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I think my sister in law might be an alcoholic. Not sure what to do. Her and my brother have three kids together.
Last weekend was my grandfather's funeral. At the service she started drinking wine, and getting through a few glasses pretty quickly. She then got in an argument with my brother about how she wanted to stay and go to the smaller party we were having with just close family. My brother was saying no, because he had been worried about this exact scenario, they'd only originally planned to stay for the service. She then suggested that he take the kids home and she could stay and get a ride home from our parents. Keep in mind, this is not her grandfather. She didn't know him particularly well either.
That was the latest incident. There are many more that start with some variation of "[sister in law] drank too much and then she ..."
Bad stuff and I have no useful advice, just want to say that I hear ya and my thoughts are with you.
Thanks, I live two hours away from them, and my interactions are only a few times a year. So while I feel for my brother, this luckily isn't much of a personal burden on me.
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That sounds more like a "your sister-in-law is a colossal jerk" problem than an alcohol problem, or at least an interaction between your sister-in-law's jerkitude and alcohol.
Having some, even a lot of, wine at a funeral isn't a big deal. Getting into a fight with your husband at his grandfather's funeral is, as is voluntelling your husband's parents to serve as your designated driver. That's an insane level of disrespect.
I'd be extremely perturbed if a brother or sister-in-law treated his or her parents that way, a grandparent's funeral that way. Much less my parents or grandparent. Maybe I'm slowly becoming a crochety socon boomer (and/or perhaps the Overton rug is shifting underneath me), but as an adult you should be on your best behavior around your family, especially any family-in-laws.
I've always disliked her. Tried to talk my brother into breaking up with before they were engaged. He kinda did, and then got back with her. I tried to ask him if he was really really sure he wanted to marry her. He said he loved her. My dad and I joked that if my brother changed his mind last minute we'd have the truck ready and high tail him out of the wedding. I'm not gonna tell me brother "I told ya so", but between you and me ... i fuckin told him so.
This lady is in her mid 30s and she has two lovely older siblings. Its not a generational thing, or a 'how she was raised' kind of thing. Its a her thing. I think before this incident I just really disliked her and thought of her as a jerk and responsible for all her crappy behavior. This seemed beyond her normal level of being annoying and petty that it finally got me to stop and think "is this alcoholism?"
In line with @raggedy_anthem 's point, and your point: It might not be strictly medically alcoholism. But yeah I get a strong sense that if alcohol wasn't in the picture things would be better.
Alcoholism, despite the stereotype, almost always has an emotional component which, if resolved, removes the driving compulsion to drink, though not always the urge.
Behaviorism has identified four drivers of behavior: attention, escape, access, and sensation. Some memory in her past, I’m guessing, carries a stressful semantic meaning which makes her feel she is required to escape. By my experiences, probably an initial event and a reinforcing event.
I find this claim appealing, but it's so poorly-defined as to be impossible to test. "Emotional component" is a placeholder - it might just as well be phlogiston or black bile.
There are three categories of emotions (per Triessentialism): Identities, Roles, and Imperatives.
Each of these can drive compulsions in search of fulfilling or self-validating those emotions. The specific ones are so subjective to each individual's experiences and history that even guessing would be foolhardy.
I'm still struggling to understand what claim you're making about the nature of alcoholism. You stress that wants and needs are (imperative) emotional components. So is it just that people stop being alcoholics when they stop wanting/needing to drink alcohol? But that's almost tautological.
Alcoholics generally don’t drink because they “want to drink,” they drink to fulfill one of the behavior functions (attention, escape, access, and sensation) because they can’t fulfill a different emotion elsewhere in their life.
Somewhere in their past, someone else made a bad choice which not only impacted their lives negatively, it also injured an instinct: the choice made them believe their world wasn’t how it should be and they’re just going to have to live with being personally screwed by a bad deal. It could be a bad identity: they’re born with the wrong skin tone or genitals. It could be a bad relationship: their teacher cares more about homework than understanding. It could be a bad imperative: they didn’t get something they needed because someone neglected them. Often it’s because one of their caretakers was neglectful or even abusive.
What’s key to understanding alcoholism is the compulsive nature of the disorder: they feel driven to drink, and they haven’t had the tools, the technique, the time, or the teachers to help them find and disarm the emotion which compels them.
Alcoholics Anonymous gives all of these things, in an atmosphere of nonjudgmental camaraderie, patience, and mentorship where people who realize they need help can find it. The program was so successful (compared to other things) that it became the model for recovery from other addictions, such as narcotics, sex addiction, and life drama addiction (CoDependents Anonymous).
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Honestly all of those sound valid for her.
She does seem to crave attention in social situations. She is a consummate extrovert.
She has complained enough about my brother that the rumors have reached me, even though I am in a totally different social circle and live two hours away. She thinks of him as emotionally unavailable. So escaping that.
Access to social interaction that she seems to desperately crave.
And feeling something. (maybe sensation is a stretch for her)
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Does her drinking go past being a nuisance like the one scenario you outlined in detail, or does it become genuinely dangerous/debilitating at times? It's one thing to be lush, another to be a menace to yourself and others.
