Living with Alcoholism; A Personal Story

I recently had some news, sad news, to say that a friend I had known for a long time had passed away. I had lost touch with this lady many years ago, but from time to time, we would catch up and touch base. I knew that my friend had some issues with alcoholism, but I guess I had not appreciated the severity of her problem, which she understandably kept to herself.

I am no stranger to the tragedy of alcoholism and my friend’s passing brought back a lot of painful memories. You see, my own mother was a victim of this illness, some 30 years ago, though at the time, I could not comprehend the complexities of her condition. I understood why she drank, but, in my ignorance, I, like many people, thought she should just be able to just “Stop” and to get it under control. How utterly naïve I was.  

I am writing this very personal blog about my own experiences in the hope that it might offer some small level of understanding or support to others who might be suffering the same.

                   ------------------------------------------------------

My childhood in the UK was fairly uneventful and ordinary really. Mum was mum, always there, caring and kind. She was a brilliant gardener, and grew all our own fruit and vegetables for many years. My grandfather, her father, had been a market gardener during the war, and she had clearly inherited his skills. She also made jam, dressed me in home-made fancy dress costumes for the school fair, and raised a ton of money so my primary school could have a swimming pool. She was secretary of the PTA and an all-round good person.

A tiny me with my mum

She was my first champion, as a mum should be, constantly boosting my self-esteem. Always telling me I was beautiful (even WITH that pudding basin fringe I lived with) and encouraging me that I could do anything with the right attitude.

Me and mum in her lovely garden, and me with THAT haircut!

I often felt I was a bit of a disappointment as daughters go. An out and out Tom boy, with a high sense of adventure; I engaged in risk taking behaviour from an early age. With many broken bones and stitches to vouch for this, I feel that my poor long-suffering mother despaired, and longed for a more gentile daughter, perhaps one who painted or played the piano nicely. Hmm, it was never gonna happen. I was usually to be found running wild in the woods with my boy cousins, up a tree or falling in the brook.

My dad and I had a more distant relationship. I loved him of course; I mean, he was my dad, but he wasn’t a hands on dad at all. He was more caught up in his golfing and, as a fairly large figure in the Masons, he spent a lot of time at the Masonic Lodge and was far too busy to pay much attention to me.  I recall as I got older, that he and mum argued a fair bit about the amount of time he spent out of the house. On one famous occasion, she threw my roller skate at him (and missed) while shouting, “It’s not a wife you want, it’s a housekeeper” in great Maureen O’ Hara style.

My dad was always a bit of a Jack-the-Lad; seen here on the wall

However, despite the friction his absences caused, the fact was that she idolised the man. He was her whole world, and like many women of her generation, she depended on him totally. Mum never learned to drive, she didn’t know how to use a cheque book. Convent educated, she was an innocent abroad whose life experience in general was fairly limited.

I remember her telling me once that she had overheard another woman talking about her impending marriage to my father and saying, “Can you believe it, Tom’s marrying that MOUSE of a girl”. I know that hurt her deeply, and she felt less than adequate as a partner for such a charismatic, and popular man. 

Mum front row far right; the good girl in the hockey team

The little mouse bride

Despite the opposition, they did marry and mum settled into a life of domesticity, while dad worked. He would eventually own his own business, which only served to add to the pressures on their increasingly strained relationship.

Mum with me and my brother at a local beauty spot

Tragedy struck one day in May 1981. I had (foolishly as it turns out) got married and only three days previously, had moved to another County about 80 miles away. I got the news via the new people I had gone to work for. I still remember the look on the man’s face as he came to tell me I needed to ring home. He could not look me in the eye, he studied the ground, overwhelmed with the hand grenade that he had just thrown into my world.

My father was dead at the age of 56.  A heart attack, in the back of a taxi of all places, and just like that, my life would never be the same.

And just like that, he was gone

This is not the place for me to write about the feelings of anger, disbelief, grief, loss and everything, which accompanies the sudden death of a loved one so close to you. Maybe another time.

I knew however, that the impact of his death on my mum would be utterly devastating.

I was not wrong.

She learned of his death from the police – 2 sombre faced men, who came to the house, with their sincere, yet empty words of condolence and sorrow. Glad when they could leave again and get back to their own lives. Away from the madness, where the poor woman was throwing glasses at the wall and screaming at them.

