When my daughter came home for the holidays after her first semester at college, I loved having her back. She’d had a great time and I enjoyed hearing her stories. During Christmas dinner, however, alarms went off in my head when I realized she had drunk at least five big glasses of wine without showing any effects. How was this possible?
There had been other warning signs that she was drinking a lot, so I found a psychologist who was willing to meet with her a few days later. After talking with Karina, he gave me his learned opinion that “everyone drinks at college. You have nothing to worry about”.
He was dead wrong, though it took another 15 months before her drinking had grown so out of control that nothing could hide it.
Here’s What I Wish I had Known Then
First, unless a clinician has trained to be an Addiction Counselor or has a degree in Addiction Medicine, they’ve likely received very little training in the disease of addiction. Don’t take their word as gospel.
Secondly, very few women still appear to be sober after drinking five glasses of wine in a two hour period unless they’d been regularly drinking even larger quantities of alcohol. Because Karina was filling up her wine glasses to the brim, she probably had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .25% or more by the end of dinner. (Here's how to estimate BAC). That’s three times the legal limit to drive! Most people would have been vomiting, falling over and possibly passing out.
The fact that Karina seemed perfectly fine after drinking so much meant that her brain and body had gotten used to functioning with high levels of alcohol. To avoid vomiting or passing out, her body was suppressing its normal response to a poison. While she’d learned to mask the impact of intoxication on how she walked and talked, alcohol was affecting her judgment and response times just as much as it would anyone else.
Because I ignored my concerns, I came very close to losing my daughter. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and progress it did.
If I had it to do over, I would have looked for other clues that she was drinking way too much. I would have unobtrusively marked the level of liquid in our liquor bottles and counted our unopened bottles of wine. I would have looked for empty liquor bottles in the recycling bin or piling up elsewhere. [Later, when things got really bad, I was tipped off to look in her suitcase and found 17 empty wine bottles rattling around! She hadn’t figured out how to throw them away without being caught.]
And I like to think that if there was enough evidence that she had a problem, I would have planned a surprise trip to her dorm. But in reality, I don’t know that I would have.
We want to believe our kids when they tell us that nothing is wrong. And by the time they’ve developed a serious addiction, a lot of kids have gotten really good at lying and covering things up. Looking back, I can’t believe some of the ridiculous stories Karina told me that I accepted at face value.
With the wisdom gained during six years of dealing with Karina’s alcoholism, what I believe today is this -- if you suspect your college student has a drinking or drug problem, unfortunately, you’re probably right.
