Hello @Soul84, I hope you’re feeling a bit better in yourself now… but still shocked enough by your behaviour to realise that you’re going to lose your marriage and family if you don’t stop drinking. I’ve got some suggestions for you; I hope you find them helpful.
Firstly, ‘alcoholic’ is a bit of an outdated term now; it’s being phased out in favour of ‘alcohol misuse disorder’. The reason for that is because people have a picture in their head when they think of an alcoholic - someone who wakes up in the morning and has a drink, someone who drinks every day, someone, in short, who is ’not like me’. Nobody wants to think of themselves as an alcoholic, so they think ‘well I’m not an alcoholic because I’m not doing xyz… so my drinking’s fine and I’ll carry on’. But it’s not fine; you’re misusing alcohol. Getting so drunk that you come home and abuse your wife the day before Christmas, and then try to drive drunk… that’s not ok at all, is it? The danger is, that once your hangover and remorse has worn off, you’ll forget how awful your behaviour was and how awful you feel now, and think ‘oh this time will be different - I’m not an alcoholic, I just like a few beers’. So I’d strongly advise you to make the decision now, today, that you’re not going to drink alcohol again, and get all the help and support you need to make that true. It doesn’t happen just by hoping it will, unfortunately - you need to ‘do the work’ to make sure it happens.
What I’d advise you to do, is the following;
Tell your wife that you don’t drink any more (and mean it - every time you drink alcohol from now on, will be destroying her trust in you and another bit of your marriage) and that you’re going to do whatever it takes to get and stay free from alcohol.
Buy ‘Alcohol Explained’ by William Porter. If you don’t like reading, get it as an audio book and listen to it every day/night.
Once you’ve listen to/ read the book, join the ‘Alcohol Explained’ Facebook group.
Start attending Smart Recovery online meetings. It’s CBT based, and doesn’t have the ‘higher power’/spiritual 12 step stuff that AA has (unless that stuff appeals to you, in which case try AA). I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going to an AA meeting, personally, but I’ve been to Smart Recovery meetings and they’re great. There are online meetings all over the world, so you can find one to attend every day.
Sign up for the free Alcohol Experiment, watch the videos and do the work - write a journal and do the exercises they tell you to. You need to do a bit of analysis into why you misuse alcohol, and learn about the effects it has on the brain.
Don’t think ‘oh I don’t want a drink today anyway, so I don’t need to read/listen to my book/ attend a meeting’! It’s the times when you’re not struggling that you need to lay the foundations for when you are struggling.
There’s so much support out there now for living alcohol free; books, podcasts, videos, free programs, meetings, peer support, Facebook groups. Embrace it!