It hit her hard. She was now alone. Both her children had left and had families and lives of their own. My brother and his wife lived close by, and offered as much support as they could, but it was not enough. Nothing was enough, and it never would be again. She wanted the man she loved, and his passing had destroyed her. She would stand at the open bedroom window in the middle of the night calling his name, while knowing he would never again hear her voice. She stopped eating and sank into a grief so deep, she was unreachable.

Mum was never a drinker, that’s the ironic thing. Girls educated in Catholic convents, can buck their stringent upbringing and be fairly wild, but my mother was one of the obedient ones, a mouse, as that woman had so cruelly called her. She was at best, a social drinker, a sherry at Christmas, and maybe a glass of wine with Sunday dinner, but an alcoholic? The very idea was laughable.

She had come out of herself a bit as with my dad, she had quite the social life but an alcoholic? Never.

Mum having a bit of fun, not long before dad died

However, in an effort to deaden the pain of her loss, she began to drink. Bell’s Whisky was quite literally her poison. As a family, we all tried to reason with her, to offer some comfort, while secretly and with a large measure of guilt, wishing she would “move on”. After all, my dad was hardly ever home. Surely, she could start a new life? 

Oh the callousness of youth, the selfishness of reason, which is designed to benefit only the self. Get over him? She had worshipped the ground he walked on for over 25 years, she was never getting over this man. 

Never.

Her drinking became the topic of much discussion within the close family. I went as far as visiting her own GP and discussing it with her. She told me very simply that unless my mum wanted to stop drinking, there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Tragically, mum did not have the motivation to stop. Her world had collapsed, there was no reason to try any more. 

The hundreds of friends who had packed dad’s funeral to the extent that there had to be police directing the traffic, had long abandoned her, unable to deal with the raw pain she exuded. It also turned out that they were mainly dad’s friends; mum was a persona non gratis – she was “Tom’s wife” and not a person in her own right. The “friends” faded into the background, no more than a memory of a life she used to know. It was, in effect, a slow suicide. She was killing herself one day at a time and the rest of us got to watch, to stand by helplessly as she did so.

Here’s the brutal honesty of it all.  While mum was sinking lower and lower, I was fighting my own emotional battle. I am so thoroughly ashamed to admit this now, but I was filled with seething resentment.  Several years had gone by, and her drinking had got worse. I now had 2 small children, one of whom was less than a year old. I was a busy young mum in a miserable marriage of my own, and limited in what help I could offer. 

I missed my dad too; she was not the only one suffering from grief, but rather than unite us, his death seemed only to divide. I had wept rivers of tears for him; he would visit me in my dreams and I would ask him where he had gone. Once my children were in bed for the night, I would cry for hours, aching with the longing to see him again. The next day I would put on my game face and be a mummy again. My simple logic was, "If I can carry on, then why can't you?" 

Clearly, I'd never been in love like she had.

My emotions would flare up at the most unexpected times. One day I was pushing my first baby in her pram through town and saw another young mum doing the same. The difference was, that this girl had her mother with her. What a happy scene they presented, 3 generations together. I was jealous, angry and resentful all at the same time. Why couldn't my mum be there for me? I wanted my babies to have a grandma, to know that family bond and to be excited when grandma was coming, like I used to be as a child.

It was never to be.

Mum had taken to making drunken rambling phone calls to me in the middle of the day. I knew she wouldn’t remember any of it the following day, and took to avoiding answering the phone. Some days when we did talk and she was more lucid, she would plead with me to visit her. Money was tight, and I would try to explain that it was not so easy to simply “pop over” as it was too far to travel with 2 small children in one day and at that time, petrol was an expensive luxury. Days later I would receive an envelope with £10 in it “for petrol”. My insides would cramp into a ball; my own mother paying me to go and visit her - it felt like emotional blackmail and only added to my feelings of frustration and failure.

I did visit, of course I did. I would go into her house, the house I grew up in, and I would search it like some deranged CSI agent looking for evidence. I would find it too; glasses of whisky hidden behind the curtains, behind furniture and even in the oven. I went through every emotion possible, from rage to sadness, from sympathy to contempt. Yes, contempt; I found myself despising my own mother for what I perceived as her weakness. In one awful argument, I recall asking her why she could not deal with my dad’s death as other widows I knew had dealt with it. I pointed at my children through tears of anger while demanding to know why they were not enough motivation for her to stop drinking. Oh what an ignorant, stupid egotistical child I was.

She would cry, I would cry and we would try one more time to “work it out”. 

I look back and cringe at my own insensitivity. How could she possibly “move on”? She lived still in the house they had occupied since I was three years old. Every room screamed his name, as the ghost of his memory walked past her every day.

