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I think my wife has an alcohol problem/functioning alcoholic. This has been happening over the last year but the problem has progressed. I don't know how much she drinks but this is what I have seen. She has hidden it from me in the past and lied about it. She claims that its because I "freak out" over her drinking. She was drinking 1 bottle a night and on weekends sometimes she would have 1 or sometimes 2 bottles in a day. She would start to drink sometimes as early as 9am on Saturday mornings. Typical comments from her: "I poured the rest of the bottle out" (not sure whether to believe that or not), etc, etc. Our confrontations have gotten worse over this. She agreed about 2 weeks ago she would no longer drink during the week. I made her mad/upset Monday and she took off from work and went home and opened a bottle of wine (her drink of choice). I went home at lunch on the hunch she was gonna drink and confronted her about it. She got mad at me and yet another arguement. I left and came back later and we talked. Tuesday morning I got up and went downstairs and the glass that was sitting with wine in it I poured out. She came down and saw me doing it and the look on her face was that she was mad. (Side note: She has accused me of treating her like a 2 year old before and being over controlling. That may be somewhat true.) I immediately thought I had done the wrong thing. I was washing dishes and had a meltdown and crying. She came over and saw me and was very sympathetic asking what she had done wrong. I told her I would be fine and said I just needed a hug. I had asked her the night before about going to a counselor with me and she said we could talk about that later. She had previously (2 weeks ago) said she has a problem that she cannot just have one glass of wine she has to pour a second, can't be satisfied with one glass. I went to a counselor on my own yesterday and may try an Al-Anon meeting in the near future. I have always been a problem solver. I have read alot of things on the internet. I worked late last night but don't think she drank yesterday. Should I be happy that there is some progress in her plan to not drink during the week? What do I do about the weekend? I dread the thought of it looming. I am to the point just the sight of wine makes me ill. I sometimes cannot hide my feelings and if she opens one on Saturday I am afraid she will see my reaction and she will say what I have heard before "It's the weekend." and it will continue with her reporting to me what her alcohol consumption is. She has done this in the past when she sees my reaction by saying things like "This is my first bottle" "I didn't drink during the week." which all may be true. Trying to find a game plan for myself that best fosters her reducing/quitting drinking. Please help.
"Functional" alcoholic is a misnomer. People are all at various stages of functioning in the outside world and having a job, relationship, or whatever does not make you a "functional" alcoholic. It just makes you an alcoholic with a job and relationship and house (or whatever). Most of the time, alcoholism does impair the relationship (as it is here) and it does impair job functioning but many times the alcoholic doesn't realize how until they are sober.
Regardless, I do think alanon is a great idea for you. You have the standard merry-go-round of anxiety, control, and then her acting out, justifying, and resenting you. Nobody can tell you how to feel about her drinking. Going to alanon is not going to make you ever "like" her choices regarding alcohol. It will have you focus more on you and what you can do to ensure your own peace of mind as opposed to staying on this merry go round of reacting and trying to influence her drinking patterns. That's pretty futile. She may come to you 100 million times with "Oh I need to stop drinking!!!" before she actually does something about it. It's hard not to take the bait and try to exert control over things.
You have control over you and your choices primarily. Time spent reminding her of her previous statements of intent to quit or applying logic to her when she is clearly in denail is not going to be fruitful. She will recover and/or stop when her higher power provides the clarity that she really has a problem AND that she needs to do something about it. You are not her higher power and it wont help to try to be it either.
It is legitimately scary that her problem may get worse before better. I can empathize with that and so will your peers in Alanon. Living with an alcoholic is very draining. Wishing you find as much serenity and peace in your journey as it has started today! Glad you are here.
You have come to the right place & yes please go to at least 6 Al Anon face to face meeting to see if it's right for you. I too once was married to a alcoholic & AL anon saved me many years of frustration, trying to control, reason etc. Alcoholism is a family disease we all get sick & we all need help. It does not matter what you do a alcoholic will drink as long as they choose to. The disease is cunning, baffling & powerful.
In Al Anon we get the support, understanding & love that only those of us that have travelled this road understand.
Sending you love & support
Please keep coming back
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Icie
"Holding a grudge is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die..."
I'm glad you have found us. Al-Anon can help provide understanding of alcoholism, and give the tools to deal with it.
Here's what I wish I had known when I was just starting this journey. In Al-Anon we have the Three C's about alcoholism: You didn't Cause it, you can't Cure it, you can't Control it. It's not that we shouldn't. It's that we can't. If it were possible, one of the millions of people who have been down this road would have found the way.
The alcoholic herself is the only one who can make the decision to stop drinking and put it into effect. But she can't do it on her own. People who do it on their own are not called alcoholics. If she could just turn it off like a light, she'd be a non-alcoholic and this whole problem wouldn't have started up. Alcoholics need a larger program of recovery. AA is the big one and it's free and it's always available. Some alcoholics choose rehab (especially useful when physical detoxing has to happen) and then transition into AA or another longterm program.
But here's the catch: she also can't be convinced to start the program of recovery. Because it has to come from internal realizations. Experience and history have proven that when they go in because they feel pressured, the results are not very good. And alcoholism is so powerful that the results are not guaranteed no matter what.
So the sad fact is that nothing you can do will keep her from drinking or will help her to stop. I wish this weren't true. Most of us generally go through a long time of trying to make it true before we take Step 1: We acknowledged that we were powerless over alcohol.
