In the Sufi tradition there’s a famous story

The mullah Nasruddin, a twelfth-century fool and sage,was on his hands and knees intently searching under a street light when his neighbor saw him, came out and said, “Nasruddin, you look totally absorbed as you crawl on the ground. What is that important to you? What are you looking for?”

“My key,” he replies. 

More neighbors come out to join in the meticulous search. Carefully and systematically they all get on their hands and knees pursuing every inch of the ground in the vicinity of the lamp. No one can find the key.

“Wait, Nasruddin,” someone finally asks, “just where did you lose this key?”

“In my house. I lost the key in my house.”

One neighbor immediately replies, “Then why, Nasruddin are you looking out here under this streetlight for a key you lost in your house?”

“Because, of course, I can see better under the light.”

A drinking problem in the family is often what draws our attention—because it is “in the light.”

With problem drinking, pleasurable family interactions may decrease while the drunken behavior slowly takes more of the limelight, gradually taking center stage. Too often your choice may seem to be:

• Verbalize your feelings about the drinking to the drinker
• Suppress your feelings about the drinking from the drinker

Actually, there are numerous choices of expressing feelings and many are non-verbal. Suppressing feelings may be appropriate on a limited basi, but it is a significant problme if it is the regular mode of operation.

Either way the drinker’s behavior can consume your mental and emotional attention. When it doe, your focus is on them and not you.

How you’re impacted by the drinking is often in the shadows

It’s a natural human tendency to help someone you love when they’re having a problem. There are two kinds of helping:

• Situational helping, which comes with the give-and-take of most relationships
• Chronic helping, which creates a potentially problematic pattern

Chronic helping

The chronic helping pattern may start with genuine care, concern, and a wish to assist in improving your loved one’s well being. Although, the manifestation of this over time will have differences. There's a common theme—the gradual, invisible, and insidious impact on the helper.  The impact of a drinking problem has an impact on you, the family member.

The majority of the impact is on you when you’ve taken on helping roles

THere are psychological effects of alcoholism on you and the rest of the family members, not just the problem drinker. You’re affected on three levels:

• Your feelings
• Your thinking
• Your body

Your feelings are influenced by the problem drinker

When the problem drinker isn’t drinking or drunk, it’s totally natural for you to feel more positive. The reverse is also true. When they are drinking and drunk, despite your best efforts, your feelings can easily become negative. You may act on these feelings and say or do things which are counterproductive to improving the problem drinking situation. Chronic negative feelings affect how we see our selves and our world. They also affect our thinking.

Your thinking is influenced by the problem drinker

You may hear the drinker say one thing about the drinking, but then behave differently. Saying one thing and doing another creates a gap in understanding. Your mind has a tendency to fill in the details with a story that either rationalizes or criticizes the behavior. Your thinking may meticulously search for clues that support your story.

Feelings and thinking are closely related. Your feelings lead your thinking and vice versa. Your feelings become a filter that color your thinking, and your thoughts directly lead into certain feelings. The repetitive story that goes through your mind and your feelings about it form a pattern.

Often our individual pattern of thinking and feeling is learned in childhood and gets recycled throughout our lives. The impact of this pattern may go largely unseen for years.

Your body is the receptacle for your thinking-and-feeling pattern

The cycling pattern may involve a childlike hope that the problem will go away or the drinker will finally just stop. However, ignoring a drinking problem or addiction by suppressing feelings leads to carrying the burden in your body. Eventually your body says to you, “If you aren’t going to pay attention to the emotional signals, here are some physical signals for you.” Over time the result can be physical ailments like irritable bowel syndrome or esophageal reflux, to name two.

With the drinking problem constantly in the light, your barely conscious pattern of either expressing feelings or suppressing feelings is often unseen in the shadows. This pattern gets stuck in the body resulting in compromised functioning in your own body. 

“So, how can I change my pattern?”

The first step is to increase your awareness of how you respond to the drinking. You’ve probably adopted specific patterns for a very good reason in the past. The problem is that the past pattern may no longer serve you. It’s not easy to just quit our patterns of thinking and feeling even when we know these patterns may be self-destructive. Instead of just quitting cold turkey, trying reducing the habitual behavior and using a new behavior that’s a bit out of your comfort zone.

Changing a pattern requires you to change where you put your energy and focus. Changing a pattern can be done when you change how you structure your time, what you do with your time, and how you see yourself. 

“Okay, I’m all for taking better care of myself. Where do I start?”

One easy way to start this process is to shine the light on you, your thoughts, feelings, interests, and passions. Set up new daily routines that require you to put a bit more focus on your own interests. Spend time doing things you enjoy and haven’t done in a while. The goal is to stretch yourself by setting up a discipline that supports you emotionally, then make this a priority in your life and become accountable to yourself for your own choices.

When you have multiple self-care habits well established, you’re on the right track. Know that the strength to continue your self-care is necessary both to maintain your own level of well being and to productively confront the drinking problem. The more you focus on your own health, the more resources you have to deal with the problem.

“But—I feel guilty taking care of myself.”

Feeling guilty for taking care of your self can be an indicator of a very rigid self-destructive pattern. You may not be able to change your pattern alone. Reach out to your healthy support systems (family, friends, work, church, special interest groups). If you do not have healthy support systems it’s important to build some. Ask people you trust for their feedback on your self-care relative to your unique situation.

When you take steps to increase your self-care, over time, you’ll have more energy and inner resources to make good decisions about the drinking problem in your family. Although this may sound difficult, know that self-care brings you closer to finding the solution to the drinking problem in your family.

Like Nasruddin

When you put all of your focus on what is under the streetlight—in this case, the problem drinker—it will not yield the key to changing the drinking problem. If you continue this habit, it most likely will result in the same as what Nasruddin found under the light—nothing. Like Nassruddin, you may feel or think the key to the drinking problem is under the light. But without feedback it’s likely you won’t find what you’re seeking.

Summary

Don’t make the mistake of focusing on the problem drinking at the exclusion of your own thoughts and feelings about the drinking. If not attended to, your thoughts and feelings will become deeply entrenched patterns that affect your own body and health. Changing a pattern may mean shifting your focus from the drinker to yourself.

For assistance with this process contact a trained addictions counselor or coach who can assist you in this change. To learn more, set a free 20-minute telephone consult.