Continuing support group for those affected by someone else's drinking

[pointythings]

Our current thread is nearly full, and it's too valuable to lose in the mists of time, so this is thread 2. Come here if you are struggling with a loved one's drinking - partner, parent, child, friend, there's support for you here no matter which person in your life is struggling with the drink and having an adverse impact on you. The women on here have all been there or are still going through it. We support and advise each other, we don't judge, we listen.

Original thread here to refer back to: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/alcohol_support/4581221-support-group-for-those-affected-by-someone-elses-drinking

I'm sure you could come up with an excellent list of things he could do to make his life better. He doesn't see it that way. He doesn't have to.

Right now, he's got a roof over his head, a warm bed to sleep in, you to take care of him and as much booze to pour down his throat as he thinks he can get away with. All the things you think he could/should do to make his life better are just not that important to him. You don't have the legal or moral right to insist he live his life the way you think he should. That's not in your power. What's in your power is to decide whether having him in your life is better than not.

I've just had a fairly calm conversation with him about things.

He admitted to drinking more than usual recently because he is scared. I countered with the fact it has been several years since his drinking increased.

He said he is drinking to stop him taking so much naproxen because long term naproxen use can cause kidney damage. At this point I laughed out loud.

He said he hadn't drunk yesterday. I pointed out the evidence to the contrary.

He said that his drinking didn't affect anything.

I also said that I didn't have to live with an alcoholic.

@Thefellowship I am so sorry that he is giving you the classic lies of the alcoholic. He isn't going to listen to you, because if he did he would have to do something about his drinking and he isn't ready to do that.

Mine openly told me that yes, he knew he was an alcoholic and he was fine with that. He also told me he was afraid of getting dementia, whilst indulging in behaviour that would increase his risk of getting dementia. This is the addiction you're talking to, and you are powerless against it.

The only person you can save here is yourself - and you can take your kids with you. I'm so glad they see him for what he is.

He's just asked me the name of a series I recommended for the third time today. Cognitive decline could be part of his condition but it's probably the alcohol right?

@Thefellowship either or both. To be honest, the questions you need to ask are to yourself. Is living with an alcoholic good for me and my children? If not, why I am I putting myself and them through this?

Because the alternative feels worse?

In the last years with my husband he was drinking 3-4 bottles of wine a day at times, so over 200 units a week, and yes I was his carer, combined with him displaying controlling behaviour and extreme anger. I kicked him out and he went to his sister. We have spoken a lot since his death by suicide. She was reaching the end of her tether and equally was not in it to be his carer. He had apparently had had a brain scan showing atrophy, and had had a cardiac arrest and was awaiting surgery. His mother has profound dementia and he had always said he would kill himself before that happened to him. In the end he made his choice.

I am desperately sad that this was his story, but I sometimes wonder how my life would have been if I had become his carer and kept on putting up with it , because a miracle wasn’t going to happen.

I keep saying alcohol is cruel and it changes those we love, but if you are not looking after yourself you cannot look after your children.

Having said all that, I know when I started posting here I didn’t really want to hear the advice because I still loved him and couldn’t face the practicalities of leaving, they seemed impossible. But what I learned was that the impossible becomes possible when it is reality. 🪷

Because the alternative feels worse? Worse in what way? Leaving is a scary prospect. I absolutely understand how terribly hard it is -and the guilt can be hard to bear. But I also know for a fact that living with a drunk is far worse than living apart from one.

When I was in it, I didn't post on Mumsnet. That was in part because I didn't know the alcohol board existed, but also because I was in almost as much denial as my husband was. I didn't want to face up to the reality that the future I had been envisaging - where we would raise our kids, they would go off to uni, we would enjoy the empty nest and have time together and travel - wasn't going to happen. There was also the fact that my parents had such a happy marriage, as did his parents - breaking that up felt like failure.

I only started posting on the night I caught him drinking, and lying about it, two weeks after coming out of rehab.

However, I did see many posts from the wise @AttilaTheMeerkat on Relationships, and I knew full well what her advice would have been. Yep, denial.

It's sometimes very hard to face up to what you already know.

