Help me help my friend.

May 3, 2008 8:13 AM

A friend of mine is headed for self-destruction. How do I help him?

I just got back from a party hosted at my friend's apartment. It's a shotgun apartment, so his room is at the back, but his roommate's bedroom is right next to the living room, and holds many people during a party.

Many of the people I hang out with are crazy, although not destructively so. A window in his roommate's bedroom was broken during shenanigans. The person breaking the window offered room, food, and repair costs to the roommate. This is not the issue.

The issue is that my friend had been chafing at the roommate for months, and took the opportunity to get very drunk and punch another window out. With that, he announced that the roommate should leave. I left with a jewelry box owned by the roommate, which was tossed from a balcony. The box is broken, although the contents are fine.

My friend is generally a calm and quiet sort, but when he drinks, he's been displaying very erratic behavior. The weekend before this, he traveled to a college town and drank heavily at a party. He caused enough problems to get the cops called on him; it ends up that someone else was arrested in his stead. Before this, there was a weekend where he was very drunk and got police and the fire department called to a bar he was at. Before that, he just got groups of people after him.

The point here is that he is getting in increasing amounts of trouble, and he is causing trouble for those around him. His roommate deserved none of his actions; rent was paid on time, chores were carried out with regularity, respect was paid in full. His friends, myself included, are starting to have to deal with the trouble he causes when drunk.

There are other factors. One I want to mention is that we run in a 'bike gang' - a group of cyclists who have a pub crawl on Fridays and a number of other events. One virtue of this group is to be a crazy motherfucker. It should be said that there are no crazy motherfuckers in this group - at worst, there is one person, a leader, who will hurt himself but will never hurt anyone else. My friend has been acting like a true crazy motherfucker, and he has begun to hurt other people.

I've been around a vast number of drinkers in my time. Most generally keep to themselves and try to have a good time. A few go out to bars looking for fights, but for those people, there's always been a strong sense of loyalty to those that they knew. In this case, this person is the first I've known who has been erratic enough to cause issues with other friends.

How should I handle this?

Reply to [e-mail].

posted by anonymous to human relations (10 comments total)

There's not enough info here. You say your group is accepting of crazy motherfuckers. But you don't like your friend acting like a crazy motherfucker. And your last paragraph is really unclear. Does your friend go to bars to start fights? Do you enjoy being around people who go to bars to start fights, as long as they're loyal to "those they know"?
posted by mpls2 at 8:49 AM on May 3, 2008

I can't say if your friend is a problem drinker, only he can determine that, but it sounds to me like he is exhibiting what I would call alcoholic cruelty. Boy can I relate.

I began drinking alcoholically while in college, and continued to drink progressively worse for the next twenty years. At first, all the people I hung around thought I was great, the life of the party. And when sober, I was a laid-back, caring friend. Life was great, I had lots of friends.

As time went by and everyone began maturing, except me, the loyal friends began to get on my nerves. They started dating, and can you believe the bastards, getting married even, instead of focusing all their attention on me. You see, alcoholics are attention hounds. It's all about me, me, me. That's the nature of the disease.

Unlike your friend, I never became physically belligerent, or broke things (but certainly many alcoholics are dangerous this way), but I was an emotional terror. My alcoholic cruelty to my friends was to torment them about abandoning me. In what little time they would allow me into their family life, I would make sure to say embarrassing things to their partner or spouse just to get even. Never had any intention of doing things like this when I was sober, but get me drunk and the tongue waggles.

Eventually I found myself friendless and alone. The last five years of my active alcoholism were lived like this. It seems to me your friend is attention whoring. Not at all uncommon with problem drinkers. You asked what you can do to help.

My advice is ignore him, abandon him even. I know he's a great guy when he's sober, so was I. But do not enable him by cleaning up after him, or apologizing for him. Believe me when I tell you that you cannot change his drinking behaviors. Only he can make that decision for himself. So you must change your behavior toward him to make a difference. When his life becomes unmanageable, when he begins realizing he is running off all his friends, perhaps then he will come to some manner of turning point.
posted by netbros at 9:14 AM on May 3, 2008 [3 favorites]

Talk to your friend. Let him know about your concerns.

BTW -- a friend in my group was horrified to see his drunken behavior when viewing a videotape someone had taken at a party. He became more conscious of his drinking after that and asked friends to intervene and remind him to "slow down" well before approaching "the edge."
posted by ericb at 9:51 AM on May 3, 2008

Talk to him. Tell him exactly what you have told us, about how he's hurting others.

One virtue of this group is to be a crazy motherfucker.

If you're concerned about your friend being a crazy motherfucker, then stop treating being a crazy motherfucker as a virtue, even jokingly. Sometimes mature people can have fun by facetiously extolling the benefits of irresposible behavior, while respecting the limits that must always be observed. But there will often be the immature person who doesn't "get it," and exceeds the limits, thinking that what you facetiously embraced was actually serious.
posted by jayder at 10:30 AM on May 3, 2008

His friends, myself included, are starting to have to deal with the trouble he causes when drunk.

Not "have to" deal with; you're volunteering. Dump him like you'd dump a crazy girlfriend. Let him know you're out. Tell him why. And then don't go anywhere with him, at least not anywhere that sells alcohol or allows you to bring your own, and help the roommate move out.

Unless he's very big and mean, and perhaps even if he is, someone is going to kick his teeth in soon. You don't want to be there.
posted by pracowity at 11:12 AM on May 3, 2008 [1 favorite]

Al-anon! This is *exactly* the kind of question that everyone at Al-anon meetings are trying to struggle with - how to deal with a friend/ family member/ loved one who is going down.

There are meetings all over the place - you don't have to say anything if you don't want to, you can sit by the door and you can leave early and/or arrive late if you want. But I'd strongly suggest you go and see if you can learn anything that would help you figure out how it might be possible to help.
posted by jasper411 at 1:01 PM on May 3, 2008

You're going to need to have a talk with him, and tell him why you are going to leave his ass hanging the next time he starts trouble. Then do it. Walk out, tell him he's an ass. If he doesn't change his behavior, then you will need to drop him completely. You can't fix this guy, he can only fix his own behavior.

Oh, and the Crazy Motherfucker thing? It attracts crazy motherfuckers..that's why most people don't do it.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 2:33 PM on May 3, 2008

Um. Dude. You're in a bike gang full of people who act insane, and you're surprised when one of the group can't take it? He needs a new set of friends, and maybe rehab.
posted by paultopia at 3:48 PM on May 3, 2008

In case you're curious, what the heck a shotgun apartment is.
posted by WCityMike at 6:52 PM on May 3, 2008

No one can answer this better than you can, seriously. You know him the best.

Help him about as much as you feel you can / should before he starts to affect him negatively. Then just step back, and let him figure it out on his own. Sometimes that's the only answer for a lot of people.

However if he is a very very close friend, best thing you could do is when you hang out, don't drink (meaning you, don't try and tell him not to drink), and refuse to go to places where people are drinking. If you guys are close, and he respects you, it will have a lot of influence on him. My 2 cents.
posted by rasmerack at 5:38 AM on May 4, 2008