The Drinking Problem Everyone Misses

The fact that your loved one is still going to work, still paying the bills, and still taking care of things, that's not proof that the drinking isn't that bad. For a lot of people, that's actually the reason it gets so much worse. Today, we're going to be talking about why high functioning is the most dangerous kind of drinking problem. When most people picture a drinking problem, they picture something obvious. They picture someone who can't hold a job, Someone who shows up slurring their words, someone whose life is visibly falling apart. But there's a whole other category just as serious and way more confusing, and that's what we call the high-functioning alcoholic. This is the person who coaches Little League, who gets promoted at work, who drinks at the neighborhood barbecue and nobody bats an eye, who has it all together just enough that when you try to say something to them, To anyone, it sounds like you're overreacting. Today I'm going to break down 4 specific reasons why this type of drinking problem is the most dangerous. Not because it's more severe in the moment, but because everything about it is designed almost perfectly to stay invisible to them, to the people around them, and sometimes even to you. Let's start with the most frustrating one, because this is the wall you've probably ran into More times than you can count. It is genuinely hard for someone to believe they have a drinking problem when they're still doing all the things, still showing up to work, still handling finances, still getting the kids to school, still keeping the house together because their brain is working hard to minimize the consequences. The evidence that they're okay is right in front of them. Every successful day at work has data. Every bill paid on time is data. Every pickup at school is data. In their brain, it all adds up to, I'm functioning, therefore I do not have a problem. The tragedy is that the high-functioning alcoholic's greatest strength is their ability to keep it together. It becomes the biggest obstacle to getting help because in the world of addiction, what usually breaks through denial is consequences. The lost job, the DUI, the marriage actually ending— those are the things that force someone to look at what's really happening. But the high-functioning drinker is, for now, avoiding those big consequences, which means their brain never really gets the signal that anything needs to change. And what does that leave you with? It leaves you watching something slowly erode while everyone around you says it's fine, while they say it's fine, while on paper, technically, nothing has fallen apart yet. You are living in the gap between what is happening And what is officially acknowledged. And in that gap is an incredibly lonely place to be. So I want to say this to you directly, but what you're seeing is real. The slow erosion is real, and you do not have to wait until everything falls apart completely to take it seriously. If this is already hitting close to home and you're nodding along right now, make sure you subscribe because everything I'm going to cover in the rest of this video and in the videos coming next is specifically for people in your exact situation. So hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of it. Now let's keep going. The second reason is the brain chemistry thing, and I want to explain it to you in plain English because this one's going to make a lot more things make sense. When someone drinks a lot, alcohol suppresses something called glutamate in the brain. Now glutamate is an excitatory chemical, and it essentially makes your brain feel alert. Alcohol pushes that way down. That's why drinking Feels relaxing, but here's the problem: when the alcohol wears off, the brain overcorrects. It floods back with a surge of glutamate more than normal to compensate. And what does that feel like from the inside? Anxiety, irritability, restlessness—a low-level feeling that something is wrong. The person experiencing this doesn't know that it's the alcohol that's causing it. They don't wake up thinking, "Oh, this is a withdrawal effect." They just feel anxious. They feel irritable, and their brain, being human, is going to look for a reason why. And what are they looking at? Their job, their marriage, their finances, their life. And so over time, they become increasingly convinced that the problem is their job or the economy or the fact that you're so hard to please or that the marriage never really worked. In their mind, that's why they drink, because everything is so stressful. You see, the alcohol is creating the emotional state, and then the brain is assigning a story to it. And that story is almost never, I need to stop drinking. In fact, it's almost always about something or someone else. For a lot of families, that someone else is the person watching this video right now, which is one of the main reasons why many of you feel like you're going crazy because they start becoming more irritable, more critical, more convinced that you're the problem. And there's a real neurological reason for it. None of it is actually about you. Now, wrapping your head around how all this is working is just one step, but there's actually a lot more to it. In fact, in our Denial Breakthrough Challenge, we do it every 6 or 8 weeks or so. It's a live 4-day group coaching event where I walk you through exactly how to approach these conversations differently. The link's in the description, and I'd love to see you there. All right, now let's move on to our 3rd reason. Now, this is the one that makes people feel the most alone. When someone's a high-functioning drinker, most people in their life don't see it as a problem. Their friends drink with them. Their coworkers meet them at happy hour. Their family says, he works hard, he deserves to unwind. Their buddy who drinks just as much