Learning to Live with Yourself and an Alcoholic

Excerpted from
Marriage On The Rocks: Learning to Live with Yourself and an Alcoholic
By Janet Woititz

Excessive Dependency

The alcoholic is a very dependent person. He prefers not to take responsibility for his behavior. Let George do it. Then when George does it, if anything goes wrong, it's George's fault. He himself would not have made the mistake. The alcoholic prefers to have someone make all his decisions for him, including what he eats and what he wears. Recently, I've been working with a family in which the alcoholic husband is continually threatening suicide. This keeps the rest of the family off balance. Every time he makes his threat, they get scared and try to talk him out of it. They minister to his every need and whim. This man cannot decide whether to have cornflakes or an egg for breakfast, and quite often, he eats nothing.

The last time his wife called me in a panic with "This time he really means it," I answered, "Say good-bye. After all, if he really means it, there's nothing you can do." When she said "Good-bye" he came right home. What else could he do? Thinking he might be ready for some help, I called him the next day. "My family would be better off without me," he lamented. "They probably won't dance in the streets," I answered, "but I will, because at least you have made a decision." I also gave him the name of a doctor who would prescribe medication to ease convulsions while he was making his decision. He still hasn't made it.

He's dying more slowly from alcohol than from the more flamboyant act of suicide, but he's given up the threats. His wife and two oldest daughters started college this fall. One of them is a student of mine and comes in smiling and happy. They are my main interest. They have not abandoned their alcoholic, but they have learned how not to abandon themselves either. He's not too crazy about me because he can't control them anymore. Yet, he still does not want to take responsibility for his behavior.

Avoiding responsibility and making decisions is one of the things that causes alcoholics to drink at first. But drinking does not resolve dependency problems. The alcohol itself becomes a need. His "I just need a drink to relax me so I can think clearly" becomes a vicious cycle, creating even worse physical and emotional dependency.

Emotional Immaturity

"When an individual starts drinking alcoholically, he stops developing emotionally" is a common maxim. He just looks like forty. Emotionally he is about seventeen. I'm sure you often feel that your alcoholic husband is just another child in the house. This, as strange as it may sound, is very close to the truth. A client of mine was making wonderful progress, which stopped suddenly. After a month had passed, I finally confronted him. Was there a change in his life that was getting in his way? The only thing he could think of was taking two or three drinks each night in order to get to sleep. Those two or three drinks could have been shot glasses or tumblers. From the moment he started drinking to excess, he stopped developing emotionally. My position was quite clear: I do not counsel chemicals. When he eliminated the alcohol, we were able to move on.

Emotional growth tends to result from confronting discomfort or pain. If we remember clearly, we have to admit that the times we grew the most were during times of trial. The happy times, the carefree times, were not growing times. I have never heard anyone say, "It was a wonderful easygoing time, and boy did I grow." Growth seems to come with a desire to develop or change, along with a discomfort about things the way they are. Since the alcoholic is busy anesthetizing himself against unpleasant reality, he cannot develop emotionally. His chronological age and his emotional age are very different. One is adult and the other, child. You get into trouble when you expect this drunk child to act like a sober adult. How many times have you criticized your alcoholic husband for his behavior? You were, in effect, asking a drunk to act sober when you said, "Don't drive like that!" If you had in you what he had in him, would you drive any differently? Probably worse. "Don't cry like that!" we say to a child. He replies, "It's the only way I know how to cry!" What we are really saying to the child is, "Don't cry!" and what we are really saying to the alcoholic is, "Don't be drunk!" That's a contradiction in terms. It is natural for the child to cry, and it is natural for the alcoholic to drink.

Low Frustration Tolerance

The alcoholic has a short fuse, and you never really know what particular thing is going to set it off. Life itself ignites the fuse. Certainly a wife and children get in the way. The least little thing can set your husband off. Things tend to happen which cause outrageous reactions. The phone has a habit of ringing when someone calls. Alcoholics have been known to rip it off the wall because it has the nerve to intrude. In addition, a simple snag can turn the whole day into a nightmare - the baby-sitter is ten minutes late, there is no clean towel in the bathroom, or the mayonnaise is on the wrong piece of bread.

The ordinary frustrations of everyday living are overwhelming to the alcoholic. Have you ever noticed the way children walk through a room, and it immediately looks like a disaster area? They really didn't do anything. I'm constantly amazed! Nobody did anything, but the time I spend cleaning up the kitchen that nobody had anything to eat in, defies the imagination. The alcoholic cannot handle this kind of frustration. He wants things the way he wants them, when he wants them, and how he wants them. If it doesn't work his way, he either becomes violent and busts up the place before storming out to drink, or, if he is not prone to violence, he simply takes refuge in drink. It is a way, if only temporarily, to dull the nerve endings. Since the frustrations he is unable to handle are not the ones that go away, he invariably has reason to get drunk again.

As a result of your husband's irrational behavior, you start to walk on eggs. You don't want to set him off, so you are very careful not to do or say the wrong thing. You also try to get the children to be very careful about what they do and say. You look for the "right" time to tell him about the dentist bill. You become tense trying to keep everything calm, and then something happens to screw it up anyway: The car won't start; a light bulb blows; somebody forgot to put the cap back on the toothpaste. It is all your fault because you are a rotten wife, or a rotten mother, or a rotten housekeeper. The abuse varies according to the particular drunk, but it does go on and on.

If you're like most people, you can't help thinking that in some way it was your fault. You could have checked the toothpaste; you did have a hard time starting the car yesterday; and if you had only. . . . What you are not allowing for is the fact that if it wasn't the toothpaste, or the car, it would have been that you talk too much, or you don't talk enough-but it would have been something. It's hard at the time to think logically, because while you are taking responsibility for whatever he is frustrated and angry about, you are also feeling things like, "No jury in the world would convict me of manslaughter if they knew him." And then since nice people don't commit murder, or even think about it, you feel guilty. You've lost again.