Drinking and driving has happened a few times ... while picking up her kids.
Her level of alcohol consumption doesn't seem to get to the level of being personally dangerous. Like I don't think she is getting sick from how much alcohol she's consumes. It just interacts with her existing mental issues in a horrible way.
That is concerning, to say the least. I'd suggest you talk to your brother about trying to talk her into some kind of understanding of what she's doing, and then building off whether she shows insight into her condition. If yes, great, she can probably be talked into at least trying therapy or medical intervention. If not, then the hard questions start getting asked. I hope it doesn't come to that.
By existing mental issues, are you referring to a concrete diagnosis, or just being a bit of an asshole, which is sadly something I can't bill for?
My brother keeps a large emotional distance from ... everyone. Its one of his wife's main complaints. I am mostly just trying to get him to talk to me at all right now. Not cuz he is avoiding me. Its just very hard to get him to open up about stuff.
She is in therapy. No idea why it is so useless. The two older kids are in therapy, and she talked my brother into getting therapy too. Which hasn't been bad for him.
I don't know if there is any concrete mental diagnosis. I do know that back when we were all in highschool she got into a car accident her senior year (took a turn a little too fast). My brother has said once or twice before that her personality changed a bit afterwards, but he didn't know her that well beforehand. It was a weird night that highlighted some differences between me and my brother. It was the only time I've seen him kind of frozen. He is usually very calm and collected, and I thought that meant he could also do anything. But it wasn't the response of a man of action, rather than a kind of emotional deadness.
Night of the car accident:
I am going to drop off my sister, I just got my learners permit. I am 16. We run into a car accident on one of the common roads. I hear some feint screaming. Roll down the window, it becomes more clear. Blood curdling scream like someone is in serious pain. Its freaking my mom and sister out. I have a temptation to get out and go see what is happening, but EMS is already present. We turn around go a different way. Coming back home we assume the accident has maybe been cleared up. Its not. Call my brother, we find out my brother is in the traffic behind the accident. Maybe 6 or 7 cars back from where the accident happened. He mentions that he can't reach [his now wife] on cell. I get out of my car, switch with my mom to being in the driver seat. I hike along the road about 30 or 40 cars. (this is a country road where you see a car pass by once every minute or so. Many of the cars are just turning around in the middle of the road.). I get to my brothers jeep. Ask him whats going on. He is biting his lip. Says he doesn't know. Cell phone is in his hand. I don't think to ask how many missed outgoing calls he has. He was much closer to the site of the accident than we were on the other side, he definitely heard the screams.
Her parents get a call that their daughter is in the hospital. My brother and mom head there. I head back home. My parents and my [now sister in law's] parents meet for the first time in the hospital.
The story later is that they were cutting a jacket she loved in order to extract her from the vehicle, she was aware enough to know they were cutting the jacket, but not aware enough to not scream bloody murder at EMS personnel who are rescuing her from a destroyed vehicle. She suffered a concussion at the time.
It was not a case of drinking and driving. They were heading to a party where they would be drinking, but were planning to spend the night.
I think back on that night as pretty pivotal. I think she would have just been a highschool tryst for my brother if not for that night. The parents wouldn't have met. There wouldn't have been a seriousness to the relationship. I also wonder if it impacted her mental health permanently, there are plenty of cases of people being permanently mentally altered by traumatic brain events.
Also it shows she is a shitty driver even when sober, she definitely shouldn't be driving drunk.
Hah! Yeah talk therapy is pretty useless for deep emotional issues or traumas. I think it can be useful for 'normal' people who don't have deep-seated issues, but in my experience anyone with serious trauma needs something more. If she's open to it she could look into different modalities like breathwork or somatic experiencing, but... sounds like that's a hard ask.
That story is wild. She was screaming over a jacket? Woah.
For the driving drunk with kids thing... that is extremely serious. I know adults who are permanently messed up from getting into an accident with a drunk parent. Sounds like you can't do anything more than what you're doing without really burning some bridges, but I wish you luck. It's not an easy situation.
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I appreciate the context. It seems to me that your hands are rather tied, unless you want to go pretty drastic by doing things like calling the cops on her if she's driving drunk. I wouldn't do that myself, the consequences would be severe for the family, even if you manage to do it anonymously.
As for therapy, eh, for a would-be psychiatrist I'm ambivalent on it. I like me my drugs, no wishy washy bullshit. But that aside, therapy covers a lot of different techniques, from those with good empirical evidence bases to bullshitting everything like Freudians and Lacanians. I hope they're doing the more validated (and ideally less woo) stuff, but it's not a miracle maker, especially when a person seems to plausibly lack insight or regret for their decisions.
I'd advise you to wait and watch, at least for now. Or perhaps have a good bud of your brother, some he listens to, try and give him a hint. Or maybe have the family corner your SIL and make pointed comments when she's acting up.
But what do I know dawg, other than that it's a shitty situation to find yourself in. I do hope it works out!
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