Alcoholism: Why It’s Still Hard For Me To Deal With

My second husband was an alcoholic.  I didn’t know the first thing about alcoholism when I married him.  I thought the word referred to drunks on the street who pushed around overflowing shopping carts.  I’ve learned that it is a progressive disease; the first few years of our marriage weren’t bad; actually I was quite happy.  Then we started having fights that made no sense to me.  I would try to defend myself, and then suddenly the topic had changed, and I had no idea what we were even fighting about. The fights often lasted for hours.  In Al-Anon I learned those fights were called ‘the dance of death’.  They drove me crazy.  I learned not to engage if he had been drinking. But eventually we also had those fights when he was not. I then learned to tell him that I didn’t understand what we were fighting about, so I was unwilling to continue.  Nevertheless, life became more difficult.   At five o’clock I would wait for the ice to hit the glass with a knot in my stomach.  I had no idea if he would become a slurry drunk that night, an argumentative one, mean, or if he would just pass out.  None of the alternatives felt pleasant to me.  Still, I didn’t call him an alcoholic.  I did know something was wrong, and finally persuaded him to go to a counselor with me. She sent me to Al-Anon and never mentioned drinking as a problem again in our joint sessions. When I called her years later to ask ‘why’ she said, “He would have refused to continue coming if I mentioned his drinking!”  Wow!  That might have been true, but if it was the major problem for me, in our marriage, how could she not deal with it?   Had she dealt with our issues in a more ethical way I might have left him years earlier, and had a much easier time financially when I did.  To say that living the way we lived for years has changed my life is an understatement. I can’t stand being around drunks.  I hate the intrusive, thoughtless behavior.  I hate having to cater to the alcoholic’s wishes, because nothing else is even considered.  I hate being seen as ‘mean’ when I don’t want to dance the dance.  For over ten years I have surrounded myself with people who drink in moderation or don’t drink at all.  When faced with people who do, in a situation I can’t exit with grace – say with someone else’s family – I am stymied. So now it seems I have another lesson to learn, once I figure out how to handle it.  Making an appointment with my therapist (not the woman who avoided the topic of alcohol!) seems a good idea.  I trust that talking it through with a professional, talking to my Al-Anon friends, and going to my meetings will help me figure out a solution that will work for me, as well as take into account the people I love who have also been affected by the recent turmoil. Yet again I am relieved I no longer live with active alcoholism. A short addendum: I will be creating my short videos once a month from here on in, and writing a short blog the rest of the time.