I’m doing a story for my creative writing class, and my main character is a girl whose dad doesn’t want to stop drinking alcohol. I was just wondering what would be a good reason for his refusal. I was also wondering how the girl would convince her dad to go and get himself treated. Any ideas?
What would be a good reason for an individual to refuse undergoing an alcohol treatment program?
– September 27, 2008Posted in: Alcohol Treatment Program
I think the most obvious reasons for refusal is denial, shame, and unwillingness to change. You could start the story by showing the father’s resistance to positive change, and then throw in a traumatic experience/catharsis that forces him into rehab. It’s so sadly cliche but true, that it sometimes takes life-changing or near-death experiences to force idiots to take action.
There can be many factors why a person would not want to stop drinking alcohol. It’s probably because the person finds comfort in alcohol and would not want to give up that feeling. For your story, maybe you could make it sound as if the dad has an underlying secret that he can’t forget. Something that bothers him, haunts him. He’s using alcohol as a means of forgetting that.
As for the girl convincing her dad, maybe she’d try to do alcohol intervention to get her dad to agree to going to the treatment. She’s going to appeal to her dad’s good side, make him remember the man he used to be– the man he still could be. She’s going to show him that he can get through life even without alcohol, because letting alcohol run his life isn’t a solution to his problems.