A Prisoner

A Prisoner. I heard this at the Family Night Rehab, from a man who was describing his life with his wife and her alcoholism. He was an ex-military person, who apparently spent some time in active combat.

A Prisoner. That's how I feel, or maybe felt. A Prisoner.

Not too many people - if any at all - can actually understand the feeling of living with an active alcoholic. Especially one that is angry, deceitful, lying and puts on a "show" to the outside world. No one will know how they can manipulate you, and make you lose self-confidence and self-esteem. Essentially, they make you feel inadequate, undeserving, unloved and often, like it (it = everything) is some how your fault. At least this is the words from some of the people from these meetings.

For someone reading this - who is not living with an active alcoholic - this may sound extreme. I can assure you - it is not.

Living with the alcoholic - even when I did not know she was drinking - somewhere deep inside, I was missing something. I look back now and know it was the hidden drinking of alcohol by my wife that was affecting me. It was big and little behavior that was out of the norm that soon became "the norm" that threw me off. But I didn't know it back then.

The weird behavior was; the throwing out (purposely losing) diamond earrings, because they were, "too small." Or falling down in the center of a sidewalk, because she had too much too drink (I didn't know it then, because I didn't see her drinking). Or when she threw up one morning on a street, on a beautiful spring morning in a quaint southern town on the Atlantic Ocean with my friend and his wife looking at her going, "what the ?" The burning of food. The burning of pots. The late bills.

How in the world did you miss this? You dismissed it because when you inquired about it to someone you trusted, you got "dismissed" as being "controlling" or a "control freak" or that, "I am a little ditzey." So, you start to doubt yourself. Self-doubt . . . a killer of instinct and all good from within.

It's all clear now of course. How could I have missed this? But we do. How many stories have I heard from both men and women who have spouses that hid their drinking - so well, that no one even had a clue. Next thing we know, there is no escape. Because we have become too weak, too ashamed, too much self-esteem lost, to leave, to get unstuck.

Then one day, something happens. We say - "Stop."

Where and when do we say this? How do we get away. I can tell you, that only through getting out of the house, every day, and meeting with YOUR friends or better - Al-Anon Meetings. Only at Al-Anon Meetings is really where you find people who understand.

I have compassion for the alcoholic. I really do. I feel sorry for her. She is being controlled by a substance that is powerful. Except in our society we see alcohol as "alright." It the alcoholic's fault for not being able to control themselves. It's "just" 10% of the population who can't handle it. If it was cocaine, well then, that's another story.

But it's not just the 10%. It may be another 25% - because of the effects on the family. Maybe the number is larger. We have made drinking glamerous and popular. We have become connessiuers of beer, wine, and scotch. Isn't that sad, knowing what we now know? The general population has not a clue of how this is a dangerous drug.

Are we prisoners? That is my question to you this morning.