#31 What can she do about his beer drinking?

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#31 What can she do about his beer drinking?

Post by Gabby » Fri Apr 08, 2005 3:06 pm

Dear Ann Landers: I've been reading your column for years, but never dreamed that one day I would write to you. I am hoping you will print my letter so my husband will see it. I know he reads your column every day, and I'm not getting my point across.

"Pat" seems to be drinking more beer than ever, and I am trying not to nag him about it, but it's getting harder and harder to keep my mouth shut. He can't seem to do anything unless he has a beer in his hand. After work, when he reads the mail, he will have four beers before I can get dinner on the table. Even if dinner is ready when he walks through the door, he'll open a beer. After dinner, he drinks a beer and watches TV or reads a magazine. He sometimes takes one with him to the bathroom and drinks it before or after his shower.

I love him very much and hate to see him do this to himself. Pat is 55 years old and a health nut, always watching his weight and cholesterol, but he is totally blind to what he is doing to himself by drinking so much beer.

We have a hard time communicating, so I have been going for counseling ever since his mid life crisis began. My counselor told me my husband is definitely an alcoholic. What now? A LOVING WIFE IN PALATINE, ILL.

Dear Loving Wife: No woman has ever nagged , cajoled or threatened a man into sobriety.

I assume the health nut gets an annual physical. You might phone his doctor and talk to him. Meanwhile, make a promise to your self that you will never mention his drinking again. Has your counselor suggested that you attend AlAnon meeting. If not, look in your phone book. Ann Landers


Gabby's Response:

Hi Loving Wife: Given that you are the enabler, the trainer, the rewarder it is virtually impossible for him to confront and choose sobriety around you.

You say your counselor says "Pat" is an alcoholic. What do you say? Does he also deny that he is an alcoholic? My guess is he denies being one to the degree that you deny ("seems") being the enabler and being addicted to having an alcoholic in your life.

When you begin studying communication and the effects you have on others you'll come across the subject of responsibility. Then you'll have the choice to try on the following sentences:

1) At some point in my relationship I made something more important than mutually satisfying communication.
2) When first I noticed that he began drinking more than was comfortable for me I did not get to the source of what it was about.
3) I not only have a hard time communicating with him, I have lost my ability to communicate in a way that inspires his health.
4) I have trained him to drink.
5) Around me he prefers to go unconscious.
6) I am addicted to living with an addict.
7) I am so addicted to what I call "love" that I refuse to allow that another woman/person could love him in a way that would inspire him to live (to be conscious).

LW, you don't say how long you've been going to a counselor however, I do know that a communication consultant would effect a transformation within one 3-hr session. All results are produced by how you communicate. I don't get from your letter that you are ready to heal yourself. I don't get from you the commitment it will take to allow him to choose to live or die. That is to say, you must be willing to not have him in order to heal yourself. He may or may not ever heal. As long as you think of him as being more sick than you, the both of you are doomed to more of the same. It will be as much of a challenge for you to complete your experience of enabling as it would be for him to get back to choice about alcohol.

There is nothing more invalidating than to discover that what you call love and the way you relate, the way you communicate with someone, not only doesn't inspire health but drives them unconscious towards death. It's you who are suicidal. Even if you leave him, you'd have to find another addict to enable (until you get to the source of this debilitating behavior of yours).

Do you think there is any correlation between his drinking and the fact that you still practice deceit? Do you think that deceit has consequences? Having a columnist do your communicating for you behind his, and quite possibly your counselor's back, is deceitful. Remember, he is counting on you to continue being a conniving, strategizing, wimp so that he can continue to kill himself and to take you with him. He even knew he could count on you to choose a counselor who would support you in silently putting up with it for another 24 hours. Worse yet, you are counting on him drinking again today so that you don't have to acknowledge your own sickness.

My advice: Complete your relationship with him by acknowledging to him what you have been hiding/withholding from him. Effect a change in housing. Communicate to him that you will not communicate/relate with him except in writing, about logistics, until he can say he has not had a drink for six-months in a row. Invite him to do The Clearing Process for Couples with you. And, get yourself to a communicologist, a communication skills coach, who will model how to communicate responsibly, from cause, with another therapist. You will prolong the healing process to the degree you hang out in hope about saving the relationship. What you're looking for is the very first time you compromised your integrity with him, after which it was all over but the drama; that incident remains an incomplete, the source of the breakdown in communication between you, after which he lost his respect for you. Since then you've set it up for him to abuse you (non-verbally) and now you blame him for going unconscious. You simply don't inspire excellence. It must be his choice to heal. Threatening to leave might cause him to cut back on his drinking, but only for a while. It must be his choice to drink moderately and not in a way that abusively upsets his partner. —Gabby

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