Expert: Rebos - 9/15/2006

Question
I do not know if I am being overly jealous or if my boyfriend is an alcoholic.  He does drink every night but sometimes it is not so bad.  Lately he goes drinking with his boss at a Sports Bar in our area.  He will phone me and tell me he is having 1 last drink and then he will come home and all is good and he tells me he loves me etc..., after an hour I phone him and he says he is on his way another hour passes and I phone him and he starts shouting at me and he is at a nightclub and normally by now I cannot even understand him anymore because he is so drunk and he tells me he hates me and I hold him back etc...  I do not understand why does he love me one minute and hate me the next?  Is it me, am I holding him back or is it the alcohol talking?  We have been together for 4 years now and I am so despondant at the moment about our life together.  He is 22, do you think we are too young to be together anyway, am I expecting too much of our 4 year relationship?  What makes me the most upset is that I do not mind him going to the Sports Bar, but don't lie to me that you are coming home when you are not.  And then he tells me he is coming home but he goes out instead to a nightclub, why does he not invite me with when he is drunk?

Answer
Good afternoon Lizzy

Thank you for your question. I hope that my answer helps you. Your situation is not uncommon or unique, therefore part of this answer to you will be a generic that I have sent to hundreds of other people who have been where you are right now. So please read this answer as though it was the first time that I wrote it.

Your boyfriend …when he drinks he experiences what is called a Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde Syndrome. If you are not familiar with the term it means that he has a personality change when he drinks! If he is generally an honest guy when he is sober he will become dishonest when he drinks. If he is known to tell the truth when he is sober, he will become a liar when he drinks. You get the idea? In the final analysis he will do anything to protect his right to drink. I don’t know what kind of boss he has who continually brings his employee, (who undoubtedly has a drinking problem) out for drinks to a sports bar …all that I can say is that his boss may also have a drinking problem if in fact his boss is even there with him. Your boyfriend may be lying about being with his boss when he really isn’t. Your problem will not go away, but become worse, if your boyfriend takes you up on bringing you drinking with him. Don’t do it! It is not an answer to your boyfriend’s problem. Don’t wish for something that you will be sorry for.

Lots of 22 year olds have serious relationships with no problems, but since he has been with you since he was 18 he may not be as well equipped as you are to handle the relationship… and may be looking for a way out. Something has pushed him over the edge from being a social drinker to an alcoholic drinker. Yes, I believe that your boyfriend is an alcoholic. Social drinkers don't have to lie about their drinking or protect their right to drink.

The action that you take will undoubtedly determine what the rest of your will be like! If your boyfriend does not stop drinking, and you stay with him, you are looking at a relationship and the good possibility of having a lifetime full of pain and misery. If he does not stop… for sure he will get worse. If you continue to stay with him you will become his victim, but never his girlfriend, lover or wife. Drinking alcoholics take “hostages” they never take partners, because their alcoholism does not allow them to have a normal relationship, with another human being.

Alcoholics who are still drinking are generally self-centered to the extreme, booze is more important to them than ANYTHING ELSE. As much as he may say that he loves you his addiction will never allow you to come first, booze will always come before you, his health, his job, his family, and even his very life. By breaking up with him you may be doing him a big favor by helping to raise his “bottom”. In other words his recognition that he has lost another thing that was important in his life. I know of many cases where the non-drinker of a couple ends up “joining” the drinker as a matter of their own survival. What ever you do (unless you are also having a drinking problem) don’t join him in his drinking, because to be a male alcoholic is bad enough, but to be a female alcoholic is much worse because of the “special” problems that a woman drunk faces. Plus, you will become his weak prey that he can do with whatever he wants to.

It is very easy for those who are close to an alcoholic to become “enablers”. An enabler is a person who allows an alcoholic to continue drinking, primarily by their acceptance of the alcoholic’s actions and not holding them accountable for their unacceptable behavior. If an enabler has no special knowledge or training in the field of alcoholism and they try to help, the alcoholic can sense the weakness of the enabler and they continue on drinking because they know that they will be forgiven and rescued time and time, again… and again. In a backhanded way you will give him “permission” to drink by your continued acceptance of his unacceptable behavior. What ever you decide to do it should be based upon your head talking and not your heart. Don’t let your actions appear to be allowing him to continue drinking. If you continue on the road that you are on you haven’t seen anything yet. Alcoholism is a progressive disease it only gets worse it never gets better on its own. I would make it very clear to him that you do not want to hear from him again until he does something positive about his drinking problem…and then only after he has been sober in a program of recovery (like AA) for at least one full year. Never make any threat to him unless you intend to follow through with it.

