Who Does Alcoholism Affect?

Many people often wonder who exactly alcohol addiction affects. I know it should be fairly obvious to you that alcoholism will affect the alcoholic themselves, but are there any other people in the life of the alcoholic that get affected as well? Yes, there are definitely other people that get affected by the alcoholic and I’m going to do my best to share with you all of the people in the alcoholic’s life who can get hurt by this terrible disease.

How People are Negatively Affected by Alcoholism

The first person to be negatively affected is obviously going to be the alcoholic. This is always going to be the case because the alcoholic is the one struggling with Alcohol Dependence Syndrome, and they are probably trying so hard to quit even though they would never show it on the surface. If you think about it, who would want to hold themselves hostage to a disease that they have no control over? Nobody in their right mind would do this, and when you are an alcoholic caught up in this disease you definitely aren’t in your right mind any longer.

How Alcoholism Affects the Significant Other

Alcohol will absolutely affect the significant other of the alcoholic in many different ways. Most of these ways are going to be very negative as you can imagine, so this disease unfortunately takes its toll in so many different areas. The spouse of the alcoholic will not be able to properly communicate with this person any longer so their relationship will definitely suffer a great deal.

The significant other of the alcoholic will feel lost and alone because they may desperately want to try and help this person but they just don’t know what to do that will make it all better. They will experience all kinds of emotional problems as well because alcoholics often tend to do and say things that are very hurtful to the people that they love the most, so the spouse will unfortunately take the brunt of this nasty talk and they may even have to live with it for many years until the alcoholic truly gets help and it finally stops.

How Alcoholism Affects the Alcoholic’s Children

As I’m sure you can imagine, or maybe you even know from personal experience, the children of an alcoholic are affected negatively by the actions of their parent. They have to see their parent acting like a drunken idiot or a belligerent person and it can be very embarrassing for the child to have to see. Their parent might show up to school functions drunk and make an ass out of themselves which would obviously make the child feel worthless and miserable.

Plus the alcoholic might beat their child while they are drunk so there is the chance that physical abuse is going on as well as mental abuse. And let’s not forget all the emotional pain and suffering that alcoholism will cause for this child, which will probably force them to seek out therapy at some point in their life because they don’t know how to cope with what they saw growing up as a child. This could really affect their development negatively in many different and profound ways.

So if you know an alcoholic that is still heavily drinking, you should do everything in your power to try and get this person the proper help. They don’t want to live this way and any help you can offer them might be a major benefit to them arresting the further development of this disease.