Alcohol in the Slovenian family: how it is normalised until it breaks

“We don’t drink at our house. We offer hospitality.” That is what a woman in her forties told me when I asked how alcohol had worked in her family home. She said it perfectly calmly, as a fact, and only heard herself a few sessions later. At home there was spirits for guests, for the cold, for the stomach, for bad news, for good news and for Sundays. There was never any drinking — there were only reasons.

That is the heart of this piece. In a Slovenian family, alcohol rarely turns up as a problem. It turns up as hospitality, as hard work, as ritual, as respect for a guest. And that is exactly why it stays invisible for so long.

And straight away this too, because it matters more than anything else here: stopping alcohol abruptly can be life-threatening. In someone who has been drinking heavily and regularly, withdrawal can cause seizures and delirium. It belongs under medical supervision. If your family is considering stopping, the first call should go to a doctor, not be a decision taken over Sunday lunch.

Where we stand as a country

The Slovenian public health institute NIJZ reports some of the less comfortable figures in Europe. By alcohol consumption per head, Slovenia sits persistently in the upper third of European countries, and consumption has fallen over the past two decades more slowly than anyone would like. NIJZ estimates that alcohol is linked here to roughly a thousand deaths a year — from liver disease, cancers, accidents and suicide.

What is unusual about that figure is how invisible it is. Nobody dies “of alcohol” in a way that would be written on a death notice. They die of the liver, of a road accident, of a fall, of an illness that developed over fifteen years. That is precisely the power of normalisation: consequences arrive so late and so indirectly that nobody connects them to a cause any more.

The law restrains this somewhat — the Act Restricting the Use of Alcohol prohibits sale to minors, limits sale in the early hours and regulates advertising. But the law is an outside frame. At home the family order applies, and that order is older than the law.

One more thing that surprisingly often drops off the table here: with alcohol there is no amount that carries no health risk at all. Risk climbs gradually with use and does not begin only once someone becomes addicted. That does not mean everyone must stop. It does mean that splitting the world into “normal people” and “alcoholics” is misleading — in reality there is an unbroken range along which a person moves in both directions, and that range is exactly what normalisation blurs.

How normalisation proceeds

Normalisation is not one decision. It is a series of small agreements that nobody speaks aloud.

First alcohol is part of ritual: a christening, a confirmation, a birthday, St Martin’s Day, the pig slaughter, lunch at grandmother’s. Then it becomes a measure of hospitality — whoever does not offer is stingy, whoever declines is odd. Then it becomes a tool: for sleep, for courage before a hard conversation, for the end of a long day. Then it becomes a rule nobody mentions — everyone knows when father is not to be spoken to, and everyone knows this is not discussed. And only at the very end, much later, does it become a problem somebody names.

Each stage makes sense on its own. Which is why it is so hard to point to where it slipped.

The language that hides it

Slovene has an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for this. “He’s fond of it.” “He has the odd one.” “He works, he’s never missed a shift.” “He isn’t violent, he just goes quietly to bed.” “A farmer has to drink.” Each of those sentences does exactly one job: it compares the person with someone worse and thereby ends the conversation.

In my room I also often hear the reverse version, which is just as effective: “That’s normal, everyone does it.” When the benchmark for health is sought next door, it is always found — because there is always someone who drinks more.

So in my work I do not ask about amounts. I ask about the role. What happens if the drink is not there for a week? Who accommodates whom? What is not talked about at home? The answers to those questions say far more than any number.

What is striking is that the same language works inwards too. The person drinking thinks about themselves in exactly the sentences they heard at home. So in conversation I rarely meet denial in the sense of lying; I meet a sincere conviction assembled out of family phrases. Nobody invented it — everyone heard it at the table.

Family rules that make themselves

When alcohol persists in a family, three unspoken rules form around it. Classically we sum them up as: don’t talk, don’t feel, don’t trust.

Don’t talk means the incident is not mentioned the next morning. Dinner carries on as though nothing happened. Don’t feel means anger and fear get put away, because in this house they are impractical. Don’t trust grows out of inconsistency: the same person is warm on Tuesday and absent on Saturday, so a child learns not to count on what is announced but on what is observed.

These rules are not malicious. They are defensive. They keep the family running, and that is precisely why they are so tenacious — until somebody breaks them, everything looks fine. I write separately about what a child takes from this into adulthood in the piece on trauma in the body, which describes why constant readiness settles into the body rather than into memory.

