There is a post on the board about drinking whilst being a member of al-anon and whether or not that is hypocritical etc. And it details a situation where a spouse is complaining about their drinking partner whilst drinking heavily themselves. It brings up a lot for me. I started to write a response and then when I realised it was going to be a long one I thought I would make it separately as it's off the track somewhat. It is something that has troubled me regarding al-anon from the beginning, however I didn't have the self-assurance or faith in my own perceptions to articulate it before now as I had all kinds of assumptions about what people might think. So I'll have a stab at it now and I'm sorry if it seems obscure or makes no sense to others. 

I have mentioned here before that I was a binge drinker in my early days and I have been through stages of problematic drinking throughout my life. I first came to al-anon because my partner's drinking was much bigger and scarier than my own and through working the steps and making a commitment to self-care I came to reject the simple joys of blinding headaches or puking all morning and sleeping the day away. Through al-anon I also developed a desire to care for my own safety and with a dangerously drunk partner it became essential to be sober and clear thinking to protect myself and make rational decisions during his rampages. I've attended AA a few times in my life, to explore my own relationship with alcohol and have a couple of very close AA friends who love to talk program and first gave me the notion of getting myself to al-anon which is ultimately where I seem to find myself at my best. I have started again attending AA occasionally and read the literature and keep up with AA friends however I have never adopted long term abstinence. The fact that I so vehemently don't WANT to probably means that I should but that is between myself and my HP. What is relevant is that I am honest with myself about my relationship with alcohol and for the most part I drink little or none but during times of isolation, ie when my daughter is away during school holiday periods with her father I can lose interest in self care and start binging. Drinking and isolation go hand in hand for me; I don't drink in social situations at all. Then I usually pull myself up, go to a meeting or 2 and find myself "cured" and lose interest in drinking for the next 6 months...I'm sure there is a term for someone who uses the program like that and I'm sure it probably isn't complimentary, lol, but that's me right now in any event. I generally have no interest in alcohol so it's hard to find motivation to take on a long term program but when I am lonely and sad it can still bite me on the ass and make me feel like the world is ending. Anyway that is neither here nor there, I just wanted to establish that I have a history with alcohol and no two ways about it. I am a card-carrying member of the dark side and in no way a teetotalling saint.

Anyway what I wanted to share is unfortunately a bit of a negative experience I had with al-anon before I joined the program and something that I have kept to myself for a long time. It is giving me cause to re-evaluate my approach.

My ex husband and I met in high school and we used to binge and party and generally treat ourselves like garbage. We both drank and he also did a lot of drugs which I sometimes tried to join him in but did not like and for the most part declined. I experimented a bit in high school but always found the experiences frightening and usually pretended to partake whilst actually not ingesting anything so as to "fit in". Anyway when I became pregnant at 26 I ceased smoking and more or less stopped drinking other than to follow my mother's advice which was to have no more than 1.5 glasses of wine twice a week. (It's weirdly specific, isn't it?) I come from a family of very heavy and excessive drinkers so this counts as abstinence in our family. If I were to be pregnant again I would abstain entirely but I did what I thought was correct at the time and it was a radical change for me and one I really enjoyed, much to my surprise. Who knew that not being drunk all the time wouldn't suck? Motherhood was an amazing motivator for me; I almost feel as though I came to life for the first time during that time. I wanted to be healthy and well and happy for my child. I had never cared before that; I thought I was utterly worthless and I was on a mission to punish myself I think. Anyway my ex husband drank and drugged his way through my pregnancy and because I was boring and he could no longer smoke pot in the house, he took to leaving me at home alone to be pregnant all by myself while he got wasted with his buddies. It sucked. We were poor, we lived in a poo-hole of a flat. I broke my foot which refused to heal and sat on the couch talking to my growing belly when I became too big to work any longer. Husband didn't work while I was pregnant because he just didn't want to, bless his little cotton socks. He stayed at his friends house being wasted and playing xbox. He rode his skateboard 2 hours there and 2 hours back because we couldn't afford a car. That makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Of course he usually had to stay there for days at a time because it was a lot of effort to skate home and then back there again. Sigh, we were really sad juvenile people. How we created our amazing, clever daughter is a mystery only her very own HP could possibly explain.

