Functioning Alcoholic

The functioning alcoholic is the alcoholic who can hold down a job, pursue a career or care for children while continuing his or her alcoholism. Some can do these things successfully, but how well do they handle the other functions in living? How do they function in the role of spouse, parent, driver, financial manager and community volunteer? His job or profession isn't his only function in life.

Two famous entertainers come to mind, a very popular late-night TV host and a famous singer-entertainer: both were alcoholics, but both were also known to be wife beaters. We are all aware of other public examples: the successful politician charged with impaired driving, the wealthy businessman who abandons his family, claiming poverty.

Multiply the public examples of alcohol abuse and dysfunction by a thousand, and you get a picture of the neglect, abuse, lies and cover-up that are probably out there among the population of so-called functioning alcoholics: the alcoholic farmer who sexually abuses his young daughters, the alcoholic teacher who amasses a large collection of child porn, the mother whose children die in a house fire because she had passed out while drinking.

Consider the successful professional who pours himself a drink as soon as he gets home. Since he won't drink and drive, he never attends his children's games or takes them camping. Is he "functioning?"

What it comes down to is this: to function is to function in life, not just in one part of life. Ask yourself if you know any alcoholics who not only do their jobs, but are also truly functional in life. I can't think of any, but there may be a few.

Consider the young woman with brains and ambition who wanted to become a doctor. Like many students, she had to take a work break from her studies to earn the money to continue. She worked in a bar, but drinking gradually crept into her daily routine. Now at 50 and four marriages later she's still working in a bar, her dream of being a doctor a distant memory. She considers herself to be a functioning alcoholic, but is she really functioning, when she has abandoned her dream and falls so far short of her potential?

During my alcoholic period, I did my job and I was a kind loving father. But I never got around to writing. I will never know whether I might have started my writing career much earlier, were it not for the drink. I do know that I never went to any of my kids' games during my alcoholic period, and I wasn't even aware of the neglect until it was too late. I thought I was functioning well, but only after I had switched my lifestyle to a much healthier one did I realize how far I fell short.

The point is that addictive drinking leads to underfunctioning, and underfunctioning people do not live up to their potential and in the end usually quell their dreams.

In my mind, the abandoned dreams and the general underachievement of alcoholics do not spell "functioning." They spell serious "underfunctioning."

Whenever I meet a person who considers himself to be a functioning alcoholic, I can't help but wonder what that person might have been or created or given, if they hadn't fallen under the spell of alcohol and sunk into alcoholism.

How long the "functioning," at whatever level, can last in the presence of alcoholism.

Excessive alcohol consumption was affecting my health. If I hadn't changed to a healthier lifestyle when I did, I would have been dead years ago. And what I have brought to others over the past thirty years would simply never have existed.

I had a good friend who was a brilliant youth psychiatrist. He would go back to an apparently productive afternoon after a five, double-martini lunch. But he left his wife and two children and potentially thousands more young clients by dying far too young. Liver cancer ended his functioning.

I lost two alcoholic colleagues to suicide. They left young families. This fall two friends died of health repercussions of alcoholism. They were significantly younger than me. With all of these untimely deaths most people were too polite or too embarrassed to even mention the alcohol factor in their deaths.