Alcoholic Parent

Hi, I have an alcoholic father, and I am ashamed and embarrassed to go somewhere with him. My mother and I are trying to make him go to an clinic and start treatment. How to make him go?

Hi, you can ask somebody who has strong influence on him to make him go to the treatment. Alcoholism is a disease, and it needs professional care. Beside medications, and psychological help also family support is very important for dealing with this bad habit. If you feel bad about not being a perfect child don’t do so. If your parent drinks, it won't make him drink less if you do better in school or help with house jobs. Reasons like having a rough time at work or being out of work are not good enough to be an excuse for drinking, nothing is.

I know what your going through. My mom is an alcoholic and I get so embarrassed to go out with her. Not that she goes out when she is drinking but she has lost alot of weight from it. She is so small people stare at her like she has something the matter with her.
My mom has been once and it hasn't helped. She started gainging weight but then let it all go down the drain again. Now she refuses to go back.
If I were you I would tell him how you feel and maybe he will go.

I know how hard it is to watch a parent suffer from alcoholism. My Dad is an alcoholic; he has been sober for 5 years now, which I am very proud of. But it took a long time to get there. You can tell a person that they need treatment until you are blue in the face, they can even spend a couple of months in treatment, but it will not work unless they really want to get better. It wasn’t until my dad hit rock bottom (which was not pretty) that he finally realised that he needed help. And the one of the main reasons he was able to get better was that he had a family who was willing to help him get better. I think the best thing for you and your Mum to do is to not enable his drinking, that is not make it easy for him to get away with drinking, don’t make excuses for him. I remember before my Dad went to treatment my Mum and he went to counselling, it was hard and a lot of the time my dad would not go because he saw asking for help as a weakness. You also need to talk to someone, whether its your friends, a counsellor or even one of those phone in help lines, they are better than I thought they would be. You could also organise an intervention, there are organisations that can help you do this. I used to think that interventions were a waste of time until I was involved in one and saw the outcome (which was good if you were wondering). I wish you all the strength in the world because this is not an easy path to go down, but the eventual sobriety of your father will make it worth it. I wish you and your family good luck!

i understand. i have an alcoholic father as well. it's the hardest thing in the world to deal with and no one will ever quite understand unless they go through the same thing. i have found that nothing i have done has helped..but i hope maybe this will help you. If you tell your father ( when he is sober, perhaps in the morning) in a calm tone how much his drinking really hurts you, and how you would never do anything to hurt him, maybe that will make a change. The fact that he knows how much is upsets you may encourage him to change.