.