Quick Guide to Secondhand Drinking: A Phenomenon That Affects Millions

By Lisa Frederiksen

The explosion in 21st century brain research is radically changing our understanding of what happens to the brain when it’s under the influence of alcohol and when it’s on the receiving end of a person’s drinking behaviors. As a result, this science is giving us new language for talking about a phenomenon that affects 90 million Americans and hundreds of million more people worldwide. This phenomenon is Secondhand Drinking (SHD).

SHD is a term to describe the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others. Drinking behaviors include: verbal, physical or emotional abuse; driving while impaired; domestic violence; committing a crime; creating a safety risk or productivity burden for co-workers; sexual assault; generating significant economic costs to others related to lost workplace productivity, health care expenses for problems related to excessive drinking, and criminal justice and law enforcement expenses related to alcohol consumption, to name a few.

People on the receiving end of these drinking behaviors experience a range of negative physical, emotional and/or quality-of-life impacts. Thus attacking the underlying problem, a person’s drinking behaviors, from the other side – preventing and protecting oneself from secondhand drinking – offers a sea change opportunity.

So how does a person protect themselves from secondhand drinking without interfering with another person’s right to drink? What does stress and stress-related brain and physical changes have to do with SHD? How is it possible secondhand drinking affects 90 million Americans? And perhaps most importantly, why should we care?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990790006

Book preview

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Introduction to Quick Guides and Lisa Frederiksen

You’ve likely never heard the term, Secondhand Drinking, let alone the idea that it is a phenomenon affecting 90 million Americans and hundreds of millions more people worldwide. It is the subject of this Quick Guide, which is one in a series of Quick Guides that will cover a range of related topics, including: how to talk with children about a parent’s drinking or drug use problem, the brain facts about puberty that most teens and parents don’t know (brain facts that if understood could have a powerful influence on how we prevent underage substance misuse), and what does and doesn’t help with addiction recovery, to name three.

21st Century brain research and science is the link running through all of these Quick Guides. It is this research and science that has unleashed an explosion in discoveries about the human brain, its development, its functioning, what changes it, what can heal it, its ability to regenerate cells, why addiction can cause a person to lie, cheat and steal from those whom they love the most, what improves its health and more. It is this science, simplified, that is attention grabbing and results in people self-electing to change because it has generally never been heard before or at least not in the context described in one of these Quick Guides. This science is giving people of all ages, when tailored properly, the ah-ha information they’ve needed – the why and how – to change substance misuse patterns, deal with stress differently (such as that associated with secondhand drinking), hold off on drinking until age 21, treat addiction as the brain disease it is, seek help for mental illness and so much more. This science is that powerful because it shatters the stigma, misinformation and shame that surround these issues.

But it doesn’t help if we don’t understand it, which is the point of my Quick Guide series. I have been researching, writing, speaking and consulting on a host of brain and addiction-related topics since 2003, a pivotal year for me. It was the year one of my loved ones entered residential treatment for alcoholism and I was plunged into a whole new world. As the author of several books by that time, I was well versed in researching complex subjects and elected to shift my efforts to understanding this new world, starting with trying to figure out why they called it a disease. Having learned to re-eat after 12 years bulimia and anorexia, I had always assumed people who drank too much could learn to re-drink. Thus I had tolerated and coped with what I would soon understand was 37 years of various family members and friends’ alcohol abuse or alcoholism prior to the bottom falling out in ’03.

What I have uncovered and since shared in my recent books, If You Loved Me, You’d Stop!, Loved One in Treatment? Now What! and Crossing The Line From Alcohol Use to Abuse to Dependence, presentations, blog, workshops, articles, videos, radio and Internet interviews, is truly revolutionary. Please visit my website, BreakingTheCycles.com, for more information. After all, this is a Quick Guide and everything about it is intentionally brief with hyperlinks to take you to key resources for more detailed information.

Thanks for reading this particular Quick Guide, Secondhand Drinking: A Phenomenon