Amber Hollingsworth, a master addiction counselor, explains why alcoholics stay in denial longer than users of other drugs. Alcohol causes blackouts and memory distortion, building layers of denial. Her advice: stop demanding they admit the problem. Instead, get them willing to try change, give time for sobriety to show the real damage, and follow a staged path to intervention.
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Are you dealing with an alcoholic spouse? You know, an alcoholic wife, husband, partner? Well, if so, then you probably know how frustrating it is to hear them minimize the problem, to hear them say that you're the one that's overly critical or that you're making too big of a deal about it. But stay tuned, because in this video, I am going to explain to you why alcoholic denial is worse than other addictions. I mean, alcoholic denial is way worse than someone. Than someone's denial about heroin or cocaine or meth. And you might be thinking, but, Amber, those are way harder drugs. How can alcoholic denial be way worse than that? Well, don't worry. Just keep watching, and you're gonna find out the answer. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth, master addiction counselor and founder of Hope for Families Recovery Center. And you're watching Put the Shovel down, the YouTube channel dedicated to helping families understand the science and psycholog of addiction so you can recover your loved ones and your life and get back on track. So if that sounds like something you need to do, consider subscribing, and I'll make sure you have every tool and piece of information you need to get that job done. Okay? So I promise to tell you why alcoholic denial is worse than other addiction denial. You see, here's the thing. When people are doing drugs like cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine, they may deny to you that something's a problem, but deep down inside, they really do know it's a problem for themselves. They just don't want to admit it to you out loud because they're scared of stopping or because they don't want to stop, or they're fearful about what life will be like if they have to stop, or they're fearful of withdrawals. So denial for them, they may deny it to you, but they probably on some level, get that it's a problem for themselves. Occasionally, they'll minimize that problem or make it seem less than what it really is of themselves. But with alcohol, it seems to be a whole different story. And here's why. You see, because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant fancy for shuts down your thinking brain, or what I call takes your filter off. What happens when most people have an alcohol problem is they drink and or use other drugs with the drinking to the point that they end up in a blackout. And so alcohol particularly distorts your memory process. People either don't remember at all what they did or how bad it was, or they remember little pieces of it. And even if they do remember the whole thing, their memory of the event and what happened has this weird filter over it that makes them not remember the situation the same way you remember it. You know, like an Instagram filter. It changes the whole thing. And so when I deal with alcoholics, you can almost count on the fact that they're gonna tell me some version of, it's not that bad. This other person is overreacting. It's probably because their mother had a problem, and they're just projecting that on me. They're gonna tell you some vers. Now, they may admit to you that there was, like, this time or two where things got away from them, but overall, they really are quite clueless about how bad those situations really were. So they tend to stay in denial longer. And this is a really delicate situation. You can't just go in there and rip that sort of denial layer off the top and say, oh, let me tell you how bad it is, because I have had family members in the past to do things like make videos and show it to the person. But even when you do that, usually the person feels so humiliated and embarrassed, they have those other defense mechanisms that immediately kick in about defensiveness, about, you're recording me, you're trying to trap me. And then they get stuck on those thoughts instead of the thoughts about what actually happened in the video. So the issue about helping people break through denial is complicated. Have you seen that movie Shrek? You know, where ogre says ogres are like onions? We have layers. Denial is like ogres. It has layers. It's so insubuzentific. Important in how you go about dealing with that denial. The first thing you might want to understand is that someone does not have to admit the severity of the issue in order to make a change. They just have to get to a point where they realize that at this moment, for whatever reasons, they need to make a change. They don't have to like it, they don't have to want it. They just have to be willing to do it. So if you have a loved one in your life who's in alcoholic denial, stop trying to force them to say how bad it is. Because the more you try to force them to be honest and admit to themselves just how bad this problem is, the worse it's going to get. The more defense mechanisms they're going to get, the more they're going to project and blame and minimize, you know, the story. Oftentimes, as people get sober and they work their recovery program, they become more and more and More able to see how bad the problem was and to admit to how bad the problem was. But sometimes they need a little sobriety. They need to step back from the situation long enough and far enough to really be able to see how bad it was. So that's part of it is stepping back enough to see how bad it was. And second part of that is they need to have enough ego strength to be able to see it and admit it and acknowledge it to themselves and maybe to other people without totally falling apart and crumbling. Think about it like this. I bet you've made really big mistakes in your past that at the time, while you were making them or shortly after, you felt really embarrassed and horrible about, and you probably didn't want to talk about it, and you definitely didn't want to tell anybody about it. But now maybe you're years past that. You know, think about when you were a teenager and things you did that you wish you wouldn't have done. You would have been horrible. You wouldn't have admitted it to anybody. But now when you look back and you say, oh, when I was a teenager, I did this and that and the other. Because you. Because you don't have your whole identity all wound up in who you were at that moment. And so you have more ego strength. And plus, you know that teenagers do all kind of dumb stuff. So you're able to really admit to just how big that mistake was. It's kind of like that. So stop trying to force your loved one to say just how bad it is. Focus on trying to get them to be willing, but not like it to make a change. And I know what you're thinking. Well, Amber, how do we do that? Well, that's a long, complicated answer. But don't worry, I've got a path for you. And this video right here is your next step in that journey.
