A YouTube self-assessment video by Amber Hollingsworth presenting eight unofficial clinical signs she uses to judge alcohol use disorder. Key cues include being pressured to seek help by someone else, high-achieving but anxious personality, disrupted sleep (early-morning awakening after drinking), blackouts, shame/embarrassment about drinking behavior, unresolved grief and resentments, and intense fear at the thought of life without alcohol. The video ends with links to a separate detox checklist video and a downloadable checklist.
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And so in this video, I'm going to tell you the things that I look for if I'm trying to diagnose somebody with alcohol use disorder. Now, in a previous video, I talked about the official criteria, so make sure you check that one out if you haven't already. But the one that I'm about to tell you now, you're not going to find in the official book. These are just some of the things that I look for if I'm trying to figure out if someone's an alcoholic or not. Number one, first and foremost, somebody has done dragged you into my office. Your parent, your spouse, your best friend. Somebody has made you show up in my office because they're upset with you about your drinking is a really good indicator that you might have a drinking problem, despite the fact that you might think that they're overreacting, that they're making a big deal about it, and that it's really not that bad. If someone's pushed you to the point that they're trying to make you get help for your drinking, then you need to take that seriously. Go ahead and count that as number one on Amber's list of criteria for being an alcoholic. Number two, alcoholics tend to be a type. People in general, alcoholics are usually pretty successful, they're pretty motivated, and they get a lot done. But with that, they also have a lot of anxiety, which is one of the big reasons why they turn to drinking. It's like they can't turn it off. They don't know how to just be, or just settle in or be in the moment or be present. So really high motivation and drive mixed with high anxiety and difficulty turning the brain off. That's Amber's criteria number two. Now, number three has to do with sleep patterns for people that have an alcohol addiction. You see, there's a certain type of sleep pattern that alcoholics just tend to have. Usually what happens is they usually need to drink or take some kind of sedative or benzodiazepine to go to sleep. So it doesn't look like they have a sleep disorder because they, they usually can go to sleep fairly early, but they wake up like ridiculous early, like 3, 4, 5 o' clock in the morning when the rest of us are just getting Snuggie in the bed. People with alcohol problems are awake. And the reason is because as you were sleeping, your liver was filtering out the alcohol or the benzo or whatever you needed to have to go to sleep. And as soon as your liver's filtered that out, it's like bamboo awake, head going 100 miles an hour. So it's not so much that alcoholics can't go to sleep. It's more that they don't stay asleep. The next thing that I look for is whether or not a person has been having blackouts. You know, these are entire chunks of time where you can't remember what happened. If you frequently wake up and you think to yourself, oh, God, what did I do last night? And you open up your phone to try to look through, or you look at your wife or your spouse's face to try to figure out what happened the night before, you. You can go ahead and count this one as one of the symptoms. And that one actually leads me right into my next one, which is frequently feeling shameful or embarrassed about the things that you've done while you were drinking. If you have a tendency to drunk dial your ex or you've gotten more than one dui, or you act a fool at a social event, or you embarrass yourself at a wedding and you feel really humiliated by these incidences, go ahead and count that one. The next criteria that I look for is unresolved grief and or hurts from the past. Many times if someone's been drinking in order to deal with grief or loss of any kind of situation, they never really move through that grief. They don't get over the loss. They stay stuck. Basically what happens is those feelings come up and you drink and push it right back down. And when the feelings come up again, you drink and cram it right back down in there. So it's pretty common that I can see someone in my office who experienced a major loss like a long time ago, but when they're telling it to me, it's like it happened just yesterday. That's unresolved loss or hurt, which is a little bit similar to the next one, which is unresolved resentments. Because you see alcoholics, not only do they not get over grief, but they don't get over being mad at people either, because the same kind of thing happens. It's like they relive it, especially when they're drinking. That's something that somebody did to you or is doing to you or is messing up you at work or your spouse, and you just think about it and obsess about it, and the drinking is making it worse. It's like I'm holding that grudge, and not only am I not getting over it, but it's getting bigger and bigger resentments. Okay, here comes a biggie. The next symptom is when you think about life without alcohol, you really start freaking out in your head and you're thinking, life would be terrible if I couldn't drink anymore. I'm not even sure it would be worth it. So if you feel like life would be really, really horrible and the idea of living without alcohol freaks you out completely, then go ahead and count that criteria. So those are my eight unofficial criteria of alcohol addiction. If you're ready to do something about it, your next step is to figure out whether or not you need alcohol detox. Because the withdrawal from alcohol can be very serious. You don't want to take this lightly. If you're concerned that you actually may need some medical detox help, check out this video. I'm going to put it right over here. You right over here. Over here. I can't remember what side for you. And in that video, I'll go through the checklist on how to know if you actually need detox. And if you'd like a typed up copy of all these that I just named, plus a copy of the official ones, just click the link in the description below and you can download that checklist for free.