She made promises she had no hope of keeping. One of the worst times was when I planned to make a trip to the far north of Scotland. At the time, I only had one daughter. She was 18 months old and suffered from appalling car sickness – taking her with me was out of the question. I only planned to be gone a few days, and mentioned to my mum that I was thinking of asking my close friend to care for my daughter in my short absence. There was a wounded silence on the other end of the phone. I waited, knowing what this was about before asking with an inward sigh, “What’s the matter?” The silence between us grew until finally, she spoke, “Why can’t I look after her?” she asked in a small voice.

My breath caught in my throat. Did she really just ask me that? I stumbled over words, trying, not too successfully, to be tactful as I explained that given her circumstances I thought it best if she didn’t babysit.

Her next words were stinging, and delivered with all the self-belief she could muster. “You think I would drink don’t you? How could you think that I would do that when I’m caring for my granddaughter, how COULD you think that of me?”

It was enough; she shamed me into agreeing that she could care for my precious baby.  

I got to Scotland after an exhausting 10 hour drive. I immediately went to the phone to ring mum to let her know I had arrived and to ask how she was getting on.

She was drunk.

My world spun, everything tilted and at that moment, for the first time in my life I hated my mother. I felt utterly betrayed and totally helpless.

I hung up, rang my sister in law, and gabbled out a tearful explanation begging her to go and rescue my daughter, which of course she did. I returned home the following day with 24 hours of pent up anger just waiting to explode. There was a terrible scene of course, which I regret to this day.

However, it was this event which brought my mother’s issues with alcohol into sharp focus. As she lay on her bed sobbing tears of guilt, I suddenly saw with alarming clarity what had evaded me for too long.

This woman was sick. Really sick.

She did not need me to shout and blame her for her actions, what she needed was unconditional love and understanding, which had been painfully lacking from me, her only daughter. I stood shaking with the adrenaline of the confrontation, and was overwhelmed with shame. I went to her and sat down besides her attempting an apology.

For the first time since my father died, I felt the full force of the pain of HER loss. She cried like a child, repeating over and over, “I want him back, I just want him back”. I felt like a voyeur; I was witnessing something which I did not deserve to be a part of, something so primeval, which I had never before encountered.  It was a sobering experience.

I’d like to be able to tell you that things improved and that my mum sought the help we had all urged on her for the past 4 years.

That would be futile. She did not get better, in fact, she got worse.  

She knew; of course she knew. She began to set her house in order, putting the home she had shared with dad on the market and agreeing to buy another, smaller property. She never got to make the move.

Her drinking caught up with her, and she was admitted to hospital where she lied to the consultant, and believed she had fooled him. When I arrived, he spoke to me and said that my mother had told him she drank approximately a bottle of whisky a week. Confirming the skepticism I could see in his eyes, I told him that it was more like a bottle a day. He commented that people did not get this sick on a bottle a week.  I found myself trying to explain, to somehow make him see that I had tried, we had all tried. He understood of course, he'd seen it all before.

One day when I was visiting, I came out of the lift and sat on a bench in the hall, working myself up to go in and see her. She looked absolutely shocking. The illness had turned her a terrible shade of orange and she was basically skin and bone. As I sat there steeling myself, the lift doors opened and an old man got out. Looking at me, he came and sat beside me and patted my hand, as if in silent sympathy. He asked who I had come to see and I found myself weeping into the arms of this total stranger and telling him about the pain and sadness I was feeling. He just listened and let me get it all out. Then, standing up to leave, he pressed a box of Mr Kipling French Fancies into my hand, no doubt intended as a gift for whoever he was visiting. "For you lass" he said, "Cake always helps". Who he was I do not know, but to this day I will never forget that small kindness. 

Mum was in hospital for three weeks before cirrhosis of the liver took her from us.  It had only been 5 years since my dad died, and now, I had to face the loss of my mother. 

Before she passed away, she said to me, “I’m afraid”. When I asked her what she was afraid of, she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to die”.

In that moment, I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake her and shout as loudly as I could, “Of course you’re going to bloody well die, we’ve been telling you that for the past 5 years”. Instead I took her hand and asked without a hint of cynicism, “Was that not the plan all along?” She smiled, a rare smile and simply said, “Maybe, but now it’s here I don’t much like the idea”. 

At that moment, my heart broke into hundreds of tiny pieces.