HOWEVER, if for some insane reason you cannot stop yourself from continuing your relationship with him, then it would be wise for you to go to Alanon meetings. It is the only way that you will survive the ordeal of having an alcoholic in your life. If you
choose to remain in your relationship with him and you don’t attend meetings you have no one to blame for your situation but yourself.

Alcoholics are not bad people, they are sick people who need help, but they must be held responsible for their actions! You may not be able to do anything about your boyfriend’s drinking but you can do something about the problem that has developed in your life by having alcoholic in it. Until you are armed with the right kind of information, knowledge and implications of the disease, your efforts to help him will be for nothing. Alcoholism is deadly and it destroys everything and everyone who comes into contact with it. Please go to Alanon meetings it will be your only chance to survive the relationship, “if you choose to remain in the relationship”.

If you don’t already know, it is generally believed, by many in the field of alcoholism, that it is a three-fold disease. Mental, Physical and Spiritual.

The “mental” part of the illness refers to the mental obsession to drink that precedes the first drink... a pre-occupation with thinking about drinking which is so powerful that the alcoholic must drink. The “physical” aspect of the disease is that once the first drink is downed a physical compulsion takes over in the form of a deep incessant craving that the alcoholic must continue to drink until some outside incident stops them or they pass out. The “spiritual” part of the illness (not spiritual in a religious way) is in the loss of an alcoholic’s values, and a willingness to settle for less and less as the drinking continues. It becomes difficult for the alcoholic to determine the difference between right and wrong or good and bad. The alcoholic develops a change in priorities where drinking becomes more important than health, family, job and friends.

Stopping drinking is not a matter of willpower. Alcoholism is a disease. Drinking alcoholically is but a symptom of a deeper underlying problem that must be faced up to in order for an alcoholic to recover. Without learning what that problem is, trying to stay away from a drink is known as “white knuckle sobriety”. It isn’t very long before the alcoholic has to drink again. FOR THE ALCOHOLIC THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CUTTING DOWN, drinking only on weekends, changing what they drink, smoking pot or taking other mind altering drugs or even switching to “near beer” with 0.05% alcohol. For the alcoholic nothing will work short of total and complete abstinence from any thing that contains alcohol or other mind-altering substances (drugs). Of course the exception is a medical doctor’s prescription as long as the doctor understands that he/she is dealing with an addicted person.

Unfortunately, all alcoholics must hit their own bottom before they do anything about stopping. I am sorry to say that hitting a bottom for some many may mean going as low as a person can go...plus six feet! Don’t let him take you there with him. Let him go and get on with your life. Once again, you may help to save his life by raising his bottom even if you are no longer together. Until he “admits and accepts” that alcohol is causing him problems there is little you can do for him. No one can scare an alcoholic into stopping drinking. Threatening, begging and even putting him away against his wishes will not get him to stop doing what he has not made up his own mind to do. Don’t think that he does not want to stop he can’t stop when left to his own devices. Also, don’t be lulled into thinking that he will stop drinking just because he says that he will. It’s not that he will purposely lie to you… but he will lie to himself because down deep he is afraid to stop. Alcoholism is powerful, cunning, baffling and insidious.

An active alcoholic’s choices become limited to: attending a recovery program like AA, or entering an in-patient detoxification clinic that has an after care outpatient program, then to the AA program. If he does nothing about stopping then he is destined to die a drunk’s death, get involved negatively with the law or end up in a mental institution. I am sorry to be blunt, but I am only stating what you probably already know. Rarely have I seen an alcoholic stop drinking on willpower alone. The disease is too powerful.

There is no reason why you should remain in such a horrible situation as you are. Just ask yourself what you would advise a friend to do if she came to you and explained the same
situation that you are going through as her problem. I would bet that you would tell her to
get away from him ASAP. You were not put on this earth to allow another person to enslave you and have to live in fear and yet do nothing about it.

If you do talk to him you may want to say that you are leaving him because of his drinking. And… that until he is sober for at least a year or more that you do not want to hear from him or have any contact with you. You have to get on with your life. Don’t let him trap you into “that this whole thing is your problem and not his”. Alcoholics are very clever at turning the problem around to protect their own right to drink!

God forbid that you have a child with him and then become tied to him for the rest of your life. His drinking will always come first.
I wish you the very best and I hope that I have not taken too much liberty with you in the way I have responded to your question. You seem to be intelligent women…don’t let this man destroy your life. Get out while you can, and concentrate on someone who can love you, more than booze. I know that you love him…but HE CAN”T LOVE YOU AND ALCOHOL at the time

If I can be of further help please do not hesitate to contact me again through Allexperts. Thank you Rebos