Even in recovery family life is fraught with tension. Such things happen, if we meet up as a family, and there is drink; and, there is always drink. The pattern re-emerges, but you would be ostracised for psycho analysing it and defining a family pathology! Distance and objectivity and definition, are not the order of the day, no matter what.

I had not realised the possible damage to family members until a few years back when, being newly in receipt of my first computer (and the associated problems) I had asked too much of one of my brothers. I was shattered absolutely, when, he suddenly became the model of my father, at his most damaging and ugly, and extreme…throwing my bag and belongings out onto the street.

I was truly amazed and broken-hearted! I wandered the streets, of my old home-town sobbing. I had not realised the damage to him was so great that he became this tyrannical bully; unreasonable, abusive and twisted.

I was gutted. It was not so much what he did to me that was so terrible. It was the awful realisation that ‘the monster had resurrected’. My alcoholic father had left his model on my poor, wrecked brother, who incidentally was very fragile and had not known an easy life; he already had endured tragedy.

My eldest sister, eldest family member, is the worst. I have learned now, that the very best way to survive, is minimal contact. Nonetheless, when we have a family ‘do’, I feel myself bracing myself for abrasive or non-affirming brushes. I would never have known how to do this if I had not had love and praise and appreciation from friends.

Sadly, the sibling rivalry is also a feature of our ‘cement’.