All the hurt, the anger, the frustrations about her drinking evaporated in that moment and as we held hands, we made our peace.

I never saw her again. She slipped away while I was not there.

I miss her every day. She was a beautiful person, she was my mother. 

             ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have shared this very personal account, hoping it might help people in a similar situation, whether you are ill with alcohol addiction, or living with it as a family member.  The loss of my mother and the accompanying sense of a life wasted never leaves me, neither does the regret that I did not do more. 

Alcohol is responsible for so much pain and many tragedies, from car accidents to domestic violence and child abuse. It is legal, widely available and socially accepted.

I am now a qualified social worker with much experience in dealing with issues surrounding alcohol and its impact on the individual and their wider families.  I am aware of all the available research and theories in working with people who have alcohol issues. I did not have the benefit of this knowledge 30 years ago. However, all the knowledge and learning in the world can not prepare you for the journey you must take when a friend or loved one is battling with addiction. 

In many ways, my personal experiences with my mum, contributed to my current knowledge. I don’t doubt I am still trying to make amends in some way for my historical failure to help someone who needed more from me than I was able to offer at the time.

If you are affected by any sort of addiction, please, be encouraged to seek professional support. Go to your doctor, he or she will understand and point you and your loved ones in the right direction. 

I only wish I had done more, sought more advice, not been so caught up in my own angry emotions, that I could not see my mother’s terrible pain. I cannot turn back time, but I can try and help others not to make the same mistakes I made.

Freya 

Emotional Resilience

I qualified as a social worker in 2001, and like many of my compatriots went into my first job, wide-eyed and eager for action. The years of training and study were complete, and while I realised that the training would always be ongoing, it was time for “the real thing”.  

I was appointed to a child protection team, dealing with referrals concerning children in the locality. I was not without experience, having worked as a teaching assistant in local schools, as well as spending three years in residential settings with children who had emotional and behavioural difficulties. In addition, I had been a Foster Carer for the Local Authority caring for babies prior to their being placed for adoption. I had also been working in this particular team on a part time basis during my time at University, though my work was limited to taking referrals and accompanying colleagues on visits.

I had been assured by a senior manager at my interview that;

 - I would not hold more than 8 cases for the first 12 months and,

 - I would not hold ANY child protection cases; my caseload would be restricted to “children in need”.

I can almost hear the collective sigh from social workers as they read this, because;

 - It was, at best, a dubious promise to make, and,

 - It was in fact completely erroneous and impractical

I was, however, blissfully unaware of the complexities of working in a team of social workers, all of whom were overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work they had to deal with.  I would hear them worrying about how many children they had on their caseload and how stressed they felt. They would question aloud how they were going to get all their visits done, never mind write the endless reports, which always seemed to be overdue. I pitied them, but I felt safe; after all, I was only going to have 8 cases max, and none of them would be child protection …….. right?

Wrong.

The reality kicked in precisely 2 weeks into the job. One of the children on my caseload was a young person of 13 years who refused to attend school, and who exhibited challenging behaviour at home. Things came to a head, and I received a frantic phone call from his mother telling me that she had lost her temper and punched her son in the face. She requested that I come and remove him immediately from her house, adding that she never wanted to see him again. I went immediately to speak to my line manager, and with hindsight, my naivety was laughable, as I honestly expected that, the case would be transferred to someone else with more experience. After explaining the situation to her, she rightly advised that an Initial Child Protection Case Conference would need to be convened. I anxiously enquired who would write the report and her response brought my new world sharply into focus. She raised an eyebrow in mock query and said,

“You’re a qualified social worker aren’t you? You’ll be doing it”.

And so it began; call it what you will; a baptism of fire, thrown in at the deep end, a rude awakening. It all equated to one thing, THIS was the reality of the job. There would be no protected caseload, no special dispensation because I was newly qualified and certainly no abatement of cases being allocated to me.  

Within a few weeks, my caseload had grown to 34 children, 19 of whom were subject to child protection plans. While this might seem like a luxury number of cases to an experienced social worker; to a newbie like me, it was an unbelievable nightmare. There were never enough hours in a day and like every other social worker I have ever met, I worked far more hours than I was ever paid for, in an effort to keep my head above water. 

It was a vicious circle; the more I tried to be superwoman by working at home or staying late in the office, the more I created an illusion, with regard to my capabilities ............... it was no more than a mirage. Consequently, my manager overestimated my capacity and the work kept coming. I was given cases far above my level of experience; badly injured babies, complex court cases, extremely aggressive parents and more.

