My son is fifteen... I'd really want to know if he had such an awful problem. But the thing is, I can't imagine how I wouldn't know. Do your parents not smell it on you, or wonder about your nights out, or when you stagger in? If you're having blackouts then it has to be obvious to other people. Perhaps your parents do know on some level, and are trying to block it out. If this is the case then you would be doing them, as well as yourself, a favour by telling them.

I know I'm not one to preach, because I have an alcohol problem myself, (in fact I am only just recently starting to take action to help myself) but please stop sooner rather than later, because it will only get worse.

I was just talking to a woman who told me that she started drinking in her teens, and by the time she was in her twenties she'd been raped while unconscious several times. She has two children now, under five years old, and it's only now that she's really getting the help she needed. She said after the first time she should have realised and got help, but she didn't. She found it so hard not to drink while pregnant with the first that sometimes she just fell off the wagon. She was petrified that the child would be born with fetal alcohol syndrome, but thankfully the little girl is well. Once her child was born she felt safe to start drinking again, and before she knew it she was pregnant yet again, with no idea how it happened. She finally told her doctor, and is clean, though as you can imagine her life has been irrevocably altered by what's happened to her.

Please, I'm telling you this because it's so important. You say that you like waking up with no idea what you did the night before. You don't want to wake up pregnant, or with a venereal disease. I'm really not trying to give you a scare story here, I literally had this conversation today, and it shook me up.

You're still so young, your liver hasn't even stopped growing yet... if you've been drinking since you were eleven or twelve I shudder to think of the damage that you could have done.

The good news is that the liver can recover... And if you have so much support in terms of counselling etc, please make use of it. In the end this isn't about pleasing your parents, it's about saving your life.