Do Alcoholics Care About Other People?

I was a mean addict, but not a sociopath.

Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash

Before getting sober, I was a much meaner person. Getting drunk brought out the worst in me. I was petty and cruel. I got angry over everything and nothing.

I’ve talked to people who knew me back then, and they said that being around me felt like walking on eggshells. They never knew what was going to set me off.

When I think back on my drinking years, I remember them as a time of deep isolation. That was largely because I withdrew from the world, choosing to spend my nights at home getting drunk rather than socializing.

However, although my isolation was largely self-imposed, I also wonder how much of it was caused by people avoiding me. I was incredibly unpleasant to be around. Who the hell wants to hang out with someone who is going to start yelling at them for no reason?

Of course, my anger issues aren’t unique to me. Although it would surely be an over-generalization to say that all alcoholics have anger problems, I think it would be fair to say that most do. It’s such a common trait that I’d guess it’s one of the first things people think of when asked about the personality of addicts.

So, if alcoholics are so quick to scream and yell—if they’re ticking time bombs of rage—does that mean that they don’t care about the people around them? Are alcoholics just selfish sociopaths?

I don’t believe so.

While there may be some element of selfishness in our drinking behavior, most of us are not mean because we don’t care. We’re mean because the alcohol messes with our brain and destroys our ability to regulate our emotions.

When I used to go into drunken rages, I never once felt like I was being mean just for the sake of being mean. Instead, my anger was driven by a strong belief that the other person had done something deeply wrong. That belief was completely mistaken and unjustified, but it was still the operating force behind my anger.

Normally, within an hour or so, I would have calmed down. If not, the rage would always be gone by the next morning when I sobered up.

And what came next, after the anger disappeared?

Deep regret.

I felt like the biggest jerk in the entire world. I would apologize, and I’d really mean it. I would promise myself (and others) that I would never snap at someone like that again.

But, just like the addiction cycle itself, I’d always end up breaking that promise.

It’s easy to feel committed to bettering yourself when you wake up first thing in the morning. The regrets from the night before are weighing down on you, and you promise yourself that today will be the beginning of a new, better you.

It gets a lot harder to keep that promise as the day goes on. By the time you’re coming home from work, exhausted and needing to relax, it’s all too easy to go back to drinking. And once you’re drinking, it becomes nearly impossible to regulate your emotions, and the anger comes back too.

If I hadn’t quit drinking, I never would have gotten my anger issues under control. The effect that alcohol had on my emotions was just too great for me to overcome.

That didn’t mean that I hated the people around me, or even that I was indifferent to them. I still loved my family and cared deeply about my friends. Despite that, the drinking brought out the worst in me.

The good news about all of this is that most alcoholics are not sociopaths. That means that if they address their addictions and get sober, they can also learn to treat the people that they care about better.

The bad news is that if they don’t stop drinking, they’re probably going to keep treating the people around them like crap.

Ultimately, we need to view an alcoholic’s terrible behavior as a symptom of their drinking. That’s not an excuse for the anger, but it is a concept that can guide its treatment.

I know that a significant portion of the people reading this newsletter are not addicts, but rather people who know addicts. I’m not writing today’s newsletter to tell you whether you should or shouldn’t keep those addicts in your lives. However, I do think that it’s important to understand that an addict’s rage isn’t typically driven by hatred or spite. It is often, quite simply, a chemical reaction to all of the alcohol that they are drinking.

These days, when I think about how my sobriety has changed my life, the single most important difference is how it has reduced my anger problems. I’m still not perfect. I still sometimes get angry over small things.

However, these days, I can recognize that anger, work through it, and move past it—without ever taking it out on other people.

Sobriety has drastically improved my life, but I’m far more proud of how it has improved the lives of the people around me. They’re finally no longer walking on eggshells.

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That’s it for today’s newsletter. Thank you for reading! If you haven’t already, please make sure to subscribe. And if you want to read more about alcohol and anger issues, check out this 2022 edition of the newsletter in the archive: Alcoholism and Rage.