But there's good news! Things can get much better anyway! Alcohol sweeps everyone around it into the chaos and distorts our own thoughts too. We can choose recovery for ourselves. That's what Al-Anon is for. When we get into recovery, the whole dynamic changes, and that means that everything changes. It can't stay the same when we are different.
The amount you say your wife is drinking (and I don't doubt you one minute) suggests to me that there's definitely a problem. If anything, usually we underestimate the problem and the drinking. I know those tricks about "I poured the rest out" and "I didn't drink as much as you think." Lies go with the territory, I'm afraid. The disease defends itself.
I hope you'll keep reading all the threads on these boards, find a face-to-face meeting (and there are meetings online here too), read the literature, and go for your own recovery. It really will make a difference -- that's the guarantee.
I am so glad you found us here at MIP. I can so relate, I used to monitor my A's drinking and was obsessed with how much and when. Al-anon meetings have been a great place for me to grow and learn about myself and why I am the way I am. The book "Getting Them Sober" by Toby Rice Drews was very helpful for me also. I hope you keep coming back and can dive into some face to face meetings. Sending you love and support on your journey!
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Sending you love and support on your journey always! BreakingFree
Al-Anon/Alateen Family Group Headquarters, Inc. 800-344-2666
" Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional."
"Serenity is when your body and mind are in the same place."
So, do I tell my wife that I am going to Al-Anon, deny it, don't bring it up unless she asks? How do I react when this Friday night I get home and we are making dinner and maybe preparing to sit down and watch a movie and here she comes with wine glass in hand? Do I just act like the alcohol is not there and ignore it? Do I take the small victory if on her own she cuts back the drinking during the week? I have heard that some sort of progress is better than nothing. If/when she asks what I think about her reduced drinking, etc what do I say?
Thanks everyone for the encouragement and advice. I must say it is much easier to talk about this to people I don't know then air it out to mutual friends.
When my AH's drinking was getting out of control and I finally made the decision to go to Al Anon, I just flat out told him and asked him to stay home with our son so that I could go. I didn't ask permission, I didn't make a big deal about it. My AH would always choose my main meeting nights to tie one on, I'd always come home from meetings to see him sitting there with a drink when he hadn't had a drink in front of me for the whole rest of the week, LOL. It was like his subtle passive aggressive action to say "I'll show her". He didn't like me going to Al Anon but he didn't fight me on it, either.
As for how you handle yourself if you come home and find her drinking: that's up to you. That's where boundaries come in. If you're OK with being around her while she's drinking you could just choose to ignore it. If she is sloppy drunk and getting mean you can set a boundary that states that you don't want to be in the same room as the person who is drinking. You don't need to verbalize it, you just excuse yourself and go do something else in another room. If the alcoholic asks, "Where are you going?" You can tell the truth, "I choose not to be around people who are drunk(drinking, passed out, belligerent, silly...insert whatever word applies here) so I'm going to do something that I enjoy FOR ME. And then, you just go do it. No arguing, no fighting, you just take care of yourself and let the alcoholic do what they want to do: which is normally to drink.
My AH has been pointing out to me that he hasn't had a drink in blah, blah, blah days. I hear it so often I loose count. When he asks me what I think of the cutting back, or supposed quitting, or whatever I simply say, "That's great. I'm happy for you. Can you please pass the salt?" In other words, I don't engage or get trapped in a HUGE discussion about the drinking because it always wound up with him lying, minimizing, making excuses, etc and I got tired of hearing it. At some point, you have to do what is best for you and you will learn that in Al Anon and by coming here. Welcome to the boards, you got some great shares up there in this thread and I hope you read each one with an open mind and open heart. We have all been where you are today.
Aloha hdftby and welcome to the MIP board and family also. Isn't it great that you can find and get into a family that understands? Isn't is strange that her drinking is out of control and you're feeling scared about it? I did that. My alcoholic/addict wasn't as concerned as I was and so I had to learn how to accept and detach from it myself...which isn't a normal behavior of normal human beings. I thought I had to react to it and if I didn't than I would get worse and I'd also being giving the perception that I don't care. It got worse whether I cared or not and that was because she didn't care. That is how the disease works and no matter how I tried to out think it or out move it I always came out around last on the list...Normal!! What do you do? Don't know. What I did was I went to my first Al-Anon meeting inspite of how I thought it would come out between she and I because a hotline person said that "your life depends on it". She was soooo right and I didn't let anything interfer with me getting there. My alcoholic/addict and I had argued and fought about a ton of things and one more which was about ME geting help wasn't going to turn the world on it's feet...It was already on it's head for me!! LOL. One thing I learned in recovery is how much the disease runs off of fear...it needs to have fear of change in order to keep things the way they are and then move it toward getting worse and it will get worse if you find an excuse to stay away from help. The Al-Anon Family Groups is about and for the family, spouses, friends and associates of alcoholics...those people who's drinking affects us negatively.
Again...welcome and let us know how the meeting comes out for you. Many of use will already know how the alcoholic might react to you going. In support (((((hugs)))))
I think you've gotten better advice here than I can probably give! Great place to come to. Since your relationship is similar to one I left about 6 years ago, there are boundary issues if you are 'treating her like a 2 year old' (and I'm certain she acts like it sometimes but...LOL) and if you feel you need to check in with her to go to an Al Anon meeting. So if I have anything to offer I'd like to offer (if I missed that it already was, I apologize) two books.
Henry Cloud "Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No" and Toby Rice Drews' "Getting Them Sober". Both books are tremendous and I read them often and refer back as much as I can. I use principles in both books for much in my life - even dealing with my kids!
