Reflection
Living With an Alcoholic
If you are frightened for your safety right now, do not wait for a therapy appointment. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and answered at any hour. If you are in immediate danger, call 999.
Most of what is written about alcoholism is written for the person drinking.
This is for the person living with them.
A note on how it is written. I have used “he”, because that is how most of the people who come to me describe it. It is not always a he. For some readers the drinker is a wife, a mother, a father, an adult child. Use whichever word fits. Almost everything below applies unchanged.
Walking on eggshells
You do not know when he is coming home. You do not know what state he will be in when he does. You have learned to listen to the sound of the key in the door and know, from that alone, roughly how the evening is going to go.
That is not anxiety in the ordinary sense. It is accurate prediction under conditions of permanent uncertainty, and it is exhausting in a way that people who have not lived it consistently underestimate.
You have become an expert in reading his mood.
I want to say something about that skill, because it is rarely named. It is a real expertise, developed over years, at enormous cost. You can detect from the way he puts down his bag, from three words on the phone, from the particular quality of his cheerfulness, exactly where things stand. Nobody trained you. You learned it because you had to.
And it does not switch off. It runs when he is sober. It runs when he is out. For many people it goes on running long after they have left.
The dread before ordinary things
There is a family gathering on Saturday. Other people are looking forward to it. You are calculating.
Will he drink too much. Will he say the thing he says. Will you spend the evening watching his glass and steering conversations and making excuses, and will you have to manage the moment afterwards when everyone is politely pretending not to have noticed.
Weddings, Christmas, his mother’s birthday, the school event. Occasions that are supposed to be pleasures become operations to be managed.
And underneath it, the other fear, the one that arrives when the phone rings at an unexpected hour. That it is the police. That there has been an accident. That this is the call.
The lying, and being told you are the problem
I haven’t been drinking.
You can smell it. You have found the bottle. You know, with complete certainty, that it is not true. And somehow he still finds a way through, because the denial is not a single lie you could catch, it is an entire system, maintained with real ingenuity, and he has had years of practice.
Then the part that does the deepest damage. You say what you can see, and you are told that you are imagining it. That you are obsessed with it. That you are paranoid. That you are the one with the problem, and honestly, given how you have been behaving lately, is that surprising.
Do that for long enough and something gives way. Not your knowledge of the facts, exactly. Your confidence in your own perception.
This is why so many people arrive in my consulting room unable to say plainly what is happening in their own home. They can describe individual incidents. They cannot bring themselves to the conclusion, because the conclusion has been argued out of them, night after night, by someone they love.
Why you cannot see it from inside
Many people cannot see this clearly while they are still inside it, and something has to break the isolation before they can.
That is not a comment on anyone’s intelligence. It is what happens when reality-testing is done alone. Ordinarily you check your perception against other people: you say what you saw, someone tells you whether it sounds right, and your sense of what is real is continually calibrated. In a house organised around a secret, that mechanism is turned off, and then turned against you.
So the first thing that helps is not coping strategies. It is a second person who is not invested in the story, saying: yes, that happened, and no, you are not mad.
Therapy is one way to get that. A friend who has finally been told the truth is another. A room full of people who have lived the same thing is another, and for some people it is the one that works first. What matters is that it is somebody, and that it is somebody with nothing to gain from the answer.
For many people that sentence, said by anyone at all, is the first accurate thing they have heard in years.
Fear in both directions
Two fears often live side by side, and they pull in opposite directions.
The fear that he will hurt you. And the fear that if you push, if you say the true thing, if you leave, he will kill himself.
That double bind is one of the cruellest features of this situation, because it removes both available moves. You cannot confront and you cannot stay silent. People in that position are not being weak or indecisive. They are correctly identifying that both doors appear to be locked.
I cannot tell you the way out of it in an article. Two things are worth saying plainly, though.
The first is that you are not responsible for another adult’s decision to end his own life. Not when he tells you that you are, and not when he believes it himself. It is a terrible thing to have said to you, and it does not become true by being said with feeling.
The second is that this particular fear is one of the things you can take to a consulting room or to a group, rather than something you have to hold alone at two in the morning. Other people have been told exactly this, by people they love, and it can be spoken about with those who have been through it.
If you believe he is at immediate risk, that is a matter for urgent medical help, through his GP, through 111, or through A&E. It is not something you should be carrying on your own.
And there is no switch-off button
Chaos in the money. Sometimes chaos in the law. Exhaustion that is physical as much as emotional.
But the thing that distinguishes this from other kinds of hardship is that there is no shift that ends. There is no leave you can take from it. Difficult work has a Friday. This does not. You wake into it and you sleep in it, and even the good weeks are spent waiting.
Why you, and why him
Here is the part that is harder to say, and I want to be careful how I say it.
When people come to me in this situation and we look at their history, something recurs. A father who drank. A mother who drank. Or no drinking at all, but a childhood in which they were the one who managed things: a depressed parent, an ill sibling, a household whose stability depended on them being good, watchful and undemanding from an age when they should have been looked after.
That does not mean you brought this on yourself. He drinks because he drinks. You did not cause it, and you cannot cure it.