I became aware of an alien sensation in the pit of my stomach, like an oily snake writhing about, ever demanding, ever present. I did not sleep properly, and when I did sleep, I would wake up with a dull ache in my jaw where I had ground my teeth in the night. My left eye developed an almost permanent twitch and I was jumpy and on constant red alert, even when I was not at work.

I did have regular supervision, but my fear of being seen as a failure led me to play down my feelings of stress and anxiety. I told my manager that I felt a bit swamped, and she smiled and told me I was more than capable of dealing with the cases I had. I felt undue pressure to succeed and not let the team down. After all, I was the new girl and did not want to be seen as a failure to the job in which I so wanted to succeed.

It took only 9 months for me to burn out.

I remember the day so well. I was at my third case conference in a week, none of which had seen the support of my manager. As I sat facing the mother in question across the table, she began to shout at me, berating me for the things I had written in my report. As she spoke, it was as if she was disappearing down a long tunnel. I watched in detached fascination – I could see her mouth moving, but no longer heard any words. What I didn’t realise was, that I was having a panic attack. I was fortunate in that the Chair of the meeting DID realise what was going on, halted the meeting, and asked everyone to leave the room. I was a shaking, hyperventilating wreck, unable to string a sentence or understand what was going on.

I was sent home, and went to see my ever-sensible and very pragmatic GP; I explained my failure to her, my inability to do the job I so wanted to be good at. What she told me was shocking, 

“Take time off or you’ll be having your first nervous breakdown”.  

How could this have happened? I was dedicated, conscientious, and hard working. What I failed to appreciate at the time was that there is a world of difference between being a capable person, and having the experience and fortitude required to cope with this highly stressful profession. So, what’s the solution?

Stress and crisis management are part of the role of the child protection social worker. I am of the opinion that to avoid burn out, we must firstly be brutally honest about our feelings; don’t make the mistake I did and try to be superwoman, bravely battling on, fearful of being thought of as a failures. We must feel safe to share our anxieties and confide our fears and gain the support we need to continue doing the job. Secondly, we need to develop EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE.

Emotionally resilient people share certain traits, which all of us can learn to develop. Here are just a few ideas, which may help.

A Few Key Elements to Emotional Resilience

Know Your Boundaries

Take control and be decisive. BE HONEST - If you need help or advice; ask for it, and if you need to say no, say no.

Develop Self-Awareness

Learn to reflect on what is causing you to be anxious and why. Be prepared to adapt and be flexible where possible – bend don’t break.

Acceptance

Be realistic about what you can and cannot change; accept you don’t always have all the answers.

Be Reflective

Step back and consider all possibilities. See the bigger picture, discuss problems with colleagues, and listen to advice.

Keep a Sense of Perspective

You cannot do it all; do the best you can and keep a positive self-image. The storm WILL pass.  

Take Care of Yourself

Healthy eating, sleep, relaxation, and exercise. Have outside interests and a positive network of people. Maintain a sense of humour and learn to appreciate silence. Run, write, play sports, cry, sing, meditate, breathe.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. There are a multitude of ways, people can develop their emotional resilience. This is simply a short list of ideas, which may bring some immediate insight and encouragement.

In my case, I made the decision to take 12 months out of social work. I started a successful business, and spent the time reflecting on how and why things had gone so wrong. When I felt confident that I had developed a realistic perspective, I returned to child protection and found that in adopting the above suggestions and more, I managed to keep a healthy balance. Even on the most stressful days, I was still able to say I loved my work and while social work will always be stressful, I have never again suffered such debilitating stress to the level that it prevented me from doing my job.  

I put my experiences to good use. In 2013, with the support of my husband Steve, I retired from front line social work and wrote a book based on my experiences. The book is titled, Known to Social Services, and is a fictionalised account of the day to day life of a social worker. Known to Social Services was the bestselling social work book on Amazon UK within a few weeks of release. I wrote the book for several reasons, but mainly to raise awareness of the almost impossible task faced by social workers today. The book has exceeded all my expectations, and has provoked a positive response from the general public and social workers alike. I am especially gratified to have feedback from students as to the book's insight into an unknown world, a world, they are about to enter; their comments in regard to its usefulness as a part of their development and training, means a great deal to me.  

Known to Social Services is available via Amazon and other outlets as a download or paperback. To find out more about this and my other work, please visit the website. I am currently working on a sequel, which will look at the world of child trafficking. 

www.freyabarrington.com

Freya