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 4.57 (Highly recommend) from 16 votes (1362 Visits) |
I lost someone extremley close and it kills me, I still try to be a good mum but feel like a failure every day.I drink to soothe the pain and all my family are many miles away. I dont feel that I am giving my kids a fair go, ...My children are my life...
Working through your grief is most definately a painful process. Losing someone you love is tremendously heartbreaking, but it is necessary to ensure your future emotional and physical well-being even during your period of grief. If you do not grieve at the time of death, or shortly after, and instead choose to greive through alcohol, or worse, drug abuse - the grief may stay bottled up inside you. This can cause emotional problems or physical illness later on.
It is important to steer clear of alcohol, caffeine and even nicotine because the chemicals are addictive. They can work to "numb" the pain away, but in the end the addictions can alter your life and cause you to be in worse shape than you would have been had you dealt with your grief appropriately. During a period of grief, alcohol can become extremely addictive, an addiction that will be hard to break later in life.
Alcohol works closely with secrecy. Oftentimes, when you are turning to alcohol in a time of grief, you do so in secrecy, sneaking alcohol whenever you can. Sneakiness, secrecy and deception are harmful to the relationships that you maintain with your children, your spouse, anyone that is close to you. Sneaking alcohol, and dependancy on it causes an erosion effect in your relationships - it will cause breaking of trust and other relationship inhibitors.
At this time, during the early stages of grief, it is easy to see that your children and family are becoming distant as a result of alcohol abuse. Now is the time to accept that life is for living, to reach out to your family. If there is someone close to you that you trust, tell them about the problems you are having with your alcohol abuse and ask them to be someone that can be accountable to you.
Plan some time with your children, just you and them. Reach out to them now and try and repair any broken trust or hurt that may have come between you as a result of the alcohol.
Here are some more resources that might be helpful to you at this time:
http://www.cyberrecovery.net/
http://www.soberrecovery.com/
http://www.griefshare.org/
(September 2006) (