I should also be honest about the limits of that observation. I see the people who come to see a psychotherapist, which is not a random sample of anybody. Plenty of people arrive with nothing of the sort in their history. They met someone, that person turned out to drink, and there is no pattern underneath it to find. If that is you, this section is not about you, and you should not go hunting for a wound to explain something that does not need explaining.
Where the pattern is there, though, it is worth something. If you learned very early that love means monitoring someone, that your job is to hold things together, that your own needs come after the emergency, then a situation which other people would have walked out of in the first year is one you have the equipment to survive. You are not staying because you are foolish. You are staying because you learned this role before you were old enough to refuse it.
And that is why the answer is not simply to leave.
I have watched people leave one alcoholic and find another. Or leave and find someone who is not drinking but who still needs managing, still needs rescuing, still organises the household around their own difficulty. The bottle changes. The role does not.
What the work actually is
So the work is not only, and sometimes not first, about the relationship.
It is about understanding what draws you towards these situations, and it is about learning to take care of yourself rather than finding someone who needs taking care of.
That is a strange sentence to read if you have spent thirty years being useful. Many people find the idea of turning attention towards themselves genuinely uncomfortable, even shameful. It sounds like selfishness. It is, in fact, the thing that was missing, and it takes time, because you are not learning a technique, you are learning a way of being that nobody taught you when it would have been natural.
On the word “codependent”
You will meet this word within about two clicks of searching, and I have mixed feelings about it.
I do not label people. If you were in my room I would not tell you that you are a codependent, as though it were a diagnosis you now have. What I would say is that what you are describing is a way of being, and that it belongs to the field of codependency.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. One says: this is what you are. The other says: this is a pattern with a name, other people have it, it is well described, and patterns can be worked with.
Why I suggest a twelve-step group as well
If you were my patient I would suggest you also go to Al-Anon, which is for the families and friends of alcoholics, or to Co-Dependents Anonymous.
Not as an alternative to therapy, and not because therapy is insufficient. For a straightforward reason.
You need more support than one hour a week. Even if you could come two or three times a week, you cannot ring me at midnight when the anxiety arrives and the house is quiet and you do not know what to do with yourself.
I want to be exact about how the alternative works, because the detail matters and it is easy to get wrong. It is not the helpline that gives you this. Al-Anon’s UK helpline runs from ten in the morning until ten at night, on 0800 0086 811, and it is the right number for finding a meeting and for asking what the thing actually is before you go. What gives you midnight is the meetings. People exchange telephone numbers there, and you are told to take them and to use them. After a few weeks you have a short list of people who have lived precisely this, who expect the call, and who will not be surprised by anything you say.
That is not something I can provide, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
If you are in real distress at an hour when you have nobody to ring yet, Samaritans answer at any time of day or night on 116 123.
“Should I stay or should I go?”
People ask me this directly, and they are usually hoping I will answer it.
I do not, and it is not evasion. A decision of that size, made because a therapist recommended it, tends not to hold. When it becomes difficult, and it will, there is nothing underneath it except my opinion.
What I do instead is help you gather what you need in order to decide.
Take a piece of paper and write two columns: the reasons to stay, and the reasons to go. Not once, over weeks. Watch what changes and what does not.
Then ask five people who care about you what they think.
That second instruction is the important one, and I ask for it deliberately. You have spent years being told that your perception is faulty. The remedy for that is not my opinion replacing his. It is a return to the ordinary human practice of checking what you see against people who know you and have nothing to gain. Some of what they say will surprise you. Some of it you will have known and not allowed yourself to hold.
A word about the number, because for many people it is the hard part of the exercise. If you cannot think of five, you have not failed it. You have found something out. Isolation is not incidental to this situation, it is one of the ways it keeps going, and noticing how short the list has become is often the first honest measurement anyone has taken of it. Start with the people you do have. The list tends to lengthen once you begin using it.
The aim is that you end up with as much information as possible: about him, about yourself, about how you look to people who love you. And then you decide. It is your life, and these are life-changing questions, and they should not be answered by someone who goes home at the end of the hour.
If the childhood came first
For some readers the drinker was not a partner but a parent, and what remains is not a decision to make but a pattern to understand. The long effects of growing up in that house have their own shape, and I have written about them separately in complex PTSD: when the trauma never ended.
If you are in danger
One exception to all of the above.
If there is violence, or if I believe your life is at risk, I will say so directly and I will urge you to act. Confidentiality in therapy has limits where there is a serious risk to life, and I say that to people at the start rather than letting them discover it.
If you are frightened for your safety, please do not wait for a therapy appointment. In the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and open at any hour. If you are in immediate danger, call 999.
A last thing
Most people in this situation arrive believing they are there to talk about him.
They usually spend the first months discovering that they have not thought about themselves, in any real way, for a very long time, and that nobody has asked them to. That is where the work is, whether the relationship survives or not.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst with more than 25 years of clinical experience, including nine years working within private residential treatment and five years supervising clinical teams in addiction services. He sees clients in Harley Street and Fitzrovia in central London, in Bermondsey, in Colchester, and online in English and French.
This article is educational. It does not constitute an individual assessment and does not replace psychotherapy, medical advice or urgent support.
