Starting Point
Starting Point
My husband and I have been married over 26 years. He was my dream come true. He has been drinking since age 16, but it never occurred to me he was an alcoholic because I thought alcoholics were bums drinking out of brown paper bags on street corners.
My husband graduated from law school, then joined the Air Force where most activities he chose centered around drinking. Later he worked to establish a private practice and was successful. The nightly drinking continued, and he would blow in later and later.
I sought counseling and the therapist told me he is what is called a functioning alcoholic. I was in total disbelief. My husband turned to the counselor and admitted he was an alcoholic, though he later denied that admission. The next session he came in wasted and was asked to leave.
Since then the alcoholic has filed for divorce and refuses to speak to me. I know of at least one affair. He has acknowledged he is an alcoholic, but he has absolutely no intention to stop. I can’t believe this is really happening. How do I start over?
Robyn
Robyn, last summer a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry reported 76 percent of alcoholics in the U.S. never seek treatment. The 24 percent who do get treatment wait an average of eight to 10 years before seeking that treatment.
Even then, it will be years more before the alcoholic stops drinking for good, and additional years before they stop acting like an alcoholic, if they ever do. Alcoholics have a smugness about the castles in their mind. In that domain they set the rules and they make the laws. Like any absolute monarch, they are unwilling to give up their power.
It doesn’t matter whether you think alcoholism is a disease, a moral failing, a chemical addiction, or the aftereffect of a lousy childhood. The prognosis for successfully living with an alcoholic is poor. If children are present, the consequences are dire.
Human development follows a predictable pattern. To develop their own brain, children need to be around mature brains--brains working from reality, brains meeting challenges and facing facts. Observing those brains and patterning themselves after them, give children what they need to master life.
Child abuse is the term which most accurately describes what children in an alcoholic home endure. The effects of an alcoholic home on children are well-known: depression, inability to form close relationships, relentless self-criticism, inability to complete projects, and constant approval seeking.
Even the non-drinking spouse is changed. That person is co-opted into making excuses, covering up, and pretending what happened the night before never happened. That’s what’s so striking about your letter. You left nearly everything out. The fears, the arguments, the spoiled occasions, the conversations which he didn’t remember are all missing. It’s as if you still don’t want to go there.
That’s understandable because denial is a powerful defense mechanism; it keeps us from having to face pain. Denial operates in two ways. On an internal level, denial keeps us from having to confront our fears and the loss of our hopes and dreams. On an external level, denial keeps us from difficult confrontations with events and other people.
But the cost of denial is high. That is why it is so dangerous. When a person fails to prepare for the consequences of what they seek to deny, those consequences escalate. You feared the dismantling of your marriage and becoming a single woman again, but what you feared you must now confront.
So it’s time to go back to your therapist and tell him or her what you didn’t tell us. You need to talk through why you did what you did, and why you couldn’t admit what was before your eyes. It will feel embarrassing and humiliating at first, but that is where you must begin.
Wayne & Tamara
Authors and columnists Wayne and Tamara Mitchell can be reached at www.WayneAndTamara.com.
Send letters to: Direct Answers, PO Box 964, Springfield, MO 65801 or email: DirectAnswers@WayneAndTamara.com .
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Posted on Jan 28, 2008 by Site Admin
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