in this video we're going to cover the truth
about sneak drinking so if you or a loved one has fallen into the habit of
sneak drinking i mean alcohol of course this video is for you
for those of you who are new here i'm amber hollingsworth master addiction
counselor and this channel is all about helping you understand the science and
psychology of addiction so that you're always five steps ahead of it and you
can get your life and your family back on track i've been working with
people and their families that have substance use disorders for a
long time and i've heard everything you can think of under the
sun about sneak drinking and i want to help you understand
the behind the scenes of what that really is
all about now when i have a client in my office who's sneak drinking
they usually have a litany of excuses as to why that's going on so let's cover
some of those first first and foremost they usually are
telling me or more importantly themselves something
along the lines of they only have to sneak drink because
the family member usually the spouse or the parent or whoever is so
uptight and unreasonable and they just get freaked
out every time you drink so you have to sneak and hide it just so you can either
avoid the confrontation with them or so that you don't
upset them maybe you're telling yourself that but here's the thing
if someone in your life is getting upset with you because
of your drinking that's a really big clue
that maybe it's a problem now you might be telling yourself that you only drink
because they get upset but my guess is a big part of the reason they get upset
because you sneak drink and so family members they feel obviously
frustrated about the drinking but even 10 times more frustrated because you're
constantly sneaking it and they know something's up and when they ask
you about it you totally lie right to their face i've had so many
clients and they'll tell me they're like amber
if someone asks me if i've been drinking i've been drinking like i immediately
say no i cannot even help it i lie in that moment even though i know
it is completely obvious it's just like a reflex a lot of times
i'll say no sometimes like the next day i'll own up to it but in that moment
it's like no i haven't been drinking and sometimes you know
they'll turn it on the other person or start an argument or deflect or use some
of those other techniques to sort of get out of the hot seat now other
excuses you might be telling yourself is well i just need a few to loosen up
before i go out and meet my colleagues or before i go do
this social event because i get a little uptight in social events you might be
telling yourself well i just need a couple of drinks to
wind down and relax you know before bed or after work
something like that you might be telling yourself well i just want to have a few
drinks i just want to have fun i mean i work really hard all the time
what's wrong with having just a little bit of fun well
if you have to drink to have fun might be a little bit of a problem because
when you deal with an alcohol use disorder one
of the criteria is that you lose the ability to have
fun and enjoyment from activities that don't involve
alcohol like if you've had old hobbies or interests or things you used to enjoy
doing you might not enjoy those anymore once you've developed an alcohol use
disorder especially if there's not alcohol involved in that activity like
for example if you love to go fishing
and you drink when you go fishing you might still like to go fishing but
if you used to love to go fishing and now you wanna you know your
father-in-law wants you to go fishing with them but there's not gonna be any
alcohol involved you probably don't want to do that that's what i mean
when i say like you need it to be able to have fun relax and enjoy yourself and
the reason for that is is because alcohol although it may
make you feel like you're relaxing and de-stressing in the moment
is actually raising your anxiety through the roof in the long run so
over the course of time it's making you more stressed more
anxious and lowering your ability to deal with and tolerate that stress and
anxiety so you feel more and more and more like you're
coming unglued or you're sort of bursting at the scenes
with anxiety inside that's one of the big traps about alcohol is it relaxes
you but then it makes that worse so of course that makes you feel like it's
called the i need a drink feeling you know what i'm talking about but you see
no matter what those excuses that you're telling yourself
about why that is happening the real truth
about why your sneak drinking or your loved one is sneak drinking is because
you feel shameful about it you feel guilty about it
somewhere deep down inside you know you're doing something that you
shouldn't be doing i usually say if you're doing something that you can't
tell someone else whethere it's drinking or
anything else it probably means it's something that you shouldn't be
doing now i know you're giving yourself a lot of excuses as to why you need to
do that maybe you're telling yourself you need to do that to protect that person
but i think you know deep down inside that that's
not the truth i deal a lot with businessmen who drink too much and they
talk to me about how they sort of purposefully wait till their
wife goes to bed and then they stay up and drink
after she goes to bed because they're having to hide it from their wife all
day long or i deal a lot with people who have sort
of the alcohol hid under the seat in their car or in the
trunk or in the garage and another huge problem
with this is when you get to the sneak drinking point
you gotta really like gulp it back right you gotta get it in fast because you
gotta do it undercover and when you do that
the drinking problem usually escalates because probably at that point you've
moved on to something that has less smell
you know something like vodka is a pretty common one and
you're drinking a lot of it really fast because you're trying to get it down and
so it hits you hard and fast and with your
loved ones they're gonna feel like you were fine one second and literally
they were with you the whole time and 30 minutes later you were just fall down
drunk and they don't even understand what happened because they don't
understand that you're walking into the other room the bathroom wherever you've
got it hidden and you're chugging it back and then it
hits you super quickly and so once you get to that
point of sneak drinking the whole problem the whole alcohol use disorder
really starts to go downhill quickly so if you're doing this
there's a really good chance you've got a problem on your hands now i'm not
saying even that you're an alcoholic or that you're even alcohol dependent i'm
not saying that you have to drink every day or that you're going into the
shakes in the mornings although that could definitely be the case
it's not always the case but sneak drinking
even if it's not every day even if you don't have to even if you're not going
to get physically sick without it that's a really good indicator
that something's going wrong you know most people think
that having an alcohol use disorder or alcoholism
is all about how much you drink but the truth of it is
in the actual official criteria for alcohol use disorder it says nothing in
there about what or how much or how frequently you
drink it has a whole lot to do with how the drinking is impacting your life
and so up next i want you to watch these two videos the first one is about the
official criteria for alcohol use disorder so i'm going to tell you out of
the book like what the legit ones are to receive that diagnosis and the second
one is me telling you some unofficial criteria these are things that i see
patterns pretty consistently they're not in the book but i can tell you they're
almost always there