A familiar story about a family in distress over one member’s drinking:
Dustin Poirier Details Broken Relationship With Father Struggling With Alcoholism
Poirier happens to be a celebrated MMA fighter, one “whose parents separated when he was just 5 years old.” After they divorced, his father drifted deeper into chronic alcoholism and eventually, homelessness.
His grown children, all doing well on their own, are still trying to get him to quit drinking, and not having much success.
”My sister went out and found him and spoke to him and told him that we were willing to help him out, but he doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t want it,” Poirier explained to a reporter. “He wants to, you know, he wants to drink until he dies…”
It’s far from the first time I’ve heard that, mainly in hospital settings, from family members of late- stage alcoholics. Most interpret such statements as evidence that the drinker has already given up, lost any hope of or desire to change — and thus there’s no longer any point in anyone else making an attempt to help him.
As Poirier puts it, “That’s just, you know, how alcoholics are stubborn, and that’s his choice, man.”
I can understand his response, but I’m not sure he’s right about that. Someone as enmeshed in the disease as his dad appears to be may have lost, at least temporarily, the ability to see an alternative path and make the decision to pursue it.
As one neurologist characterized the late-stage alcoholic dilemma: “think of someone who can talk your ear off, but beneath the surface is a mass of confusion. He’s lost the ability to reason his way to the obvious conclusion. He keeps adding two and two and coming up with something other than four. To him, giving up and dying is the only alternative left.”
“Except it isn’t. But he can’t stay sober long enough to realize that.”
I never forgot that. And I recalled a different patient, in his mid-60s and a few years sober, who explained to me that towards the end of his drinking, he told any number of people to go away and let him die.
“But looking back, I didn’t really want to die. I was like a hurt animal lying in the road. The kind that makes you think, somebody ought to put the poor thing out out of its misery. That was me. And for the life of me, I couldn’t think of any other way out than death.”
“Just damn lucky for me that other people could. They made the decision. And all I had to do was follow along. I could do that.”
There’s a lesson in there somewhere, about helping people with addictions. Sometimes you just have to stop talking and act.
