Quiet people can become abusive, noisy people can become withdrawn and remote, some may spend the day sleeping on the lounge, some may be awake all night - the person you love becomes someone quite different! And they behave differently. This is an example of how alcohol can take over a person's mind and make serious changes to them.
Its like living with a different person. I used to long for 'my girl' to come back: that is, when she stopped drinking for a while. The 'other woman' she was when drunk I did not like at all. We had no life together.
So what can we do???
This is not easy to live with. One of the ways of coping is to run away from it all. But, mostly we LOVE the person who's drinking and want to help them. So we stay on.
What works is to focus on ourselves. If you have been reading these posts you will have seen by now that there is not much we can do for our alcoholic except leave them alone:
A dear friend of mine used to sum it up thus:
- KEEP YOUR MOUTH OFF THE PERSON
- KEEP YOUR MITTS (HANDS) OFF THE PERSON
- KEEP YOUR MIND OFF THE PERSON.
By starting to think about looking after YOURSELF, you will take your mind off your drinker.
Read the HELP PAGES on the right, and some previous posts, and see how I learned to live with an active drinker and gave her a chance to find her way to sobriety.
I had to leave it to her : all I could do was apply the 3M rule and just help when she needed it.
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