"My Husband Is An Alcoholic!" - Relations

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 20:18

I am married and have two children. For the past two years my husband has started drinking, he works as a driver and waits every Friday to celebrate "this day". At the same time, if these are long holidays, he falls out of life, I can not find him anywhere, I have to call my relatives and friends. Then time passes, he returns, asks to forgive him, says that he loves me and the children. It's hard and difficult for me, I work, I try to provide children with a decent life. With them, I generally keep quiet about how much they have endured. My husband and I have been together for 15 years, he has become a dear person to me, I love him, but I can’t live like this anymore. Everything inside is torn apart

Irina, 38 years old

Your family is a two-phase system, in the first phase your husband is sober, in the second he is drunk. In general, if the family does not break up due to the partner's alcoholism, then the dynamics of dependence and codependency will develop there. In a sober state, the alcoholic works, there is some kind of interaction in the family, but everyone is worried because they expect a binge to come soon. They begin to calculate his approach for some reason: now dad starts drinking beer or his emotional state changes. And the wife is getting ready, she is worried, upset. Her condition cannot but affect communication with her husband. He accumulates physiological stress - his body needs alcohol, his wife has emotional stress, they connect, discomfort increases. Against this background, a binge arises. It's good when a person, having drunk, behaves calmly and, having come home, just goes to bed. But even in this seemingly mild situation, it happens that the wife, on the contrary, behaves violently: she can reproach, grumble, scream. The companion of an alcoholic behaves "drunk" in a sense, and then, according to the law of symmetry in communications, an abnormal interaction begins in the system: the husband can respond aggressively to his wife's attacks - that is domestic violence. Family therapists have a good formula: "Drunken behavior does not come from the bottle."Drunken behavior doesn't come from the bottle."Drunken behavior doesn't come from the bottle."

As alcohol addiction develops, a person usually begins to behave aggressively, demands something from his family, attacks them.

When a man goes into a binge, his wife takes over his family responsibilities, because he has no time. And so she takes the children to school, buys groceries, and is also afraid that he will be kicked out of work, and then they will have nothing to live on.

The paradoxes of our time: on the one hand, there is a very high tolerance for drunkenness in society, and on the other hand, they do not invite guests and friends home, because they are ashamed of dad. Then, if he is a heavy alcoholic, then he needs to be helped to get out of the binge, and this has to be done by his wife.

In general, the wife is exactly the character who is the client of family therapy in this situation. Suppose the wife brings the alcoholic out of the binge, then the period of family life begins, when he promises, when he repents, the spouses reconcile until he drinks again. When he was drunk, they communicated very emotionally: conflicts, fights. When he is sober, they are engaged in family affairs, but there we see a different emotional pattern: they do not have close, emotionally intense interaction. And vice versa, when he goes into his drunken phase, they have an emotionally close, but very negative interaction, and it is not the alcoholic who stabilizes this situation, but his co-dependent spouse.

There are two tasks of working with an alcoholic family: the first is working with codependency. Usually a codependent person has the illusion that he can change the other, heal him, persuade him not to drink. This idea must be destroyed absolutely, the codependent person must stop being so, and this happens when he leaves the alcoholic to his fate. This is a pretty scary choice, because an alcoholic is a person between life and death. A strong alcoholic can die of delirium tremens, he can be beaten, robbed. So the companion of an alcoholic is a person who must let go of this situation, which is completely unnatural and very difficult. The second thing we are trying to do in such a family is to remove the phase at the level of communication. The communication that is specific to one phase and to another phase must be reversed. It is very difficult to work with an alcoholic family alone, unaccompanied by a group of Alcoholics Anonymous or a narcologist. Any addiction does not stop, we cannot cure an alcoholic. Considering the structure of his body and metabolism, an alcoholic in a sense is forever.