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How to Tell If You're An Alcoholic - A Quick Quizby Suzann Kale
True alcoholism is considered by most experts to be a disease. It's not a personality flaw. If you find you have, say, diabetes, you do something about it. If you find that your body processes alcohol incorrectly, you do something about it. Some women simply drink moderately. Some drink too much, but are not alcoholics.
Here are some questions to ask yourself, so you can know for sure if your body is having problems with alcohol. (It's best to know now, before physical damage occurs.) 1. Do you ever get blackouts? (i.e. Do you often forget the details of the night before?)
3. When you're out drinking moderately with friends, do you find you want to drink more when you get home? In other words, do one or two drinks prime the pump? If so, we've got a big red flag waving at us. The red flag pops up if you drink because there is some issue you need to blot out. (continued below) |
Some of us drink - from a little to a lot - and our bodies just can't process it efficiently. We are the ones who need to take action, so we can keep our health.
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5. Do you binge drink on the weekends? If so, this does not necessarily mean you're an alcoholic. But it does mean you need to look into the situation more carefully. Some people naturally outgrow the binge drinking thing. But if you find the weekend binging slowly but surely starts bleeding into the weekdays, you could be at the beginning stages of alcoholism. The other problem with binge drinking, whether you're an alcoholic or not, is that it's dangerous to your health. 6. We all drink to relieve stress occasionally (those who drink) - but if your primary daily reason for drinking is to relieve stress, this is a signal that you could be headed for an addiction problem. 
Alcoholism Can Be SubtleWe don't have to drink like the brave souls who open their lives to us on A&E's cable TV show Intervention. Some of us go about our lives and no one - not even ourselves - realizes that our bodies are not processing the alcohol efficiently. And then one day, seemingly out of the blue, we're having our daily glasses of wine and wake up in the emergency room with tubes sticking out of us. Others go for years without any physical reaction to alcohol and then find that we've toasted our livers. We don't want to get to those points. Even if we think we're mild drinkers, we need to learn to abstain if we believe we are alcoholics. Watch yourself during the day, and especially when you drink. Be an observer of yourself. Write down what you drink, what the accompanying thoughts and feelings are, and if there are any consequences. Many of us are into denial - that's part of the whole dance. By objectively noting everything on paper, we can begin to see things as they really are. If you find yourself hesitating to write down these details, that too is a red flag. If you want to check into this further, here are some fabulous resources: •The Hazelden web site (http://www.hazelden.org/) 
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