as them is right there agreeing that everything's fine. So when you raise a concern, when you say things like, I think your drinking has gotten out of hand, you don't just hit a wall of their denial. You're fighting against everyone around them who's been quietly validating this for years, probably. And then on top of all that, something happens that's one of the most painful parts of the situation, scapegoating. Because their brain is already anxious, already irritable from what we just talked about. It needs a target. And if there are people in their life that all agree that the drinking isn't the problem, the The only target that's left standing is you. You become the nag, the controlling one, the one who's never satisfied, the reason the relationship is so hard, the reason they drink in the first place. Spouses tell me all the time that they almost start to believe it. When one person says something to you, you can dismiss it. When it's the whole social circle agreeing with them and you're the only one ringing the alarm bell, it's pretty isolating. It makes you doubt your own reality. Their friends are not wrong about what they see. They don't see what happens After the party ends and everyone goes home. This is what I call the social permission structure of the high-functioning drinker. The drinking is hidden in plain sight because it fits right inside the norms of the world they live in, which means you, as the person closest to them, you're carrying the full weight of something nobody else wants to talk about. And this last one is the one that's going to make some of those arguments finally make sense. When someone drinks heavy enough to actually black out, Which happens a lot more than you might realize. They're not just forgetting the details. Their brain literally didn't record what happened, which isn't like forgetting where you put your keys. A blackout is when alcohol interrupts the process that moves short-term memories into long-term. You know, like the argument, the way they came home, what they said to you. It was never even filed. So there's no memory to access. And it's super frustrating because it means when you say, You don't know what you said to me last night. And then they say, that's not what happened. It means they're not always lying. They're telling you the truth, a truth their brain has filled in because the real one was never recorded, which is why arguments about the past go absolutely nowhere. You're trying to hold someone accountable for a reality that for them does not exist. It's like trying to prosecute someone for a crime they have no memory of committing. So the next time they look at you, genuinely confused and say, I didn't do that, that confusion might actually be real. It doesn't make the damage less real, but understanding how all that works changes how you engage with it. Like, I've seen a lot of families take their loved one to every kind of doctor and specialist thinking that there's a neurological problem or early onset dementia. All these kind of tests get ran trying to figure out what's wrong because there's clearly a memory problem and the person themself They know what's causing it. They know it's because they're drinking. But usually when all this is happening, it's sneak drinking, so they're not going to tell you that. When someone can't access the evidence, and all this is just another thing that makes alcoholic denial that much worse, because when someone can't even remember what they did, the worst nights just keep getting erased. That's why they can't see the picture that you can see. Every morning, they're starting from a cleaner slate than you are. You wake up with all the memories and the emotional weight of everything that happened the night before. And they flat out just don't remember, which is why they come down and act like nothing happened. Now, on the outside, they usually act kind of nonchalant about it, but on the inside, it's kind of scary not to remember. And honestly, they're probably doing something I call it like temperature checking. They're trying to feel you out, like get a sense of your energy to try to figure out what the heck did happen last night. So hopefully all this helps you make sense of everything that's happening. So why is high functioning drinking the most dangerous kind of drinking problem? Because everything they're still doing right becomes proof in their mind that nothing's wrong. Because the chemistry of alcohol withdrawal makes them feel like you're the problem. Because their entire social circle is quietly validating that they're fine. And because the blackouts hide the damage, they don't even remember it. It basically just gets erased one night at a time. Every single one of those factors is working against you. They're not purposefully trying to hurt you. This is just how functional alcoholism shows up. I want you to know that the problem isn't that you're crazy. Yes, it is actually happening. You just haven't found the right words yet. It's not that you need to gather more evidence to show them a clearer picture because the denial mechanisms involved here is just going to rationalize and minimize and disregard all that evidence anyway, to them, to the people around them, and sometimes even to you. Now, that doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do. It means you have to approach it very differently. Not louder, not harder, just differently. If you're relating to this because you've been on either side of it, drop a comment below and tell me one word that describes how this situation makes you feel. I really do read every single one of your comments. And if you want the step-by-step approach to how to actually reach and get through to someone who's in this kind of denial, the link to the Denial Breakthrough Challenge is in the description, and I would love to see you there. I'll see you guys in the next one.