My mum is an alcoholic

[lissy85]

Hi,

I am 29 years old and my mum has been an alcoholic since I was 11. I have been through a lot with her the majority of it awful (I have other words I can use but I'm new to this forum so best not use those), however no matter what she has done to me and my family we always end up going back and trying to help her out. She has been through rehab a few times, some privately funded by us and some funded via the NHS. None of these have worked as in the longest she has stayed sober is 40 days and the shortest being a few hours or a day sober.

She can not just stop drinking as she has fits so has to gradually detox, which she has been trying again, she detoxed for two weeks gradually reducing her intake of alcohol until on Monday it was her first day with no alcohol. My brother went to see her and discovered that as they had been sat chatting she had been drinking red wine out of her coffee cup (when my brother went to the toilet she switched her black coffee for red wine). She then got really upset when he challenged her on this and she said it's because she was shaking etc and needed the wine. So instead of shouting at her etc we took the nice appoach etc and have been prety much at her house since trying to keep her motivated etc to stay sober. However as much she says she wants to stay sober I don't believe her and am at a loss of what to do. I gave her a list of AA meetings and NA meetings in her local area for her to get back in to attending and she says she is going to do it but I very much doubt she actually will. The problem is she is a 50 year old woman we can not babysit her 24 hours a day. Me and my brother both work and I have a 9 month old son so it's not easy or always appropiate to be monitoring her.

Basically I have had 18 years of trying to help her all to no avail, I have tried the hard approach and the softly softly approach and nothing works, we have let her hit rock bottom with no support network around her as that was another thing we were advised to do. She says she wants to get sober and stay sober but I can't help feeling that she is just saying that so we leave her alone to keep drinking.

I have my brother to spea to about this as he gets it as he has lived with it, I also have my husband to speak to about about this but he doesn't fully understand it all as he didn't grow up with it. I maybe should have put this post in the friends and family section but noticed there were not many replies to posts on there so thought I would try my luck here.

Sorry for the very long post, I obviously needed to put all this down somewhere, hopefully someone can give me some advice or maybe is going through the same thing or similar and can understand.

Thanks, Lissy.

[Andy284]

Hi Lissy
Has you mum tried AA meetings?