There is a particular weight to saying, I’m worried about my drinking, when you’re also somebody’s mum. The next thought may not even be about you. It might be: Have they noticed? Have I let them down? What would happen if I needed treatment? Who would look after them?
And perhaps there’s a bigger question behind all of those: What will people think of me as a mother?
You may have rules around the children that have become very important to you. You don’t drink while they’re awake. You never miss the school run. They’ve never seen you drunk. Those things can become evidence in the case you’re continually making to yourself that everything is still under control.
They can also exist alongside a genuine worry about what happens once the children are asleep and you finally have nothing else to do for anybody.
Safeguarding is considered as part of alcohol treatment assessment where children are involved. NICE also says people experiencing alcohol problems should be treated supportively and without judgement, with their privacy and dignity respected.
If you’re a parent and you speak to Abbington House, you can tell the admissions team what’s worrying you, including any concerns you have about your children or how treatment would work around your responsibilities at home. Having children doesn’t automatically answer the question of what treatment should look like. Your circumstances need to be understood as part of the wider conversation about what’s been happening and what support may be appropriate.
If something you tell us raises a safeguarding concern, that can’t simply be ignored or kept outside the assessment. The team will need to consider it properly and explain what happens next. The exact response will depend on the circumstances, which is why we wouldn’t make a blanket promise about what will or won’t happen before we’ve spoken to you.
Perhaps you’ve tried saying something. Not the whole thing, just enough to see what happens.
“God, I think I’m drinking too much lately.”
Your friend laughs and says, “Aren’t we all?” Or your partner tells you you’re fine because you hardly drink compared with some people. They’re probably trying to make you feel better, and for a little while it might work.
What they don’t know is that you’ve tried not to drink three times this week and ended up drinking anyway. Or that the amount they see isn’t necessarily the amount you’re drinking. You don’t explain that bit, the conversation moves on and you can bring it up again another day.
Except another day has a habit of becoming another week.
Sometimes telling somebody you’re struggling with alcohol feels like opening the door to another question:Why? You might not know the answer. Or you might know perfectly well and not want to talk about it yet.
Perhaps drinking has become tangled up with anxiety, something that happened years ago, a relationship, loneliness, grief or another part of your life you haven’t spoken about. Perhaps none of those things apply. There doesn’t need to be one hidden explanation behind every woman’s drinking.
You don’t need an impressive reason for why this has happened either. An assessment for alcohol treatment looks at the wider picture, including physical health, mental health and social circumstances, because those things can matter when deciding what support somebody needs. You can talk about the drinking before you’re ready to explain everything around it.
Maybe this is where you get stuck. You can acknowledge that you’re drinking too much, that you need to cut down or even that alcohol is making you unhappy, butalcoholic feels like a completely different statement.
You don’t have to call yourself one.
It isn’t the word Abbington House uses to decide whether somebody needs help, and you don’t have to take on an identity you don’t recognise in order to talk honestly about what’s happening. There are more useful questions: has your drinking changed? Are you drinking more than you intend to? Are you thinking about alcohol more? Have you tried to change your drinking and found it difficult? Is something about it worrying you?
A professional assessment can go further than that. Specialist alcohol services use recognised assessment tools alongside conversations about drinking patterns, dependence, health, mental health, social circumstances and risk to understand what kind of support may be appropriate.
You don’t need to diagnose yourself before you’re allowed to have that conversation.
When you first contact Abbington House, you don’t need to arrive with a diagnosis or know whether you need an alcohol detox. The admissions team will start by asking about what’s been happening with your drinking: how much and how often you’re drinking, how long this pattern has been going on, whether you’ve tried to stop or cut down before and what happened when you did.
They’ll also need to understand more than the amount you’re drinking. Your physical and mental health, any medication you’re taking, previous treatment or detoxes and your current circumstances can all be relevant to deciding what needs to happen next. If you’re caring for children or somebody else, or there are practical things making treatment difficult to imagine, you can raise those during the conversation too.
If there are signs that you may need an alcohol detox, this needs to be assessed rather than guessed from the amount you drink alone. Abbington House provides medically supervised detox on site where this is clinically appropriate. The detox plan is determined following assessment and clinical review, taking into account your drinking history, health and individual risks.
You won’t be expected to decide for yourself whether you need detox before you call. Equally, you shouldn’t suddenly stop drinking based on something you’ve read online if you may be physically dependent on alcohol.
If residential treatment at Abbington House is appropriate, the admissions team can explain what admission would involve and answer the practical questions that often come with it. That might include when you could come in, what to bring, what happens when you arrive and how the first part of your stay is likely to be organised around any clinical needs.
There may also be situations where residential treatment at Abbington House isn’t the right option. If that’s the conclusion after speaking with you and assessing what’s happening, we’ll tell you rather than trying to fit you into treatment that isn’t appropriate.
The information you share is handled privately, but confidentiality has limits where there is a serious concern about someone’s safety or safeguarding.
What matters at this stage is that you don’t have to make your drinking sound worse to be taken seriously, and you don’t have to make it sound better because you’re frightened of what we’ll think. The admissions team needs an accurate picture of what’s happening so they can work out what the appropriate next step may be.
Maybe you’ve spent a long time making it sound smaller. You’ve joked about needing wine after a bad day, compared yourself with somebody who drinks more, stopped for a few days and felt relieved that you could. You’ve promised yourself you’ll sort it out after the weekend, after Christmas, after the holiday, when work calms down.
And maybe, from the outside, everything still looks completely normal.
That doesn’t mean you need to turn your life into a disaster story before you’re allowed to say you’re worried. If something about your drinking has changed enough that you keep coming back to the question, you can start with that.
Call Abbington House to talk through what’s been happening with your drinking and whether residential treatment may be appropriate. If it isn’t the right option for you, we’ll tell you.
01438 583222
