SHOULD YOU TURN YOUR BACK?

There it is - the ominously empty bottle. There is the unconscious figure slumped across a sofa. There is someone who is an alcoholic - and though it is your own husband, or wife, or mother, or father, you are agonizingly unable to do anything to help.

Where can you turn? After you've tried your doctor, clergyman, or Alcoholics Anonymous, - a new book, THE ALCOHOLIC IN YOUR LIFE, suggests another alternative - turn your back.

"When it is apparent no amount of aid is going to turn the tide, "writes Jo Coudert", a writer-editor specializing in psychology, "must a strong life be sacrificed to prolong an enfeebled one? I think not. I think the choice must be made and that it must be to save the healthiest. Anything else is waste compounded."

It is a shocking point of view - but Miss Coudert speaks from unhappy experience. She is the daughter of an alcoholic mother, and she's spent ten years nursing, coaxing, pleading, scolding. All wasted.

At the age of 25 Miss Coudert gave it all up. She and her mother never lived together again although her mother lived another twenty years. "One person can provide for another the climate for change, the courage for change, and the incentive to change," she says, "but when change still doesn't come, you must accept the alcoholic's drinking - or leave.

"It is a terribly human thing to try to do it, but you just can't save someone else," she says. "People save themselves or they are not saved."

THE TORONTO DAILY STAR

DON says: This is an interesting and somewhat shocking point of view. I do agree with it! There is no power on earth that will enpower an individual to change the habits of an alcoholic. You can wear yourself out, risk a breakdown, lose friends, who won't come back to see you while the alcoholic is around. It can impact your life impressively! Of course we all want to help the alcoholic, but if, after a prolonged try to get them off the sauce fails it is time to go. GET AWAY FROM IT FOR YOUR OWN SANITY.