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Alcohol Abuse and Relationships

According to Beck (2011), the author of an interesting memoir dealing with alcohol abuse and relationship communication, people can and do turn to alcohol when relationships go bad. In addition, they also turn to alcohol as a way of celebrating when relationships are good, so it would not be possible to say that alcohol is only used as one of the coping techniques by people who are struggling in their relationships or who have relationships that have ended badly. Yet, Beck (2011) does go on to say that there are many factors that would cause a person to use or abuse alcohol, including codependency, anxiety, and depression. The relationships that are seen among different people are generally more complex than one would think when just looking in from the outside, and that is important to consider when looking for correlations between alcohol abuse and relationships.

Kelley, Cash, Grant, Miles, & Santos (2004) address the issue of parental alcoholism and how it affects adult attachment in college-aged men and women. The goal of that study was to examine the relationships - both romantic and general - of men and women in college who had lived with an alcoholic parent prior to the age of 16. That group was then compared with a group who did not have an alcoholic parent in the home. Kelley, et al. (2004) found that the individuals who had at least one alcoholic