The role of the one who does not drink

In such families the most exhausted member is often the one who does not drink. They take over control: hiding, apologising, phoning the workplace, arranging, planning, smoothing. Every one of those acts comes from love, and every one of them postpones the moment when consequences would become visible to the person drinking too.

This is not a reproach. It is a description of the trap that care sets for itself. I have written about where care ends and carrying someone else’s load begins in the piece on setting boundaries. A relative’s exhaustion has much the same shape as burnout at work — with the same persistent thought that without you it all falls apart.

Women drink more privately

The picture of Slovenian drinking is male: the inn, the pig slaughter, a glass after work. So the other half often goes entirely unnoticed. Women here drink less than men, but the gap is narrowing in younger generations, and when the drinking is troubled it usually happens at home, alone, in the evening, after the children have fallen asleep.

This has two consequences. The first is that the problem lasts longer before anyone notices — no inn, no witnesses, no scene. The second is that shame is stronger, because a woman’s drinking is attributed to her as a moral failure in motherhood rather than as an illness. In practice this means women come for help later, and often for something else: for insomnia, anxiety, exhaustion. Alcohol gets mentioned in the third or fourth session, usually in a sentence said in passing.

When it breaks

It almost never breaks because of an insight. It breaks because of an event. A test result that can no longer be ignored. A licence taken away. A partner who leaves. A child who says something out loud in front of relatives. A fall on the stairs.

So it makes no sense to wait for someone to “work it out for themselves”. In addiction, insight usually does not come before change but after it. What the people around can do is something else: stop removing the consequences. Not punishment, not an ultimatum, not a scene in front of the family — just no longer phoning his workplace for him.

The moment it breaks is both the most painful and the most useful. In those days a person is open to a conversation in a way they have not been for five years. So it pays to know in advance where to phone — who the family doctor is, where the nearest addiction treatment service sits, what the opening hours are. When the window opens it usually stays open for days, not months.

Why nobody says anything

Because Slovenia is small. Because in a village everyone knows. Because “alcoholic” is a word that declares a person to be something rather than describing what is happening to them. Stigma research consistently shows that addiction is the most stigmatised of all mental health problems — more than depression, more than schizophrenia — and that this delays help-seeking by years.

Shame here does not work as motivation but as fuel. I have written about the difference between shame and guilt in the piece on shame. And in men this compounds with another reservation — I have written about why they arrive in therapy later, often only when someone else decides, here.

Where this picture does not hold

Now I have to correct something, because what I have written could be taken too quickly.

It is not true that every family where drinking happens is an affected family. The vast majority of people who drink at celebrations and lunches do not develop an addiction, and their children carry no consequences. A glass of wine at Sunday lunch is in itself a sign of nothing. If you are reading your own family into every mention of alcohol in this piece, you are reading too much.

Nor is it true that total abstinence is the only acceptable measure. Some people with less severe problems do successfully reduce their drinking without stopping entirely, and harm reduction research supports this. Where dependence is severe, abstinence is usually the more realistic goal — but insisting on all-or-nothing with someone who is not yet ready often just means getting nowhere.

And third: moralising does not work. Research on motivational approaches shows fairly consistently that confrontation and blame strengthen resistance, while an accepting, non-judgemental conversation reduces it. If you came to this piece for confirmation that you are right and someone at home is at fault, you have not found it. Addiction is not character and not weak will, and treating it as though it were usually achieves nothing except closing the conversation.

What you can do

If you are a relative: stop tidying up the consequences for him, and say one true thing about yourself rather than ten about him. “I will not phone your workplace again” is a sentence that works. “You are an alcoholic” is not.

If you are the one drinking: the first step is not a resolution but a doctor — especially if the drinking has been long and regular. In Slovenia the route to help runs through the family doctor and the addiction treatment centres; I have described what that route looks like in the piece on referrals and waiting lists.

And if you are a child in such a family, even a grown-up child: what you were carrying was never your job.

What to remember

In a Slovenian family alcohol rarely enters as a problem — it enters as ritual and hospitality, then becomes a tool, then a rule of silence, and only at the end does it show itself. The language we use hides it along the way.

Instead of asking about amounts, ask about the role. Stopping abruptly after long-term drinking is dangerous and belongs with a doctor. Not every family where drinking happens is harmed, abstinence is not the only route, and blame moves nothing. Things move when someone stops removing the consequences — and when someone says one true thing about themselves.