The Family Alcohol Support Service

The Family Alcohol Support Service TFASS offers private consultation, if you have a spouse, family member or friend who feel that they are suffering from the effects of alcohol addiction.

About Us

The Family Alcohol Support Service (TFASS) is a support and consultation service, a (private) discussion forum and a follow up and referral service for anyone who has a spouse, family member or friend, who is suffering from the effects of alcohol abuse (alcoholism). This service has been established to help people understand the complexities of the problem and to help educate, equip and

advise them through the turmoil that it brings, even though they are not the ones afflicted with the condition.

If you have a problem with alcohol this book may help. If you don’t have a problem, it will certainly help explain.
12/04/2018

If you have a problem with alcohol this book may help.
If you don’t have a problem, it will certainly help explain.

14/05/2017

Excess.
An excess of anything in life, and particularly an excess of an addictive nature, has limited success but one of its successes is how it can distract us and make us avoid ourselves. As I drank to excess, I was a success in self-avoidance. This ‘worked’ for me because the main thing I wanted to avoid in my life was myself.

Furthermore, alcohol creates such a distraction and a diversion in our lives that after some time, the reason we drink doesn’t even matter anymore. Alcohol is a dangerous servant and eventually, its power even negates the need for a reason. While in the past I drank for ‘a reason’, I was now drinking because it was simply what I did and what I had become. And then, the ever-diminishing circle starts that will, in most cases, lead to the consequences that we all face. It’s all as ugly as it is inevitable.

As I drank to excess, I was a success in self-avoidance. Because alcohol was (almost) my sole excess, it was also my sole distraction. The key to getting better was what my past distractions taught me when they no longer distracted me. That is, when I stopped. Only by stopping my drinking could I stop my self-inflicted distractions and gain the clarity in my thinking to see to what extent I had avoided myself.

06/01/2017

Alcoholics Anonymous 3.
Some people also view AA with suspicion in regards to their ‘tradition’ of holding meetings for members. But an AA meeting is little more than a way for members to remind themselves of their dreadful past and therefore have respect for their future as they live with their disease. After all, anything learnt is useless if it’s not remembered and simple memories can often be an unreliable source of knowledge. Generally speaking it’s knowledge of myself that got me better from my disease and it helps me to be reminded both. Groups can often have more influence and sway than the individual and an AA meeting is no different. It’s really no more than a ‘collective memory’ in the same way that ANZAC day is for Australians.

06/01/2017

Alcoholics Anonymous 2.
Some criticise AA for having its members call themselves ‘alcoholics’ as enough reason to claim that AA has cult status. This is the most well-known of the AA customs. When I attend an AA meeting, I am obliged to say, “My name is Paul and I’m an alcoholic.” In the same way that the theology of Christianity gave the names of Jesus and Christ to the one person and his principles, AA gives me my name and my disease in the one breath. In the same way that the Bible promotes honesty – “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” – AA requires me to be honest in my admissions to myself and to others at in the meetings. Some like to call this a ‘negative narrative’ in that it only reminds people of their disease, but one has to wonder at the merits of this claim and the fact that’s it’s not peculiar to AA. The fitness industry doesn’t ask you to ‘admit’ that you may be overweight or a health risk to yourself, yet they have their own ‘negative narrative’ by having enough mirrors in their gyms and centres to help members with their own ‘self-honesty’.

06/01/2017

Alcoholics Anonymous 1.
Even the best of actors are always at risk of losing their audience and the reason that AA lose many members is that the message it delivers is often interpreted as more religious dogma than the simple recovery early members seek. They have themselves to blame for this. Their literature is littered with references to a god, your higher power and spiritual principles. It is a shame that religion gets in the way of AA’s fundamental philosophy, which is, of course, just that – a philosophy. After a time, it helped when I looked at AA as my religion in the same way some people see football as their religion. This had the two-fold effect of removing the concept within the AA material of a higher power as my ‘saviour’, and making my reading of the material and attending meetings more of a hobby and about helping others rather than seeking religious salvation.

26/12/2016

A taxing time.