Anyway his absenteeism and being terminally wasted continued and I will never forget the morning after our daughter was born, when he came into the hospital drunk, stoned and absolutely stinking of drug smoke to tell me proudly that he had been out celebrating the birth of his child all night. His breath smelt like furniture polish and puke. I wanted to punch him. With all of my heart, I wanted to punch him.

He continued to do what he did throughout the almost-a-year we stayed married following her birth and when she ceased breast feeding at 5 months I took to sitting outside alone in a rocking chair at night while he was out getting wasted with his friends and I drank beers until I fell asleep and I started to realise that I was in trouble and I started attending AA and abstaining completely. Drinking myself stupid was no longer acceptable to me now that I had a baby and I knew I couldn't do it alone. I needed help. Sadly it was shortlived.

Prior to me beginning AA he told anyone and everyone that I was an alcoholic and that I was the cause of all of our problems. I suppose that was an easy story for us to stick to as I was willing to put my hand up and play the fall guy and tell anyone that would listen that I was a very bad person with very bad problems. I was a very willing scapegoat. I began to notice that whenever we had company (I loved when he invited his friends over as I wasn't alone and I would cook up a storm for everyone and then sit outside around the fire and join in the drinking; I LOVED to feed everyone and it was my reward to sit down afterwards and get stonkered by the fire and join in the craptalking) and I started to notice that he seemed to be trying very hard to get me drunk. He would buy 2 bottles of whiskey and he insisted on a rule that we each had to drink an equal amount and that he couldn't have his next drink until I had finished mine, and as I am not a fast drinker (I get drunk very easily, I never did develop a tolerance plus I had been completely dry for over a year) he would be demanding that I chug my drink so that he could refill it.  I was very unhappy and drunk me would become emotional, usually crying to someone about something (me drunk generally means me huddled in a corner sobbing hopelessly, not what you would call a "fun drunk") and then he would begin telling our friends "see? Look at her! She's a disgrace! How am I meant to cope with this?" and so on. It was really horrid. He was in no way responsible for "making" me drink by the way, don't get me wrong, that's absolutely not what I am getting at. But he did seem to be very invested in making sure I got good and drunk when his friends were present and then making a show of how terrible I was. I felt as though he was putting me on display and it was weird and awful and I had absolutely no tools to deal with it. I just wanted it to be like the "good old days" when we would get drunk together and have a blast but it was different now. It was horrible in fact. It felt like he really needed to show the world how very awful I was and yet he made every possible effort to stop me from doing better or finding ways to become stronger and healthier. I recognise what it was now but at the time I didn't. I thought he was my perfect husband and I was a disgusting failure that had to find a way to do better. 

So anyway I started attending AA and predictably, he resisted. A lot. He refused to mind our daughter in the evenings so that I could go. So I took her with me. He drove me to the first 2 meetings but then went to his friends and wasn't there to pick us up afterwards. So I arranged a lift with a fellow member and then I had my AA friend drive quite a way to transport me to and from meetings. AA friend didn't mind because he lived and breathed AA and he knew I was determined. Husband complained and resisted and accused me of having affairs. The harder I worked at staying sober the harder he tried to get me to drink and I am not projecting here; I have not spoken about this here before because I know how it is when the A in our lives blames us for their drinking and thought it best to just not go there or discuss this, but what I mean is he would come every night with a bottle of booze and say "but I don't understand why you can't have a drink with me, I bought this for you, does being sober mean you can't even have a drink with me in the evening because that SUCKS" and then when I refused he would throw a tantrum about me being "no fun" and go to his friends for the night....again. Or he would say we were "going out for dinner" and then take me to a pub and plonk a beer in front of me and tell me I was wasting his money if I didn't drink it. On one hand he was telling the world he had an alcoholic nightmare wife and on the other he was (a always drunk and stoned and b) doing everything he could to get me to drink. It was ghastly and being the obsessed deeply codependent wife I was, I had no real sense of self preservation and just wanted to manipulate him into liking me again.Then his parents came to visit from overseas. He asked them to bring huge amounts of alcohol duty-free and became aghast when I said I wasn't going to drink with them (they are quite extreme alcoholics and when we had visited them a few years earlier it had been a horrible drunken free-for-all). I did give in after a few nights of his terrible dissapointment that I was being "antisocial" and listening to them get stonkered in our living room and joined them all in their alcohol fuelled hell and surprise- I got drunk for the first time in months, and I pulled out our wedding pictures all happy and excited and when he angrily told me to put them away I cried; he seized the opportunity to show his parents what his "terrible drunk wife" was like and we had a huge argument in front of them. The next day he told me that his parents thought he should leave me. Naturally. See I couldn't just get drunk and pass out happy like a normal person. I always freaked out and cried. It was unseemly. Just as an aside these people didn't drink 'socially", they drank until they all passed out in their chairs, or the garden, or on the toilet, etc. They are very heavy drinkers; it's like the family sport.