Ex DP’s mother contacted me yesterday and sent me screenshots of messages he’s been sending her, saying he was going to “k*ll everyone on this train carriage” because she said no to having him stay at her house.
I’ve also received messages from two women over the last week, asking me to tell my boyfriend to stop harassing them (they assumed we were still together because he still has me on his Facebook picture - I have him blocked on all social media)
And also a message from his DD (17) from a previous relationship saying “have you heard dad is d**d again” … He has a habit when he’s drunk of pretending to be other people and announcing his own death. Then when he sobers up, he claims he was hacked.
His DD is so used to this happening now that she takes it with a pinch of salt. It’s emotional abuse.
I also received an email from him last week, he has a job interview tomorrow and he sent me his speech he’s going to read out while there. The job is a role as a support worker for people with alcohol/substance misuse issues. His speech talks about how he has personal experience having been through it himself in the past, so he believes he could be a positive influence.
This man is deluded. He’s been drunk himself almost every day for the last two weeks. The last job he had a fortnight ago, he lost before he started because he turned up drunk on his first day.

Do you want all this contact from his relatives? If not, you need to start politely batting it away (although his DD sounds like she has her head screwed on straight). Maybe sympathise blandly and direct them towards Al-Anon and SMART Family & Friends - it's up to them to seek their own support regarding their relative, you're not there to provide it.

@pointythings i don’t think they do it as a means of support from me. I think it’s more to warn me that he’s drunk and the mental state he’s in, incase he asks to see our DD when he is clearly in no fit state to.
When he sobers up, he blames the things he says and does on the fact he was drunk.
But that isn’t normal drunken behaviour.
Never in my life have I got drunk and even thought about pretending to be dead, or that I’m going to k*ll anyone.
When he’s sober he appears completely ‘normal’, but there has to be some sort of mental health issue there for him to say and do the things he does while drunk, surely?

@MamaBear81 ah, so you have an early warning system. That's a good thing, and you can probably offer each other some support.

Re mental illness - I really don't know. My late husband always had zero self esteem and was at one point diagnosed with mild depression, but realistically what did for him was his upbringing (very strict, authoritarian and traditional) followed by joining the US Air Force (more conditioning to conformity), so that he was left completely unable to think for himself. When we met, he was coming out of that mindset and growing as a person, but as he got older, he returned to his comfort zone, which was rigid black and white thinking at all times. That is also typical of addicts though, so it all feels a bit chicken and egg.

So your ex may have something MH going on, or he may not. It's impossible to tell.

@pointythings he has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, which he has daily meds for - although he doesn’t take them routinely, when he’s drinking he doesn’t take them at all. He doesn’t even know what day it is, let alone remember to take his meds. And if I ever tried to remind him, he used that as an excuse to call me controlling.
He hasn’t had any trauma to lead to his alcoholism either. He’s always said he had a perfectly normal, happy healthy upbringing. Middle child of 5. Was always close to his family until his drinking pushed them away because he becomes abusive, confrontational, unpredictable and erratic while drunk.
When I’ve tried to talk to him about it sober, he’s said it started out as just social drinking as a teenager but somehow spiralled into what it is now. He’s lost all his friends he used to drink socially with because of the way he behaves, and now his only ‘friends’ are other alcoholics.

I really needed to read this today as the guilt is getting me - should I have stayed, could my support make the difference. Thanks for strengthening my resolve.

1. i supported for the worst two years and nothing changed, just the steady decline
2. There is no support that can ‘fix’ an alcoholic. Only they can.
3. But while I was trying, I was ruining my life: the anxiety, stress, worry, drama was making me a worse mum, a worse friend, a worse colleague

I put my own oxygen mask on first. I stopped trying to set myself on fire to keep an addict warm.

@MamaBear81. my ex also has ADHD, anxiety and depression. Low self esteem. Childhood trauma as the child of an alcoholic (which I am too, so I keep telling myself it falls into that category of - it may be one reason but it isn’t an excuse). He too mucks around with his anxiety meds (he isn’t on meds for ADHD as he was on stimulants and abused them) - takes them at best for 5 days, stops taking them, forgets them etc.

At this stage I think it’s just impossible to know what is mental health and what is addiction. My mantra is: it’s a degenerative brain condition, he has been on 200 units per week for the vast majority of the past two years, of course his mental health is worse. He is focused on the idea that mental health is the cause and addiction is the symptom, maybe he’s right, I used to try and argue with him that his mental health was better in rehab and his meds work better when they aren’t battling against the depressant and mood altering effect of alcohol etc. Now it isn’t my argument to have. I didn’t manage to convince him otherwise when we were together and I wasted my life trying. He is going to do what he is going to do.

The pretending he is dead thing is really demented. His poor step daughter.