Life creates challenges that we all must face; however, as an alcoholic I discarded these challenges because, despite all its promises of the opposite, alcohol had made them far too challenging. As time went on, just living my life as an alcoholic was challenge enough because my mind was too busy and erratic and its moving parts had slowly stopped working. While being an alcoholic is unrewarding it is, at the same time, a disease that keeps you very occupied in remaining unrewarded. It’s no fun being an alcoholic because our lives a simply so taxing.

26/12/2016

Controlled drinking?
‘Controlled drinking’ is an oxymoron. It's usually the last line of defence that an alcoholic has, particularly for someone in rehab. By saying it, we are admitting that alcohol has been a contributing factor in our life choices and the reason that we are in rehab, but at the same time we believe that, in the future, we can be in control of our drinking and of ourselves. This is the disease of addiction at its cunning best. Not only can you not control the thing that’s controlling you, but a symptom of alcohol (and alcoholism )is lack of self-control. The disease not only tells us that we don’t have it, it tells us that, even if we do, we can have some control over it.

If you look hard enough you’ll see that one of the symptoms of our disease is the need we develop for control. This incl...
21/09/2016

If you look hard enough you’ll see that one of the symptoms of our disease is the need we develop for control. This includes mainly the things we can least control as well as most things to do with us. Alcoholics aren’t concerned about world poverty, climate change or foreign war zones as much as we are concerned about ourselves. This concern for ourselves is manifested mainly in how others view us, their opinions of us and culminates with our desperate need for others to agree with us.
Trying to be in control of things also includes our immediate physical world (yet another that we can’t control). I saw many people in my rehab who were so busy being in one, and trying to control everything about it, that they mostly forgot why they were in it in the first place.

A rehabilitation service is not a meritocracy. No ‘marks’ are given and no exam is set. Completing a stay in a rehab, wh...
21/09/2016

A rehabilitation service is not a meritocracy. No ‘marks’ are given and no exam is set. Completing a stay in a rehab, whatever its length, is no guarantee that sobriety is sure to follow. In fact, mostly it won’t. The truth is that, like making money, if it was easy everyone would do it.
What a rehab will guarantee is a respite, a sense of serenity and some peace of mind for the family and friends that we have wreaked havoc on as a result of our disease. Of all those in my rehab that I met one thing was generally a certainty. They mostly had mothers, fathers, wives or husbands who were, for the first time in many years, sleeping soundly at night.

22/04/2016

Heartless.

I don’t know many people who are happy to admit to themselves that they like being an alcoholic. At the same time almost all of us don’t know what to do about it and certainly not how anyone else could help. Most of the time we’re so busy leading unhappy lives that we leave little room for anything to do with changing it. Sadness, regrets and remorse are busy ‘idle’ occupations and with a healthy dose of self-pity thrown into the mix the best we can do is find time to drink more.

We have a disease that turns us into monsters that even we don’t like. We give outward impressions of heartlessness yet the contrary is true. We seem also to appear emotionless yet we are so full of them we can’t put them in any order or context let alone explain them to anybody. It’s little wonder we prefer our own company.

22/04/2016

Get better from what?

One of the most often repeated comments about alcoholics is that we don’t want to get better. This is true but it’s true for far more reasons simply than the fact that we have an addiction. We have a mental disease as well. We don’t want to get better because we don’t know what we need to get better from. Not only that but we don’t even know what getting better is.
Clouding the issue even further is that the thought of not drinking is so foreign to us and such an uncertain proposition that we will do pretty much everything we can to avoid it. Of course this doesn’t help us and allows the disease of alcoholism to foster its addiction even further.
We don’t need to stop drinking as much as we need to give up. The difference between the two methods is subtle and very puzzling to those of us that have it and certainly to those who don’t.

03/03/2016

A symptom as well as a disease?
In general people drink for a reason. It is now known that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often involved with a person’s alcohol abuse. Put more simply most people drink to remove inner and mental problems that they may have developed over time. It’s not surprising that most alcoholics suffer from some form / level of depression. That’s why solving the problem is so difficult because everybody drinks for different reasons. Some may not even be aware of the reasons themselves.

Address

Canowindra, NSW
2804

Telephone

0488623265

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