I went back to AA that day and he continued to drink and drug and he was treating me with absolute contempt which I could not understand. I was crushed. It made no sense. I was giving sobriety the best I knew how to give and he was drinking and drugging every day and then telling me at great length how I was ruining his life with my drinking. I didn't have a CLUE back then that he might be projecting his own stuff onto me, I just thought I was doing everything wrong. I actually believed that if I could get it right, I could be a perfect wife and everything would be fine. Because he didn't have a problem at all, I was the only one with problems.

Here's the kicker.

He went to al-anon one night a few weeks after his parents visited and apparently told him he should leave me. He told me he was going and I admit I found it pretty puzzling but I told him groovy, that's a good move. He came back and told me, "they said I have to look after myself and only myself". OK, good. Whatever works for you. He also said "they told me I have to protect myself from you". Er, alrighty then. Do what works honey. I love you!

The next morning he woke me up very roughly and dragged me outside. He was drunk, at 8am on a Sunday which was not unusual and I had not had a drop for weeks as I was firmly back on program. He sat there, chugging his premix and told me he had a great revelation after his al-anon meeting and that he was leaving me because "I have to look after myself, Mel". He packed up everything we owned (and I'm not kidding, he took the lot, even the bed although he had not purchased ANY of it, they were all my own things and things purchased by my parents) and off he went leaving me with a baby and a house that was empty aside from vast, vast amounts of his rubbish. He came back 2 weeks later (I welcomed him with open arms) and pretended he wanted to get back together and took all of my rent money and left again and that was the end of our marriage. 

He used the same line over and over to justify everything...taking all of our belongings, my money, refusing to mind our child so that I could work on the weekends, refusing to pay child support, refusing to meet a single responsibility. "I have to look after myself, Mel". And he really did look after himself, no doubt about it, and he continues to do so. His commitment to the task is quite impressive.

So anyway, to quote the late Terry Pratchet, we've passed a lot of water since then. 

But it does give me pause to think about what I say to others in program and how I make assumptions about the loved ones they describe and how very wrong I could be. It's SO tempting for me, when someone describes their alcoholic loved one, to start analysing the motives of that third party and give my opinion about what they are saying and doing and how they are probably manipulating others to feed their addiction. I do it ALL the time and I think it's something I would like to be conscious of and cease doing because I can never actually KNOW. I think about my ex husband going to an al-anon meeting, where he said they were "all nice older ladies" who comforted him and told him he should look after himself, and how he went home and got drunk and the next morning left his (very sober) wife and child and took everything they owned and I think, I can just never KNOW what someone else's reality is and if I am going to participate in a board where we discuss al-anon and delve into the unavoidable grey-area of giving some form of advice (and there's no way not to do that in a forum; you can't exactly have "no cross talk") then I need to be mindful of my own experiences and remember always, there but for the grace of HP go I.

Thanks for reading and I am sorry if this makes no sense or seems irrelevant but it's been weighing on me and I needed to try to articulate it.