Alcoholic Spouse | What To Do If My Spouse Is An Alcoholic

I have been sitting here for a while this morning and reading about what it means to love someone who has the disease/illness of alcoholism. There are a lot of challenges it causes to someone who is sober, be it a child of an alcoholic, a spouse of an alcoholic, a parent of an alcoholic, and a sibling of an alcoholic, or even having a friend with the problem.

I have most definitely suffered from a lot of cognitive dissonence because of this challenge. I have also suffered a lot of emotional abuse too. Someone who has this problem can "seem" nice and then they can have a darker side too. There is definitely a Jeckle and Hyde that presents with this challenge and I have been on the receiving end of it many times throughout my life.

I do believe that individuals that suffer from alcoholism deserve to get help. It's true that these individuals are at war with themselves just as Jamie Lee Curtis describes in her recent discussion about being sober for 22 years. The problem with this challenge is in how consuming it is and how there is very little room for the person who is on the recieving end. I do believe that people that become alcohol or drug abusers don't start out by wanting to become the addict. I think at first the person simply enjoys the high and relaxed feeling they experience from alcohol/drugs and it's possible that individual doesn't realize how they begin engaging more and more.

When I talk to my older brother, he expresses a lot of anger. At times it's hard to listen to what he shares too. He has been very respectful and had helped me with some extremely challenging situations when it comes to my older sister. Yet, at the same time there is a limit to the emotions I am able to express. And that is indicitive of what it's like when it comes to growing up or being around an alcoholic.

There is always this golden rule I had to follow that I didn't even realize, "always make sure you stick to talking about THEM". I have to remember the importance of making sure I keep things directed towards THEIR NEEDS because if I don't I will most definitely face some kind of blow back. Yup, as long as I keep things about THEM AND THEIR NEEDS, it's safer for me. Did you ever have someone tell you they have no respect for you and yet that individual had a problem with alcohol addiction?

There is this commercial that comes on where someone is singing "Walk a mile in my shoes, Walk a mile in my shoes". And one of the things that has come VERY CLEAR to me is how quickly people can judge you when they have NO IDEA what your life has been like.

I was the last one to leave home and there were many nights where I would come home and my father would be in the kitchen with a fire lit drinking his wine alone. I often sat and talked to him until the sun began to come up. I did not do much talking about myself, but instead I listened to him talk. There were a lot of things he experienced in his life. To KNOW someone is being able to sit and LISTEN and I did want to know my father. I did not think about his sitting there drinking that wine as alcoholism. Instead there was something "lonely" about what he was doing. I learned that by sitting and listening to him, which I did do several times, that I got to walk in his shoes, sort of like reading a book about him and what his life was like. I look back and think that he had to face a lot of challenging things in his life despite being very young. He tended to be very much into "self" with all these things he shared. I think he did need a presence he could talk about it all with.

Years later when he could no longer sit and drink his wine because he fell down one time too many and broke some ribs, I was at my sister's house and noticed him quietly sitting alone by the fire. So I sat with him and began talking to him about his past. I pretty much got so I could tell he was staring into that fire and recalling his past (something he did a lot). I guess I knew he was alone with it so I sat with him so he would not be so alone. And that last time as he was sharing things with me, some of which he was repeating, I thought about how very young he was when he experienced all these things. I said to him, "My god daddy, you were only 17 and so young, that's really just a child yet". And I actually knew this being a mother of a 17 year old and KNOWING how young that really is. And for the first time he looked right into my eyes, and this time the one I was talking to was that very young child that had to see and understand things even though he was really just still a child. It was that young boy that waited his entire life to have someone else recognize how hard it was for him when he was so very young. Actually, I came across a picture of my father dressed in his uniform and OMG he really was just a boy in that uniform. We tend to think of them as men, but that's NOT what I saw in this picture. No, this was really just a young kid.

Back then no one talked about how the war affected them. These young boys that came back home as men were expected to JUST move on and get a job and be a functioning civilian again. They were expected to JUST MAN UP and my father tried to do just that. Yet, it was clear he was alone with all the things that young boy experienced and witnessed.

Yes, my older brother has a lot of anger, and I do know he has a right to his anger. My father's history most definitely created a person who genuinely did not have the ability to be a good parent to his son.

There are a lot of things about my parent's generation that created challenges. There were a lot of parents that drank too and it was something many in that generation engaged in. My father never really got over what he saw and experienced during the war. He went to serve before he got to finish his senior year of high school and that's what he had to complete when he came home from war and then he put himself through college. His father served in both WWI and WWII and his father was an alcoholic, and a mean drunk. So my father did not really have a very good example of what a healthy father is like.

There are a lot of things my generation did not have an understanding of. I never used the terms toxic, triggers or abuser or this person and that person is narcissistic like is so widely used now. Most in my generation just learned to work around different social challenges and personal family challenges. My parents pretty much taught us that it's ok to love someone who presents challenges. My mother was one who constantly said "you have to accept people for what they are". It's very different today than it was when I was younger. We certainly have more knowledge about what alcohol use does to someone's brain. It's actually been rather triggering for me to read and learn about it and remembering what I dealt with in my past that frightened and confused me.

I also have some anger myself. Mostly anger about what it does to people and how that has affected me very deeply as a person. I had a lawyer who had a problem and was at the point where he developed the shakes, lack of sleep, lack of being able to remember and he HAD been a top lawyer and very well known. His years of drinking was taking a toll and he should have retired but didn't. And he made a mess of my case and I literally could not find ANY lawyer for a very long time to help me. As soon as they heard his name they ALL declined. I would sit with my therapist trying to get help and at one point my therapist said that he had been wondering if I was dealing with an alcoholic. Yes, but it was more than that because he was mentally declining as well. People knew but chose to look the other way, after all, he was at one time highly regarded and no one wanted to see the reality. They just all distanced even his own son who also practiced law. What should have taken two years to settle ended up taking nine years. And that's only because I did finally find a lawyer that COULD see it and COULD look at my case which at that point was going to get thrown out because of how he was failing. He ended up having 11 suits against him for malpractice and finally he got caught driving drunk.

When I say ANYONE can have a problem, I AINT KIDDING.