House is yours so you kick him out

dh never lost his license tho down to pure luck and was given 10 points for being in charge of a vehicle drunk as they couldn’t prove he drove it drunk

he did

he said court and fine and 10 p was the kick up the arse he needed. That was Oct /nov 2023. Dec 2023 he was drinking again

feb 24 I finally had enough and told him to go

you can do this @Lozzie89 as he is isn’t changing sadly

@MamaBear81 this sort of emotional blackmail is very common with alcoholics and it is hard to bear. I had frequent calls from my DH threatening to kill himself and he went completely AWOL on a couple of occasions which was terrifying. Just try hard to keep an emotional distance. When he talks nonsense, don't engage.Keep telling yourself he's not your problem. If he does commit suicide, it is his choice. If he keeps drinking, he is killing himself slowly, and that's his choice too. There's no point trying to work out why he is drinking. Again, that's not your problem. I must sound like a hard cow, but believe me, I know how agonising it is, particularly when there are children involved. My regrets now are all about how I should have focused completely on them, instead of wasting years worrying about what he was going to say or do next.

@CharlotteByrde oh I’m already emotionally detached, his guilt trips and attempts at emotional manipulation don’t work on me anymore and he can’t stand it.
But it’s not just suicide threats, he’s actually pretending to be dead. He will message his DD, me, his family etc pretending to be someone else, announcing that he has passed away. He even puts status updates on his own social media, saying he’s dead.
Then he eventually sobers up, deletes his social media for a few days and tells everyone he was hacked.
This has happened so many times now, he gets ‘hacked’ on a regular basis and all these so-called hackers say the same thing - that he’s dead. He doesn’t seem to even realise that what he is doing is emotional abuse.
My main concern is our DD, she’s 2.5 yrs old and I don’t want him doing/saying the same things to her when she’s older as he does to his 17yr old DD.
At the moment our DD still sees him, but only if I am 100% sure he is sober and only ever with another responsible adult present.
But I can’t help worrying if this is good for her, or wether I would be better off cutting his contact with her. She adores him and often asks for him, so I feel like I would be punishing her if I did that.
But sometimes she goes weeks without being able to see him because he’s constantly drunk. Then she will see him once or twice, before he goes off on another bender.
There’s no consistency at all, he spent her 2nd birthday drunk when it had been arranged for him to see her. And I’m worried the older she gets, the more let down and hurt she’s going to feel if it continues (which I’m confident it will because it has for her whole life so far)

Sadly, your daughter will learn gradually that her dad is incapable of being a reliable parent who puts her needs first. As she gets older, she may well make her own decisions about the contact she wants, or doesn't want, with him. What I did, and I'm still not sure if it was the best thing to do, was to keep explaining to my children that their dad was seriously unwell, that he was addicted to alcohol and it was affecting his brain and making him say and do things he didn't mean. One way or another, it is difficult to protect children completely from the impact of having an alcoholic parent, even when the alcoholic is no longer living in the house, or living at all.

It is a very difficult balance. Are alcoholics responsible for their actions or not? My girl defended her parent for years , they are ill, the alcohol helps with the pain etc etc. No missed birthday, blatant neglect , act of aggression, or emotional abuse was ever their fault. Until I said that I couldn’t cope any more and would have to block them
and she got quite angry and said “but you think I can and I’m 15?”
I do believe it’s a disease but I also believe that recovery is only possible if the person afflicted stops making excuses and takes responsibility for the damage done. And I know some people do that, and free themselves ,
but I’m afraid that I would never get invested in helping anyone with alcoholism again because it seems to so rarely work. So if another loved one fell into this, I would be saying “sorry but I can’t be around you until you sort this out.” And I know that’s harsh but I’m not going thru it again, even if it was one of my children.

@Nogoodusername isn’t it lovely when we don’t hear from them

if he wasnt dd dad I would block him but we will be tied for years yet

then I feel guilty /sad as once we were happy and I loved him enough to have a child with him

then I get a text and think what a knob

Then he can be nice and I feel sorry for him - but not enough to give money or get back together even tho he would like that

its a vicious circle

DH has consumed at least 80 units of alcohol since the recycling went out on Thursday evening. I'm considering how to separate. Because although he says his drinking doesn't affect anything, I don't have to watch him drink himself to death.

I am glad you're starting to think about separation. There's no need to rush into anything, but now you are able to see it as both possible and necessary. Take your time, get the proverbial ducks in a row and then go.